BORIS Johnson is familiar with the Annals of Tacitus, on the decline of Emperor Nero after he turned on Seneca, his adviser and former tutor.
Seneca, born in the same decade as Jesus of Nazareth, was widely admired. Indeed, Seneca’s proto-Christian philosophy is taught to this day. But ethics became a major inconvenience to Nero as his political ambitions developed. He killed his mother, his wife, and ultimately himself, having being declared a public enemy by the senate after 13 years of tyrannical rule.
Here in Britain 2,000 years on, Christian ethics have been utterly abandoned by our leaders for the first time since the Christianisation of Britain 1,400 years ago. The prevalent philosophy of our times is Scientism, and Johnson is evidently duped by it, hooked on it, and perhaps intimidated by it, hence permanently flanked by an odious new breed of VIP scientists.
Science does not, and cannot, do ethics. Conversely, even the most unethical of regimes can excel in science. In the 1930s, no nation was more advanced in science than Germany. In 1961, the Soviet Union put the first man into space. Today Communist China publishes more science than any other nation.
We can see from the documents published by the UK government that ethics is now an inconvenience to be circumvented for ‘the science’. I will prove in this article that Boris Johnson is just as hostile to Christian ethics as Emperor Nero and President Xi Jinping.
Several contributors to TCW Defending Freedom have pointed to the Government’s documents on the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution, but on May 13 the Government published something even more sinister than Klaus Schwab’s Industrie 4.0.
In ‘partnership’ with the German military the UK Government has published a 110-page ‘think-piece’ called Human Augmentation – The Dawn of a New Paradigm.
It is only during our times of so-called ‘scientific emergency’ and the Coronavirus Act that a madcap Teutonic philosophy could possibly get a hearing.
Human augmentation, we are told, is necessary for military defence: if our soldiers don’t augment – through gene editing among other techniques – the enemy will get there first.
The theory is absurd. No matter how robust our soldiers’ exoskeletons, or gene-edited eyesight, or drugged-up brain power with – wait for it – ‘neuropsychopharmacology’, they are not protected from nuclear bombs. Furthermore, to win a war after creating an army of gene-edited monsters would be a Pyrrhic victory indeed.
Here is a screenshot from the introduction of the UK Government’s explanation of human augmentation:
Human augmentation is not primarily about defence; it is about transforming society in the vision of its authors. The authors talk about man made in their idealised image, complete with ‘life extension’.
There are many instances of the word ‘gene’: ‘gene therapy’, ‘gene editing’, ‘gene sequences’. We read that British society is already amenable to gene editing because much of the population in 2021 has accepted jabs of synthetic mRNA gene expression.
But here’s the rub (page 46):
‘This example [Covid-19 vaccination] shows that we cannot assume human augmentation will be automatically effective or accepted in its intended use, no matter how beneficial its effects may be. Human augmentation may be resisted by elements of society that do not trust the effectiveness and motive of the augmentation. This will increase the need for dialogue between society, industry and the state’ (my emphasis).
HM Government now suppresses meaningful dialogue, and as I wrote in my last piece for TCW Defending Freedom, it has given up the right to expect our trust. ‘Dialogue’ between society and state involves bribing 16-year-olds to accept gene therapy even if their parents deny consent.
Where are the ethics in all this? The document explains:
‘We cannot wait for the ethics of human augmentation to be decided for us . . . There may be a moral [sic] obligation to augment people, particularly in cases where it promotes well-being and protects us from novel threats. It could be argued that treatments involving novel vaccination processes and gene and cell therapy are examples of human augmentation already in the pipeline . . .
‘The future of human augmentation should not be decided by ethicists or public opinion, although both will be important voices; rather governments will need to develop a clear policy position that maximises the use of human augmentation in support of prosperity, safety and security, without [sic] undermining our [sic] values.’
From where do these thinkers take their morals and values? Science, in its very definition, is amoral and value-free.
There is no instance of the word ‘God’ in 110 pages; no instance of the word ‘Christian’. The human augmentation philosophy, with its Faustian promise of ‘life extension’, is wholly godless.
Those of us who understand the ethical underpinning of Western civilisation must put up an intellectual fight. There was a time when the Conservative Party understood the value of the Ten Commandments. Now it preaches to 16-year-olds: dishonour your parents and honour the state and its free junk food.
Needless to say, the five of the Ten Commandments that refer to God have been utterly rejected by Boris Johnson’s Cabinet.
It is only in acknowledging man’s sanctity in God that man has sanctity. Otherwise we are reduced to the philosophy of Nero, or the Communists, or Stephen Hawking, who said, ‘The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet.’
We have seen in the past year how governments in the most advanced democracies can bulldoze new ‘scientific’ thinking through every obstacle. The governments of ‘new normal’ nations are hell-bent on racing to ‘the new paradigm’: human augmentation.
The body is the Temple of God. My body doesn’t belong to the state. It does not even belong to me. It belongs to its Creator. I am no saint, but I am obliged to try to keep my ‘temple’ holy (whole). Central to Christian belief is that the Christ was fully human. Allowable ‘augmentation’ is not through mechanical and genetic adjuncts, it comes through spiritual and intellectual growth, as Jesus ‘increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man’ (Luke 2:52).
Alas, you won’t hear a peep from the Church of England. As I’ve written elsewhere, the Archbishop of Canterbury has endorsed Industrie 4.0.
Fight on, freedom-loving Christian (and Jewish) friends of TCW Defending Freedom. Fight the soulless übermenschen.
Take, eat; this is my body . . .
