Discussion 4
Carefully read these three essays from your Learning Resources for this week:
- Michael Schulson, “What Robot Theology Can Tell Us About Ourselves”
- Nicholas Carr, “The World Wide Cage”
- Benjamin Breen, “Into the Mystic”
and choose a different question from the previous discussion in the research project list and answer it in relation to an issue in technology and religion according to theses of these two articles. Please only reference these three sources above and refrain from personal opinions. Your post should not have any first-person pronouns and as always. any badly written posts (i. e., clearly not proofread) will be downgraded. Also, simply writing the article’s author and the year is not a proper citation. All quotes and paraphrases necessitate FULL citations.
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R E L I G I O N D I S P A T C H E S
B Y M I C H A E L S C H U L S O N ( H T T P S : / / R E L I G I O N D I S P A T C H E S . O R G / A U T H O R / M I C H A E L – S C H U L S O N / ) / S E P T E M B E R 1 , 2 0 1 4
WHAT ROBOT THEOLOGY CAN TELL US ABOU
T
OURSELVES
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here are places you never expect to be in life. For me, this was certainly one of them: in a
conference room in suburban Charlotte on the campus of Southern Evangelical Seminary, with
an enormous old Bible on a side table, shelves of Great Books lining the walls, and, on the
conference table itself, a 23-inch-tall robot doing yoga.
158
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(http://religiondispatches.org/wp-
content/uploads/2014/04/DAVID_yoga )
D.A.V.I.D. does yoga.
Meet the Digitally Advanced Viritual Intelligence Device, a NAO (now) robot known as “D.A.V.I.D.”
Weighing at a little over 11 pounds and costing $16,000 (the seminary was given a discount from
Aldebaran(http://www.aldebaran-robotics.com/en/), NAO’s French manufacturer, and a donor covered the
cost), D.A.V.I.D. evokes a certain sculpture by Michelangelo—human artifice reaching for a kind of
material perfection.
Its eyes flicker purple and green. It can recognize faces, respond to
vocal cues, read emails out loud, play MP3 files, and trace a sound
to its source with a swivel of its football-shaped head. Tiny motors
drive the flexion of its joints. Download a certain program, and the
robot will begin to play soothing New Age music as it stretches
toward the ceiling and then lowers itself, gradually but with
surprising grace, into a perfect downward dog.
D.A.V.I.D. may be cute, and robotic yoga may be goofy, but the
intentions of SES and Dr. Kevin Staley, an associate professor of
theology and the robot’s handler, could not be more serious.
Through those 23 inches of silicon and plastic, they hope to tackle
questions about what it means to be human; about how we should interact with the non-human entities
in our lives; and about what a uniquely Christian response might be to a world in which humans start to
seem more like computers, and computers start to seem more and more like human beings.
Welcome to the future of theology. Or, more accurately, welcome to the theological past. While SES, an
independent evangelical school in Matthews, N.C., claims to be the world’s only seminary to own a robot
(and I can’t find any reason to doubt them, unless you count Siri on all those theological iPhones), the
entanglement of robotics and Christianity has a longer history than you might think.
How machinelike are we humans?
For centuries, the Catholic Church was the main patron of automata—elaborate mechanisms, often
driven by springs, that were the precursors to present-day robots. “Not only did automata appear first
http://religiondispatches.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/DAVID_yoga
http://www.aldebaran-robotics.com/en/
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Is it ethical for people to
have sex with robots? How
should we treat
anthropomorphic
computers? Should there
be a limit on how human-
like, or how pervasive, a
and most commonly in churches and cathedrals, the idea as well as the technology of human-machinery
was indigenously Catholic,” writes Stanford’s Jessica Riskin in her marvelous
essay(mailto:http://arcade.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/article_pdfs/roflv01i02_03riskin_comp3_083010_JM_0 ),
“Machines in the Garden.”
Automata, according to Riskin, “peopled the landscape of late medieval and early modern Europe,”
which was “positively humming with mechanical vitality.” Church-commissioned clockmakers built
mechanical angels and demons to decorate altars; “automaton Christs—muttering, grimacing, blinking
on the cross—were especially popular.” Some churches even had automatic heretics. A mechanical
moor’s head once hung in the cathedral in Barcelona, the expression on its face changing with the
intensity of the organ music.
Automata entertained churchgoers. They also helped philosophers and theologians sharpen their
thinking about the relationship between physical motion and an immaterial soul. When Leibniz and
Descartes meditated on the nature of life, Riskin explained to me, “these were the machines they looked
at.”
Descartes famously compared the living body to an automaton, while nineteenth century polymath
Charles Babbage, a father of modern computing, was so fascinated by automata as a boy that he wrote a
treatise(http://www.victorianweb.org/science/science_texts/bridgewater/intro.htm) in which he compared the
outcomes of God’s natural laws to “the results afforded by the Calculating Engine.” Babbage, in other
words, conceived of God as a kind of computer programmer.
Giving the impression of life, automata and robots push us to ask
what it is about living beings that may be machinelike—and what,
if anything, about life is distinct from a material mechanism. In
the sense that SES is using a robot to explore deep questions, says
Riskin, “there’s some continuity here.”
In a technical sense, too, D.A.V.I.D.’s lineage goes straight back to
the church. Those Catholic automata gave rise to machines used
purely for pleasure and amusement; from this broader automated
mailto:http://arcade.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/article_pdfs/roflv01i02_03riskin_comp3_083010_JM_0
http://www.victorianweb.org/science/science_texts/bridgewater/intro.htm
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particular digital
technology can become?
tradition, craftsmen developed methods that would be adopted
into industrial machinery and, later, the earliest computers. They
may be distant relatives, but the mechanized Christs of medieval
churches and the motherboards of a NAO robot share a family
tree.
In an
interview(http://www.religiondispatches.org/books/science/7539/does_multiverse_theory_bring_theology_into_science/)
with RD earlier this year, Mary-Jane Rubenstein discussed how advances in physics are blurring the line
between science and theology as physicists come to terms with cosmological concepts that were once the
domain of theological speculation, like multiple universes. Something similar can be said of digital
technology today: that, having left behind their religious roots, computers are raising issues that circle
back into religious territory.
