Yesterday I wrote about what I believe has to happen in the long run if the machines aren't going to win. By the machines winning I mean that we're at a balance point where technological development can go one way or the other: either the machines will serve human needs or humans will come to serve the machines. What resources are there now in the culture to resist the latter?
Everything is moving inevitably toward transformations defining the human future in which biological and information technologies are setting the agenda by default. This is what we should all be worried about, not petty con men like Trump and his besotted supporters. They are so many resentment-blinded Calibans who are naive enough to think the drunken clown Stephano will deliver them from the wizard Prospero. Caliban, at least, was educable. It remains to be seen whether most Trump supporters will be able to acknowledge as Caliban did in the end --
Ay, that I will; and I'll be wise hereafter
And seek for grace. What a thrice-double ass
Was I, to take this drunkard for a god
And worship this dull fool!
But while I believe that unfettered techno-capitalism presents a greater threat to the human future than right-wing fanatical fantasists, no compelling defense against techno-capitalism can be mounted if the forces that care about a positive human future must waste time and energy fighting this rear-guard action against thrice-double asses and political drunkards.
Yesterday, I reiterated what I've been saying here off and on for years--a compelling mythos must emerge that synthesizes what science and religion have always provided at least since classical antiquity. Humanity flourishes when both are in balance and working in a mutually cross-fertilizing ways. Chaos ensues when one or the other dominates a society in such a way that it excludes or filters out what the other would contribute.
When rationalism dominates, a soulless, rather mechanical, algorithmic imaginary of the human being dominates. Think Immanuel Kant or Auguste Comte or Jeremy Bentham. This in turn causes as a reaction, some times healthy, like the Romantic reaction to Enlightenment rationality, but sometimes really, really crazy as we see now in the various, bizarre cargo-cults like Q anon.
When a fundamentalistic or rigidly dogmatic religiosity dominates, it produces theocratic autocracies that crush the human spirit and its need for free inquiry. This in turn causes an overly rationalistic reaction that becomes radially skeptical about all spiritual possibilities and often a haughty contempt for anybody who thinks there are such possibilities, and this in turn leads to the problems described in the previous paragraph.
This is where we are now. Things are very, very fragile. Things could go really bad really quickly if balance isn't somehow restored.
So, in the meanwhile, for me, the question is how to keep at least one eye on the long-term extinction-of-humanity threat posed by techno capitalism while at the same time dealing with the immediate cultural war between the spiritual delusionists and the rationalist nihilists. This war is a ridiculous waste of time; it's a petty squabble that is completely divorced from the real crisis that we as global humans face. It is keeping us stuck in impotent paralysis and preventing any consensus to develop in attacking the imminent threats to everybody, left or right, for whom a "humanism" and its ideals still have some inspirational power.
For me central to the humanistic ideal is the possibility of depth, of retaining the capability for an openness to the fathomless mysteries of Being. As Heidegger put it somewhere, we're too late for the gods and too early for Being, but at the very least we have to keep that option open for future generations. Opening up to those depths and resisting any developments--technical or moral--that close us down or create filters that seal us off from those depths is the very minimum that must be accomplished in the short run.
An openness to these depths is essentially dependent on our being embodied, and through our bodies embedded in nature--real nature, not virtual, new-Gnostic parodies of it--and through nature an openness to the Cosmos and its mysteries. Mortality and the body are essential elements of maintaining this openness, and any attempts to get rid of either are profoundly de-humanizing.
My guess is that for some readers this assertion is obvious but for others not. The idea of science finding a way to overcome death is the most desirable thing they can imagine. But I can't imagine anything worse if overcoming death requires becoming a disembodied consciousness or a consciousness that comes to reside in a machine of some kind. This kind of post-humanism must be resisted, but nobody is making a robust case for resistance, and so technological developments move inevitably toward it with few obstacles.
So in the meanwhile...
On the one hand, we must vigorously combat delusion while at the same time respecting the human need for a larger sense of meaning and purpose for human history. As we have seen dramatically realized in recent years, large swaths of the population will embrace delusion unless something better fills the need. And so then on the other hand, we must develop a robust counter narrative that celebrates human possibility in such a way that it might be possible to resist the coming post-humanistic reign of the machines.
Such a narrative must honor science and critical consciousness while at the same time celebrating a second naïveté, one which enables us childlike to become open to mysteries of Being that would disclose themselves to us were we to become receptive to them. This is the way to balance, which is the precondition for renaissance and a cultural reconfiguration--perhaps even a new Axial moment in the evolution of consciousness.