It started with the memes. People in the online know were all reading the tweets of Bronze Age Pervert. Quoting from neo-Nietzschean joke-manifesto Bronze Age Mindset was a sign, on what was still in 2016 called the alt-right, that you not only valued strength and masculine vigor and the annihilation of all liberal and feminizing impulses from the sclerosis of the liberal-bureaucratic-democratic establishment but also that you could speak the cant of the scene. It was the first Trump administration, and half the alt-right was high on the promise of meme magic—the tantalizing notion that a group of posters on 4chan had, implausibly, harnessed the latent energies of the universe and the powers of Internet vibes to meme Donald Trump into office. Neopagan vitalism was as sexy, in the recesses of the Internet characterized by avatars of cartoon frogs, as the mirror-image figure of the “resistance witch” on the anti-Trump left.
But memes, as they tend to do, shape reality in their image. Somewhere between Trump’s shock victory in 2016 and the inevitability of his return, vitalism became not merely a pithy means of online identity-formation but a renascent political and, indeed, spiritual project. In 2019, Bronze Age Mindset received a laudatory review from the Claremont Institute’s Michael Anton in The American Mind. Anton, who had received the book from influential reactionary blogger Curtis Yarvin, praised Bronze Age Mindset as a necessary expression of “youthful dissatisfaction...with equality as propagandized…a hectoring, vindictive, resentful, levelling, hypocritical equality that punishes excellence and publicly denies all difference while at the same time elevating and enriching a decadent, incompetent, and corrupt elite,” declaring that “BAPism is winning.” That same year, Politico reported, Bronze Age Mindset became de facto required reading for the junior staffers in the Trump administration.
Then, in 2023, Bronze Age Pervert was revealed to be a former Yale political science graduate student named Costin Alamariu. A few years earlier, being revealed as the proponent of ideas of “biological hierarchy,” or declaring that there is “a different standard” of morality applied to the rubes he calls “huemans” and to “the true men who are willing to live in danger, and who don’t care for their animal lives” almost certainly would have gotten Alamariu cancelled. Instead, Alamariu parlayed his viral fame into academic legitimacy—at least in certain corners of the academy. His Yale doctoral thesis on Plato and eugenics, Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy, recently self-published on Amazon under his own name, made its way among Amazon’s best-selling twenty-five. If owning a copy of Bronze Age Mindset was sufficient, in 2016, to signal counter-cultural transgression, today, the cool kids have Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy on their shelves.
Vitalism—at least, a distinctly “based and red-pilled” iteration of it—is not only the provenance of Bronze Age Perverts and Raw Egg Nationalists and a whole ecosystem of right-coded bodybuilding influencers and post-Petersonian denizens of the manosphere but also, more broadly, the ideology underpinning the whole of the contemporary New Right. It counts as adherents not only techno-optimists, accelerationists, and proponents of “dynamism” such as futurist investor Marc Andreessen, as well as masculinist Nietzscheans such as Alamariu and the manosphere influencer Andrew Tate, but also traditionalist Christians, with whom the tech-right now exist in uneasy alliance.
Articles in Christian publications such as The American Reformer and First Things regularly treat vitalism’s victory in the marketplace of ideas as, if not an unalloyed good, then nevertheless a useful one in the service of liberalism’s demise. Public intellectuals such as the philosopher (and Christian convert) Matthew Crawford have celebrated vitalism as an intellectual and political sensibility that, like Christianity, shares the “positive intuition that human beings are called out of themselves toward something higher, and that to refuse this call is to lead a diminished life of self-satisfaction.” For Crawford, vitalism and Christianity “share an adversary in modernist metaphysics”—and, in particular, in a thoroughly unenchanted, materialist vision of the world that reduces human beings to mere animal matter “from which it is hard to imagine any resplendent deed shining forth.” Or, as the Catholic New York Times columnist Ross Douthat put it, somewhat more pithily, on X: “Essence of any tech-trad convergence is that existence should be approached as legible, meaningful, important, non-absurd.”
To be a vitalist these days, in other words, is not just to want to make fun of “blue-haired” feminists (among BAP’s favorite targets) online but to embrace a vision of life at once atavistic and eschatologically focused: a return to masculine primordiality that prefigured, in turn, a new evolution into a race of technologically as well as physically gifted Übermenschen.
