This is the technological age. The age of the new man …
Paul Virilio And The Administration of Fear
In my last post I highlighted philosopher Paul Virilio’s concept of the administration of fear–that “assassin” that doesn’t kill but keeps you from living.
Technology is the vehicle of the administration of fear.
Fear is the state of having nothing under your feet; nothing to ground you. When you fear, you feel utterly alone. Fear comes out of a loss of hope. This is why Christ told his disciples and others not to fear, because He is the foundation, the rock, the Being. Without Him there is much to fear.
Is it any surprise then that in a world of mono-atheism–the belief in no belief at all–fear is rampant? Fear is the system short-circuited. Media drives belief to the lowest common denominator: a tarted up, collectivized ‘self’ as the centre of the universe, which is the universe of the collective qua consumer (product, media, belief). There is nothing outside the self, and even the self doesn’t exist beyond something highly curated and fake. And that’s precisely the trap of the new media.
The Rise of the New Media
Claude Larchet …
The Internet and social media allow everyone access to vast new means of social self-representation. But also, through various technical contrivances, they allow one to stage oneself in a flattering and exaggerated way. … The new media … have created a world parallel to the real world [the metaverse], a virtual world where the most important thing is to speak about what one does or intends to do, or to get others to speak of it. This has become more important than actually doing it. What matters is not what one is truly, but what one passes for, one’s appearance rather than oneself.
The shift from the real to the virtual, the traditional to the deconstructive, and original (where nothing is original), and the hopeful to the dissatisfied. Technology of this magnitude swallows our people whole. It is all consuming.
But let’s look further, in conjunction with Paul Virilio, at the spiritual impacts of the new media …
The new media have … led to the impoverishment of spiritual life. More and more, they have taken the place of traditional religious and spiritual practices, and at the same time they are changing and partly destroying the inner and outer conditions that favor the practice and development of spiritual life. … The new media are seen as a way to a new world and a new man, the ideal of all religions … The new media are presented as the basic condition for the blossoming and happiness of modern man. They are said to open the door to a world of promise and the emergence of humanity enhanced. …
The Religion of the New Man
Larchet denotes a number of people who have elaborated on this the religion of the new man:
- Armand Mattelart who sees a religious dimension in Marshall McLuhan’s “global village”.
- Ignatio Ramonet who fears technology may evolve into a messianism of the media.
- David Le Breton who shows a link between “religiosity of cyber culture and the Gnosticism of early Christian era”.
- Mark Dery shows the link between American cyber-culture and the spiritualist New Age movement.
- Pierre Musso writes about the networks as “a new god arises, a tehnical new god. The Internet is only one of its luminous apparitions: The Net … “It is the idol of the contemporary cult of movement, of flow, of connection, linking the present to the future.”
- Philippe Breton sees this new spirituality as a religion without a god, that has its roots in “Gnosticism, Manichaeism, dualism, the counter-culture of the ’60s when the new age adopted the spirituality of the far east, and in the theology of Tiehard de Chardin who proposes to end the division among men by promoting the nooshphere (The New Media Epidemic, 138).
The latter connection of technology to Tielhard de Chardin, the noosphere, the new age and eastern spirituality brings us into the forerunner of this new religion, namely the the various supranational organizations run by and aiding and abetting the running amok of global elites. And those organizations, and the people who run them, are not neutral. The transhumanist movement is counter-divinization, and the new media counter-liturgy. Larchet …
Through the continuity of the new media, and especially of connected objects, the plan of the new man unfurls. He is to be freed from his present limitations, reprogrammed and augmented, thanks to the techniques of bionics, robotics, and IT, which in synergy he perfects. He gains limitless memory and supremely powerful artificial intelligence. Thus he acquires the divine qualities of omnipotence over himself and the environment, of incorruptibility and immortality (NME, 140).
Larchet continues on to note the connection of the development of these technologies and transhumanism (as its culmination) through companies like Google, etc. But it goes farther than that to the elite think tanks and annual meetings, the back room deals and strategic plans of a cartel of unelected aristocracy that bridge out over the next one hundred years. A brave new world that has been carefully planned over a century ago with a long-game in mind. Fear is critical to the rise and acceptance of the brave new world tied to the global financial elite and their political cronies, for how else will people give up their civil liberties to embrace, in the words of Kissinger, “a New World Order” with a whole new fiscal and socio-political–even religious–structure?
The New Man and The GMO Human Race
Back to Paul Virilio and the administration of fear and the way news media creates perpetual fear while promulgating misanthropy through rationalizing, for instance, population control. …
The demographic questions is crucial. Yet the way that we approach it is essential. There is an awful way of closing it, which relates to civil dissuasion. Civil dissuasion agrees with activating the genetic bomb, the possibility of mutating the human species, of producing life. After the industries of death broght about by the gas chambers and concentration camps, the industries of life now offer the possibility of a genetically modified human race, calling into question humans born of blood and sperm, therefore the wild, the “natural” part of humanity. The “naturals” would become the new savages with augmented people leading a new humanity shaped less by political totalitarianism than bioengineering.
Both Larchet and Virilio see the rise of a whole new human being, and thus not a real human being at all. A being reengineered to love and be at peace, to accept structures of power that subjugate it; a fully compliant and complacent being–what Virilio calls “dissuaded”–designed to ‘naturally’ dwell in a smaller ecological footprint; a creature made compatible with an earth of dwindling resources.”
Thus we are in the middle of the Singularity: the convergence of man and machine to form a new being, a new entity that can fuse technological power with the dynamism of the human mind.
Creating Art In The Age of the New Man
But this will not truly be human, but rather the hybrid ‘being’–the Anthropocene, the age of (new) man. And the fear of course is the schism of the new man with the old man; the AI enhanced man and the ‘natural’ or ‘savage’ man. The new man rising up as god, not through Christ, but through technology. A reversal of the ‘old man’ that Saint Paul writes about. In such a model, the old man is the Christian–weak, needy, poor, foolish–and the new man is that which is not saved by God, by our Lord Jesus Christ, but rather by the works of its own hands.
In Huxley’s Brave New World, John Savage is a stranger to the Brave New World. He is educated, bookish, inquisitive, and not technologized. Yet he is the savage. He becomes depressed and kills himself at the end of the story, thus, perhaps, putting an end to a pre-technologized humanity.
How will you respond to the brave new world?
Because it’s coming sooner than you think.
In fact, it’s evolving right now, and has been for centuries.
This is the world we have to create in–that we are called to create in.
This is the emerging world that we will have to make serious choices about.
And those choices will not be easy. They will make the vax/unvax controversy a cake walk.
In previous posts, I wrote about Dostoevsky (link) and Solzhenitsyn (link) as two warriors who wrote in both nascent times and in the midst of revolutionary chaos. We must muster that same courage to face the days ahead.
As the Lord of Spirits hosts–Father Andrew Stephen Damick and Father Stephen DeYoung (link)–say, in Christ we have won. It’s clean up time. But mopping up can still be a messy job. There can be many slips and spills. And it’s not easy work to clean up a big mess.
May the Lord of Armies buoy us up–we who dare to create, dare to love, dare to inspire and be inspired, dare to fast and pray, dare to attend as many divine liturgies as we can, dare to give alms and then some, dare to say no to systems of power and oppression that rise up against our King and our God, the Lord Jesus Christ.
May we dare to wait on the Lord in stillness and silence–amidst the clatter and the chatter–and have our strength renewed, and rise up like eagles; to walk and not be weary, to run and not faint.
