MACHINE WORSHIP
How Modern Man is trapped in his own inventions
In this brief series I will explain some of the ideas and processes which have produced a system of machine worship, replacing the earlier revolutionary cult of the worship of Man.
Seen from a critical perspective, modern “progress” from the deification of Man to that of his machines is the liberation of mankind into a trap.
FROM MAN TO MACHINE
Our lives are already shaped by machines.
Socialised on algorithms, our food and food-for-thought are produced by a constantly refining technique and technology on whose products we increasingly rely for our sustenance and our sense of reality.
Yet the progress of the last century towards a utopian technological society seems to have hit the brick wall of reality.
The consensus politics that has managed the West by this technique has produced not a paradise but a perilous state of emergency.
It is morally, financially and ideologically bankrupt, and the liberal remnant states are now refining the technique of digital repression to prevent their own replacement.
The answer to this crisis is AI, we are told. It will deliver us from the doom loop of liberal policies, which have replaced prosperity with precarity, and our national homelands with antagonistic factions of foreign and domesticated grievance.
Naturally, a godless system cannot turn to God to save itself from itself, and nor can an empire of lies admit the truth to escape the consequences of its own actions.
This is how the belief in our salvation by machines has been secured: not because it is realistic, nor because it is desirable - but because there is nothing else to turn to in this unhappy ending.
How did we get here?
LIBERATED INTO A TRAP
One way to illustrate this trap is through myth. The French nihilist Albert Camus did this with Sisyphus, presenting through this Greek myth the idea of the absurd condition of man born to die without purpose1.
According to the French Existentialist all we are here to do is roll the rock up the hill until we can’t.
The spirit of this sage is animated in the person of Henri, Le Chat Noir, who says:
“My thumbs are not opposable. And yet I oppose everything”:
The myth of Sisyphus, Camus says, is the fate of man without meaning. His conclusion?
“One must imagine Sisyphus happy”.
Really? Really.
Later, Theodore Roszak updated this myth2. As with our moral values, new innovations to mythology are invented to make sense of our inventions.
Roszak’s New Sisyphean model of mankind had a machine pushing the rock, with Man now chained to the machine. Roszak warned of the mistake of viewing the human mind as a sort of machine.
Today we see attempts to build a machine intelligence from the input/output loop of human-machine interaction.
Who operates whom is the question of this essay.
More precisely, how much of Man remains when machines dictate the pace and purpose of his life?
FOUR IDEAS TO EXPLAIN THE MACHINE LIFE
In this post I explain four ideas and their effects which show that modern life is a sort of dead end presented as universal liberation. Why is this the case?
A life absent God is a life absent meaning. It is also not true3. We shall see why this matters, whether you believe this or not, as truth is true because it remains itself across time. This is the fatal limit which cannot be exceeded.
The modern liberal system is built on the foundational lie that man’s potential is limitless, not that of God who made him.
In seeking to remake himself by his own invention, Man has delivered himself into evil.
The reason he is imprisoned is the worship of his Reason produces a misprision. He becomes the convict of his convictions, the instrument of his own devices.
This is not simply a matter of reliance on his gadgets, but includes his being subsumed entirely into the mechanics of the modern technological society.
Idea 1: Technique
I have written before about technique. This was the subject of Jacques Ellul’s book, La Technique, transcribed in English as “The Technological Society”.
You can think of technique as the operating principle of mass scale society. It is the algorithm of modern life. Technique was defined by Ellul as the refinement of the production of a standard result - the “most efficacious” method of doing things.
The result produced by the technique of mass society is power. Everything in it is mobilised towards this end, reducing mankind to a component in a machinery of organisation4.
The human result is a culture of machine worship, in which man becomes a product of the processes made possible by means of his own invention.
Idea 2: Forms of Godless Worship
The charming degenerate Bertrand Russell pointed out that systems of government can also be secular religious cults5.
Russell, like Camus, believed Man was an accident of atoms. Both of these sages believed everything came from nothing, for no reason at all6.
Russell said that Bolshevism and Fascism led to State Worship, and proposed the worship of humanity instead.
I would add “market worship” to this list, and will explain now how belief in Russell’s mirage of eternal humanist values produced a trap very much defined by its time.
His beliefs reduce men and their motives to the output of biological machines, whose expression should be governed by Reason alone.
This is reminiscent of the Cult of Reason placed, temporarily, in the Churches of post-revolutionary France. The result was not universal happiness.
Idea 3: Machine Values
In our time, new values are invented to make good the potential of new technology.
As this technology produces novel possibilities, new arrangements of words are made. These are called ethics, and they are explanations as to why the man-made horrors we have witnessed are in fact the new wonders of the world.
New values are made up to justify the use of new machines. The machinery of society is accordingly refined, with the new god sold us as better than the old.
Abortion, euthanasia, the non-human generation of human life, its hire and sale - all these are made possible by new technology.
The value of human life is replaced by price, and in practice it has become a consumer product to be acquired or disposed of as a matter of convenience.
The new values we have are new word games played in the minds of the public, whose lives will be consumed in the ever-refining machined society around and indeed within them.
How does this happen?
Idea 4: Machined inside and out
With our moral values produced by a machine-like view of human motive, and with new values invented to justify the use of new inventions, modern man is machined into a diminishing product.
His soul is deleted, the value of his life now contingent on utility and preference.
The more machined is man, the less of him there is.
I think this should be borne in mind when we hear that AI - the complex patterns of advanced machines - is going to save us from ourselves.
Modern man is increasingly repatterned on machine output.
