Ancient and Modern Enlightenment: from Noosphere to Technosphere (by Ben Cain)
by rsbakker
Enlightenment is elite cognition, the seeing past collective error and illusion to a hidden reality. But the ancient idea of enlightenment differs greatly from the modern one and there may be a further shift in the postmodern era. I’ll try to shed some light on enlightenment, by pursuing these comparisons.
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Ancient Enlightenment: Monism and Personification
Enlightenment in the ancient world was made possible by a falling away from our mythopoeic, nomadic prehistory. In that Paleolithic period, symbolized by the wild Enkidu in the Epic of Gilgamesh and by the biblical Adam in Eden, there was no enlightenment since everything was thoroughly personified and so nothing could have been perceived as unfamiliar or alien to the masses. The world was experienced as a noosphere, filled with mentality. Only after the rise of sedentary civilization in the Neolithic Era, when farming replaced nomadic hunting in 10,000 BCE, which allowed for much larger populations, was there a loss of that enchanted mode of experience which actually depended on a sort of blissful collective ignorance. As a population increases, the so-called Law of Oligarchy takes hold, which means that social power must be concentrated to avoid civilizational collapse. Dominance hierarchies are established and those in the lower classes become envious of the stronger and more privileged members who are sure to display their greater wealth and access to women with symbols of their higher status. By doing so, each social class learns its boundaries so that the social structure won’t be overridden, which would invite anarchy.
As Rousseau argued, civilization was the precondition of what we might call the sin of egoism. Contrary to Rousseau, prehistoric life wasn’t utopian; at least, objectively, human life in the Paleolithic Era was likely quite savage. But the ancients seemed to have an easier time perceiving the world in magical terms, judging from the evidence of their religions and extrapolating from what we know of children’s experience, given their similar dearth of content to occupy their collective memory. Thus, even as they killed each other over trifles, the prehistoric people would have interpreted such horror as profoundly meaningful. In any case, I think Rousseau is right that civilization made possible a falling away from a kind of intrinsic innocence. Specifically, the increased social specialization led to an epistemic inequality. As food was stored and more and more people lived together, there was greater need for practical knowledge in such areas as architecture, medicine, sanitation, and warfare. The elites became decadent and alienated from nature, since they found themselves free to indulge their appetites with artificial diversions, as specialists took care of the necessities of survival such as the harvesting of food or the defense of the borders. These elites codified the myths that expressed the population’s mores, but while the uneducated majority clung to their naïve, anthropocentric traditions, the cynical and self-absorbed elites more likely regarded the folk tales as superstitions.
Here, then, was the origin of enlightenment as the opposite of wholesale ignorance—and this was a normative dichotomy. Enlightenment was good and its opposite, mental darkness, was bad. Whereas prior to civilization everyone was enlightened, in a sense, or at least everyone deferred to the shaman’s interpretation of how the spiritual and material worlds are intermixed, civilized people came to believe there’s a secret perspective which alone imparts the ultimate truth, leaving the majority in relative ignorance. As for the content of the enlightened worldview in the ancient world, this was informed by both the egoism and the cynicism that distinguished the hierarchical civilization from the prehistoric past. The content thus had two elements: monism and personification. On the one hand, reality was thought to be a unity, whereas the world appeared to be a multiplicity. Enlightenment was the ability to see past the illusion of change, to the underlying timeless interconnection between all events. Again, in the mythopoeic world, there was no distinction between reality and appearance, because mental projections were given equal weight with the material unfolding of events. The world was a magical place. But the enlightened person had to recover a distorted memory of that childlike, mythopoeic vision, as it were, by theorizing a unity beyond the disenchanted multiplicity that confronted the civilized ancients.
On the other hand, ultimate reality was generally personified. So the absolute unity was called God, equated with the self, and often compared to the particular human who actually ruled the land. That is, the civilizational structure was projected onto the spirit world and the gods were used as symbols to reassure the ancients that their social order was just. There was such personification even in Buddhism, specifically in the Mahayana variety, according to which Bodhisattvas are worshipped and Buddha nature is thought to take not just the inconceivable and thus impersonal form, but ghostly or celestial as well as physical ones.
Ancient enlightenment thus had to reconcile the urge to personify, which was a remnant of the mythopoeic experience that was exacerbated by the advent of egoism even among the masses, and which the elites came to use for political purposes, with the world’s alien, indifferent oneness. That theoretical oneness expressed especially the elites’ growing alienation from nature and their nostalgia for the presumed innocence of the earlier, nomadic period. Monism made egoism out to be preconditioned by ignorance, since if the world were really an ultimate unity, the apparent self’s independence would be an illusion. But because egoism had numerous social and economic causes, the enlightened worldview retained some anthropomorphic projections onto the unity, to rationalize the nature of the civilized individual. There were degrees of enlightenment, so that one or the other factor, impersonal metaphysical unity or personification, predominated. For example, in the Eastern religions, the anthropomorphisms were stripped away as the enlightened person was thought to experience a transcendent unity, in a purified state of consciousness. Alternatively, the monotheistic Western traditions generally took a personal deity to be the highest principle.
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Modern Enlightenment: Objectivity and Artificialization
The next epochal change was the birth of modern civilization in the European Renaissance and Scientific Revolution, followed by the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. This transition was marked by profound advances in investigative techniques, which presented the educated upper classes with an altogether impersonal world. Instead of being horrified by this new knowledge, modernists relished the opportunity to conquer a material world that has no prior rights or else they sought refuge in the halfway house of deism. In any case, modernists were forced to reconceptualize the idea of enlightenment. Whereas the ancient kind posited a metaphysical unity that was somehow both transcendent and personal, modernists eventually eliminated personhood altogether, not just in metaphysics but in psychology. And so modern enlightenment is an appreciation of the implications of thoroughgoing metaphysical naturalism. The real world is still a hidden unity and scientists seek to uncover the causal pattern that establishes that unity. Thus, the dichotomy between the reality of the hidden spirit world and the illusion of mundane plurality in the spatiotemporal field of opposites became the split between a rational understanding of nature’s impersonality, as confirmed by the impartiality of cause and effect, and the naïve personification of anything, including ultimate reality or the human self. Enlightened modernists are materialists who think that mind is an illusion and that fundamental reality is bound to be alien to our sensibilities.
However, the conception of enlightenment as a matter of rationality, set off against the darkness of superstition, can’t hold, because rationality is a personal matter which takes for granted the illusion of the personal self. The modern myth of enlightenment as merely the courage to follow the logic and the evidence where they lead can’t be the whole story of the great transition to the modern period. Something else must have happened, not just a rise of rational neutrality, if rationality itself is merely peripheral. Instead of seeing modern enlightenment in terms of the symbol of the Light of Reason, and thus as a mental phenomenon, we should see it as technological: modernists exited the Dark Age through their technological advances which literally made the world brighter in the case of the commercial use of electricity. More broadly, modern enlightenment is the expansion of the “Light” of Artificiality, which makes for a wealth of historical data points. After all, what makes a dark age dark is the lack of lasting evidence of the culture’s identity, due to massive illiteracy and the absence of durable technologies that tell the tale. All of that changed with the printing press and the computer, for example. A Bright Age, then, is bright with cultural information and the light rays should be thought of as being transmitted especially to future historians.
Commercial light bulbs were patented in the late 19th C, although scientists studied electricity as early as 1600 CE. The Age of Enlightenment is primarily an 18th C. period, so the world didn’t literally become much brighter during the modern Enlightenment. However, the paradigmatic rationality of Enlightenment intellectuals, especially that of Isaac Newton, led directly to the Industrial Revolution in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, which included the invention of the light bulb. So we should look at modern enlightenment as beginning with the myth of rationality and giving way to wonder at the undeniable reality of recent technological advance. First came the light of Reason, then scientists realized that personhood and thus reason are illusory. But all along, the modern process was set in motion which replaced the darkness of nature with the light of artificiality (with technological incarnations of culture which endure and testify to our historical identity). Thus, modern enlightenment is only inchoately the dichotomy between neutral (non-personifying) reason and ignorance; the real distinction is between natural, pristine reality, which is dark and monstrous precisely because of its impersonality, and the light we bring to the world by impressing our stamp into it—not subjectively through mere theological interpretation or magical supposition, as in the mythopoeic period, but through the inexorable, objective spread of modern technology.