At the extreme end of this phenomenon, we have the concept of artificial intelligence, which strikes
immediately at questions about the extent of human power, and whether intelligence is distinct from a
soul. Meanwhile, some transhumanists
foresee(http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/culture/4456/the_cult_of_kurzweil__will_robots_save_our_souls/)
a period when the human mind will be uploaded onto a deathless computer. As religion scholar Robert
Geraci has argued(http://jaar.oxfordjournals.org/content/76/1/138.full ), this vision of people shedding their
imperfect bodies and achieving immortality sounds an awful lot like the Rapture.
Technologies don’t need to seem futuristic, though, in order to spur a bit of philosophical reflection.
IBM’s Watson is now a Jeopardy! champion, and, with Siri, Apple has arguably offered the first mass-
market robot. It’s easy to imagine a time when we have regular, substantial interactions (some of them,
perhaps, romantic or sexual, as in Spike Jonze’s Academy Award-nominated Her) with objects that act a
lot like human beings.
Meanwhile, budding technologies like Google Glass merge the personal and the digital in novel ways. All
of which brings us back to 21 century iterations of that same old question—the same one, really, thatst
http://www.religiondispatches.org/books/science/7539/does_multiverse_theory_bring_theology_into_science/
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http://jaar.oxfordjournals.org/content/76/1/138.full
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Click to listen to D.A.V.I.D.’s
voice:
Descartes recognized long ago, meditating on automata: how do we distinguish between the human and
the mechanical?
These are the kinds of questions that Kevin Staley, an IT specialist-turned-theologian, spends his days
musing over. Is it ethical for people to have sex with robots? How should we treat anthropomorphic
computers? Should there be a limit on how human-like, or how pervasive, a particular digital technology
can become?
And, at least in principle, these are the kinds of questions that D.A.V.I.D. is best equipped to provoke.
A huge dream to put on technology
When I visited SES, Staley replayed for me the robotic routine—also called, in NAO-user lingo, a
“behavior”—that he designed for the robot’s unveiling. Staley has the patient, low-key attitude of an
engineer, though he programmed the robot to open with some banter and corny jokes before getting
suddenly, almost chillingly, serious. “I know that together we will be studying the ethical questions
about my very existence in human society,” the robot intoned with the flat poignancy of Stanley
Kubrick’s HAL.
D.A.V.I.D.’s eyes glowed purple.“Dr. Staley,” the robot continued,
“are you concerned that one day your kind will treat my kind as if
we were the same?”
Despite being encased in plastic, it’s easy to treat it like a living
thing. “My younger son,” said Staley, “calls it his younger brother,
just jokingly.” It terrifies Staley’s cat. Whenever D.A.V.I.D. looked
toward me, I instinctively stared straight back into its painted plastic orbs. One little girl told Staley’s
wife that the robot was almost certainly female, though Staley and Eric Gustafson, SES’s Director of
Development, tend to refer to the robot (which, at the time of my visit, had not been named) as “it.”
From time to time, though, both of them slip and call it “he.”
00:00 00:04
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It’s this tangle of uncanniness, fascination, personification, and occasional repulsion that Staley wishes
to explore. “What I’m trying to get at, too,” he explained, “is what in a person’s response [to D.A.V.I.D.]
is shaping that response. Is their initial acceptance or initial rejection of it based on some underlying
theological, philosophical reason for why they don’t, or is it just kind of a gut response?”
He plans to take the robot to visit classes and church groups, and then to quiz people about their
expectations and reactions. In his own classes, Staley would like to upload sections of his lectures to
D.A.V.I.D. That way, the robot can deliver content for him—at once the subject of the lecture and the
lecturer itself.
But the robot’s biggest role may be in helping to thaw the long silence among evangelicals, and among
religious groups of all kinds, on issues related to personal technology. I first noticed this silence last
summer, while trying to
find(http://www.religiondispatches.org/dispatches/michaelschulson/7365/the_google_question_of_evil/) some kind of
religious reaction to the NSA scandal. What I found instead was that, on issues of internet privacy and
the growing role of personal technology in everyday life, religious groups were remarkably silent.
“For the most part, for most people, I don’t know how much critical thought goes into asking, ‘what are
the consequences of us introducing this technology into our lives?’” says Staley, referring to a range of
digital tools. “Typically, and especially in the Christian community, I think the response to these sorts of
things has been very minimal.”
He suggests that, quite simply, most people don’t connect faith to the seemingly commercial details of,
say, iPhones, or robots that care for the elderly(http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/19/disruptions-helper-
robots-are-steered-tentatively-to-elder-care/), or the dynamics of personal relationships conducted over Skype,
even though these changes have a bearing on the way we relate to other human beings.
As an alternative to this silence, Staley’s work touches on two possible modes of religious response to
technology, which I’ll call—because sci-fi topics deserve sci-fi names—the Strong and Weak Theories of
Theorobotics.
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(http://religiondispatches.org/wp-
content/uploads/2014/04/monk_robot )
Auto-monk commissioned by
King Philip II of Spain in the
16th century. Image:
Radiolab(“http://www.radiolab.org/“).
The Strong Theory, which occupies the balance of Staley’s dissertation, deals with more futuristic
questions. It acts as a kind of direct rebuke to those transhumanists and futurists who wish to merge
human and machine, asserting instead the sanctity of the human form (created “in Our image,” says
Genesis, and later taken on by a Son of God, according to the Gospels) endowed with a soul that cannot
be translated into ones and zeroes.
This approach sounds abstract, but it touches on serious questions
about what we want from the tools we build. For many, “technology
is viewed as a way of saving us,” argues Staley, drawing a direct
contrast between this view of technological salvation and his own
evangelical faith. “If you eradicate God from the picture, you have no
other means to achieve that end. There’s no other way to achieve
victory over death other than by some hope that you have the
technological means to make it possible. And it’s a huge dream to put
on technology.”
Plenty of us, of course, aren’t looking for immortality anywhere—not
through technology, and not through religion. Here, the Weak
Theory of Theorobotics applies. This kind of reaction holds that
religious groups, with their widespread emphasis on building
personal communities of living, breathing human beings, have a
unique platform from which to critique certain technologies.
Plenty of religious communities are trying to put services
online, though (at least thus far) it’s probably easier to telecommute
than to teleworship. Whether you appreciate religious voices in the
public sphere or not, it’s clear that faith-based movements could
make some distinctive cases for the power of human proximity and
non-digital interactions—the kinds of cases that might make techno-critics like Sherry
Turkle(http://www.amazon.com/Alone-Together-Expect-Technology-Other/dp/0465010210/ref=sr_1_1?
s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1284476989&sr=1-1http://www.perseusbooksgroup.com/basic/book_detail.jsp?
http://religiondispatches.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/monk_robot
https://religiondispatches.org/automata/%22http://www.radiolab.org/%E2%80%9C
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isbn=0465010210/sturkle/www/) and Evgeny Morozov(http://www.cjr.org/cover_story/evgeny_vs_the_internet.php?
page=all) proud.