Nor is vitalism limited to the culture-war shibboleths with which it once seemed identical. It’s true, of course, that vitalists still focus—to greater or lesser degree—on what they oft-politely term racial, ethnic, and sexual difference and hierarchy: Among Matthew Crawford’s areas for inquiry in his vitalism seminar is “the specific political iteration of ethne over evolution,” while The American Reformer’s John Winter hopes that Christian vitalists will win out over their Nietzschean brethren by presenting disaffected youths with examples of “Christian men who exemplify true virtù, men who, in earlier times, the average man would follow into battle…[men who] will not deny hierarchy.”
Yet both the proponents and critics of vitalism tend to center their examinations of the movement’s strengths and weaknesses on its role in disputed cultural issues: Vitalism stands, or falls, on its relationship to liberal egalitarianism, sexual difference, and one’s stance on HR departments. Yet vitalism demands to be taken seriously, and critiqued, on theological grounds as well as, if not more than, culture war ones. Both its promises, and its perils, lie in its sacralization of human consciousness, and—even more so—its equation of that consciousness with reality itself. In the age of the Internet, where consciousness has now, more than ever, seemed to transcend its material vessels, the promise of vitalism is all the more palpable. At first glance, vitalism seems to avoid the perils of either materialism or Cartesian dualism: The power of life is a power in this world. But the worship of life vitalism promises is also, implicitly, the veneration of reality entirely subject to the human will.
Today’s vitalism, no less than the more explicitly metaphysical versions of vitalism that marked its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century iterations, is best understood as a religious, as well as a political, project. Nineteenth-century vitalism was, after all, not merely a celebration of power, or masculinity, or even eros, as we find it in, say, the online lectures of Andrew Tate, but rather an attempt to identify at the center of all life a governing, invisible, materio-spiritual force, whether defined as pouvoir de la vie (the preferred term of the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck), “animal spirits,” or what the philosopher Henri Bergson would in 1907 term the élan vital. If today many of us use variants of the language of “energy” to discuss the hidden underpinnings of the universe and its internal motion toward self-overcoming, we owe our language to vitalism’s proponents. It is not such a leap, after all, from talk of “ethereal fire”—as one 1802 pamphlet on electricity put it—as “the very soul of the universe…the accelerating, animating, and all-sustaining principle both of the animate and inanimate creation” to today’s vocabulary of vibes.
But vitalism wasn’t just an attempt to identify a universal source of all life. More often than not, implicit in that attempt was the sacralization of the specifically human capacities for imagination, self-determination, and erotic desire. Our wanting—both in the specific narrow sense of sexual reproduction and the broader sense of self-determination—is a kind of evolutionary force: that which compels us toward existential action.
Life, for the vitalist, is constantly self-overcoming, self-shaping, self-fashioning. We desire things—and people—and that desire leads us to create in our own image; we propagate, whether through children or ideas and machines; we evolve; we become our own telos, and maybe even our own gods. We struggle to become ourselves, to live authentically—not in the contemporary, affective sense of the word, but in the sense that we ache to know, and unfold, ourselves within the duration of our own lives. We are not created beings, in the vitalist worldview, but created becomings: evolving toward a self-transcending final end. That creating, furthermore, may well take place in the physical world, but it is ultimately a creativity downstream of our mental and affective capacities: to want, to will, to imagine. As the American spiritualist Andrew Jackson Davis put it in his Great Harmonia, written in the middle years of the nineteenth century, a text shot through with vitalist imagery: “Mind is the Flower of matter, as man is the flower of creation…that which is grain today may tomorrow form a portion of nerve and muscle, and the third day it may become an element of life; on the fourth, a sparkling thought.” The evolution of life that vitalism implies happens within the material world, but it points toward the transcendence of materiality.