Glommed on to one screen or another, whether on his phone or doing his makework email job, the structure of his brain and of his social reality is mapped by a feedback loop of virtual rewards. His increased online presence is his real world absence, within and without his own body.
This of course brings new meaning to the concept of humanity as a sort of biological machine, as modern man becomes a product of the technique of mass society, neurologically rewired into synergy with a biodigital system.
IN THE NEXT PART
In the next part of this brief series I will explain more about how man is reduced to one dimension as a result of the replacement of the worship of God by the culture of the machine.
The ideas I have presented here may be new to you or not. They may be difficult to understand without practical examples, which I will provide in part two.
The Big Idea in this series is to show you how the Modern idea of Man limits him to the limitations of the Modernist philosophy: a cult of Man restricted to the novelty of his inventions.
I also hope to show you that there is nothing new in the vision of utopia presented through artificial intelligence.
The promise of transcendence through the remaking of man by means of machines is as old as the belief that the machinations of reason and rephrasing can refashion reality.
What is promised with AI is not a revolution. It will deliver an update to the social algorithm of machine worship. Is it liberating to imagine Man will be blockchained by the machine that pushes the rock? Is all our becoming restricted to being tokenised in the process of the refinement of technique?
No.
The task of life of course is not to chain ourselves to a machine to secure an aimless momentum for its own sake.
It is only when we deny the higher spiritual dimension to human life that we are reduced to ones and zeroes. Denial does not delete this in general - only in particular.
There is always an escape from the exitless prism of symbol and system and syntax errors which comprise the operating system of the modern machine.
It is only by denying reality that the door is sealed shut.
It is a cruel paradox that life becomes a living tomb sealed by the sanctions of Enlightenment if its false promises of deliverance by invention are believed.
Being as being trapped in a life without meaning is a choice.
If you wish to experience the timeless, pray. The alternative is simply absurd7.
Despite my reckless habit of stating the obvious out loud I am still at large. This fact alone should give you hope, if you cusp on the treason of despair.
I wish you all a blessed advent and I hope this post has helped to explain some of the state we are in, and how we shall get out of it. All’s well that ends.
The Hungarian-Jewish dramatist Pereszlenyi Gyula Marton (“Martin Esslin”) wrote a book in 1961 about the Theatre of the Absurd, in which he defined the era-defining concept of the absurd as:
“The inevitable devaluation of ideals, purity and purpose”.
The destruction of moral norms in the service of “progress” is a feature and not a bug of Machine Worship, which was enacted in the West by political policy and cultural production in the 20th century. This is one explanation for the vile absurdity of much of modern culture.
I investigated this in a post titled The Kingdom of Satan.
Roszak was a curious fellow. Vehemently anti-Christian, he also despised the Enlightenment. His work has merit for its warning of a future society sealed shut by technological power and his critique of machine modelled mankind as a sort of “biocomputer” in “The Cult of Information”.
The Noble Pagans such as Plato and Aristotle knew there was a supernatural and timeless aspect to life, without which life did not make sense. If you despise the idea of God, you can consider the fact that 2+2=4 remains true regardless of the political dispensation of the time.
The denial of the supernatural element of life not only renders it meaningless, it is simply false. The Godless call this the abstract, but it remains true that mathematical truth transcends formal proof. It just “Is”, and “Is always”. As usual, machine worshippers simply change the names of things to make them make sense, inventing a new symbol-set of words to do so. Number is therefore a “Construct” - meaning we make it up in our minds.
This is the Machine Age answer to all questions - Man simply invents everything, and where he does not, he makes up stories to tell himself he is all there is. This is Man’s word against God’s, as of course machine worship is anti-Logos.
The odd paradox of the modern cult of the self is that it has dehumanised man into a component in a machine. This too is called progress, as the less of him there is, the more progressive he has become. The world shrinks to fit him.
You can read about the Managerial Revolution in Burnham’s 1941 book of that title, which was the blueprint for the rise of the administrative-bureaucratic model of permanent governance - a system of machine politics which was to survive elections, and would come to absorb all the institutions of society as its technique was refined.
Russell once amusingly explained how smoking saved his life. He accepted the moral inversion of Freud, seeing in normal sexual behaviour a recipe for universal neurosis to be cured by a rational sexual freedom. For Russell, “sex hunger” was alike to that for food and drink: a mechanical/biological process.
We inhabit the results of sexual “liberation” today, which is the annihilation of all meaning in human sexual relations beyond appetite.
It is the mark of an Enlightened mind to maintain that things happen for no reason at all. Contemporary examples include rising violent and sexual crime rates unrelated to mass migration, “antisemitism” unrelated to the actions of Israel, and “transphobia” unrelated to the performative degeneracy of the differently-saned. Many such cases.
Albert Camus said the starting point of all great minds was to realise life was absurd, because we were born without consent to die.
He died an absurd death, in a car crash with a return train ticket to the same intended destination in his pocket. His solutions to the condition of his life, made absurd by the denial of God, was to become revolting in order to promote love and understanding among men. So, rebellion and love - or “F*** YOU, DAD!”.
This is the perspective of a mind regarded as amongst the most brilliant of the 20th century.
Having no oil in your lamp is "denying reality." Rushing to buy the oil from merchants is going to the philosophies of men. Grace, it turns out, is not transactional.
Admittedly, I read just a handful of Camus' scribblings, but I never understood why he was considered a great thinker. Then I realized that his proponents were also the ones extolling the dreck adorning the walls of the modern art section of the local art museum. Then it all made sense.