D.A.V.I.D.’s main role, then, may be as an easy-to-publicize provocateur. SES took the
robot(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19_T3WbJH2E) to the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist
Convention this summer, and D.A.V.I.D. will be making an appearance at SES’s National Conference on
Apologetics this October, where it’s delivering part of Staley’s talk—and where it’ll receive billing as a
speaker.
In this role, D.A.V.I.D. has a lot in common with Samantha, the digital protagonist of Her, or the
androids at the heart of Blade Runner. All are constructs intended to entertain, even as they provoke us
to think critically about the tools we use—and to link that reflection to the broader ways, religious and
not, in which we think about the world.
When I asked Jessica Riskin whether the predmodern Church used automata primarily to entertain
parishioners or to instruct them, she rejected the premise of my question. The two roles, she explained—
to amaze and to demonstrate—were so entangled as to be inseparable.
Watching D.A.V.I.D. do yoga, it was hard not feel some kinship with those medieval parishioners, all of
us standing at the foot of the altar, amused but also rapt before a machine unlike any we’d seen before;
and all of us wondering, in that moment of encounter with the mechanical other, what it might tell us
about ourselves.
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Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, speaks on the stage at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona,
S
pain, February 2016.
Photo by Albert Gea/Reuters
https://aeon.co/
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�e world wide cage
Technology promised to set us free.
I
nstead it has
trained us to withdraw from the world into
distraction and dependency
Nicholas Carr
It was a scene out of an Ambien nightmare: a jackal with the face of Mark Zuckerberg
stood over a freshly killed zebra, gnawing at the animal’s innards. But I was not
asleep. �e vision arrived midday, triggered by the Facebook founder’s
announcement – in spring 2011 – that ‘�e only meat I’m eating is from animals I’ve
killed myself.’ Zuckerberg had begun his new ‘personal challenge’, he told Fortune
magazine, by boiling a lobster alive. �en he dispatched a chicken. Continuing up the
food chain, he offed a pig and slit a goat’s throat. On a hunting expedition, he
reportedly put a bullet in a bison. He was ‘learning a lot’, he said, ‘about sustainable
living’.
I managed to delete the image of the jackal-man from my memory. What I couldn’t
shake was a sense that in the young entrepreneur’s latest pastime lay a metaphor
awaiting explication. If only I could bring it into focus, piece its parts together, I might
gain what I had long sought: a deeper understanding of the strange times in which we
live.
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What did the predacious Zuckerberg represent? What meaning might the lobster’s
reddened claw hold? And what of that bison, surely the most symbolically resonant of
American fauna? I was on to something. At the least, I figured, I’d be able to squeeze a
decent blog post out of the story.
�e post never got written, but many others did. I’d taken up blogging early in 2005,
just as it seemed everyone was talking about ‘the blogosphere’. I’d discovered, after a
little digging on the domain registrar GoDaddy, that ‘roughtype.com’ was still
available (an uncharacteristic oversight by pornographers), so I called my blog Rough
Type. �e name seemed to fit the provisional, serve-it-raw quality of online writing at
the time.
Blogging has since been subsumed into journalism – it’s lost its personality – but
back then it did feel like something new in the world, a literary frontier. �e
collectivist claptrap about ‘conversational media’ and ‘hive minds’ that came to
surround the blogosphere missed the point. Blogs were crankily personal
productions. �ey were diaries written in public, running commentaries on whatever
the writer happened to be reading or watching or thinking about at the moment. As
Andrew Sullivan, one of the form’s pioneers, put it: ‘You just say what the hell you
want.’ �e style suited the jitteriness of the web, that needy, oceanic churning. A blog
was critical impressionism, or impressionistic criticism, and it had the immediacy of
an argument in a bar. You hit the Publish button, and your post was out there on the
world wide web, for everyone to see.
Or to ignore. Rough Type’s early readership was trifling, which, in retrospect, was a
blessing. I started blogging without knowing what the hell I wanted to say. I was a
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mumbler in a loud bazaar. �en, in the summer of 2005, Web 2.0 arrived. �e
commercial internet, comatose since the dot-com crash of 2000, was up on its feet,
wide-eyed and hungry. Sites such as MySpace, Flickr, LinkedIn and the recently
launched Facebook were pulling money back into Silicon Valley. Nerds were getting
rich again. But the fledgling social networks, together with the rapidly inflating
blogosphere and the endlessly discussed Wikipedia, seemed to herald something
bigger than another gold rush. �ey were, if you could trust the hype, the vanguard of
a democratic revolution in media and communication – a revolution that would
change society forever. A new age was dawning, with a sunrise worthy of the Hudson
River School.
Rough Type had its subject.
he greatest of the United States’ homegrown religions – greater than Jehovah’s
Witnesses, greater than the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, greater
even than Scientology – is the religion of technology. John Adolphus Etzler, a
Pittsburgher, sounded the trumpet in his testament �e Paradise Within the Reach
of All Men (1833). By fulfilling its ‘mechanical purposes’, he wrote, the US would turn
itself into a new Eden, a ‘state of superabundance’ where ‘there will be a continual
feast, parties of pleasures, novelties, delights and instructive occupations’, not to
mention ‘vegetables of infinite variety and appearance’.
Similar predictions proliferated throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, and in their
visions of ‘technological majesty’, as the critic and historian Perry Miller wrote, we
find the true American sublime. We might blow kisses to agrarians such as Jefferson
T
https://archive.org/details/paradisewithinre00etzl
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and tree-huggers such as �oreau, but we put our faith in Edison and Ford, Gates and
Zuckerberg. It is the technologists who shall lead us.
Cyberspace, with its disembodied voices and ethereal avatars, seemed mystical from
the start, its unearthly vastness a receptacle for the spiritual yearnings and tropes of
the US. ‘What better way,’ wrote the philosopher Michael Heim in ‘�e Erotic
Ontology of Cyberspace’ (1991), ‘to emulate God’s knowledge than to generate a
virtual world constituted by bits of information?’ In 1999, the year Google moved
from a Menlo Park garage to a Palo Alto office, the Yale computer scientist David
Gelernter wrote a manifesto predicting ‘the second coming of the computer’, replete
with gauzy images of ‘cyberbodies drift[ing] in the computational cosmos’ and
‘beautifully laid-out collections of information, like immaculate giant gardens’.