What’s monumental about modernity isn’t that some white male Europeans learned to think more rigorously, thanks to the scientific methods they invented. Of course, there are such methods, but modern enlightenment shouldn’t be personalized. When you characterize the new kind of enlightenment in that way, you’re left with incoherence since naturalism won’t support naïve personification. Instead, modern enlightenment must be thought of as a great widening of perspective, so that instead of projecting our ego onto indifferent nature, we eliminate our ego through existential encounters with nature’s monstrosity which humiliate us, doing away with our pretensions. Left thusly vacated, the real world is free to flow through us, as it were. In this case, the glory goes not to the great scientists, regardless of how exoteric modern history is told; the scientific methods, for example, must be part of nature’s self-overcoming on our planet, due to a shift from biological processes to artificial ones.
Scientific methods of thought are algorithms which presage the functions of high technology, as in the computer. In other words, before mass technology there was massive regimentation of intellectual life, whereas prior to the Scientific Revolution, social regimentation was confined to the army, to government, farming, and the like, while the business of discovering the nature of reality was still a free-wheeling affair. Ancient philosophy was mostly an artistic kind of speculation, although there are protoscientific aspects of ancient Greek and Indian philosophies. The Presocratics, for example, followed the logic of their hypotheses, however counterintuitive those hypotheses may have been. But what made the Scientific Revolution so special, objectively speaking, was a social transformation. Instead of being ruled mainly by biological norms, such as by the instinct of preserving the genes through sexual reproduction, which were thinly rationalized by the art of myth-making, a new dynamic was introduced: what Jacques Ellul called the necessity of efficiency as a matter of technique.
All species employ techniques, because they’re adapted to their environment, but the Scientific Revolution was the birth of an impersonal, regimented subculture of cognitive elites, one that’s modeled more and more on the machines made possible by that cognitive labour. In place of personification, mystification, or artistic speculation, there’s surrender to rational technique, to algorithms, and to the other scientific methods (public and repeatable testing of hypotheses, mathematical precision, and so on). It’s as though in depersonalizing ourselves, thanks to skepticism, the disempowerment of the Catholic Church, and so forth, we allowed nature’s impersonality to flow more easily through our social structures. Whereas hitherto, our bodies were governed by evolutionary norms and our minds were consumed by myths and illusions of personhood, which we projected onto nature so that we became doubly deluded, modernists abandoned personification, which freed the mind to mimic what the rest of the universe is doing, namely to flow in what I call an undead (impersonal but not inert) fashion.
We still personify techniques when we think of them teleologically, as having a mentally represented goal. However, even if there’s no divine mind desiring nature to end in some way, natural processes do have ends, which is just to say that there are natural processes, as such, or changes that have initial conditions, transitional periods, and probable points of termination. The more we understand nature, the wider our field of vision until we think of everything as a cosmic whole having a beginning (the Big Bang), a middle (evolution and complexification in space and time), and an end state, such as the universe’s heat death. What we call the scientific methods, then, or the more efficient modern techniques of rational thought, are really—according to the enlightened modernist—an inflowing of some underlying natural process besides biological evolution, one which begins with ultra-rational cognition and continues with the elimination of the noosphere and with the transformation of the biosphere into the technosphere.
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Counter-Enlightenment and the Return of Mythopoeic Reverie
As long as we’re depersonalizing enlightenment, we should note the Counter-Enlightenment period which leads from the Romantics and other early critics of modern hyper-rationality to postmodern relativism and general jadedness. I won’t attempt to adjudicate this debate here, but I want to close by reflecting on whether the Counter-Enlightenment should be interpreted as an omen indicating that modern enlightenment will itself be transformed. Again, if we ignore the psychological and social levels of inquiry, since an enlightened modernist must regard them as misleading, we can look at historical developments as stages of some larger process. Natural selection explains the design of living bodies, but not the cultural shifts between elite forms of cognition. From mythopoeic animism, to the middle ground of ancient mystical theism, to modern naturalism, there’s a clear elimination of personhood from grand theories. Moreover, there’s exponential progress in technical innovation, as modernists have come to divorce rationality from artistic interpretation. Rather than seeing herself as similar to a shaman, in being a wise person, healer, or hero for venturing into the unknown, an enlightened modernist is more likely to think of herself as a glorified calculator. Modern cognition is hyper-rational in that logic for us is demythologized, and the sciences are separate from the arts and from the humanities, which means that scientific cognition is inhuman (objective and neutral). Science is thus the indwelling of natural mechanisms, due to a breakdown in resistance from religious delusions, resulting in the perfection of the artificial world. Modern geniuses are distorted mirrors held up to undead nature, the reflected image being a technological bastardization of the monstrous original.
And yet we may be witnessing here a cycle rather than a linear progression. Technology may allow us to recover the mythopoeic union of object and subject, so that modern objectivity overcomes itself through its technological progeny. After all, the artificial world caters to our whims and so exacerbates egoism and the urge to personify. Whereas modern enlightenment began with a vision of a lifeless, mechanical universe, the postmodern kind is much less arid and austere. This is because postmodernists are immersed in an artificial world which turns fantasies into realities on a minute-by-minute basis, thus perhaps fulfilling the promise of mythopoeic speculation. For example, if you’re hungry, you may ask your smartphone where the nearest restaurant is and that phone will speak to you; next, you’ll follow the signs in your car which adjusts to your preferences in a hundred ways, and you’ll arrive at the restaurant and be served without having to hunt or cook the animal yourself. The prehistoric fantasy was that nature is alive. Modernists discovered that everything is at best undead and certainly devoid of purpose or of mental, as opposed to biological, life. But perhaps postmodernists are realizing that the world was undead whereas it’s now being imbued with purpose and brought to nonbiological life by us through technology. Instead of mythologizing the world, we postmodernists artificialize it, and whereas natural mechanisms train us to be animals following evolutionary rhythms, artificial mechanisms may train us to be something else entirely, such as infantilized consumers that recapture the prehistoric sense of being at the world’s all-important center, thanks to our history of taming the hostile wilderness.
Three Pound Brain 
What’s monumental about…
To my evaluation, using the word monumental is attempting to slap a wet chunk of personalisation clay onto the process of impersonalisation. An act of still trying to know it, in human terms, from the outside. To name it in the old ways, as if looking in at something. Instead of working from within a fortification/a set of defences, looking out beyond known walls.
It’s not monumental.
I’d also disagree about the idea that impersonal nature is slithering in amongst us any more than ever before. Instead you and I have just been cut off from generating (or hunting) our food, and via various men in crisp uniforms and oiled guns (paid for/off by our labour) weve been cut off from shelter unless various board game conditions are met.
It’s impersonalised as we live like battery hens. Who can show their way of living is so great, when the ways of living (food/shelter) are so utterly controlled elsewhere? Only the alpha’s you lothe so much are able to give the impression of personally enacted bounty – and so a whole pop idol culture comes about such sleight of hand/face illusion. And the rest of us buy video games and try to get to the top of the score chart or top level, so as to prove our blood as true and strong.
And all of this hardly takes anywhere near the cutting edge of technology/scientific thinking. In a way, that’s yet to be employed. Not saying that it wont be employed – just it’s actually quite oldschool right now. Or so is my arguement against it being some impersonalised nature issue. It’s just old school normalised oppression. Oh, I pay when you live in clusters, you want stuff like an organised sewerage system – and this takes contributions from all in the cluster. But it hardly requires whipping away personal food production capacity – and generally via the means of artificial land ‘ownership’ declaration. How deliciously primitive is the idea of anyone somehow having a special, magical ‘ownership’ thing over dirt? Then because regular folks, various regular folks who have other regular folks with sharp implements and a loyalty to them, declare they ‘own’ the land. Eventually it makes itself look more legitimate that that, with governments owning the land. In tight, indifferent to personal food production, lots. If you can even meet their boardgame terms (terms paid for in staggering your life away from what you’d want it to be, in radical terms…so as to not stagger it away from what you want it to be too much (as in, forced to live under a bridge because everywhere else is owned by .gov/men with guns)
I don’t really see impersonalisation as the problem. The battery hen-ification of the population hardly seems high science to me.