It’s possible to read the history of vitalism, therefore, as at least in part the history of the sacralization of the imagination: an attempt to re-enchant an increasingly secular and scientific age by putting human potential at the metaphysical center of it. The search for the élan vital was also the search for the origin of human consciousness, as well as for the ghost in the machine separating matter from life. Vitalism was both a field of scientific inquiry and a site of religious and at times occult speculation—something that might well obsess, for example, the luminaries of the Harvard establishment, Christian clergyman, and traveling faith healers alike. Thus, for example, do we find vitalist imagery both in the writings of Benjamin Waterhouse of Harvard Medical School, whose 1790 “Discourse on the Principle of Vitality” contains an attempt to account for “that portion of the subtil [sic] electric fluid which pervades all bodies and animates every particle of matter,” and the sermons of the Congregationalist clergymen Henry Ward Beecher, who in 1865 preached of the “law of the evolution of spiritual life in man” through the preservation and development of the “vital principle” in man, which he likened to the germ of a seed destined to flower. The traveling hypnotist Franz Mesmer, for his part, advocated for a theory of “magnetic fluid,” which not only pervaded all life but could also be harnessed by the scientifically and spiritually advanced magnetizer in order to effect what we now think of as supernatural results such as telepathy.
Then, as now, vitalism went hand in hand with a broader cultural ambivalence about the material world’s knowability—and our ability to control it. As the historian Jackson Lears has detailed in his 2023 history of the movement, Animal Spirits, late eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century vitalist accounts were inextricably bound up with the then-novel scientific discoveries of magnetism, electricity, and evolution, all of which were, in the popular imagination, evidence of governing currents beyond the world’s surface. The post-Enlightenment worldview may have risked transforming into a disenchanted one—a mechanistic world subject to no laws but physics—but vitalism provided its adherents with the tantalizing possibility that a scientific worldview could nevertheless contain the divine.
Bergson’s contemporaries were themselves aware of the fundamental paradox within vitalism. It simultaneously valorized dynamic animal life and required a thoroughly modern, un-animal perspective. Only in the absence of cultural vitality could vitality become fetishized. As the essayist George Santayana wrote in his 1913 Winds of Doctrine, Bergson’s vitalism appealed because it “brings relief to a stale imagination…from which religion has vanished…which is kept stretched on the machinery of business and society.” At the same time, Santayana wrote, “only when vitality is low do people find material things oppressive…we must bathe in the currents of some nonhuman vital fluid, like consumptives in their last extremity who must bask in the sunshine and breathe the mountain air, and our disease is not without its sophistry to convince that we were never so…mightily conscious of being alive.”
Then, as now, vitalism also offered another tantalizing possibility: sex. If today’s vitalists see it, in part, as a bulwark against the perceived feminizing impulses of the post-#MeToo age, then so too did their nineteenth-century forebears celebrate the generative power of the erotic impulse. Sex, whether literal or merely symbolic, pervaded vitalist thought. Franz Mesmer’s “mesmeric massages”—designed to stimulate primarily female patients’ magnetic fluid—became the subject of several pornographic satires and at least one anonymously written erotic novel. Walt Whitman’s vitalist poetry, as Lears notes, equates eros with electricity: “I am He that Aches with Love” celebrates the idea that “all matter, aching, attract[s] all matter.” Desire was configured not just as the engine of generation but of all creativity in the universe.
Nowhere was this more evident than in the proliferation of the spiritualized self-help phenomenon known as New Thought. A vitalist precursor to contemporary movements like the Law of Attraction/The Secret and manifesting, New Thought held that the electrical energies of the universe governing, say, our bodily health or economic success, could be harnessed by channeling the force of our desire. Whether understood as animal spirit, as élan vital, or as mesmeric fluid, the energies underpinning the universe could be best accessed, and controlled, through human consciousness: mastering itself, and mastering, too, the consciousness of others.
While vitalism sought to celebrate animal, physical life, more often than not, its effects were found not in the material but in the memetic. The erotic energies of the universe, once rightly harnessed, shaped reality precisely by shaping imagination. New Thought guides often emphasized the power of the practitioner to command not just magnetic fluid, or animal spirits, but, specifically, the energies of the universe in the consciousness of others. “Look around you,” writes New Thought author William Walker Atkinson, “and you will see that nearly every man who has ‘arrived’ is possessed of the ability to attract, persuade, influence, or control his fellows.” The political endpoint of vitalist power, after all, proved not to be the military warrior but the duce: men like Gabriele D’Annunzio, Benito Mussolini, and, a few decades later, Donald Trump, capable of harnessing the yearnings of their populace first at the ballot box, then from the podium, then online.