The revelation continues to this day, the technological
paradise forever glittering on the horizon
�e millenarian rhetoric swelled with the arrival of Web 2.0. ‘Behold,’ proclaimed
Wired in an August 2005 cover story: we are entering a ‘new world’, powered not by
God’s grace but by the web’s ‘electricity of participation’. It would be a paradise of
our own making, ‘manufactured by users’. History’s databases would be erased,
humankind rebooted. ‘You and I are alive at this moment.’
�e revelation continues to this day, the technological paradise forever glittering on
the horizon. Even money men have taken sidelines in starry-eyed futurism. In 2014,
the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen sent out a rhapsodic series of tweets – he
http://yin.arts.uci.edu/~studio/readings/heim.txt
https://www.edge.org/conversation/david_gelernter-the-second-coming-%E2%80%94-a-manifesto
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called it a ‘tweetstorm’ – announcing that computers and robots were about to
liberate us all from ‘physical need constraints’. Echoing Etzler (and Karl Marx), he
declared that ‘for the first time in history’ humankind would be able to express its full
and true nature: ‘we will be whoever we want to be.’ And: ‘�e main fields of human
endeavour will be culture, arts, sciences, creativity, philosophy, experimentation,
exploration, adventure.’ �e only thing he left out was the vegetables.
uch prophesies might be dismissed as the prattle of overindulged rich guys, but for
one thing: they’ve shaped public opinion. By spreading a utopian view of
technology, a view that defines progress as essentially technological, they’ve
encouraged people to switch off their critical faculties and give Silicon Valley
entrepreneurs and financiers free rein in remaking culture to fit their commercial
interests. If, after all, the technologists are creating a world of superabundance, a
world without work or want, their interests must be indistinguishable from society’s.
To stand in their way, or even to question their motives and tactics, would be self-
defeating. It would serve only to delay the wonderful inevitable.
�e Silicon Valley line has been given an academic imprimatur by theorists from
universities and think tanks. Intellectuals spanning the political spectrum, from
Randian right to Marxian left, have portrayed the computer network as a technology
of emancipation. �e virtual world, they argue, provides an escape from repressive
social, corporate and governmental constraints; it frees people to exercise their
volition and creativity unfettered, whether as entrepreneurs seeking riches in the
marketplace or as volunteers engaged in ‘social production’ outside the marketplace.
S
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As the Harvard law professor Yochai Benkler wrote in his influential book �e Wealth
of Networks (2006):
�is new freedom holds great practical promise: as a dimension of
individual freedom; as a platform for better democratic participation; as a
medium to foster a more critical and self-reflective culture; and, in an
increasingly information-dependent global economy, as a mechanism to
achieve improvements in human development everywhere.
Calling it a revolution, he said, is no exaggeration.
Benkler and his cohort had good intentions, but their assumptions were bad. �ey
put too much stock in the early history of the web, when the system’s commercial and
social structures were inchoate, its users a skewed sample of the population. �ey
failed to appreciate how the network would funnel the energies of the people into a
centrally administered, tightly monitored information system organised to enrich a
small group of businesses and their owners.
The territory began to be subdivided, strip-malled and I
sensed that foreign agents were slipping into my computer
through its connection to the web
�e network would indeed generate a lot of wealth, but it would be wealth of the
Adam Smith sort – and it would be concentrated in a few hands, not widely spread.
�e culture that emerged on the network, and that now extends deep into our lives
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and psyches, is characterised by frenetic production and consumption – smartphones
have made media machines of us all – but little real empowerment and even less
reflectiveness. It’s a culture of distraction and dependency. �at’s not to deny the
benefits of having easy access to an efficient, universal system of information
exchange. It is to deny the mythology that shrouds the system. And it is to deny the
assumption that the system, in order to provide its benefits, had to take its present
form.
Late in his life, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith coined the term ‘innocent
fraud’. He used it to describe a lie or a half-truth that, because it suits the needs or
views of those in power, is presented as fact. After much repetition, the fiction
becomes common wisdom. ‘It is innocent because most who employ it are without
conscious guilt,’ Galbraith wrote in 1999. ‘It is fraud because it is quietly in the service
of special interest.’ �e idea of the computer network as an engine of liberation is an
innocent fraud.
love a good gizmo. When, as a teenager, I sat down at a computer for the first time
– a bulging, monochromatic terminal connected to a two-ton mainframe processor
– I was wonderstruck. As soon as affordable PCs came along, I surrounded myself
with beige boxes, floppy disks and what used to be called ‘peripherals’. A computer, I
found, was a tool of many uses but also a puzzle of many mysteries. �e more time
you spent figuring out how it worked, learning its language and logic, probing its
limits, the more possibilities it opened. Like the best of tools, it invited and rewarded
curiosity. And it was fun, head crashes and fatal errors notwithstanding.
I
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In the early 1990s, I launched a browser for the first time and watched the gates of the
web open. I was enthralled – so much territory, so few rules. But it didn’t take long for
the carpetbaggers to arrive. �e territory began to be subdivided, strip-malled and, as
the monetary value of its data banks grew, strip-mined. My excitement remained, but
it was tempered by wariness. I sensed that foreign agents were slipping into my
computer through its connection to the web. What had been a tool under my own
control was morphing into a medium under the control of others. �e computer
screen was becoming, as all mass media tend to become, an environment, a
surrounding, an enclosure, at worst a cage. It seemed clear that those who controlled
the omnipresent screen would, if given their way, control culture as well.
‘Computing is not about computers any more,’ wrote Nicholas Negroponte of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in his bestseller Being Digital (1995). ‘It is
about living.’ By the turn of the century, Silicon Valley was selling more than gadgets
and software: it was selling an ideology. �e creed was set in the tradition of US
techno-utopianism, but with a digital twist. �e Valley-ites were fierce materialists –
what couldn’t be measured had no meaning – yet they loathed materiality. In their
view, the problems of the world, from inefficiency and inequality to morbidity and
mortality, emanated from the world’s physicality, from its embodiment in torpid,
inflexible, decaying stuff. �e panacea was virtuality – the reinvention and
redemption of society in computer code. �ey would build us a new Eden not from
atoms but from bits. All that is solid would melt into their network. We were expected
to be grateful and, for the most part, we were.