Of course there may be further hen-ification via science – go to the airport and they can look at you naked now, regardless of clothing, due to science. All in the name of protection, of course. Don’t want any foxes getting into the coop, after all…
When I say that nature “dwells within” modernists more than ancient theists, I’m trying to conceptualize what it is to have the better model of the world without resorting to personalization. We can think of theistic delusions as defense mechanisms, which allowed the mythopoeic people to live completely in a fantasy world, like the matrix. Their world was entirely personal, whereas there were no people in their spiritual sense. Their childlike fantasy prevented the emergence of the technosphere.
After modernization, that fantasy world disappears, at least for the cognitive elites, and they produce an ever-expanding artificial world. Instead of personalizing everything, we artificialize. And instead of seeing this change as the result of having the True worldview or scientific model, which we can apply to create a more preferable environment, we might try to look at this purely in terms of an impersonal process. “Indwelling of nature” is just a figure of speech to try to get our creative juices flowing, since thinking without personalizing things is hard–for me, at least.
Ironically, the end of this process might be a fulfillment of the mythopoeic matrix, which is a highly mysterious turn of affairs. The technosphere can seem like a real rather than a merely projective or imaginary enchantment of impersonal nature. And it’s science, the great disenchanter, that’s integral to this transformation.
Your talk of battery hens (and Michael Murden’s too) gets at an Orwellian interpretation of modernity. But this assumes the possibility of freewill, which is central to personhood. At any rate, we might prefer Huxley’s idea that we’ll come to love our cages. Seeing how we can’t get enough of our smartphones and seeing also how our high-tech cages are closer to holograms than to metal boxes, the matrix metaphor seems more apt–and that leads us back to mythopoeic reverie and enchantment.
Ben, I’m inclined to think you are just latching onto what might be called the mercenary mind. The ruthless mind. It’s not nature or science in itself. It’s actually very human. And ruthless. I don’t argue that the mercenary mind grasps onto the tools of science and applies them as befits its ruthless motives. But motives they still are, even as they uglyfy the world. It’s really not witness to something outside the human.
On freewill – gah, there’s probably atleast a dozen different interpretations of freewill and I have no interest in defending them all. But frankly on the basis of ignorance, when someone might come out of two doors, you pick one and they come out of the other – well, that was, from your perspective ‘free’. Free of you knowing which door they’d come out of, anyway (which is probably why none of us like the infringement of security cameras and other such personal details being taken – they reduce our personhood by reducing our unpredictability. Then again…facebook…). I’m not sure which definition of free will you are coming from – I don’t think I come from the same definition as yours.
Really I’m left curious – got no sense of freewill or personhood – sooo, what’s the point of any old ranting, eh? Just went mad? Blunt questions if this were just regular conversation, but I presume were being atleast a bit more cut to the chase than that in this blogs comments. If not, I retract these comments.
Oh, meant to mention something you might like – there’s this roguelike game (it’s fun!) I’ve mentioned here once before called ‘Unreal World’ set in the finish iron age – I thought you might really like the start up text so I’ll repeat it here:
There are countless stories, legends and myths about the first winter.
During the first winter, the Inhemo became many.
Men, wives, children, the heroes and the wise ones walked the earth.
The heroes made the fire, they made the tools and shelters , the made skis,
and they made drums and the kantele.
When the first winter was over,
Inhemoes could not understand the wind singing,
nor the bear and the forest humming.
The wise ones among the people said that the world was no longer real.
The world was unreal.
That Unreal World text does seem relevant. Is the mythopoeic union of subject and object more or less real than the stark, impersonal mechanisms of nature?
Regarding freewill, I think you’re confusing my view with RSB’s. In this particular article, I’m laying aside some of my views and trying to understand an historical process from a different perspective. Specifically, I assume here that naturalists don’t resort to personalization in their explanations. As I say at the end, though, I think these naturalists face the irony of the counter-enlightenment and of technoscience’s fulfillment of the mythopoeic fantasy.
Anyway, as I argue in a few other articles, I do think personal properties emerge, including autonomy (self-control). The freewill you’re talking about seems like the compatibilist kind. Even the classic determinist says we may not be able to predict everything, because of practical limits on our knowledge. But in principle, the choice of which door to go through is forced like everything else.
I think there’s a stronger kind of freewill. The brain isn’t subject to external forces so directly, which makes it a sort of singularity. It’s an internal world that’s free to do it’s own thing, free to some extent from the external world. All organisms and even all cells have this freedom to some degree. Living things are partially divided from everything else and so they face the problem of maintaining homeostasis. Rationality gives us an extra filter, a means of building a higher self. Of course, our bodies are natural objects, so they’re subject to physical forces, and we’re animals that are subject to biological processes. Still, our freedom is seen in our creative capacity to behave anomalously, such as by renouncing the animalistic or socially conventional path, as in ascetic behaviour.
But even if I were a determinist, I could say I’m forced to rant just as the sun is forced to shine. Still, normative discourse would be absurd. This gets at a problem I’ve been pushing on RSB, since there’s normativity even in our understanding of science, and naturalism presupposes science. So science must be naturalised and I’d like to see the thoroughly mechanistic “account” of science.
Sticking with the impersonal view of things, though, I’d say ranting and ascetic renunciation may have causal roles to play in the larger processes, such as in the counter-enlightenment ones.
Ben,
I’m entering a new topic, but:
But even if I were a determinist, I could say I’m forced to rant just as the sun is forced to shine. Still, normative discourse would be absurd. This gets at a problem I’ve been pushing on RSB, since there’s normativity even in our understanding of science
There is no point in ‘I could say I’m forced to rant…’
This is justifying (attempting to justify) the ranting to other people.
I think you’re coming from a very human attitude here, where you take the physics of the matter as being a moral justification. But it wont seem a moral justification, it just seems like physics. Saying ‘I could say I’m forced to rant (because of determinism)’ is simply socio political manouvering. It’s just trying to argue other people into accepting something.
It’s not describing the result of adding two chemicals together. Time+you does not == rant. Saying time+you==rant is just trying to convince others into accepting that behaviour. It is not a deterministic grasp of the situation at all.
I say this, because you then say there is normativity in our understanding of science. But what you take as normativity there is just more socio political manouvering/convincing someone to accept something. Like I am now (though I hope I’m adding some testing variables, rather than trying to convince purely from the ‘I’m awesome’ standpoint. Especially given I’m not awesome (so I really have to lean on those testing points!)). Our ‘understanding of science’ is largely someones successful act of convincing you do to X or Y. I don’t mean that in a terrible way – as humans were always trying to convince others of this or that. I’m just showing the man behind the curtain, explicitly. What seems like normativity and an understanding of science is largely a convincing act performed by one or more people.
Hellstrom’s Hive (Frank Herbert) is my all time favorite book about battery-henification. As Herbert points out, the earth can’t support six billion hunter-gatherers. There does seem to be a trade off between larger population and less autonomy. If we want the average human to have more autonomy we need to have fewer humans. Given the shortage of humans volunteering to die in order to give the remaining humans more autonomy, it seems that less autonomy is the way things are going. On the other hand there is no shortage of humans willing to kill to give themselves more autonomy. In either case, the road back to more autonomy leads through a sea of blood. On the third hand, it’s possible the utopians are right and science will provide us with vast new resources, resources that will allow us to be not merely autonomous, but free. On the fourth hand, even when we have as much as we need, we never have as much as we want. Technology has never been able to keep up with greed. The thing I like most about Hellstrom’s Hive is the idea that instead of using technology to chase greed we can use technology to destroy it.
