Essay #14: What Is Man?

A guest post by Carl R. Trueman

We’re pleased to present The New Jerusalem’s first-ever guest essay by Carl R. Trueman, professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College. Carl is a penetrating thinker whose books, such as The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self (2020), explain the philosophical history of our present crises in clear and powerful terms. His latest book, To Change All Worlds: Critical Theory from Marx to Marcuse (2024), is available now. We look forward to discussing his essay in our letters over the coming month—AK + SK

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There are books that become more true over time than their authors may ever have anticipated. One of them is C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man, published in 1943 at the height of the Second World War. In its three chapters, Lewis articulated the problem of his age: a collapse in anthropology. In the 80 plus years since, that collapse has continued apace.

Lewis was not simply a cultural critic. He was also a prophet. And the problem of his age is the problem of ours. Indeed, the Psalmist’s question demands an answer today more perhaps than ever: What is man? But while the Psalmist immediately answered that he is a creature made by God to be a little lower than the angels, yet crowned with glory, in this present age his cry has more the character of a rhetorical question, a revelation of our confusion.

Recent days have seen intellectuals and other cultural leaders revisiting Christianity. This is in part surely a response to the abolition of man. As Nietzsche pointed out so bluntly to the polite Enlightenment atheists of his day, killing God is an act of deep significance for the meaning of man. Indeed, the death of God is the death of man, or at least of the notion that “man” is to be understood as made in God’s image. And, as Nietzsche saw all too clearly, that requires that we ourselves become gods, rising to the challenge of creating our own selves and our own meaning.

Lewis was writing against the background of the war, a catastrophe that had yet to be fullly realized in the gas chambers at Auschwitz and in the emergence of atomic weapons. Those developments accelerated and intensified the problem. And today, the question ‘What is man?’ is even more complicated, largely because of our technological powers.

Technology has brought great improvements to our world. Antibiotics and analgesics have transformed medical care—who would want to have undergone even a minor surgical procedure before those were a reality? But it has also enabled and accelerated the abolition of man.

The sexual revolution transformed human relationships, made plausible by some of the same medical developments that have improved our world. The internet has enabled emigrants like me to stay in touch with friends and family back home. But it has also made the most extreme pornography a real and present danger for even the smallest child who happens to have access to a smartphone. Fertility treatments have brought the joy of new life to many barren couples. But IVF and surrogacy, however laudable the motives behind them, have also tilted society towards treating children as products, as property, as things and not persons.

Transhumanism has emerged on the back of these and other technological developments, further fostering the belief that human nature is plastic, or even a problem to be transcended or overcome. And A.I. now looms large, raising questions about whether we will ultimately prove to have been made merely a little lower than the angels or a lot lower than the machines we ourselves have crowned with glory.

As the abolition of man continues apace, the need to respond is urgent. Those looking to the Christian faith understand at some level that the anthropological crisis is theological. But such returns do not in themselves solve the immediate practical problem of what man is. That problem is in large part technological, or at least fueled by technology, and therein lies our quandary.

What “man” means has always been connected to technology. From the moment human beings made tools, their relationship to the world and to themselves was shaped by technology. Indeed, tools are never simply instruments that allow us to do the same things in a different, perhaps more efficient way. They transform the range and nature of our actions and the possibilities we can imagine for ourselves and our world. The telephone, for example, did not simply make communication quicker and easier. It changed the way we communicate and thereby how we think about communication, as well as things such as distance and time.

So here is one of the main challenges. We need to understand what human beings are, and yet we cannot isolate that definition from the technological nature of the world of which we are a part. Take, for example, the question, What is a woman? One answer is that a woman is a human being whose body is normatively tailored towards gestation. But what if technology allows the building of ovaries and a womb in a body with XY chromosomes? Or we find ways to make babies in a factory and abolish “natural” childbirth? How does that affect the basic definition?

This may be an extreme example, but it is today an easily imaginable one. And it points to the problem. As a Christian, I want to be able to assess cultural, technological, and political developments on the basis of whether they restore or enhance what it means to be truly human or whether they tend to abolish or contradict it. But that requires a prior understanding of what it means to be human, an understanding that is not as straightforward as it used to be.

What is man? is the great question of every age. In our age of godlike ambition fueled by Promethean technology, finding an answer is urgent but is proving disturbingly elusive.