The Anti-Human

A strange hesitation has entered our public life: not whether humanity will survive, but whether it should. Across technology, bioethics, environmental discourse, and political imagination, the human is increasingly treated as a problem to be solved, optimized away, or quietly transcended. Our limits appear as defects. Our dependencies as failures. Our vulnerability as something to manage rather than bear together.

This issue of Comment names this emerging posture as the anti-human: not always an overt hatred of people, but a subtler temptation to escape the conditions of creaturely life altogether (often without our noticing). Our writers trace how this logic is increasingly surfacing at the beginning and end of life, in war and moral injury, in denial and forgetting, in ideologies of control, and in technologies that promise mastery without responsibility.

And yet this issue is less an indictment than a summons. Against despair, it retrieves older, sturdier truths: remembrance over amnesia, natality over technique, solidarity over isolation, and the irreducible dignity of persons made in the image of God. What emerges is a renewed vision of Christian humanism, one that is not naïve about suffering, but insistent that the person is a gift to be defended, tended, and kept at the centre of our common future, a future still worth fighting for.