In my other article on decadence and enlightenment, I point out that the larger population provides the elites with more leisure time, which allowed for a new kind of immorality and for advances in the art of theological speculation. I assume the prehistoric nomads had little free time, because they were always on the move, exposed to danger, and needing to worry about the necessities of survival–without being able to delegate. So in some sense, the Neolithic Revolution made the elites, at least, more free.
But freedom amounts to personalization. I’m going for a gestalt switch here. I’m trying to put my finger on a big process instead of looking at the condition of the units involved in that process. We can certainly ask whether technology is liberating or enslaving us. As the Matrix movies point out, it’s a little bit of both. The technosphere enables us to participate in higher-level evolution, the artificialization of everything that was once thought to be sacred, but the artificial world turns out to be an elaborate playpen which has a counter-enlightenment force. So there’s a new kind of enslavement, a fulfilling of the mythopoeic fantasy that only went underground in our archetypes.
Technology frees us by letting us do what we want more efficiently, but the nature of our environment inevitably limits what we actually want. The ancient noosphere filled the ancients’ head with childlike notions of spirituality, while the technosphere fills ours with updated, postmodern and ironic versions of the latter, turning us into deluded, narcissistic consumers (rather than naive theists). Are children free, as they naively personalize their surroundings, or are they in service to developmental processes which use the children to some end?
Excellent piece, Ben. Given the conceptual frame you set up, the primary parallel lies between ideological anthropomorphications of environment and material anthropomorphications of environment enabled by the scientific overthrow of these atavistic ideologies. But ultimately, what is the difference? It’s all natural systems: what difference does it make attributing psychology to a storm system versus a robotic dog? Is it simply a matter of predictive utility? Or are you suggesting there is some kind of genuine ontological (as opposed to ontic) difference?
Thanks! I can’t remember if I make this point in this particular article, but there are at least two relevant senses of “natural.” There’s metaphysical nature, which means naturalists are as monistic as the ancients were panpsychistic. And there’s natural vs artificial. Metaphysically, artifacts are natural too, but there’s nevertheless an objective difference between the green and the concrete jungles, between the pristine wilderness and the world that’s transformed by clever life forms. I’m aware of the danger of re-introducing hidden Cartesian dualism at this point.
But there’s also a danger for the metaphysical naturalist: calling everything whatsoever “natural” is vacuous if it turns “natural” into a weasel word. This is the problem with all monisms: they tend to become mystical obfuscations. This is exacerbated by the fact that whatever nature really is is made known only to the wizards who best understand the fundamental level of matter–and they’re telling us that no one really understands it. They have the math to calculate how it works, but they lack the reliable metaphors to understand what the hell is going on there. So if we don’t know what matter really is, because we can’t yet see the size and shape of the cosmic behemoth, “natural” in the ontological sense becomes a placeholder. And the same is true for “mechanical” or for any other naturalistic synonym.
I think this problem with metaphysical naturalism gives us the green light to play with the natural-artificial distinction–even though in the back of minds we should remind ourselves that in some sense everything is natural. We know what nature isn’t: nature isn’t made of spirits or gods or people. But now comes the irony: nature includes the fantasies of those supernatural entities (the mythopoeic worldview) and the apparent fulfillment of those fantasies (the technosphere and the infantilized consumer).
So I agree, attributing mental properties to natural systems and to artificial (high-tech) ones may be equally wrongheaded, in that we users of those systems become less useful. But there’s a difference here which seems to make for a cycle: ancient animism was merely imaginary whereas the modern technosphere is real. Granted, there are no spirits in the machines, but the machines really are at our beck and call, whereas the ancients only deluded themselves when they figured they could control nature with prayers and special dances.
The important thing is the quality of our life. The ancients wanted to live like gods, which is why they imagined they were friends with the spirits; the ancients became divine by association. Now, modern folk really do live like gods, because of our association with the machines. We haven’t created spirits (although I like to think personal properties like autonomy do metaphysically emerge at some point), but we have created a new kind of infantilization. The ancients imagined the world was personal because they were naive. Modernists became cynical and nihilistic, and they unconsciously sought to escape those burdens of enlightenment by building the technosphere that just happens to actually cater to our whims and to flatter our self-image, making our personal projections inevitable by simulating mental processes with computer programs.
So the ancient personal projections weren’t entirely idle. As archetypes, they’ve determined what we’ve done with our scientific knowledge of nature: they’ve driven us to fulfill the old enchanted view of the world. And if we stick with just the metaphysical, largely empty notion of monistic nature, we miss this interesting, ironic turn of affairs. I never miss a chance to acknowledge an irony.
I’ve never understood your arguments for why it is the universality of ‘nature’ renders it vacuous, or how the way it grounds out in mystery is in any sense special compared to the way all universal concepts ground out in mystery. The ‘weasel’ stuff just seems rhetorical as a result. How exactly does this argument work?
The ancient projections are alive and well!
But supernatural metaphysics doesn’t ground out in mystery; on the contrary, God, spirit, and so on are phenomologically familiar, which is why the mythopoeic worldview must have been so comforting. Naturalism is mysterious, because we’re coming up against the alienness of everything, including us, which is the flipside of giving up on personification.
I don’t think “metaphysically natural” is entirely vacuous, since we can define it negatively. But it’s just a fact of the present state of physics, as I understand it, that the models give scientists control without understanding. A mechanist might want to say that the understanding is bogus and that all that’s needed is control through measurement and equations that let us predict what will happen. The metaphors connecting the unfamiliar with the familiar might then be distractions. In that case, I take it supernaturalism might be as valid as naturalism, since each would be evaluated in terms of its effects, with no talk at all of truth. Supernaturalism’s use would have been as a mechanism for controlling society, while naturalism’s use would be as one for controlling everything else.
As for the danger of the naturalist’s weasel word fallacy, I think the danger is clear. When we speak of what’s natural, we usually mean something that’s no longer licensed by the actual physics. We think nature is made up of chunks of stuff, but almost everything is empty space–except that space is filled with quantum fluctuations to satisfy the Uncertainty Principle. We think natural things are solid and deterministic, but matter is fundamentally empty and weirdly indeterministic. So we think we’re saying something precise and unarguable, whereas we don’t know what we’re talking about.
And if we switch to mechanistic talk, I think the danger is that most people will understand us to be talking about things like car engines or other such gizmos or contraptions. If we’re really talking about systems made up of causal relations, this opens the door to asking what we mean by “causal relations.” Are the relations necessary and are they one-directional? Physics equations are time-reversible. So many physicists take causality to be an illusion, with reality being only the static totality defined by some exotic math.
“But supernatural metaphysics doesn’t ground out in mystery; on the contrary, God, spirit, and so on are phenomologically familiar”
and mysterious, even to the believers themselves. One of the things that makes the Book of Job so fascinating is that it is a test of fidelity in ignorance. I don’t see the epistemic distinction. One of the signature features of intentionality is the way it delivers ‘control without understanding.’ In the natural sciences, you have to chase mechanism down to the quantum before you reach this level.
“We think natural things are solid and deterministic, but matter is fundamentally empty and weirdly indeterministic. So we think we’re saying something precise and unarguable, whereas we don’t know what we’re talking about.”
But the big question has to be, Compared to what? To Biblical interpretation? Family gossip? The point isn’t that scientific theory is apodictic, only that it’s far and away the most powerful theoretical claim-making apparatus we got. I’ve debated many religious believers over the years and so I’ve come to see this line of criticism as opportunistic, as a way to clear ‘credibility space’ for nonnaturalistic claims. Science is a skeptical enterprise – the very epistemic incompleteness you reference is intrinsic to what it is, so we qualify our commitments accordingly.
The mystery of time and the attendant mysteries of causation in no way makes the Second Law of Thermodynamics less a natural law. There’s nothing wrong with pointing out these limitations of science in of themselves, but as I say, whenever they’re raised in a nonnaturalistic speculative context, alarm bells start to go off. Scientific theory is incredibly mysterious, but it’s also the only remotely reliable game in theory town.
