On Artificialism
I believe the third millennium is so far best understood as the dawning awareness of the Crisis of Man. It is a crisis involving every person on Earth, and Mankind’s relationships to earth; and to animals, to plants, to the sky, to the waters, to the weather, to the atoms, to the heavens.
What reality is (1), who we are (2), and what is the basis for understanding the relationship between them (3), are the 3 foundational questions which are under dispute.
The pain of the Crisis is that many people adhering to old answers are only beginning to realize they live in a society shaped at every level by new answers, answers which communicate a profound rejection of Man and interpret reality as a place devoid of limits.
That’s not a mistake. The acceptable bounds of public discourse are rigidly controlled to create the illusion of consensus on reality. This control is wielded by institutions which reap the benefits of obscuring how much they have abandoned the ancient answers to the three questions described above so as to impose their answer before the full consequences of the Crisis can be understood.
Artificialism is the common ideology bonding the New Answers. It begins in ancient Greece with the theory of atomism; it lurked in the background as the nominalists and realists quarreled in the medieval universities; it spurred the great consciousness shift of the Scientific and Industrial revolutions which produced scientism and reductionist materialism.
With the reach of contemporary technology, Artificialism builds on its past gains by prompting a new (ancient) rejection of reality, Man, and communion-based knowledge. Artificialism is no longer a denier of essences, but a promoter of self-created fantasies with iron boundaries. It used the blank slate when it was suitable; today it uses gnostic gender ideology when that is appropriate.
All that the Artificialist ideology wants is to replace Creation and Man. It will use anything to get there, and we have allowed it. Our engagement with its incessant temptations atrophies our memories, our skills, our hands, our bodies. It really only leaves us with feelings of addiction and rage, feelings so exhausting that we numb them by rushing back to the Artificial virtual domain to get another rush of dopamine. Increasingly the Artificialist institutions program us to fit their desires via their algorithms.
Is it inevitable, is it right?
When we see how inextricably tangled our existence has become with the Artificialist ideology, we may throw up our hands in despair. What’s real anyhow? Aren’t glasses as much a tool as a smartphone? And maybe it’s just inevitable. Maybe this is what evolution entails: a winnowing of the chaff and a centralization of the powers of the rational mind. Computer-contained memories for all!
It’s understandable to feel a surge of doubt and helplessness when one suspects one is surrounded. But not one of the futures proposed by the Artificialists is truly inevitable, and they are all dependent upon enormous amounts of deceit and manipulation. What makes Man so interesting, his ability to make choices, is something the Artificialists abhor. They do not want Man to be More Man; they want us to be something distinctly less.
A unit, not a face. A quantity, not a quality. Matter and Man must be deprived of their meaning and Man convinced it could not be otherwise. God and reality had to be deprived of truth claims so the institutions could replace them with gods they crafted to serve their own desires.
How can we respond to the total claims on reality of the Artificialists?
Artificialism works to weaken our willpower while also being utterly dependent on our attention, the fruit of our will. It requires us to feel alone and in need of its stimulations in order to continue. But at any moment, any single time we want - we can walk away. Because reality is greater than anything the Artificialists have concocted. So long as we have the slightest control of our minds, Reality may prevail.
The great American botanist Paul A. Lee wrote poignantly about thymos, the vital root: “While I was studying philosophy and theology at Harvard, Paul Tillich introduced me to a theology of culture and prepared the way for my intellectual path. He gave me the definition of industrial society as ‘a world above the given world of nature,’ where I came to see how the ‘above’ was brought about through ‘artificial synthesis,’ as in the isolation of active ingredients and their synthetic counterparts. The role of synthetics in industrial society was comparable to the role of plastics and the emphasis on simulation.”
We are told to dwell in fear about a climate change crisis, and we experience troubling shifts in our environment. What makes all the difference, though, is how and who we allow to interpret this information for us.
Is the remedy to our ills a yet further plastic-ification of the world, to give greater power to the same technocrats who have most notoriously rejected respecting Nature’s limits? Is it to consider how Artificialism is warping our food, poisoned the water, tortured and manipulated animals, and at every moment showed a determination to replace what is given with a synthetic, controlled option?
As Paul Lee wrote further: “The physicalistic-positivistic approach is the serious attempt to simulate man as an assembly of variables and response tendencies with a general information-processing capability of an “artificial” intelligence with emergent properties. The ideal of the Physicalist view is the complete simulation of man, the creation of the android under scientific management and control.”
As our stars are hidden, the sky filled with satellites and men propose to give their minds over to Neuralink, it’s good to recall we do have a choice. Re-enchantment is the creed of the moment, and it is a lovely start. But for a tired people, re-enchantment can feel like substituting one mythos for another, this one without cultural aid and an extraordinary amount of legwork.
You do not have to craft an entire worldview on your own to resist Artificialism. You do not have to fight Goliath at every moment, all on your own, forever:
“Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls.” Matthew 11:28-29
The work was done long ago on the Cross. We do not need to fight the new System with yet another new System. It is the prayer of the heart softened by metanoia, not Systems, which fully answers the triad of the 3 questions under dispute. It is our relationship with the Holy Spirit which is the summum bonum of Man and Creation.
Accept no substitutes.
YES. Yes, yes. Not to hustle, but only to say I'm with you, Tara, I'm a kindred spirit, this is what I said, too, at the end of my first essay at Sabbath Empire: "For a moment, let's stop trying to figure out what went wrong with everything, and go outside into the sun—it's still there...Let's find a tree or a rock or a little pond or even a stray blade of grass pushing up through the asphalt of the roof of the apartment complex, and sit comfortably beside it—it's still there. Let's take a few very long, slow, deep breaths through the nostrils, exhaling very slowly each time—we're still there. And then let's say, “Lord Yeshua Messiah, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner”—he's still there, too. And he's all we really need."
This speaks to my heart. Such a profound and precise encapsulation of our moment. And oddly, unutterably hopeful. Thank you.
I am increasingly on watch for those who read the times as I do, who expand and sharpen my vision, speak the language and share the meaning-making that signal *my tribe.* I'm so glad I found you, thanks to Rod Dreher. And to Him, Who inspires your thought and gives you voice.