PROGRESS IS OUR MOST IMPORTANT [HyperCapitalist] PRODUCT

“While we think of ourselves [in the West] as a people of change and
progress, masters of our environment and our fate, we are no more entitled
to this designation [e.g., Norman Levitt, Paul R. Gross and Victor Stenger
in our technocracy] than the most superstitious savage, for our relation to
change is entirely passive.…We talk of technology as the servant of man,
but it is a servant that now dominates the household, to powerful to fire,
upon whom everyone is helplessly dependent.”

Technology and AI to Humanity: “You are my creator but _I_ am your MASTER.”

“In the not-so-distant future, the bulk of our culture will be composed of
designer viruses.  Why?  Because now that we know how to do it, we will.
We will conquer the conceptual landscape as surely as we conquered the
wilderness. At first, designer viruses will compete with cultural viruses
for a share of our mind.  Soon the old cultural viruses will lose, because
natural selection with which they evolve is not as quick as the
intelligence-directed creation of designer viruses. Those ways of thinking
won’t be wiped out completely, but more and more the people infected with
old cultural viruses will be restricted to self-contained, incommunicado
enclaves like the Amish. After that battle, designer viruses will have to
start competing with each other, and more and more sophisticated technology
will be needed to create a winner in the mind war.  We will see computer
programs doing sophisticated memetic modeling to fine-tune the memes before
launching.

What kind of designer mind viruses will we see in the future?  It depends
upon the intentions and the skill of their creators – and on the memes
those creators are infected with! I would expect to see many profit-
motivated viruses, many power-motivated ones, and perhaps a few motivated
by someone’s vision of a better future for humanity.” (from “Viruses of the
Mind,” by Richard Brodie, Integral Press, 1996, pages 200 – 201.)
---------------

Like the urge for fame, the profit motive and self-love “a deux,” we tend
to think of scientific and technological progress as natural, which means,
something that does not need to be explained. It is difficult to grasp the
significance of any of these myths because they are too alive, too much OUR
myths. Then might technological transformation be another case of mistaking
nurture as nature?  IS IT natural to “progress” from the Wright Brothers to
a moon landing during one generation???  The importance of this question
today means it can no longer be evaded:  the ecological crisis impels us to
determine the meaning of technology and “progress” for us.

At the end of his historical study of death, Aries comments on the belief
that technology has no [potential] limits. “Technology erodes the domain of
death until one has the ILLUSION that death has been abolished.” This
suggests that technology might somehow be another symbolized, unconscious
version of our attempt to avoid death…[The utilization of technological
objectification is the constant negation of death]….[Buddhism, in contrast]
which does not refer or defer to any transcendental Being, can understand
such problems [vis-à-vis] its schema of desire based on ignorance.  From a
LACK perspective, technology can be seen as our collective effort to create
the ultimate security by transforming the entire world into our own
ground.  We try to make ourselves real by reorganizing the whole
environment so that it supports and attests to our reality.  “The purpose
of the god-imitator is to subdue his environment absolutely…The would-be
god on earth never stops trying to incorporate the environment into
himself.” This is another reason why people today can [allegedly] dispense
with the consolations of religion:  Now we have other ways to “control” our
fate, or at least – but futilely – try to.  If the world isn’t “developed”
enough to quell our LACK, then it will have to be developed more…”

Part of our problem is how we understand the relation between science and
technology.  We celebrate the scientific quest for Truth and subordinate
technology to the application of that truth…Many others have suggested that
their relation is actually the reverse.  “Technology is NOT applied
science.  It is the expression of a deep longing, an original longing, that
is present in modern science from its beginning. This is the desire of the
self to seek its own truth through the mastery of the object...The power of
technique is NOT to connect thought effectively to nature; it alters nature
to its own purpose. Its aim is to master its being; to OWN it.”