I agree that theists think of God as a great mystery too. All theists have a mystical side. But to the extent that theism offers any understanding as opposed to wonder, theism works by extending the personhood metaphor, which makes theistic causes familiar sorts of subjects. Naturalists have no such recourse, so natural causes are more alien than theistic ones.
Now, you’ve moved the goalposts on me here. We were talking about whether “natural” can be a weasel word and so whether naturalism offers understanding as well as just measurement and control. And now you say that science is comparatively the best kind of explanation, because it’s “the most powerful” one. Power (and reliability too) go to measurement and control, not necessarily to understanding. You can have power over something without understanding it. Likewise, you can predict how it will respond without knowing what it is.
Typically, the more we can predict and control something, the more hypotheses we’ll imagine to guess at what it is we’re dealing with. But this kind of understanding requires metaphors, and I think we might be disagreeing on what’s involved in understanding something. Indeed, this gets at my point that the naturalist needs to naturalize science too. A certain kind of understanding will have to be eliminated along with personhood, from the mechanistic “viewpoint,” right?
In any case, my point is that the theist has an easier time with understanding things in terms of metaphors, even if her understanding fails for the purpose of scientific explanation, which is the purpose of controlling the thing. By contrast, the naturalist has to stretch her mind much more, looking for associations, because she depersonalizes everything and so is faced with nothing but alien objects. To me, this raises the question of whether naturalistic explanation and understanding really do come down just to having power over the world. But you’ve resisted this pragmatic interpretation of naturalism.
I agree there are defensive, reactionary criticisms of naturalism. I mean to make room for aesthetics, heroism, wonder, and other such existential goodies. You can say those are substitute gods and that I’m peddling a quasireligion. That’s the essence of Nietschean atheism, isn’t it? My response would be twofold: first, my blog explores the extent to which there’s room for such a quasireligion on naturalistic grounds, or given what I call the worst-case scenario (the undead god, etc). You might say there’s no such room, but I mean to see for myself by confronting that scenario.
Second, I want to see the alternative to what I’m doing. That’s why I’ve been asking you to show me what science is, naturalistically or mechanistically “speaking.” Show me the mechanist who regards her worldview as merely powerful rather than also true (there are some, like Mach and other pragmatists, but they slip in values to avoid the charge of being satanic sociopaths), or who has no implicit or unconscious belief in something sacred that justifies her normative behaviour. Religions clearly have natural roles to play for us higher mammals.
You’ll say that religions and philosophies are irrelevant to the second-order, theoretical matter of understanding the world. And here we’d be back at the question of what counts as understanding. Is it just prediction and control or must there be metaphors based on creative stretches of the imagination, metaphors that make for coherence in a set of ideas and that guide us in choosing what to do with our power? If we eliminate that kind of understanding, assuming that it’s filled with delusions, what becomes of science? What is science’s purpose or ultimate end? Again, I’d like to see you tackle those questions, if you haven’t already. I mean to tackle them myself in the next several articles I’ll offer you.
I’m not entirely sure what you’re responding to here. The charge is that you’re falling back on a facile notion of science and naturalism (as just more ‘theory’) to give yourself theoretical elbow room – to make yourself sound more credible than you are. I appreciate that philosophy burns promissory notes for fuel, but you’re refusing to stare your own undead monster in the eyes by playing the ‘science doesn’t know X’ card as a means of motivating your own purely speculative project. You’re not giving your dilemma it’s due if you look at science as simply ‘one more blinkered ideology.’ You can make it silly, emphasize it’s warts, manhandle it the way you can any other collection of words, and yet it continues to eat you and everything you know all the same. This is the epistemic difference, what sets science apart from all other forms of theoretical claim-making. This is what you need to savvy, the fact that you are attempting to domesticate actual theoretical cognition with mere theoretical speculation. No matter what vestments or rags you garb it in, it’s going to continue revolutionizing everything we know via mechanistic cognition.
What is theoretical understanding? It certainly has nothing to do with how easily it comes or how it cozy it makes us feel! Otherwise, odds are science has no more purpose than we do: it just plays out, the way we do, like everything else natural.
I’m afraid I ought to repeat your opening line, word for word: “I’m not entirely sure what you’re responding to here.” Where do I say or imply here that science doesn’t know something or that science isn’t the best means of knowing the facts? Far from saying that science is limited, I’m saying that science will eat not just theistic religions, but the common understanding of science itself, as well as the notions of understanding, theoretical cognition, knowledge, truth, and on and on. And I’m simply asking the question: what is science *then,* from that modern enlightened perspective? Can we fathom what science is doing if we stop applying the implicitly normative or semantic notions to science, such as “theoretical,” “epistemic,” etc?
That’s what I try to do in this article (artificialization, technosphere). So I’m not making the transcendental argument that normative notions are inescapable. Instead, I’m trying to stretch my imagination to see science’s causal role in a very old historical process of social transformation.
You say there’s this epistemic difference, but a mechanist can use “epistemic” only as a misleading shorthand. In mechanistic terms, there is no knowledge; as far as I can see, on the mechanistic view there’s just power and causality. Now, that’s not enough for a mechanistic “understanding” of understanding or of science, theory, knowledge, and so on. That’s because there’s lots of power in the world with no hint of knowledge. This is why pragmatists often presuppose normative principles. And that’s why I think science’s connection to technology is very helpful here. Science isn’t just a means of empowerment; it’s involved in an ironic counter-enlightenment process of fulfilling our prehistoric, archetypal fantasies of artificializing/personalizing the world.
I’m still working your argument from your initial reply. I had asked about the difference between reading intentionality into artifacts as opposed to natural processes, and you responded by attempting to problematize the ‘natural’ -an argument you’ve used before but that I’ve never fully understood, to whit: “I think this problem with metaphysical naturalism gives us the green light to play with the natural-artificial distinction–even though in the back of minds we should remind ourselves that in some sense everything is natural.” I’m still not sure how this ‘problem’ is a ‘problem’ (given that it applies to all theory), or how it warrants the distinction.
Right, your criticism of the natural-artificial distinction was that it’s all (metaphysically) natural, regardless of whether we personify a tree or a car. My response was that while I agree that in some sense everything is likely natural, the problem is that no one really knows what that sense is. At least, it’s not clear what it means positively to say that everything is natural, just as saying that God is in everything is obscure. This is the problem with all monisms. The ultimate substrate becomes very slippery, whether it’s God or matter. What the hell is matter now? Is it chunks of hard, concrete stuff (atoms in the old Greek sense) or is it just mathematical structure, as Pythagoras said? Is it ghost-like waves or subatomic wave functions, as in quantum mechanics? Physicists have the math but not the metaphors for our primitive kind of mammalian understanding (or at least they lack the means to test their leaps of imagination), and so it’s physics, not philosophy that’s currently writing the promissory notes here.
How is this problem relevant? Well, what’s the force behind saying that both the green and the concrete jungles (roughly speaking) are natural? It means there’s nothing supernatural about either, sure, but I mean to grant this by saying there’s no real ghost in our machines. Nevertheless, there are still interesting differences between the natural and the artificial. Living things seem to act as instruments that transform their environments, and science, together with the other organs of modern society (capitalism, democracy) are the means of doing so with the greatest efficiency. The technosphere hasn’t literally made the world a miraculous place, by violating any natural law, but it clearly has simulated the mythopoeic vision of such a world, of one that intermixes subject and object (as opposed to eliminating the former, which is what the mechanist does).
The green jungle intermixes those two only in our animistic imagination, but the concrete jungle does so in reality. Granted, metaphysically everything is still made of atoms, whatever they are. But the concrete jungle is tied to life in a way that the non-artificial world isn’t. The one has functions and purposes, while the other doesn’t. Those purposes are subjective in that they’re used by us, but they’re also objective in that the machines are intelligently designed. The artificial world breaks down the distinction between subject and object, because it extends our minds to our tools and machines, while the artificial environment trains us to be more machine-like. (Something similar happens in biology, with evolutionary functions, because all of nature is undead, but that’s another story.)
