The Struggle to Unify
I went clubbing in Toronto on New Year’s Eve with a good friend. We went to a club that has turned pretty ghetto over the years. We managed to have a good time in spite of the less-than-stellar sound system and a washroom that ranked among the nastiest I’ve seen (and I’ve seen some pretty gross bathrooms).
I enjoyed the music, which was mostly esoteric subgenres of electronic music ranging from ambient to techno to trance. Electronic music is still the staple dance music in most clubs, although in most it’s the worst kind of top-40s crap: Britney remixes and cheesy dance versions of Coldplay. As a musical culture however, its glory days are over, at least for now.
A lot of electronic music and its culture sought to unify modern technology and older spirituality. House, with its tribal rhythms. Trance’s shamanistic inspirations. The name given to jungle, or drum’n’bass, evokes, well, drums in the jungle, something Livingstone might have been worried to hear on his explorations in Africa.
Juno Reactor, one of my favourite electronic groups (probably best known for their work on the soundtracks of The Matrix and sequels), produces a skillful blend of electronic and tribal music. They collaborated on their 1997 Bible of Dreams album with Amampondo, the famous South African traditional percussion troupe.
Electronic music’s combination of technology and ancient spirituality has created many musical successes and some vibrant communities. As an attempt at spiritual unification between the modern and the ancient, however, it is a failure.
There are other much more well-known fusions of the modern and the ancient – more specifically, science and religion – taking place right now that I think are similar in their motivations.
Intelligent Design (ID) is the idea thought up by Christians to replace creationism that basically says nature is too complicated to have evolved by itself, thus an “intelligent designer” – i.e. God, but they don’t want to say that – must have been involved (to learn more, click the link since I’m not going to get into it).
One could argue that its proponents are seduced by the powerful authority people grant to science, and they want their particular world-view, that God created the universe and everything in it, to have that same authority. This is probably true to some extent, but I think there is a deeper motivation here.
On the other hand there are those firm believers in science that have little use for religion. But I use the word believers intentionally. Many are enthralled by science to a religious extent.
I came across a version of the Ten Commandments rewritten from a “scientific”, “logical” point of view. The first commandment was “Thou shalt worship only reason”. (What about ethics? Morality? The remaining 9 said not a word about these.)
This just scratches the surface. Immortality through genetic engineering, mind transfer, where your consciousness is transferred to a computer, and true artificial intelligence (in a sense, the human creation of a soul), are technologies that many people think can be realistically achieved.
These are religious ideas wrapped in science. Science as spirituality.
Nothing illustrates this need for unification better than the growth of Scientology. Christian believers in Intelligent Design shade their faith with science. Scientists striving for immortality and artificial intelligence include overtones of religion in their research. Scientology, on the other hand, grabs science and religion in approximately equal parts, jams them together and then sells the result to movie stars.
This raises a lot of questions. What is happening here? Are these things driven by a human need for unification between old and new? Do people sense they are entering an era where technology is no longer a collection of tools but a new way of being, as long anticipated by science fiction? Is technology that crosses into spiritual boundaries (e.g. artificial intelligence or immortality) achievable, and should it be achieved? Are we destined to become one with the machine? At what cost?
January 4th, 2006 at 4:17 pm
Religion and science may be converging, but then again, maybe they were never really all that distant from one another to begin with. Maybe it is our relative understanding of the two concepts that is finding convergance. I think that religion and science may have been born for the same reason, not in the same place or time, but both as a part of the same human folly. That is to say they both offer explanations.
People are seduced by their own ignorance to create meaning and order in life. Religion and science both provide numerous mythologies, narratives, rules. They are both driven by questions of the unknown, as a result they are both incomplete concepts (so far as we can experience them). Furthermore, they are both bound by our own understanding of the world around us – in the same way that God made man in his own image (and we have a hard time proving otherwise), quantum physics claims that ours’ is not a sole reality (an equally difficult concept to experience in proof). Similarly, science offers about as convincing an explanation of consciousness as religion offers about creation. Humankind uses religion to dispell science, science to dispell religion. Still neither concept has been able to completely abolish the other – a feat that is arguably impossible – but perhaps the convergance between the two is the defeat of our own desire to abandon the place that either concept occupies in our minds. Let’s face it – they are both equally mystifying – even gratifying – pursuits for our human psyche.
