Most of us can easily imagine a new car, a new house, new technology, or a radically different society. It is more difficult to imagine becoming a new kind of human being. Yet the future of our species may depend precisely on our capacity to transform ourselves.
In Siloism, published in 1972 by H. van Doren, the idea of a “new man” is presented as something much more profound than a change in political beliefs or social behavior. A new human being would require “an entire biological and cultural accumulation,” allowing humanity to transform itself internally as well as in its relationship with the social environment.
The text also introduces the idea of the “synthetic human”: a new human type emerging from the intercrossing of cultures and peoples.
To understand this idea, it is useful to consider three processes described in Siloist thought: differentiation, complementation and synthesis.
Differentiation is the development of distinct possibilities. Something that was relatively undifferentiated develops greater variety, specialization and complexity. Differentiation is not separation or isolation. It is a necessary part of development.
As differentiated elements develop, they also enter into relationships with one another. They interact, influence one another and become complementary. From these relationships, new syntheses become possible.
A synthesis is not simply a compromise between what existed before, nor does it erase previous differences. Something new emerges that incorporates and transforms elements of what preceded it. That new synthesis can then differentiate again, creating new possibilities and beginning another cycle.
Seen this way, human history is not moving toward sameness. Quite the opposite. Humanity has generated an extraordinary proliferation of cultures, languages, forms of knowledge, identities, technologies and ways of life. At the same time, those differentiated worlds are being brought into increasingly intense contact.
The “synthetic human” can be understood as emerging within this process.
Cultures do not simply exist beside one another. When people encounter one another, they exchange language, food, music, beliefs, technologies, customs and ways of understanding the world. Over time, those encounters produce combinations that did not previously exist.
New York City offers an extraordinary example.
Few places bring so many different cultures, languages, traditions and histories into such continuous interaction. The city’s strength does not come from one dominant culture absorbing all the others, nor simply from many cultures existing side by side. It comes partly from what happens between them.
New York continually produces things that could not have existed in exactly the same form within any one of its cultures alone.
Consider, for example, Afro-Punk. Black identity encountered a musical and cultural form widely associated with predominantly white punk communities. The result was not simply traditional African American culture or traditional punk culture. The encounter created new cultural possibilities while challenging assumptions about who could participate in either world.
We can see similar processes everywhere: in food, music, language, fashion, art, relationships and political life. Cultures differentiate, encounter one another, influence one another and generate new syntheses.
Even individual human beings increasingly embody this process. A person may inherit several cultural traditions, speak several languages, live in several social worlds and develop an identity that cannot easily be reduced to any one of them.
This is not the disappearance of difference. It is the creation of new difference through synthesis.
But the same historical process can provoke resistance.
Siloism warned in 1972 about the possible emergence of a new form of Nazism—not necessarily identical to twentieth-century Nazism or tied to a particular economic system. One of its essential characteristics would be the effort to separate human beings according to nationality, race, culture or other categories, underlined by a fear of contamination.
The problem here is not differentiation itself but the attempt to make differences absolute—to turn culture, race or nationality into rigid boundaries that must be protected from outside influence. Difference becomes separation or hierarchy, and cultural encounter is experienced as contamination.
We can see versions of this tendency today in anti-immigrant movements, ethnic nationalism, racial supremacy and fantasies of cultural purity. They are emerging at precisely the moment when interaction among human beings is becoming increasingly difficult to prevent.
People migrate. People of different cultures, races and nationalities meet, marry and have children, creating new generations that embody the intermingling of peoples. Information moves almost instantaneously. Economies extend across continents. Climate systems ignore national borders. Technology connects billions of people. Ideas, music, language and culture circulate continuously.
The tension, then, is not between differentiation and synthesis. Both belong to the same developmental process. The deeper tension is between a process that remains open to new relationships and new syntheses, and one that attempts to freeze differences into permanent boundaries.
But cultural synthesis alone does not produce the new human being imagined in Siloism. Human beings are not simply transformed by history; through intentionality, we continually transform the world and ourselves. We imagine what does not yet exist, project possibilities into the future and act to bring them into being. That same intentional capacity allows us to transform our relationship with our own experience. We can change how we respond to fear, suffering and contradiction. We can overcome resentments that bind us to the past. We can become more attentive to our own mechanical responses. We can choose actions that produce greater coherence in ourselves and in our relationships with others.This suggests that the emergence of a new human being involves a double transformation.
There is an external process, produced through the enormous accumulation and interaction of human cultures, knowledge and experience. And there is an internal process, made possible by human intentionality—the capacity to reflect upon ourselves, imagine possibilities that do not yet exist and deliberately move toward them.
Neither process happens in isolation.
The world we create changes us. The human beings we become change the world.
The new human, therefore, would not be someone without roots, culture or history. Nor would it be a standardized human being produced by the disappearance of differences. It would be a human being capable of growing beyond inherited limits without denying what came before—capable of incorporating increasingly diverse experiences while intentionally overcoming suffering and contradiction.
Throughout history, humanity has generated ever greater differentiation while those differences have continually encountered one another and produced new syntheses. What is distinctive about our moment is the unprecedented scale and intensity of those encounters.
What will emerge cannot be completely predicted. We can participate in the process, influence its direction, accelerate certain possibilities and resist others. But the larger movement extends beyond any individual or generation.
The question, then, is no longer simply what kind of world we want to build. It is also: What kind of human being are we willing to become?
The process of becoming is already underway.
We cannot stop the movement itself.