Even if we lay aside what I said about the problem with monistic naturalism–I just sort of through that objection in there–the natural-artificial distinction would remain valid and interesting. The metaphysical oneness of the green and concrete jungles (the fact they’re both made of mechanisms and matter at the deepest level) simply wouldn’t be relevant to the apparent higher-level differences.
It’s the problem with all theory, isn’t it? not just monisms. The cost of doing business. I still don’t get your argument! but I agree it isn’t necessary to motivate your distinction.
I also agree that the distinction between natural and artifactual is useful and interesting, but the perennial danger, as you know, lies in our hardwired penchant to essentialize this difference in ontological terms rather than seeing it as a mere difference in complexity requiring (in some cases) a radical difference in cognitive approach. Talk of ‘extending minds to our tools,’ for instance, sounds like ontological talk, unless you see ‘mind’ instrumentally as an ‘explanatory posit.’ Are you viewing mind ontologically as an emergentist might or merely instrumentally as an eliminativist might?
But do we not delude ourselves with some other misleading separation of things there are no apparent patterns, to our misleadings. Even if gods and magic don’t rule our organization. Doesn’t some other concepts that are missing to us elude our mappings.
Yes, I can see that danger and I can see also how the figurative idea of technology as an extended body or mind might presuppose some dubious metaphysics.
The thing is, I don’t take metaphysics so seriously and I wonder if you should likewise be more Machian and pragmatic about metaphysics. To me, metaphysics and most of the rest of philosophy are just matters of story-telling, so that aesthetics becomes king. But I take aesthetics and fiction more seriously than many naturalists, who think there’s only objective truth and relatively useless and irresponsible subjective opinion. As we’ve discussed at length, the problem with the idea of objective truth is that objectivity eats away at the intuitions that give sense to the notion of truth. But because we’re mammals with an irrational, unconscious side, we’re satisfied by stories that not only make us feel better about being in the scary world, but that have certain epistemic virtues, such as their adding of coherence to a worldview.
This is the role of metaphysics. When we say that everything is natural, we’re spinning a metanarrative. And when we say, with Descartes, that there are (only) objective and subjective substances, we’re likewise telling a story that expresses our longing to be fundamentally important in the universe. The antithetical story would be cosmicism.
Yes, to the extent that a piece of philosophy is backed up by reason and evidence, it has scientific and not just aesthetic standing, but philosophy is typically mixed with artistry and the relevant art is story-telling. Grandiose metaphysical claims, in particular, are untestable and very likely to function as special fictions. They’re special because their readers take them seriously, and so they’re the elite know-it-all’s version of myths. The rabble prefer their myths to wear their allegorical meanings on their sleeves. But the cognitive elite pretend to be ultra-rational, to have only rationally justified beliefs, and so they must disguise their myths as arguments or as super-technical, scientific theories.
Anyway, to answer your question, I suspect the dichotomy between essentialist and instrumental talk of mind-extension is a false one. Instrumentalism would be the pragmatic way to go, right? I see biological and artificial minds as emergent phenomena that cry out for explanation (and for animalistic understanding through myths/tall tales). So they’re real, but they’re not naturally fundamental, which is only to say that they’re very rare as opposed to being everywhere, like protons and electrons.
I try to see this in terms of natural processes, whereas you like to think in terms of mechanisms. But the two notions are closely related. Mechanisms are more static in that they can be represented by a diagram without a temporal parameter. Processes are matters of change through time. But processes are based on causality, of course, since causes and effects make for the beginning, middle, and end of some process.
In this article, I’m talking about an ironic historical process in which the noosphere becomes the technosphere, which cycles back to a postmodern, simulated and concrete noosphere. Talk of extending the mind is meant to get at the element of transformation in this process. I suppose the notion of extension here is metaphorical; indeed, it might be vitalistic to the extent that it’s taken literally, which is the danger you’re raising. Mind you, I could argue that it’s literal, by talking about how computerization extends the programmer’s intentions through the computer code.
In any case, it’s just a philosophical story, as far as I’m concerned, so metaphors are apt. Still, a good story isn’t the same as an irresponsible fantasy (as in the worst of theism), since good stories are grounded in reality as opposed to being entirely escapist. I think there are plenty of historical facts to back up my story and to make it relevant to our zeitgeist, even though this philosophy is as much art as it is science.
But I wonder if the metaphors don’t lead your prognostications astray. I appreciate the theme: the notion of ‘technological reenchantment’ is a classic saw in SF (and the whole reason I was such a Zelazny fan as a teenager). I just don’t see it happening. Things never ceased being enchanted for the folk, so the substitution of artificial for natural systems occurs entirely behind the curtain for them. They are the blind pole of the social Akrasis I keep talking about. On the administrative side, however, there will be more and more ‘social hacking,’ a deliberate tapping into the subpersonal, which will have the effect of ever more deeply integrating the folk into vast institutional mechanisms. So on my account, for instance, it isn’t a matter of increasing disenchantment ironically reenchanting environments, but rather increasing disenchantment transforming the whole into an ever more noiseless, and ever more singular machine, culminating with us ‘uploading’ or otherwise becoming machine. Borgification, in effect!
I’m not sure the Western folk are as animistic as the ancients, but I do intend to incorporate this exoteric-esoteric split in the follow-up article. There’s the more animistic herd of consumers and technology is their source of magic, since they prefer the technosphere to the world of natural cycles. Then there are the cynical technocrats who use science to control that herd. I think we agree there, more or less.
What I’d like to see is a new religion or aesthetic that awakens the masses and makes them more existentially authentic as opposed to being merely deluded and exploited, and that also stays true to the technocrat’s insider information (so-called naturalism). You, however, seem to think there’s only science and delusion and nothing in between. I’d say that’s based on a myth of ultrarationalism, on the idea that we can or ought to be like Data or Sherlock Holmes. We’re mammals, so epistemologists shouldn’t pretend that our deepest beliefs ought to be rational. The technocrats presuppose certain philosophies and not just science, and their philosophies are ultimately myths based on certain tastes and quasi-religious convictions. I’m saying their scientistic, Machiavellian philosophical assumptions are inferior to a philosophy I’m trying to work out.
Ill-advisedly, no doubt, I’m jumping in here without any familiarity with the post or the previous discussion. But I’m troubled and intrigued by what you say in this comment, so here goes:
How can philosophy proceed with a clear intellectual conscience in the absence of the will to truth?
The answer, I think, is that it cannot. The worry is that any “existentially authentic philosophy” you might cook up in order to “awaken the masses” can fall into one of only two categories: (1) a Platonic ‘noble lie,’ or (2) just more self-deluded philosophical wankery attempting to rescue some cherished set of values or another.
The only way out that I see is the ataraxia of Pyrrhonian epoche — but that’s another story.
I appreciate your concern on this point. But even in this comment, I say that the new religion would have to stay true to the technocrat’s esoteric assumptions, which are just the naturalistic ones. So I do mean to distinguish this existentialist religion from relativist or nihilistic postmodern philosophy. I don’t say we can make up whatever we like for pragmatic reasons. Science-centered naturalism keeps our feet on the ground.
Indeed, this is how I get existentialism into the picture: the existential crisis which is central to the new religion (in the old Nietzschean way) comes about because of the curse of reason. It’s naturalism that forces us to confront harsh truths, and those truths should lead us to consider ennobling myths. Are those myths just delusions that prevent us from caring about the truth? No, because unlike the deluded masses, the elites understand that the myths are just works of art made of ideas and that they therefore don’t contradict scientific theories.
I’ve called for an unembarrassing postmodern religion. What’s embarrassing about the new religions that are actually prevalent, including New Age religions and the materialistic religion of the technosphere which infantililzes consumers, is that they degrade the practitioners, which makes those folks existentially inauthentic (roughly speaking, they lack intellectual integrity). But a new religion should be postmodern just to the extent that it doesn’t take philosophy so seriously (e.g. it judges philosophical claims ultimately form an aesthetic rather than an epistemic viewpoint).
