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John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress endures because it distills the human condition into a simple yet profound metaphor: the journey of a soul from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City. Christian’s trek across valleys, rivers, and mountains mirrors the inner struggle of anyone who longs for transcendence.
Allegory makes his trials timeless. But when I revisit this work today, I cannot help but see its echoes in our age of transhumanism and extropianism — the belief that humanity can and should use technology to transcend biological limits.
In Bunyan’s narrative, Christian carries a burden on his back until it is released at the cross. For me, this weight resembles the load of mortality we all bear: disease, frailty, the certainty of decay. The transhumanist impulse is to unfasten this pack not by faith alone but through science — gene editing, cybernetics, artificial intelligence.
Where Bunyan’s pilgrim lays his burden down in a spiritual moment, the extropian imagines a laboratory or a surgical theater. Both, however, believe the burden can be cast aside and that the journey can continue unshackled.
The allegorical terrains of The Pilgrim’s Progress also invite comparison. Christian encounters the Slough of Despond, a swamp that sucks travelers into despair. Today, I see that swamp as the cultural anxiety around technology itself: the fear that to alter human nature is to betray it. Detractors worry that uploading minds or re-engineering our bodies would drown us in a morass of hubris.
Yet, as in Bunyan’s tale, the pilgrim must struggle through mud and mire to move forward. Extropianism is not naïve about these risks; it simply insists that staying behind in the City of Destruction — clinging to mortality and entropy — is the greater peril.
At Vanity Fair, Christian faces temptations of wealth and pleasure. Here lies another parallel: transhumanism often seduces with promises of luxury — designer genes, augmented reality paradises, immortality sold at a premium. The fair reminds us that progress can be corrupted into spectacle. Extropianism at its best resists the carnival, seeking not decadence but resilience, creativity, and exploration. Like Christian, one must distinguish between what distracts and what truly advances the journey.
What strikes me most is that Bunyan ends with the pilgrim crossing a river — the final barrier of death. For Christians, this passage leads to the Celestial City. For extropians, the river is the singularity, the boundary where human identity dissolves into something beyond flesh. Will it be a city of light, or an oblivion disguised as paradise? The answer depends on whether we believe that technology can preserve the soul, or whether the soul is something only faith can secure.
Personally, I find myself walking a narrow path between Bunyan’s allegory and the extropian dream. I am drawn to the promise of extending life, curing illness, expanding intelligence. Yet I also feel the gravity of Bunyan’s wisdom: progress is perilous, temptation is real, and the river awaits us all. Perhaps the allegory and the futurist vision are not opposites but layers of the same journey. One speaks in scripture, the other in circuitry, but both whisper that humanity is unfinished.
In the end, The Pilgrim’s Progress remains relevant not because it offers certainty, but because it frames the journey. Whether one seeks salvation in heaven or transcendence through technology, the road is long, the burden heavy, and the goal luminous.
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