Jim McClellan surfs his way to spirituality on the Web
Looking to live up to the proclamations of business experts, who have declared that this Christmas online shopping will cross over to the mainstream (at least in the United States), Net retailers seem to be going all out to exploit the seasonal spirit.
However, there are those who argue that the Internet can actually offer something more profound. It can help you leave behind money-grabbing profanity and deliver a real sense of spiritual connection.
This isn’t just a matter of established religious faiths using the Net to spread their particular word. Rather, for some, the Internet seems to have become an object of devotion and reverence. These online seekers don’t log on looking for ways to get the kids a particular Christmas present. They start up their browsers in search of spiritual renewal.
Take Jennifer Cobb, whose Cybergrace – The Search For God In The Digital World came out in the US earlier this year. Influenced by the French Catholic mystic Teilhard de Chardin, Cobb sets out to develop a “theology of cyberspace” and to find a way to “include computers in our sacred lives”.
She does this by building on the variants on evolutionary theory developed by Teilhard, a priest and palaeontologist. His big idea that got him into trouble with the church hierarchy was that evolution was moving toward the development of a kind of planetary intelligence. He called this evolving global mind the noosphere (noo is Greek for mind), in contrast to the biosphere.
Cobb suggests that the Net is a step on the way to the noosphere. For her it isn’t a profane info dump but a potentially sacred space animated by divine energies, a space that might help us to “reconnect” with the planet and with each other.
According to the American writer Erik Davis, Cobb’s cyber-theology is just one example from a long history of attempts to project spiritual hopes and fears on to technology. In Techgnosis, he sets out a kind of secret history of the way mystical visions and dreams have always clustered around new technology, in particular communications technology.
Rejecting the idea that technology is just a tool, Davis, , suggests that even as we shape them, our inventions shape us and show us new possibilities. We can’t help projecting dominant technologies on to the world and ourselves. So when clockwork machines were state of the art, people imagined the world worked in the same way. Now that information technology is king, people think of their brains and even the universe as computers with God as a hacker/programmer.
Davis points out that religious images have always filled writings about the Net. For example, in William Gibson’s cyberpunk sci-fi novel Neuromancer, the Net is inhabited by an artificial intelligence that at the end of the book achieves something like godhead. In subsequent books, cyberspace is presented as a place haunted by various gods.
Even those whose business is ostensibly non-fiction have indulged in speculations about the mystic power of the Net. Executive editor of Wired magazine Kevin Kelly has talked about exchanging “soul data” online.
In his book, Davis quotes computer animator Nicole Stenger’s suggestion that cyberspace would make us all “angels” and architectural critic Michael Benedikt’s musings on the way cyberspace promises to fulfil dreams of the heavenly city of the New Jerusalem.
He devotes a whole section to the Extropians, the Californian group of true technological believers who think that one day they will be able to download the informational essence of their minds into computers and live for ever. As Davis points out, this is a techno-age upgrade of the old Christian dream of a heavenly afterlife.
Techgnosis doesn’t advance an argument so much as spin connections across history, hopping from early theories of electricity as divine life force to the ideas of techno-pagans who see the Net as a place where magic is real, and back again. But it does coalesce in a way around the neologism of the title.
Davis suggests that “techgnosis” is a kind of information age update of gnosticism, a Christian heresy in which believers rejected the world of matter and yearned for gnosis, a flash of transcendent illumination in which individuals cast off the body and ascended to the real world of the spirit. Net culture is filled with people in search of a sort of techno- transcendence, says Davis. They long to rid themselves of their clumsy bodies and re- engineer themselves into pure information.
His examples of techgnostics – the Extropians, Net guru John Perry Barlow, who rather prematurely declared the independence of cyberspace and described it as an empire of pure Mind – are all American. And there is a temptation to dismiss all this talk of the sacred power of the Net as a rather transatlantic thing. Then again one of the prime movers of the Extropian movement, Max More, is British.
“Techgnosis can be seen as an American phenomenon but I think it’s carried within virtual technologies,” Davis explains. “Any place that you find the introduction of these virtual dimensions and the dream of information being the medium of holding the mind and who we really are, the moment you have that notion that we are really information instead of bodies or souls, then you have that possibility of techgnosis. I think in a broader way you’ll find it in any highly technologised society.”
Brilliant though Davis’s book is, it doesn’t provide simple, straightforward arguments for those wondering why the Net in particular has become such a magnet for religious dreams. Anyone looking for a more digestible read should probably wait for the new book, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace, from Australian science historian Margaret Wertheim.
Wertheim says that she originally intended to write a “history of the modern scientific conception of space”, analysing the move from the dualistic cosmology of the Middle Ages, in which the physical world was enclosed by a spiritual, immaterial world, to the cosmology of Isaac Newton, in which the physical world was deemed to constitute the totality of space.
On the way, she became fascinated with cyberspace and Wertheim found herself focusing on what she calls cyber- religiosity, something that is a direct consequence of the rather strange nature of cyberspace itself. “Cyberspace is, in a profound sense, outside the physical space that science has articulated,” she explains. “It’s a non-physical space that is in some sense beyond the equations of physics, though clearly it’s a real space. It is not surprising that people project spiritual desires on to it because in the Western world, for at least 3 000 years, there has been this [link] between what is immaterial, non- physical and the spiritual.”
Wertheim looks at the way all sorts of dreams from the Judaeo-Christian tradition have resurfaced on the Net, albeit in a rather different form. But cyber-religious dreaming, unlike its medieval counterpart, lacks a moral dimension.
“In the Middle Ages, what happened to one in the spiritual world was profoundly tied to your moral actions while you were on earth. That is my biggest problem with cyber-religiosity. It is religion lite or salvation lite. Many cyber-religionists want all the good things of religion – immortality, eternal youth, a realm beyond sickness, a realm to fulfil all their dreams – but they don’t want any moral responsibilities.”
Wertheim ends her book with an attempt to outline a kind of network ethics, a sort of benign cyber-spirituality that uses the Net’s complex multiplicities to suggest an image of society and nature as interlinked and interdependent.
Although she suggests that science’s banishing of “spiritual space” has had disastrous consequences, she says she isn’t about to succumb to cyber- religion. It isn’t just that it lacks moral bite. Its vision of heaven is just too boring.
“I can’t imagine a worse fate that being downloaded into immortality in cyberspace. In Christianity, the elect are promised an eternity of bliss. But what would be the fate of an immortal cyber-elect. What would one do in cyber-eternity?”