Another way to put it is that technology is our attempt to own the
universe; an attempt that is always frustrating because, for reasons we do
not quite understand, we never possess it fully enough to feel secure in
our ownership.  Is that because the only genuine salvation is in being
owned BY it – that is, by participating in something GREATER than
[ourselves]?  “We now use the word Nature very much as our fathers used the
word God,” John Burroughs noticed at the turn of the century, and, I
suppose, back of it all we mean the power that is everywhere present and
active, and in whose ‘lap’ the visible universe is held and nourished.”
Nature can take the place of God [precisely] because both fulfill our need
to be embedded in Mystery; technology cannot because it is motivated by the
opposite response, attempting to banish the Mystery by extending our
control, as if THAT can grant us the [illusory] security we crave. Bill
McKibben sums up his somber elegy on “The End of Nature.”  “We [many many
of us is far more accurate here] can no longer imagine that we are part of
something larger than ourselves – that is what all this boils down to. We
used to be.” Our success in “improving” nature means we can no longer rest
peacefully in its bosom.  We cannot manipulate the natural world, in a
collective attempt to self-ground ourselves, and also hope to find in it a
ground greater than ourselves.

In religious terms …[and this is an argument to the explicit effect]…that
in the end we cannot avoid religious terms), THE WORLD-VIEW IMPLICIT IN
TECHNOLOGY HAS AN INADEQUATE ESCHATOLOGY. It is a meaning-system without
ANY ultimate meaning, because lacking any vision of cloture between
humankind and the cosmos.  This is a defect that is quite literally
unendurable: A sense of purpose in the universe must be and always is found
somewhere.  Then the issue is not how hardheaded we our in our supposedly
non-metaphysical materialistic [in the metaphysical sense, not in the
economic sense] realism, but how repressed or conscious we shall be in our
[ultimate] commitments. The technological response to ultimate questions –
those questions which, because they are ultimate, can never be avoided – is
to believe in…the future. What is the meaning of Life?  Where are we all
going so fast?  Since we no longer have answers to those questions, yet
cannot live without answers, our answer is to defer the issue. Until the
last few years, our eschatology has been progress: Things are getting
better, or, when they obviously are not, things WILL get better. The
ecological crisis, which is no longer impending but something we are now
well into, signifies the end of this collective dream, although it remains
to be seen whether our collective psyche will recognize the fact in time.
The supreme irony is that our collective project to secure ourselves is
what threatens to destroy us.

We have [now] seen several examples of how, when our motivations are
unconscious, we tend to pay an unexpected “price”:  What we project
rebounds back onto us.  The modern Japanese philosopher (and Zen master)
Hisamatsu put is well:  That which has become an object to me is something
that has captured me.  What does this imply about technology, if technology
is our attempt to objectify nature. For Buddhism, the problem with
technological objectification is an extreme version of the problem with all
objectification.  Since we are all nondual with the world, not separate
from it, to objectify the world is to be objectified by it and in it. As
the earth becomes a collection of resources for us to manage, the material
and social structures created to do this do the same to us, and we find
ourselves increasingly subjected to them – [inescapably trapped in the
inexorable logic of our own technological objectifications.]  Nature, to be
commanded, must be obeyed, said Bacon. But if we must obey in order to
command, then our commanding is really obeying. The master becomes the
slave, as in the dialectic of Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Mind”:

The relationship of Herrschaft and Knechtschaft [master and slave] is the
fable of technique, the inner structure of consciousness that makes the
technological world function. It is the structure of technological desire.
The self desires to assert its own truth over the object.  It wishes to be
certain.  Modern thought begins with the problem of the self, with the
COGITO claming its own existence in Descartes.  The self desires the
external world.  It desires to possess it as the object of its thought.  To
possess the object in thought implies not only knowledge at a distance, but
the power to have the object actually as part of the self’s sphere of
action.  Nature must be obeyed in order to be commanded.  The self as
master [and then slave] is born.”