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What Silicon Valley sells and we buy is not transcendence
but withdrawal. We flock to the virtual because the real
demands too much of us
Our craving for regeneration through virtuality is the latest expression of what Susan
Sontag in On Photography (1977) described as ‘the American impatience with reality,
the taste for activities whose instrumentality is a machine’. What we’ve always found
hard to abide is that the world follows a script we didn’t write. We look to technology
not only to manipulate nature but to possess it, to package it as a product that can be
consumed by pressing a light switch or a gas pedal or a shutter button. We yearn to
reprogram existence, and with the computer we have the best means yet. We would
like to see this project as heroic, as a rebellion against the tyranny of an alien power.
But it’s not that at all. It’s a project born of anxiety. Behind it lies a dread that the
messy, atomic world will rebel against us. What Silicon Valley sells and we buy is not
transcendence but withdrawal. �e screen provides a refuge, a mediated world that is
more predictable, more tractable, and above all safer than the recalcitrant world of
things. We flock to the virtual because the real demands too much of us.
‘You and I are alive at this moment.’ �at Wired story – under headline ‘We Are the
Web’ – nagged at me as the excitement over the rebirth of the internet intensified
through the fall of 2005. �e article was an irritant but also an inspiration. During the
first weekend of October, I sat at my Power Mac G5 and hacked out a response. On
Monday morning, I posted the result on Rough Type – a short essay under the
portentous title ‘�e Amorality of Web 2.0’. To my surprise (and, I admit, delight),
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bloggers swarmed around the piece like phagocytes. Within days, it had been viewed
by thousands and had sprouted a tail of comments.
So began my argument with – what should I call it? �ere are so many choices: the
digital age, the information age, the internet age, the computer age, the connected
age, the Google age, the emoji age, the cloud age, the smartphone age, the data age,
the Facebook age, the robot age, the posthuman age. �e more names we pin on it,
the more vaporous it seems. If nothing else, it is an age geared to the talents of the
brand manager. I’ll just call it Now.
It was through my argument with Now, an argument that has now careered through
more than a thousand blog posts, that I arrived at my own revelation, if only a modest,
terrestrial one. What I want from technology is not a new world. What I want from
technology are tools for exploring and enjoying the world that is – the world that
comes to us thick with ‘things counter, original, spare, strange’, as Gerard Manley
Hopkins once described it. We might all live in Silicon Valley now, but we can still act
and think as exiles. We can still aspire to be what Seamus Heaney, in his poem
‘Exposure’, called inner émigrés.
A dead bison. A billionaire with a gun. I guess the symbolism was pretty obvious all
along.
Reprinted from ‘Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations’ by Nicholas Carr. Copyright ©
2016 by Nicholas Carr. With permission of the publisher, W W Norton & Company, Inc. All
rights reserved.
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Nicholas Carr
aeon.co
is a technology and culture writer whose work has appeared in �e Atlantic,
�e Wall Street Journal, �e New York Times, Wired, Nature and MIT Technology Review,
among others. His latest book is Utopia Is Creepy (2016).
26 August 2016
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I
nto the mystic
https://aeon.co/
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From Stonehenge to Silicon Valley: how
technology nurtured New Age ideas in a world
supposedly stripped of its magic
Benjamin Breen
Close your eyes, and envision a glowing crystal suspended in infinite space. Now
breathe in slowly, counting backwards from 10. Energy pulses along the interstices of
the crystal. Exhale, and imagine a second crystal, precisely like the first – then a
dozen, a hundred, 100,000 crystals multiplying into an infinite void. And 100,000
dream catchers. And semiprecious stones inscribed with chakras. And ‘Coexist’
bumper stickers, Alex Grey posters, Tibetan prayer flags, wellness magnets, and
ionising Himalayan salt lamps.
Now open your eyes and imagine how much they all cost.
It’s easy to scoff at the totemic kitsch of the New Age movement. But it’s impossible to
deny its importance, both as an economic force and as a cultural template, a way of
approaching the world. �e New Age is a powerful mixture of mass-market mysticism
and idealistic yearning. It’s also, arguably, our era’s most popular ex novo spiritual
movement, winning adherents with a blend of ancient wisdom traditions, post-
Enlightenment mysticism and contemporary globalisation that is as nebulous as it is
heady.
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It’s worth noting at the outset: New Age is not so much a discrete collection of beliefs
as it is a Venn diagram (or a mandala, if you like) of intersecting interests, objectives
and motifs. �e New Age ‘movement’ is not a single movement at all. �e term
contains multitudes.
Arguably, the aspect of New Age that is easiest to pin down is also the most
superficial: the look. �e term conjures visions of chakra charts, indigo auras,
psychedelic paintings of bodies radiating energy, crystals, candles, ambient music and
dream catchers. One can guess with reasonable certainty that the crowd at a New Age
gathering – a solstice ceremony in Golden Gate Park, say – will display a collective
taste for dreadlocks, aromatherapy, South Asian or Andean textiles and
accoutrements such as utility kilts, gnarled oaken staffs and coin pouches that
wouldn’t look out of place at a Renaissance Fair. �e aesthetic is one of unabashed
pastiche.
So, too, are the beliefs undergirding it. Even scholars who have spent years studying
the New Age movement disagree about what precisely it is. For the sociologist David J
Hess of Vanderbilt University, ‘New Agers’ are religious seekers ‘who accept the
paranormal in the context of a broader quest for spiritual knowledge’. �e
anthropologists Ruth Prince and the late David Riches of the University of St
Andrews, who conducted a study of Neo-Druids at Glastonbury in the late 1990s,
framed the New Age as a form of social organisation that recreates hunter-gatherer
patterns of life and seeks ‘to rethink in terms of first principles the very nature of
human society’. In 1994, Christoph Bochinger, now a professor of religion at the
University of Bayreuth in Germany, wrote a monograph on the New Age movement,
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despite arguing that the term is in fact an ‘invention of the media’. Meanwhile, many
in the natural sciences and the skeptic community use ‘New Agers’ indiscriminately
as a blanket term for contemporary snake-oil salesmen who profit from a recent turn
away from Western medicine.
I would argue that if there is one thread that binds together the various New Age
movements, it is that they represent a resurgence of magical beliefs in a modern
world supposedly stripped of them.
