One more link to finish the year, an AskReddit thread: What small change did you make in 2018 that has made your life notably better?]]>Religion and politics are both ways for allocating power and social control. And a way of drawing conflict team boundaries. Their methods vary, but the medium is very much the same: physical force for the control of material property, with a veneer of ideology.
So now that we are in the post-Enlightenment world and nobody can imagine the gods being anywhere but in the sky, invisible, and probably dead, the narrative is done with gods, and the locus of power can be brought back to Earth and we don't need so many excuses to put it in the hands of a secular human elite.
Christmas Day, 2018. A couple weeks ago I mentioned Adam Curtis's prediction, "there's going to be a resurgence of religion," and since then I've been puzzling about how to define that word. With some help from Eric, this is what I've come up with:
A religion is a community of people united by a foundational belief. With so much uncertainty in life, it's practical to pick one thing that you refuse to doubt, and that belief is like the foundation of a building, or the anchor of a ship, or the seed of a crystal, for your whole model of reality.
Paradoxically, crazier religious beliefs are more robust. It's like people are boasting about the power of their faith, that they can truly believe something as loopy as flat-earthism. (Flat-earthism also offers something taken away by modernity: unseen worlds that you can walk to.)
In the old days, religion ran in families -- not just "you kids have to go to church," but people who really wanted to keep believing the same stuff for centuries. I think this is because our foundational beliefs are usually connected to whatever is the closest thing we've had to a transcendent experience. So the most magical thing kids would do, and later their most awesome memory, would be church events with their families.
That changed when we invented technologies that created stronger experiences than going to church, like television and psychedelic drugs. I'm not a Christian, because the story of the son of God dying for our sins doesn't resonate with me. Instead, I suspect that this is a badly run prison world, like on Hogan's Heroes, or that we live in some kind of fate-dense exile, like on Gilligan's Island.
Still, I'm grateful for being raised Catholic, because even though the nuns wore normal clothing, and the hymn singers looked like hippies, somehow I caught a precious vibe of epic spirituality. It's not a coincidence that my favorite sci-fi author (Roger Zelazny) and singer-songwriter (Colleen Kinsella) are also ex-Catholics.
My own most nearly transcendent experience came from a song, with help from cannabis. I feel that I've seen the light behind the world, and I want to make more lenses for that light. It's like a religion, but for one person. Just a few hundred years ago, that kind of thing would get you burned at the stake, but now it's almost common.
I expect that trend to continue, with more and more solofaithers; and I also expect a weakening of materialist metaphysics (which is totally a religion). But religion won't die, because most of us would rather share our beliefs than hold them alone. If we do get a resurgence of religion, I'm wondering what the foundational beliefs will be. I remember a favorite Bible quote of my old priest: "The stone that the builders rejected will become the cornerstone."
Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish,
How could I seek the empty world again?
Don't worry -- I have no plans to die soon. First I have to write more fiction and find it an audience. Here's a verse from a work in progress:
]]>Though fast be the clock belt and hot be the engine
Fearsome the distance from star to next star
Mother of Space, may your emptiness fill us
The trench of redemption must drown us to spill us
On beaches unreachable by who we are
What if, one day, we could design organisms that we could live in? A bioengineered creature that can feed itself with sunlight, or other gradients of energy, but that's also hospitable to humans. And, what if while the residents might choose its basic structure, it grew in ways that surprised us, like a living art project?
Is the future of humanity one of high-tech animism, in which everything around us is not only alive, but capable of carrying on conversations?
I love that idea, but I think there's a trade-off. Machines do exactly what we tell them to do (which is never quite what we want them to do) but they're expensive to build and maintain. Biology can self-replicate from common materials, but because it's self-organizing, it will have its own motives.
I don't think we can have the best of both worlds, but now I'm thinking like a science fiction writer: imagine two competing utopian cultures, one based on cybertech and one based on biotech. The biotech culture will win, because 1) it's more efficient with energy and resources, and 2) its people will be mentally stronger, because they have to negotiate with allies instead of commanding servants.
Related: a long NY Times article, Can Dirt Save the Earth? We can move a lot of carbon from the atmosphere into topsoil, but we have to change the way we do agriculture.
]]>Filing your shells by the fire
Creasing the water with violets and sighs
Asking every simmering quasar if you know it well
Autumn and the paint glowing brightly at the Carousel