Today’s vitalist New Right, likewise, shares with its more explicitly fascistic twentieth-century forebears a desire both to escape the modern world and to harness its energy. Or, to put it another way, the vitalist dream is neither fully atavistic nor antimodern but avowedly anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian. Life is a dominance hierarchy. It is evolution toward a final end. “Liberal modernity,” or “Enlightenment modernity”—in this schema—is that which restrains the natural powers of human desire and human ingenuity. The “trad-tech” alliance, about which much has been written, is not merely a marriage of convenience between Christian conservatives and their anti-woke Big Tech allies. It is also a shared individualistic vision of human, particularly masculine, greatness, as rooted in the biological and spiritual facts of life.
In this, today’s vitalists share much with their century-old counterparts: the Italian futurists. Writing shortly before and during the First World War—conceived by many of their number as a necessary purgation to restore Italian greatness—futurists like Filippo Tommaso Marinetti advocated for both “love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness”—the primal masculine virtues—alongside a thoroughly forward-looking political program of the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath…a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.” The liberation from the body and the urges of the body ultimately come from and lead to the same place: a transhumanist understanding of desire, particularly erotic desire, as galvanizing a necessary human evolution toward our final end.
It is fitting, then, that vitalism’s return to our public consciousness should have started with memes. If the contemporary Internet has done anything for our present culture, it is to make literal the claims of vitalist thought: that there is an invisible undercurrent, an implicit energy, shaping reality in its image. Our desires, our will, our imaginative power, enter this electrical realm; there, we—and humanity with us—transform and are transformed. Bronze Age Pervert’s argot elegies for a lost civilization are possible only in the world where he can go viral for tweeting them.
For the transhumanists and dynamists who comprise the Silicon Valley portion of today’s vitalists, the goal is nothing less than human evolutionary apotheosis: our becoming gods as the next stage in our natural life development. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has described artificial intelligence as a “magic intelligence in the sky,” and boasted in a 2024 blog post that we are experiencing the dawn of an Intelligence Age, where “the future is going to be so bright that no one can do it justice by trying to write about it now,” and “we will be able to do things that would have seemed like magic to our grandparents:” the natural next stage in a human consciousness whose ultimate end is self-overcoming.
If the forces of desire and imagination impel evolution onward, then, it stands to reason, the next stage in our evolutionary development is not to transcend materiality, exactly, but rather to transcend uncreated materiality. The natural vitalist home for the mind is not the body, however chiseled by Bronze Age weightlifting, but the machine, more perfected still. It is precisely this transhumanist cast on vitalism that the nineteenth-century American writer Henry Adams captured in his account of his fascination with the electric dynamo, before which he “began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross.” The dynamo, material and yet technological, is the natural home of the true currents of the universe. “The planet itself,” Adams continues, “seemed less impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge wheel, revolving within arm’s length at some vertiginous speed, and barely murmuring—scarcely humming an audible warning to stand a hair’s-breadth further for respect of power—while it would not wake the baby lying close against its frame. Before the end, one began to pray to it; inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man before silent and infinite force.”
As someone instinctively suspicious of both the atavistic right and the transhumanist turn—to say nothing of, as a Christian—it would be easy to dismiss vitalism altogether as a kind of modern techno-paganism: a rival enchantment to that of orthodox Christian faith. Certainly, Nietzsche himself, vitalism’s great moralist, cleaved the two in that way. For Nietzsche, Christianity was unnatural, life-denying, demanding not just death to the world but an inversion of reality, in which, as he writes in The Genealogy of Morals, “the wretched alone are the good; the suffering, deprived, sick, ugly alone are pious, alone are blessed by God…and you, the powerful and noble, are on the contrary the evil, the cruel, the lustful, the insatiable, the godless.”
And it is possible, too, to read the techno-trad vitalist alliance as a devil’s bargain. One might uncharitably read the openness to vitalism of Christians like Crawford as a kind of anti-woke devil’s bargain: a twentieth-first century answer to the Gilded Age compromises made by Henry Ward Beecher, whose fusion of Christian theology and New Thought–infused Social Darwinism made it all too easy to elide those gospel passages about camels, needles, and rich men.