In his now-classic book Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), the Oxford
University historian Keith �omas framed religion and magic as antagonistic social
forces. In his view, when early modern Protestant and Catholic religious leaders
persecuted witches, they were effectively trying to eliminate their competition as
explainers of the unexplainable. In this, they largely succeeded. Because
representatives of institutionalised religion had ‘all the resources of organised
political power’ on their side, they were able to force magical practitioners into the
shadows: ‘Magic had no Church, no communion symbolising the unity of believers,’
�omas writes. ‘�e official religion of industrial England was one from which the
primitive “magical” elements had been very largely shorn.’ In the process of this
rejection of supernatural explanations, post-Enlightenment religious beliefs became
increasingly standardised and grounded in the concept of natural laws that it was
within the ability of human minds to fathom.
As the German sociologist Max Weber put it 100 years ago, a distinguishing feature
of modernity is ‘the disenchantment of the world’. For Weber and the countless
historians and social scientists who have taken his theories as starting points, the rise
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of modern science and ‘scientifically oriented technology’ replaced the ‘mysterious
incalculable forces’ that pervaded pre‑modern worldviews.
But what if Weber and �omas were wrong? Ironically, at precisely the time when
�omas was anatomising the death of magic in the 1970s, bohemian mystics in places
such as California and London were reviving it. Perhaps the sole characteristic shared
by the modern-day inheritors of the 1960s and ’70s counterculture – from Neo-
Druids in Stonehenge and eco-feminist witches in San Francisco to practitioners of
alternative medicine, Indigo children and aura readers – is this desire to ‘re-enchant’
the world.
Yet if New Agers seek to recapture a pre‑modern belief in ‘mysterious incalculable
forces’, they do so using all the tools of contemporary technology and the networks of
modern globalisation. It’s not coincidental that the earliest calls for a ‘New Age’ of
spiritual awakening coincided with the Industrial Revolution. Or that the triumph of a
more formalised and commoditised New Age movement in the second half of the
20th century converged with the rise of television infomercials, books on tape,
local‑access cable channels, and the early internet. Today, New Age aesthetics and
modes of thought have filtered into mainstream society, influencing everything from
the rise of alternative medicine (a $34 billion industry, by one recent estimate) to the
triumph of yoga in the suburbs.
Meanwhile, formal religious affiliation is on the decline in the Western world, but this
rejection of traditional organised religion does not imply a rejection of spirituality.
Instead, it has created a vacuum in which the eclecticism and vagueness of the New
Age movement emerge as strengths rather than weaknesses. Which begs the
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question: if the early modern era witnessed a ‘decline of magic’ and a rise in
institutionalised religious affiliation, are we now witnessing the opposite?
solemn Englishman wearing a faux silver circlet, a green cape and a white knight’s
doublet beats out a martial rhythm on bongo drums. He stands in a circle alongside a
dreadlocked youth with a guitar and an older woman leaning on a wooden staff. At
the center of the circle, a regal, snowy-haired environmental activist and former biker
named Arthur Uther Pendragon anoints a kneeling man wearing face paint. �e
members of the circle welcome the newest druid of 2014.
It’s the summer solstice at Stonehenge, one of the epicentres of the Neo-Druid
movement. �e robed crowds that gravitate to Stonehenge on important dates in the
lunar calendar see themselves as upholding ancient, pre-Christian rites. Despite a
falling out with the leaders of the Druid Council, Arthur Pendragon remains one of
the movement’s most charismatic leaders. (Not long ago, he anointed Johnny Rotten
of the Sex Pistols as a bard of his breakaway order, the Loyal Arthurian Warband.)
In Pendragon’s earlier life, he was a working-class lad called John Timothy Rothwell
from Yorkshire. After stints in the British Army and as the leader of an outlaw biker
gang known as the Gravediggers, he experienced a spiritual awakening in the early
1980s and changed his name by deed poll in 1986. Pendragon began to regard
himself as the reincarnation of King Arthur, even going so far as to buy the sword
used as a prop in the film Excalibur (1981). A self-declared ‘English eccentric’, he and
his former colleagues in the Druid Council proudly lay claim to a tradition of pagan
practice that stretches back five millennia.
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Considering his rakish, outlaw-biker-turned-legendary-king persona, Pendragon was
remarkably easy to track down, and he proved to be both personable and generous
with his time – not for nothing is he planning another run for the UK Parliament.
Although members of the press frequently associate Pendragon and his druid
followers with the New Age movement, he doesn’t see anything ‘new’ about it.
‘I
personally do not see myself as New Age or Neo-Pagan, nor do I see myself as a part
of the druid revivalist movement,’ Pendragon told me. ‘I feel that I am a druid
practising the same belief structure and philosophy as was practiced by the ancients.’
As an historian, my impulse is to poke holes in claims to ‘authentic’, unbroken
traditions. As the English historian Hugh Trevor-Roper pointed out in his essay ‘�e
Invention of Tradition’ (1983), even the tartan clan kilts of Scotland are in fact a
product of a 19th-century reimagining of pre‑modern Highland Scots dress, owing far
more to Romantic-era nostalgists such as Sir Walter Scott than to the rugged
Highlanders of centuries past. By seeking to restore traditional customs that
industrialisation had cast into shadow, nationalist writers and thinkers in the 19th
and 20th centuries actually helped invent new ones.
The value of these claims to unbroken tradition lies not in
their factual accuracy, but in their ability to instill a sense of
empathy with the deep past
It’s tempting to apply the same argument to the Neo-Druids – that their enactment of
ancient ceremonies based on spotty historical evidence is an invention of traditions, a
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21st-century parody of Bronze Age beliefs about which even academic specialists can
claim only the most tentative knowledge.
Yet perhaps those who would dismiss such re-enactments for their scholarly
inaccuracy are missing the point. Folklorists and anthropologists have long sought to
reconstruct pre‑modern magical practices – Gaelic charms, prayers to mother
goddesses, bacchanalian rites – that resonate on an emotional and spiritual level,
even if many of their details remain contested. Perhaps the value of these claims to
unbroken tradition lies not in their factual accuracy, but in their ability to instill a
sense of empathy with the deep past.
In Donna Tartt’s novel �e Secret History (1992), a group of Classics students in rural
Vermont becomes obsessed with recreating the ecstatic Dionysian frenzies of the
Ancient Greek Bacchae, reliving pagan rites that had lain dormant for 2,000 years.