Back to truth: if you’re talking about symbols corresponding to facts, our knowledge of the facts comes mainly from science. To the extent that analytic philosophy builds on science with arguments, it should be judged on epistemic rather than aesthetic grounds–but then those arguments wouldn’t really be philosophical. The mark of philosophy is the introduction of some artistic element into the discourse and that’s where the evaluation should be aesthetic. Philosophers properly deal with speculations that guide us when we don’t know the facts. In that case, philosophical speculation competes with religious faith.
One other point is RSB’s: naturalism ironically makes the talk of truth suspect, and so we’re threatened with something like the antirealist’s performative contradiction. If we’re just mechanisms, there’s no semantic relation between symbols and facts–but then there’s no sense in saying we’re just mechanisms. So naturalism should force us to replace “truth” with some deeper concept, if RSB is right. I’m actually OK with thinking of semantic and normative properties as emergent or as being illusions that still work in ways that don’t completely misrepresent the relevant concepts (link below).
As for ataraxia, you might be interested in my take on Stoicism (link below).
By the way, are you asking reviewers of your book’s chapters to comment in the comment section of your post “New…and Improved?”?
http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2013/12/stoicism-and-cosmic-horror.html
http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2013/11/personalizing-ourselves-science.html
What biology gave us was the boundary; whether the cell membrane, echo-skeleton or the skull and sac which covers the brain which ultimately gave us the mental maps of physical movement and rules-borders of sociopolitical existence.
Ceramics and glassblowing were significant technological innovations which gave us jars for storage and transport of grains and water; but more importantly jars gave us the ability to quantify and exchange for value. Niall Ferguson’s work The Ascent of Money or how agriculture advanced to trade and ultimately the world of money.
As far as electricity, Edison’s ability to invert the glass jar and invent the electric filament which mimics our own skull and brain plus Fleming, de Forest and Armstrong who came later adding the control grids and plate elements which turned the bulb into the vacuum tube. The elements which allow for the external control of energy which mimic our own volition and intentionality.
The history of how we became nature looking back at itself and controlling it ourselves.
Some books that have inspired me on this subject are Lewis Mumford’s Pentagon of Power, Erik Davis’ Techgnosis, Neil Postman’s Technopoly, and David Noble’s Religion of Technology.
Cain, I feel like you are disregarding a whole reinterpretation of the mythopoetic enlightenment, there is a what I think a huge resurgence of a personal understanding of the universe. I would personally argue that is a Major strain of the romantic and postmodern age. I think the scientific understanding of the self fits snuggly with a personal seeking of enlightenment.
I think you’re saying that modern scientific enlightenment isn’t opposed to some kind of naturalistic spirituality. I’d agree with that, although I’m not sure RSB would. I mean to say more about this in a follow-up article, but what I say at the end of this one is that the modern technosphere has had the ironic consequence of fulfilling the mythopoeic dream of an enchanted world. The infantilized consumer replaces the ancient animist. But I’m not so sure this new kind of eclectic, postmodern spirituality is a good thing. For that matter, the prehistoric kind that must have rationalized all manner of savagery also might not have been so admirable.
I guess the way I am looking at things would be to say there are different impulses of being human. I can notice some of them, though I may not see everything about them. The magicalism of the techno era would perhaps be the infantalization of the consumer. I like your translation of the mythologic construct to the technological reduction of the person. But I would argue that the mythological investigative methods of the inner world can fit alongside the investigative methods of our physical world. This would be where I tend to disagree with Bakker and perhaps agree with you. I believe that while a lot of people saw gods and monsters for planets and etc. I also believe that some people if not many in fact understood or guessed these celestial objects were infact planets and suns etc. and similarly or even especially experience is understood by a few souls roaming this earth.
Thanks! Again, I’ll be elaborating on the mythopoeisis-consumerism comparison in a follow-up article.
If you’re interested in the idea of there being connections between modern technology and the ancient religious outlook, I recommend two of those books I cited above, if you haven’t already read them: Erik Davis’s Techgnosis and David Noble’s The Religion of Technology.
Fascinating original post, Benjamin Cain. You almost convinced me because of how well it’s written!
That being said, I do see some major assumptions at the heart of this post. Allow me to quote some of what you said to make it easier for me to respond.
[“Only after the rise of sedentary civilization in the Neolithic Era, when farming replaced nomadic hunting in 10,000 BCE, which allowed for much larger populations, was there a loss of that enchanted mode of experience which actually depended on a sort of blissful collective ignorance. As a population increases, the so-called Law of Oligarchy takes hold, which means that social power must be concentrated to avoid civilizational collapse. Dominance hierarchies are established and those in the lower classes become envious of the stronger and more privileged members who are sure to display their greater wealth and access to women with symbols of their higher status. By doing so, each social class learns its boundaries so that the social structure won’t be overridden, which would invite anarchy.’]
I tend to agree. But I wouldn’t say this shift was so much of a problem as it is a predicament. Yes, the rise of agriculture did have a major role to play after the retreat of the glacier ice sheets. We’re merely in an interglacial period right now. So, fertile lands paved the way for the rise in agriculture and surplus, however, I don’t think it’s just simply farming. It’s unsustainable farming. We took up practices that encouraged soil erosion, deforestation, overgrazing and monoculture. That’s really the “predicament” right there.
[“Here, then, was the origin of enlightenment as the opposite of wholesale ignorance—and this was a normative dichotomy. Enlightenment was good and its opposite, mental darkness, was bad. Whereas prior to civilization everyone was enlightened, in a sense, or at least everyone deferred to the shaman’s interpretation of how the spiritual and material worlds are intermixed, civilized people came to believe there’s a secret perspective which alone imparts the ultimate truth, leaving the majority in relative ignorance. As for the content of the enlightened worldview in the ancient world, this was informed by both the egoism and the cynicism that distinguished the hierarchical civilization from the prehistoric past. The content thus had two elements: monism and personification. On the one hand, reality was thought to be a unity, whereas the world appeared to be a multiplicity.”]
No, this is rather the rise and progress of binary thinking. Binary thinking isn’t “bad,” but used as the default, normal way of thinking can be detrimental. What do you want to do if you are a hunter-gatherer being chased down by a cave bear? Do you fight or do you flee? People in the modern age seem to be stuck in an artificial world with their fight or flight mechanism, stressing to the max, yet on a real conscious level, in typical industrialized societies there is not regularly something as life threatening as a giant cave bear. In hunter gatherer societies, there were greater physical dangers, however the stress was actually not triggered as often. Whereas modern industrial societies, the dangers are generally less threatening, whereas stress is triggered much more often. We have traded quality for quantity. This is not only evident in the dangers we face, but also in the food we produce and consume and the thoughts we think. We need to start training ourselves in tertiary thinking. Instead of an “either/or” approach think of it as “both/and.” Both/and still includes either/or. Everything in the universe is complimentary and interdependent.
There is a myth of the mind – if something is bad or undesirable, it needs to be rooted out like a weed. However, if you really observe wildlife in its natural setting, without the need or desire to subject it to lab work and testable, repeatable mechanical parts, you will see that nature does not really utterly destroy anything “unwholesome.” Rather, she works with what she has already, and completely and utterly transforms it into something perhaps whole and desirable to homo sapiens. Google “permaculture.” That’s a great example how we can renew our minds so we can design quality ecosystems. This is where the sickness lies. If we learn how to properly mimic nature, we will find that we no longer have many uses for artificial devices because natural living systems already have hidden, desirable and beneficial functions within that we just have to tap.
[“Ancient enlightenment thus had to reconcile the urge to personify, which was a remnant of the mythopoeic experience that was exacerbated by the advent of egoism even among the masses, and which the elites came to use for political purposes, with the world’s alien, indifferent oneness.”]