But to do so, I think, does risk reducing Christianity to Nietzsche’s caricature. Christianity is not vitalism; nor is it anti-vitalism. We are called both to hate the world and to love it, as God does. We are called to be fruitful and multiply, and also to the celibacy that, Paul suggests, is higher than even the married state. Whether we understand it as paradox or third way, the Christian worldview rejects both poles of vitalism: the atavistic fascination with innate power encoded into evolutionary hierarchy—givenness deified—and the transhumanist post-human overman that is that hierarchy’s inevitable conjured end. And it does so, I think, precisely by insisting that there is something sacred, something distinct, something divine, about human creative endeavor, about human imagination, about what it means to be created in the image and likeness of God. Human beings are not conceived as mere animals in a world of animal power; nor are we conceived as playthings or slaves to gods or kings—as in, for example, the Babylonian creation account of the Enuma Elish.
It is a theology that rests upon the word made flesh—the marriage of one of our earliest, and more formative, imaginative technologies, with the material body. To call Christianity a transhumanist religion is, I think, an overstatement, but it is a deeply humanist one. God became man, as Athanasius of Alexandria wrote, so that man might become God.
Vitalism and Christianity do—in this, I think Crawford is right—share this fundamental faith in the potential goodness of human imagination. But they differ in two significant ways.
The first is, I think, more obvious, and more politically salient. The Christian theological framework is a fundamentally democratic one: We are all, regardless of our exercise of our individual capacities, equal, and equally human, before God. What we make, or dream, or engender may well be good or transformative; it may even—in the case of children, or perhaps even technology or art—be a kind of extension of elements of ourselves in time, but our selfhood is ultimately our own. I am not my children, or my novel. Whatever the ontological status of my creations (children ranking rather higher than novels), my selfhood, and the worth and dignity of my selfhood, rests in my relationship to God. I do not become more or less human, let alone more or less worthy, through imaginative self-transcendence, even if imaginative self-transcendence is part of how I as a human being go about the world. I am no more or less human, learning haltingly to write in hieroglyphics in Middle Kingdom Egypt, than I am asking ChatGPT to draft an email for me—even as ChatGPT might dull my ability to do these fundamentally human things.
But the second distinction, I think, is no less important to make. It is the idea that our erotic hunger, that striving that makes evolution and creation and imagination all possible, has a final end. It is not, as in the vitalist worldview, directionless, for-its-own-sake, entirely self-refracted: a desire only to overcome ourselves. Eros is, as centuries of Christian mystics have reported, a hunger for God, a hunger that the desire for sex or rest or death, or self-abnegation or the creation of art only ever partly sates. We do not want just because we are wanting beings, nor even because we want to reproduce for the sake of evolutionary continuation, but because there is, beyond the boundaries of this world, an object of our wanting. “Our heart is restless,” Augustine writes, “until it rests in you.” Reality contains the purely material—the obvious natural—as well as that which we create, and also something else, to which we are attenuated by consciousness or imagination or wanting, but which is not synonymous with it.
Beyond the magnetic fluid, beyond the electrical currents, beyond the élan vital, there is not only another ghost in the machine but another telos toward which things tend. Life is not only a force for propagating more life. Eros has an end.
It is this latter sense of purpose, and its relationship to desire, that separates the vitalist from the Christian worldview. Nietzsche is wrong, I think, to suppose that Christianity denies life. Yet it is also true that Christianity denies any valorization of life that reduces life to self-propagation. If it is good for us to exist, to reproduce, to make machines or to write stories or to bulk up one’s body or to fall in love, it must be not merely because of an evolutionary impulse to expand ourselves forward in time, in the service of a more-human or post-human outcome, but because it is good for us to do those things for their own sake, or even, for the sake of God in them.
It is right, I think, to marvel at the distinctly human impulse toward discovery and self-understanding. It is right, too, to see that impulse as part of what makes us human, even to see it as one of those qualities that helps situate us in the image and likeness of God. We are—the vitalists get this right—always becoming. But what is most marvelous still is that we are.