�eir leader Henry initially approaches the task as an anthropological challenge, a
matter of systematically reconstructing ritual and gesture. But he soon realises that ‘it
had to be approached on its own terms, not in a voyeuristic light or even a scholarly
one’. In the end, Henry recalls: ‘I was struck by something rather obvious – namely,
that any religious ritual is arbitrary unless one is able to see past it to a deeper
meaning.’
n the 1970s and ’80s, the Lithuanian-American archaeologist Marija Gimbutas
argued for the existence of a matriarchal ‘Old European’ culture in the Neolithic
(approximately 7,000 to 3,000 BCE). �ese were the forgotten peoples who had been
conquered and subsumed by the Indo-European tribes that would become the Celts,
the Germans, the Greeks and Romans, and the Persians. �e Indo-Europeans tended
I
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to place male deities at the summit of their pantheon, often lightning-wielding sky
gods such as �or or Zeus. Yet Gimbutas conjectured that the Old Europeans were of
the culture of the Mother Goddess, the upholders of a tradition that stretches back to
the very earliest known sculptures made by human beings: the so-called Venus
figurines of the Paleolithic period, some 25,000 years ago.
Building on the work of Gimbutas, some have argued that traces of this age-old
religious tradition have survived to the present. Among academic historians, the
fiercest debates over the survival of prehistoric matriarchal traditions in Europe have
been waged over the question of the early modern witchcraft trials. Despite attempts
to link the historical witch craze of the 16th and 17th centuries to the survival of
ancient pre-Christian pagan practices, most historians of witchcraft and magic remain
unconvinced. Yet in �e Night Battles (1966), his celebrated ‘microhistory’ of a secret
society of witch-fighters in 17th‑century northern Italy, the Italian historian Carlo
Ginzburg, now of the University of California, Los Angeles, advances a similar, though
more specific, claim. �e witch-fighters, or ‘good walkers’ (i benandanti), Ginzburg
speculates, were a vestigial remnant of a pre-Christian fertility cult that retained some
of the ancient shamanistic traditions of Bronze Age Eurasia.
There is a ‘direct link’ between the occult movements of the
late Enlightenment and the New Age movements of today
Such debates, though fascinating, are unlikely to be satisfactorily resolved. Yet even if
we keep our minds open to the possibility that some fragments of ancient pagan
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practice can be recreated or survive through the millennia, in other respects the New
Age movement is actually a product of the Enlightenment.
As the historian Paul Kléber Monod has pointed out in his book Solomon’s Secret Arts
(2013), the Enlightenment was obsessed with the occult. From Isaac Newton (whom
the British economist John Maynard Keynes called ‘not the first of the age of reason’
but ‘the last of the magicians’) to the secret societies of the Rosicrucians, the
Freemasons and the Bavarian Illuminati, we find a culture simultaneously obsessed
with attaining a perfect mastery over nature and the universal patterns pervading all
spiritual traditions. Monod told me that he believes there is a ‘direct link’ between
these occult movements of the late Enlightenment and the New Age movements of
the present day.
But tracing that link takes us into shadowy territory: the vast metropolis of Victorian
London, a hub of empires that pulled a variety of spiritual seekers into its fog-
shrouded orbit. �e figures involved in the creation of a more formalised New Age
movement – people such as Aleister Crowley, Madame Blavatsky and George
Gurdjieff – rarely saw eye to eye. But one thing they had in common was a mystical
conviction that the world on the cusp of the 20th century was about to undergo an
epochal change. �ey were right.
have always considered myself a voice of what I believe to be a greater renaissance
– the revolt of the soul against the intellect – now beginning in the world,’ wrote a 27-
year-old W B Yeats in 1892. �e Irish poet was an early follower of Madame Blavatsky,
a Russian-German spiritual medium with a mesmerising gaze that was Rasputin-like
in its intensity. Blavatsky is in some ways the ur-figure of the New Age movement, a
‘I
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modern-day prophet whose blending of ancient wisdom traditions with technologies
of mass communication set a pattern that would play out again and again in the
decades to come.
�e members of the �eosophical Society that Blavatsky co-founded in New York in
1875 regarded their work as another manifestation of the march of scientific and
technological progress, but they also believed they were tapping into supernatural
realms of experience. ‘�ere is a hidden side to life,’ wrote Annie Besant and C W
Leadbeater, both members of the Society, in their book �ought-Forms (1901). ‘Each
act and word and thought has its consequence in the unseen world which is always so
near to us, and that usually these unseen results are of infinitely greater importance
than those which are visible to all upon the physical plane.’ Although they were
writing here of invisible auras produced by music or emotional states, the authors
could just as easily have meant Sigmund Freud’s notion of the subconscious, or a
young PhD student named Albert Einstein’s work investigating the invisible medium
of the ‘luminiferous aether’.
Science and technology went hand in hand with the dawning of the New Age. It’s no
coincidence that beliefs about alternate worlds and invisible forces coalesced at the
same time that telegraph cables and radio waves began to encircle the globe. Late
Victorian London was the centre of this global technological network, but it was also
the home to an emerging group of bohemians who tapped into these new
technologies even as they reacted against them.
�e 1920s and ’30s witnessed an efflorescence of new spiritual movements that
embraced technologies of mass communication. Some represented outright breaks
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with organised religion, like the Kentucky-born mystic Edgar Cayce’s prophecies of
Atlantis and extraterrestrials. (Cayce proved to be adept at attracting media attention
from newspapers and radio broadcasters, and nurtured an early celebrity clientele
that included everyone from President Woodrow Wilson and the composer George
Gershwin to the inventor �omas Edison.) Others, like the French philosopher and
Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin blended the Judeo-Christian tradition with an
eclectic mélange of concepts taken from Eastern religions, folk beliefs, physic and
philosophy. �e result was ideas such as Chardin’s notion of an ‘Omega Point’ when
all human consciousness would merge and become one. �e universalising science of
the Enlightenment had mutated to become a universalising spiritual movement.
During the 1960s and ’70s, the diverse points of origin for New Age thought
coalesced into identifiable subcultures. Groups such as the Wicca/Goddess
movement, the Rainbow Family, the Human Potential Movement and proponents of
Transcendental Meditation expanded the social framework for New Age beliefs away
from purely spiritual organisations and toward a more lifestyle-based orientation.