I have quite a different view of “personification.” The “gods” and “goddesses” were simply processes. They were given anthropomorphic images because in the bardic stories, they were used as tools for psychological work. It’s fictionalized history intended to emphasize spiritual ethic. Gods were specific and defined by environmental climate. In Norse mythology, Hel is very much described as unforgiving and harsh a land as the real northern lands of Europe. Odin descends into Hel to drink the “mead of enlightenment,” and in other version, he sacrifices himself to himself on the World Tree, Ygdrassil. That signifies, symbolically, a detachment from a specific egoic identity in the individual, specifically, and historically, a pagan initiate in the mystery religions. The gods are not just “superstitions. They are also summoned via psychotropic drugs. They were typically imbibed in “halls of the dead” such as the burial mounds or temples we find today. It’s not just that they used temples for worshiping their gods, the very stones had acoustical properties within with certain soundwave frequencies which emanated certain mental processes or feelings,and in with certain psychedelics, brought forth beings one could literally see in the altered state. For example, the Amazonian shamans still today guide even the most “infantile consumerist” Americans through a psychedelic journey where hundreds always report meeting a giant, glowing serpent being who “telepathically” speaks to them with profound revelations. If I am to believe that we in the postmodern age have somehow went “beyond” our ancestors, both technologically and mentally, then why do we have “converts” to naturalism, walking away with doubt and skepticism about our modern industrial world paradigm?
I will contend that the constant hand-waving and lip service going on in industrial civilization is nothing but a glorified meme about perpetual technological progress. The flip side to the civil religion of progress is always imminent apocalypse. Oh, the stories we tell ourselves! Quite frankly, people need to face up the reality that we have a finite amount of petroleum in the earth – and that earth, coupled with the sun, took thousands of years to build up in the crust. And we’ve just, on a whim, extravagantly abused this very temporary privilege. Basically the whole of industrial civilization depends on oil. The deniers who say that we will continue to have an abundant stream of oil-powered technology are always the ones who say “Oh, well it’s different this time! We’ll eventually colonize space and float around in our glorified robot space bodies” – they’re the believers in the myth of progress, who constantly laud their god in the Temple of Progress.
One thing that devotees of the god Progress and peak oil advocates always miss is the principle of “net energy.” What is the ratio between the energy I expend to extract that resource and how much energy will be gained from that resource itself? As it stands, nothing we have found in nature actually has an infinite beneficial ratio for human consumption. Devotees to the civil religion of progress insist, that it will all somehow be different this time around and we’ll find some alternative energy to keep the wheel of “progress” moving. But they all tend to forget the simple principle of net energy. So we can speculate all day long about how we’ve “transcended” the ancients in technology as our savior (the progress meme pops up again here) and on the flip side we can speculate about imminent apocalypse. It’s about as bad as Harold Camping and the fundamentalist Christians insisting that this time it’ll be different and Jesus really will return to save us all. All in all, it’s a meme that aligns itself very well with Christian eschatological Millennial Kingdom bullshit. Because institutionalized religion has always been in bed with the civil religion of progress.
In the cycle of human evolution, we can see different stages of human perception. We’re now in the stage of what one of my favorite bloggers, John Michael Greer, calls “the barbarism of reflection.” That is, we reflect on, and even reject, our previous stage of abstraction, which the ancients were very good at. However, for sake of brevity, the we’re looking at a wider spectrum that may amount to a revolution in reflection itself, where everything folds in on itself and we have a big wave of “the Second Religiosity.” That is, rationality will now find itself not separated but integrated in with mysticism, that mythopoeic vision of the ancients. We will discover that rationalism is just another binary mode of thinking – another religion.
Technology isn’t “bad.” To assume so is to rely too much on binary thinking. But when our technology outruns our values as community, we start to believe in wild superstitions like the perpetual progress of technocracy. It doesn’t need to be rooted out, it needs to be pruned and grafted onto the branch of what Cain calls ancestor “personification.” Ritual, in the context of the ancients, was not whether his ritual was done the right way and her’s was done the wrong way – no, ritual is based in whether it works or not. Is technology wrong? No. It doesn’t really work anymore, knowing we are working with finite resources. Personification was always done in the context of ritual, because it works. And it still works for us modernists. Case in point, I just personified the ritual theatre of perpetual progress. Yes, modernists still operate largely by way of myth. I like to imagine the god Progress looking something like Jabba the Hut, whose devotees are consumed by his gaping black hole of a mouth just as soon as they kneel before his throne.
Anyway, be kind enough to disagree. There’s never not enough room for value quantity.
Thanks for these constructive criticisms. We actually agree on a lot. My full view of these things isn’t contained in this article, so you might want to check out some other articles I’ve written on the specific issues (links below).
On environmentalism, I agree that we can learn from nature and indeed I believe some engineers do so, but this isn’t really a philosophical issue. I think we were forced to accelerate the expansion of the artificial world, the technosphere, because of the modern rupture with ancient panpsychist or animistic monism. As Nietzsche said, we substitute idols like Progress and Reason for the old gods. (I’m more of a Nietzschean than a New Atheist.)
You suggest the ancients were more pragmatic about their theism, that they personified nature as a technique to improve their minds. This sounds like a Jungian reading. I actually agree about the psychedelic angle (see my article The Psychedelic Basis of Theism; I think Terence McKenna is a hell of an inspirational speaker on this topic). But the problem with the pragmatic interpretation is that it assumes the distinction between literal and figurative meaning. I doubt the ancient masses were aware of that distinction and indeed I doubt the majority in time period are aware of it. The elites? Sure, but “literal meaning” is really a euphemism for the naturalistic, materialistic kind, and that sort of meaning contradicts animism. As I understand the very old way of looking at the world, there simply was no space for what we’d call objects with no subjectivity or personality. That sort of demystification would have been regarded as incoherent. It took the likes of Newton, Galileo, and Darwin to teach us how to conceive of a world in which mind is accidental rather than fundamental. In fact, most people still can’t fathom or accept that naturalistic implication, because we’re proud, anthropocentric mammals.
Indeed, I go along with Nietzsche in saying that until we deal with our animal side, we’ll keep personifying everything and preferring myths to ultra-rational theories. You make a number of interesting points about faith in technological progress and binary thinking. I also criticize what I call the myth of ultrarationality, the conceit that we can and ought to rationally justify all our beliefs. I’ve written a lot on that and on the curse of reason, which is that reason disenchants the world and forces us into an existential crisis.
You speak of a Second Religiosity, and this is exactly what I explore on my blog. I’m interested in the possibility of an unembarrassing (i.e. viable) postmodern religion. The religion would have to be naturalistic and atheistic as well as self-conscious about our tendency to personify everything (because of our social instinct). However, I think the religion would end up being pantheistic. My comparison of infantilized consumerism with mythopoeic reverie seems consistent with this call for a new religion, as long as we keep in mind that religions have always been divided into exoteric and esoteric camps. Of course, there’s already the New Age sort of religion, but I have problems with it. And there’s also Buddhism and the other Eastern traditions which are more naturalistic, but I have some problems with those too–although I think they’re superior to Western religions.
Regarding Odin, the myth about him sacrificing himself on the world tree sounds like it was influenced by Christianity. It did come after Christianity, right?
Anyway, here are some relevant links to articles on my blog that might interest you (I’m listing way too many, but they’re all in the back of my mind as I think about these things, so I might as well be up-front about it):
http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.com/2012/01/inkling-of-unembarrassing-postmodern.html
http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2012/12/the-psychedelic-basis-of-theism.html
http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2013/09/mythopoesis-and-consolation-of.html
http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2011/12/curse-of-reason.html
http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2013/08/humanization-and-objectification-why.html
http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2013/04/humankind-as-lifes-executioner.html
http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2013/08/the-art-of-new-age-myths.html
http://newbooksinphilosophy.com/2014/01/15/michael-weisberg-simulation-and-similarity-using-models-to-understand-the-world-oxford-up-2013/
Please find a completely different Illuminated Understanding of literal Enlightenment via this reference: http://www.kneeoflistening.com
[…] make sense in the naturalistic picture, and I’ll come back to this at the end of this article.) Elsewhere, I talk about the ancient worldviews as glorifying our penchant for personification. Prehistoric […]
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