Real mastery requires a MEANS.  The self develops technique – the idea of
work put into the hands of another agency held in bondage to the self.  The
agency in servitude that will allow the self to be free to enjoy the world,
is the machine.  The machine is the first appearance of the form of
technique.  The machine is a process that once set in motion will continue
to be – [like memes propagating from brain to brain like a computer virus] –
 a desired end: the mechanical servant [NB: see the Spielberg movie, with
timely and brilliant caveats and equally brilliant insights: “Artificial
Intelligence”]. The self now has, but does not realize that is has, another
self.  This is the human self that is tied to the machine. Once the machine
comes onto the scene all must be reinterpreted in terms of the machine.
L ’HOMME MACHINE is only the first crude idea of the servant-self.  This
self has experienced the absolute fear that it cannot own the external
world.  Work is the answer to the fear that the self  may be nothing, have
no more reality than the object it has the power to negate.  Technique is
the form this work takes.  All before the self can become the subject of
its work. All spheres of existence are subject to technical formation.

What rides the back of the servant-self is the fear that it is nothing.
Its DASEIN is governed by this fear.  As Jaspers says, modern man is
haunted by the sense that something is behind him. “A dread of life perhaps
unparallel in its intensity is modern man’s sinister companion.”

Perhaps the source of that dread is now clearer.

*
*
*
…the spiritual origins of Western science, the very inquiry we think of as
defining secularity [may now be clearer]. Pythagoras was a mystic, the
founder of a religious school whose sacred doctrine centered on numbers and
their harmonies.  The Harmony of the Spheres may seem absurd to us but it
was important as late as Kepler.  Some of this religiosity persists in the
attitude of such great scientists as Newton and Einstein, who demonstrate
and celebrate a non-utilitarian quest for understanding which still has
spiritual overtones, yet that motivation has long been superseded by our
desire for power and control over natural processes. This answers the
question of how our secular Western civilization could evolve out of a non-
secular society.  IT DIDN’T.  What we think of as secularity is still
sacred, for our secular obsessions are symptomatic of our spiritual need.
By trying to become real through them, we continue to seek Being – although
in a distorted, heavily symbolized fashion.

These conclusions give a new perspective on the Mahayana [Buddhist] denial
of any bifurcation between sacred and secular:

[“There is not the slightest difference
Between Samsara and Nirvana.
There not the slightest difference
Between Nirvana and Samsara.

Whatever is the limit of Nirvana,
THAT is the limit of Samsara.
There is not even the slightest difference between them,
Or even the subtlest thing.]

[NB: “Samsara”:  The everyday world.]

Without that dualism, how can Buddhism [characterize and displace the
above?]…The pattern translates into a movement from nondual PARTICIPATION
in something greater than the sense-of-self (and therefore greater than the
sense-of-lack) to a more dualistic relation in which the reified sense-of-
self USES objects in its vain Oedipal project to fill up its sense-of-
lack.  The historical tendency is toward greater objectification, which is
also subjectification, inasmuch as the sense-of-self is the first thing to
be objectified.  For Buddhism, however, “the greater than sense-of-self”
refers not to something transcendentally Other to this world but to the
interdependence [i.e., the total interpenetration of phenomena] of Indra’s
Net.  There is no appeal to another reality, just the need to come out from
[our collective and private shell] and delusive hiding place – my [and our]
sense-of-self – in order to realize THIS one, in order to experience the
full implications of my [and our] integral interdependence [and total
interpenetration] with everything else. (from “Lack and Transcendence: The
Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism,”
by David Loy, Humanities Press, 1996, pages 149 – 153)

FINIS

Addendum:  Indra’s Net

“Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a
wonderful net that has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner
that it stretches out infinitely in all directions. In accordance with the
extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering
jewel in each ‘eye’ of the net and since the net itself is infinite in all
dimensions, the jewels are infinite in number. There hangs the jewels,
glittering like stars of the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold.
IF we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look
closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are
reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only
that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting
all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process
occurring…[I]t symbolizes a cosmos in which there is an infinitely repeated
interrelationship among all the members of the cosmos. This relationship is
said to be one among all the members of the cosmos. [Moreover, said]
relationship is [precisely] one of simultaneous mutual identity and mutual
inter-causality.”