The new religious sensibility I began to sketch out in last
week’s Archdruid Report post is a subtle thing, and easy to
misunderstand. It was thus inevitable that a number of commenters over the last
week misunderstood it, or what I was saying about it. Typical of this response
were those who thought that the new sensibility I was talking about was simply
a matter of ecological concern, and pointed to a variety of existing religious
and irreligious traditions that embody ecological concern as a way of
suggesting that the new sensibility wasn’t anything new.
Just now, the state of the world being what it is, the
presence of ecological concern in any tradition of human thought is something
to celebrate. Still, the new religious sensibility I have in mind isn’t simply
a matter of caring about the environment. It implies certain things about the
relation between humanity and the rest of nature, to be sure, and some of these
things are radically different from the implications of the older sensibility
that’s shaped the religious thought of the western world for the last couple of
millennia. Still, it’s possible to care profoundly about the environment from
within the old sensibility, and it’s no doubt possible to ignore humanity’s
dependence on the natural world from within the new one, though I admit I
haven’t yet been able to figure out how.
To grasp what’s actually involved in the new religious
sensibility, we can begin with Ugo Bardi’s thoughtful
response to my post of two weeks ago, The
Next Ten Billion Years. In his post, Bardi noted the difference
between those visions of the future that see history as repeating endlessly—the
eastern vision, in his phrasing—and those visions, more common in the western
world, that see history as passing through a single arc from beginning to end.
He pointed out, and correctly, that the distinction between these two visions
rests on fundamental presuppositions about existence, and arguments between
them end up circling endlessly without resolution because the common
understandings that would allow agreement simply aren’t there.
It’s a valid point. Still, our visions don’t fall as cleanly
on either side of that line as a casual reading of Bardi’s post might suggest.
Both our portrayals of the future incorporate the inevitable death of the
Earth’s biosphere due to the steadily increasing heat of the Sun—Bardi used an
estimate of when this will take place that differs from the one that guided my
narrative, but it’s not as though anyone alive today knows exactly when the
thing will happen, and either story could be made to fit the other estimate
with a modest change in dates. Both presuppose that the Earth will be changed
profoundly by its history and the presence of intelligent life, and that these
changes will affect whatever future civilizations may rise on this planet.
Bardi’s “good future” ends, for that matter, with a far more dramatic circling
around to the beginning than mine did, with his artificial intelligence taking
on God’s role in Genesis 1:1 et seq. and saying “Let there
be light” to a new creation.
Those parallels aren’t accidental. Partly, of course,
they’re a product of the fact that both narratives are set in the same
universe, governed by the same facts of stellar, planetary, and biological
evolution, and partly they’re a product of the fact that I deliberately modeled
my future history on Bardi’s. I could have done so even more exactly, avoiding
all references to historical cycles, and my narrative would still have gotten
the fascinating split response I fielded last week. The core issue that
distinguishes my narrative from Bardi’s isn’t that mine is cyclical while his
is linear. It’s that in his “good
future,” history has a direction—the direction of cumulative technological
progress toward cyber-godhood—while in his “bad future,” and in my narrative,
it has none.
That’s the fault line that my narrative was intended to
demonstrate—or, from the point of view of devout believers in the religion of
progress, the sore toe on which it was designed to stomp. Certainly those of my
readers who found the narrative infuriating, depressing, or both, zeroed in on
that point with commendable precision. To borrow a turn of phrase from one of
the more evidently anguished of my readers, if I’m right, we’re stuck on this
rock—“this rock” meaning, of course, what those of a different sensibility
would call the living Earth in all its vastness and wonder, the unimaginably
rich and complex whole system of which Homo sapiens is one
small and decidedly temporary part.
It’s interesting to note the wholly abstract nature of that
that passionate desire to leave “this rock” somewhere back there in the
interstellar dust. Neither the reader from whose comment I borrowed that
phrase, nor any of the others who expressed similar sentiments, showed any particular
concern about the fact that they themselves were unlikely ever to have the
chance to board a starship and go zooming off toward infinity. In Bardi’s
narrative, for that matter, no human being will ever get that chance. To
believers in progress, none of that matters. What matters is that Man, or Life,
or Mind, or some other capitalized abstraction—in the traditional folk
mythology of progress, the initial capital is what tells you that an abstract
concept has suddenly morphed into a mythic hero—is going to do the thing.
To the believer in progress, history must have a direction,
and it has to make cumulative progress in that direction. That’s specifically
the thing I went out of the way to exclude from my narrative, while including
nearly everything else that the mythology of progress normally includes. My
portrayal of the future, after all, allots to human civilizations of the future
a time span around 2200 times the length of all recorded history to date; it
assumes that future human societies will accomplish impressive things that we
haven’t—the aerostat towns and floating cities of a million years from now were
meant to whet that particular appetite; it even assumes that relics of one of
our species’ proudest achievements, the Apollo moon landings, will still be
around to impress the stuffing out of a future intelligent species a hundred
million years from now. To believers in progress, though, long life, stupendous
achievements, and a legacy reaching into the far future aren’t enough; there
has to be something more.