If art is being held as the current example (Ade mentions electronic music) then we could talk about the expressive qualities of both religion and science. Still we may not find too much disagreement. Are the Northern Lights more beautiful when they are understood scientifically, or with religion? Perhaps that is a stupid question, and a different discussion.
Ade asks if we are destined to become one with the machine, well, we created the machine, so maybe we already are. It is an evolving extension of humanity, always changing, always evolving. Can we say the same of religion? By their very nature, few religions would admit to being the creation of humankind, but they are nonethless evolving in their utility to human societies. Denominations of different religious faith worldwide are all challenged to maintain their own continuity. Some might say religions are weakening, but there is a flipside to that assertion. Human consciousness is strengthening. In this context, religion may have already been too weak to hold onto human imagination. Human spirituallity may need more than religion, more than science.
January 4th, 2006 at 7:47 pm
I agree with “Human spirituallity may need more than religion, more than science”. The problem with this convergence is that I see mostly failures or attempts at convergence that I think will fail.
Failure in this case doesn’t mean unpopular. Intelligent Design might get really popular but it won’t last any more than “creation science” lasted. And scientific research intended to, say, make people immortal through genetic engineering strikes me as perhaps technically possible, but I’m not convinced this is where we ought to be going.
I had a discussion a few weeks ago about immortality through science with a friend of mine, whether by genetic engineering or “mind transfer” or whatever. I asked him if he thought it was a good idea. He replied, “Do you think that it is something we can’t try to do?”
He made the case that perhaps that sort of thing is precisely what is supposed to happen – that this is how it happens across the universe for intelligent species. That worlds of unintelligent life evolve intelligent life that goes on to transcend its evolved form.
I’m not convinced, although it is a tempting idea. It is tempting to throw aside restraint and barrel forwards on a technological quest to finally figure it all out, to fulfill whatever techno-destiny is waiting for us. If this is how it’s supposed to go, pollution and extinction don’t really matter, since they’re just part of the price that has to be paid to progress.
On the other end of the spectrum, it’s not difficult to imagine a society that has lost its fear of death not because it is immortal through science and technology but because it has made peace with the cycle of life. A society that is still rooted in an understanding of nature and our bodies. Such societies have existed before. Was their loss inevitable?
January 4th, 2006 at 8:35 pm
I don’t think anything is “supposed to happen”, at least not in a determinist sense. Perhaps other species in the universe have achieved technological singularity or died trying, but the probability of radical difference in another evolved intelligence is too high to make any conclusions about a universal, transcendent destiny. That said, I think we’ve long passed a point where we could halt this mad dash for faster computers, smarter intelligence, and better people. Keep your eyes open for the next twenty-thirty years. More than any time in human history we’ve got the power to save or damn ourselves.
Perhaps there are other solutions than technological to the so-called “human condition” (that is, the near-universal lack of acceptance of old age and death), but I don’t think we’re likely to discover them at this point. Spirituality is almost non-existent in our age. It seems the easier or more convenient life becomes, the more complex it is, and spirituality tends to favor simplicity.
January 5th, 2006 at 9:11 am
It’s interesting that, and more and more often, people believe technology is a pathway to a better (enhanced) existence; they scarcely feel the same way about spiritual or religious development. I’m going to re-quote myself (this time I’m sober Ade): “The supreme narcissism of humanity is the belief that we need to make our lives better, and that only our creativity will make that improvement happen.”
January 11th, 2006 at 11:51 am
I think The Shamen put it best when they sang:
— The Shamen, “Boss Drum”, Written by Angus/West Published by Warner Chappell Music, 1992