Parsons would chant Aleister Crowley’s hymn to the Greek
God Pan before every rocket test
In his PhD dissertation ‘�e Rocket and the Tarot’ (2010), the historian Matthew
Tribbe, now at the University of Connecticut, identified the years following the final
Apollo moon landing (1972) as the moment when a broad-based societal belief in
technological progress lost ground to interest in the occult, the esoteric, and the
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irrational. ‘Millions of Americans defected from their secularised mainline
congregations to form new, more spiritual-focused parishes, or even bolted their
denominations all together in favour of the evangelical and fundamentalist or New
Age faiths that mushroomed in the early 1970s,’ writes Tribbe. ‘�is religious revival
was only one part of a much larger cultural upheaval that saw a widespread
questioning and often rejection of the more general rationalism of the postwar era.’
Yet we might also regard the New Age movements of the 1970s as arising from –
rather than defeating – this Apollo-era conviction in the power of technology. In the
1930s, while he was immersing himself in the theoretical physics that underpinned
the first atomic bomb, for instance, the young physicist J Robert Oppenheimer was
also learning Sanskrit and compulsively reading (and comparing himself to) ancient
Vedic scripture. Similarly, even as the rocket scientist Jack Parsons was co-founding
the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Cal Tech, he was becoming immersed in alchemical
lore and occultism, performing ‘sex magic’ in his Pasadena mansion with a rotating
cast of bohemian Los Angeles characters. Parsons would chant Aleister Crowley’s
hymn to the Greek God Pan before every rocket test, and he claimed his discovery of
solid rocket fuel in 1942 (which laid the groundwork for the Apollo space program)
derived from his mystical ‘intuition’.
Before Parsons accidentally blew himself up in his home alchemical lab in 1952, he
had welcomed into his Pasadena home a Second World War veteran who’d been
expelled from the Navy for psychological instability: L Ron Hubbard. �e two men
shared a love for science fiction and black magic. But in 1946 Hubbard ran off with
Parsons’ mistress Sara – and his yacht. Parsons invoked a Babylonian god and (he
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believed) stirred up the typhoon that caused their boat to capsize, but Hubbard and
Sara survived. �e next year, Hubbard would begin writing Dianetics, which mingled
Crowley-esque occultism with Atomic Age scientific jargon. Indeed, by this time,
Hubbard was claiming to be a nuclear physicist. Scientology would emerge a few
years later.
s the New Age a mere cultural fad, a set of aesthetic signifiers and intellectual
fashions that will fade as a societal force? Certainly, one breed of New Age aficionado
seems destined to age out of 21st-century society. �ese are the types that the English
novelist Edward St Aubyn assembled for his satire On the Edge (1998), which narrates
the adventures of 12 spiritual seekers on the road to the Esalen Institute in Big Sur,
California, with a blend of bemused horror and empathy. �e hapless protagonists –
Crystal, Krater, Stash, Jean-Paul, and the rest – are undoubtedly modelled in part on
St Aubyn’s mother Lorna, an Anglo-American heiress who retreated from family
tragedy by converting her French château into a New Age institute. But if the crystals-
and-auras guise of the New Age has begun to take on a distinctly vintage character,
this does not tell the whole story.
Take Silicon Valley in California, which began with the skinny-tie IBM engineer
aesthetics of the 1950s but began to acquire its contemporary contours thanks to the
LSD-inflected eclecticism of the 1970s. From Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth
Catalog to the holistic take on computing promulgated by an India-roaming
psychedelic enthusiast named Steve Jobs, elements of the New Age counterculture
have been encoded in the DNA of Silicon Valley almost from the beginning.
I
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The line between those who seek transcendence in
technology and a ‘re-enchantment of the world’ will become
increasingly blurred
In Who Owns the Future (2013), the US computer scientist Jaron Lanier describes a
shift in emphasis from what we might call the ‘traditional’ New Age milieu of the
1980s San Francisco Bay Area tech scene – macrobiotic cooking, self-actualisation,
spiritual gurus, et al – and the trans-humanist faction that prevails in the 2010s.
Trans-humanists or Singularitarians represent the revolutionary vanguard of Silicon
Valley’s technological utopianism, but their intellectual lineage is an eclectic one. As
the open source advocate Tim O’Reilly put it at his Long Now Foundation talk ‘Birth
of the Global Mind’ (2012), Teilhard de Chardin’s post-Second World War vision of a
mystical expansion of human life into the furthest bounds of the universe was ‘the
Singularity of its day’. Yet for the Singularitarians, Teilhard’s vision will become
realised not only by a blossoming of human consciousness, but by the melding of that
consciousness with a new breed of what the US computer scientist Ray Kurzweil calls
‘spiritual machines’. �e interconnected nature of social media and the internet of
things, which draws individual human minds into communion with the built
environment that surrounds them, thus takes on an almost spiritual dimension.
To be sure, techno-utopians embrace a far more straightforward view of technological
progress than their New Age counterparts, and one doubts that a Kurzweil would find
much common cause with the Neo-Druids. But in the decades to come, I expect the
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Ben Breen
line between those who seek transcendence in technology and a ‘re-enchantment of
the world’ to become increasingly blurred.
Already in 1941, when T S Eliot versified in Four Quartets about Londoners who try
‘To communicate with Mars, converse with spirits/ To report the behaviour of the sea
monster/ Describe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry… fiddle with pentagrams/ Or
barbituric acids’, the line was blurring. �e esoteric fringes of modern science were
becoming entanged with ancient traditions such as astrology and the Tarot. For Eliot,
a former dabbler in Blavatsky’s �eosophism who by this time associated true
religious profundity with the Catholic tradition, these magical practices were all
manifestations of a superficial spirituality, the ‘usual/ Pastimes and drugs, and
features of the press’.
Eliot was on to something in that final phrase. Technologies of mass communication
allowed the various beliefs that coalesced under the New Age banner to establish
themselves as popular alternatives to traditional religion. With such metrics of
allegiance to organised religion as churchgoing and tithing in decline, New Age
eclecticism (amplified by radio, newspapers and eventually the internet) emerged as a
kind of modern magic. Weber might have been right that the rise of modernity
required the death of the enchanted world. But in that sleep of death, what dreams
may come?
is a history postgraduate at the University of Texas at Austin and the Editor-In-
Chief and co-founder of �e Appendix. He blogs about early modern history at Res Obscura
and lives in Philadelphia.
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aeon.co
7 April 2015