We’ll get to the nature of that “something more” later on.
For the moment, I want to refocus on just how much time and possibility my
narrative allows for human beings. One of the subtle traps hidden in the
extraordinary human invention of abstract number is the bad habit of thinking
that because we can slap a number on something, we can understand it. We talk
about millions of years as though we’re counting apples, and lose track of the
fact that “a million years” is a symbolic label for a period that’s quite
literally too huge for the human mind to begin to grasp.
A human generation is the average period between when a
child is born and when it fathers or bears children of its own. Over the course
of most of human history, that’s averaged around twenty years. Those of my
readers who have had children, or who have reached or passed the age when
having a first child is common, might want to take a moment to think back over
that interval in their own lives. There have been just under twelve
generations—twelve periods as long as it took you to grow from infancy to
adulthood—since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, seventy-seven
since the fall of Rome, around two hundred fifty since the beginning of
recorded history, and 12,500 or so since Homo sapiens
evolved out of its hominid ancestors. By contrast, over the period my narrative
allots to the human future, there’s room for 550,000 more—that is, well over
half a million further generations of humankind—and most of them will
experience the cultural and practical benefits of one or another of the 8,638
global civilizations to come.
The point I’m hoping to make here can be sharpened even
further if we imagine that my narrative had included, say, the successful human
colonization of Mars, or even the establishment of human colonies on
hypothetical Earthlike planets around Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani, during the
course of that eleven million year span. In that case, we would have gotten off
this rock, and onto a few others, with a few orbital colonies or moonbases
thrown in for good measure. Would that have satisfied those of my readers who
were angered or depressed by the narrative? To judge by previous experiences,
not if those colonies don’t spawn colonies in their turn, and so on out to
infinity. To believers in the civil religion of progress, anything short of
limitless cumulative extension just won’t cut it.
It’s in this context that the intrusion of religious imagery
at the end of Bardi’s narrative is so revealing—yes, it was just as revealing
in its original setting, in the Isaac Asimov short story from which Bardi
borrowed it. Such things are astonishingly common in progress-centered visions
of the future. I’ve talked more than once about the contemporary faith in the
Singularity, that supposedly soon-to-arrive event—Ray Kurzweil’s prophecy puts
it in 2045—when every detail of modern Protestant Rapture theology is supposed
to appear in science-fiction drag, with superhuman artificial intelligences
filling the role of Jesus, outer space that of heaven, robot bodies that of the
glorified bodies of the elect, and so on through the list. More generally, from
Olaf Stapledon right through to the present, attempts to project the curve of
progress into the future reliably end up borrowing imagery and ideas from the
mythic vocabulary of the western world’s theist religions, and the further they
go into the future, the more extensive the borrowings become.
An earlier post in this sequence pointed out that civil religions like
the modern faith in progress are derivative from, even parasitic on, the older
theist religions that they replace. Partly that’s because theist religions
inevitably get there first, and make extensive use of whatever superlatives
their culture happens to prefer, so the civil religions that come afterwards
end up borrowing images and ideas already shaped by centuries of theology. I suggest, though, that there’s more to it
than that. Many of the people who
dropped Christianity for a belief in the future triumph of science, progress,
and human reason in a godless cosmos, for example, still had the emotional
needs that were once met by Christianity, and inevitably sought fulfillment of
those needs from their new belief system.
Those needs, in turn, aren’t universal to all human beings
everywhere; they’re functions of a particular religious sensibility that began
to emerge, as I described last week, in the western half of Eurasia around 600
BCE. That sensibility shaped a variety
of older and newly minted religious traditions in at least as diverse a range
of ways, but the core theme with which all of them contended was a profound
distaste for nature, history, and the human condition, and the conviction that
there had to be an escape hatch through which the chosen few could leap
straight out of the “black iron prison” of the world, into the infinity and
eternity that was supposed to be humankind’s true home.
Exactly where to find the escape hatch and how to get
through it was a matter of fierce and constant disagreement. From one
perspective, the hatch would only fit one person at a time, and could be passed
through by rigorous spiritual discipline. From another, the unique qualities of
a prophet or savior had opened the escape hatch wide, so that everyone who
embraced the true faith wholeheartedly and kept some set of moral or behavioral
precepts could expect to leap through at some point after physical death. From
still another, the hatch would someday soon be opened so wide that the whole
world and everyone on it would slip through, in an apocalyptic transformation
that would abolish nature, history, time and change all at once. Much of the
complexity of the last two thousand years or so of Eurasian religious history
comes from the fact that devout believers in any faith you care to name
embraced each of these options, and blended them together in a dizzying
assortment of ways.
As western civilization moved through the same historical
transformations as its predecessors, and the rise of rationalism drove the
replacement of traditional theist religions with civil religions, the same
quest for an escape hatch from nature, history, and the human condition
expressed itself in different ways. The discussion of civil religions earlier in this sequence of posts
explored some of the ways that civil religions borrowed the rhetoric and
imagery of their theist predecessors.
The civil religion of progress was arguably the most
successful of all in coopting the forms of older religions. It had an abundance
of saints, martyrs, and heroes, and a willingness to twist history to manufacture
others as needed; the development of technology, buoyed by a flood of
cheap abundant energy from fossil fuels, allowed it to supplant the miracle
stories of the older faiths with secular miracles of its own; the rise of
scientific and engineering professions with their own passionate subcultures of
commitment to the myth of progress gave it the equivalent of a priesthood,
complete with ceremonial vestments in the form of the iconic white lab coat;
the spread of materialist atheism as the default belief system among most
scientists and engineers gave it a dogmatic creed that could be used, and in
many circles is being used, as a litmus test for loyalty to the faith and a
justification for warfare—so far, at least, merely verbal—against an assortment
of unbelievers and heretics.
What the civil religion of progress didn’t have, at least in
its early stages, was the escape hatch from nature, history, and the human
condition that the religious sensibility of the age demanded. This may well be
why belief in progress remained a minority faith for so long. The nationalist
religions of the 18th century, of which Americanism is a survivor, and the
social religions of the 19th, of which Communism was the last man standing,
both managed the trick far earlier—nationalism by calling the faithful to
ecstatic identification with the supposedly immortal spirit of the national
community and the eternal ideals for which it was believed to stand, such as
liberty and justice for all; social religions such as Communism by offering
believers the promise of a Utopian world “come the revolution” hovering
somewhere in the tantalizingly near future.
It was science fiction that finally provided the civil religion
of progress with the necessary promise of salvation from the human condition.
The conceptual sleight of hand with which this was done deserves a discussion
of its own, and I intend to discuss it in next week’s post. Yet one consistent
result of the way it was done has been a reliance on overtly theistic imagery
far more open and direct than anything in the other civil religions we’ve
discussed. From H.G. Wells’ Men Like Gods straight through
to the latest geek-pope pontifications about the Singularity, the idea that
humanity will attain some close approximation to godhood, or at least give
metaphorical birth to artificial intelligences that will accomplish that feat,
pervades the more imaginative end of the literature of progress—just as the less
blatantly theological ambition to banish poverty, want, illness, and death from
the realm of human experience has played a central role in the rhetoric of
progress all along.
There are, as it happens, at least two serious problems with
the project of perching humanity on some approximation of a divine throne in
heaven. The first, as discussed here at length, is that the project isn’t
exactly performing to spec at the moment. Three hundred years of accelerating
drawdown of the Earth’s irreplaceable natural resources, and the three hundred
years of accelerating damage to the Earth’s biosphere made inevitable by that
process, have exempted a rather small fraction of our species from the more
serious kinds of poverty and the more readily curable diseases, and handed out
an assortment of technological toys that allow them to play at being demigods
now and then, when circumstances permit.
As nonrenewable resources run short and the impacts of ecological
blowback mount, it’s becoming increasingly clear that only drastic efforts are
likely to preserve any of these advantages into the future—and those drastic
efforts are not happening.
Talk, as Zen masters are fond of saying, does not cook the
rice, and enthusiastic chatter about artificial intelligence and space
manufacturing does nothing to keep contemporary industrial society from
stumbling down the same ragged trajectory toward history’s compost heap as all
those dead civilizations that came before it. If anything, the easy assumption
that the onward march of progress is unstoppable, and the artificial
intelligences and orbital factories are therefore guaranteed to pop into being
in due time, has become one of the major obstacles to constructive action at a
time when constructive action is desperately needed. The use of emotionally
appealing fantasies as a source of soothing
mental pablum for those who, for good reason, are worried about the
future is wildly popular these days, to be sure, but it’s hardly helpful.
Yet it’s at this point that the new religious sensibility I
discussed in last week’s post throws a wild card into the game. It’s been my
repeated experience that for those who already feel the new sensibility, the
old promises haven’t just lost their plausibility; they’ve lost their emotional
appeal. It’s one thing to proclaim salvation from nature, history, and the
human condition to those who want that salvation but no longer believe that the
ideology you’re offering can provide it. It’s quite another to do the same
thing to people who no longer want the salvation you’re offering—people for
whom nature, history, and the human condition aren’t a trap to escape, as they
have been for most people in the western world for the last two millennia, but
a reality to embrace in delight and wonder.
