The Global Techno-ideology as Religion

Not only do l reject the concept of ‘sub-culture’, l reject the very notion of culture itself. The phenomenon of ‘sub-cultures’ l would define more traditionally with such terms as:

‘Movement’: group dedicated to an artistic style or political cause.

‘Demi-monde’: people clustered around sex and drug trafficking.

‘La boheme’: certain artists, sexual deviants and misfits who reject or fail to integrate society nonetheless interacting with it harmoniously at certain points while mantaining separate moral standards and values.

‘Faddists’: people sharing an inordinate concern with some fassion, style or attitude: a type of pop music — e.g. heavy metal or punk — or manner of dress and attitudes — e.g. hippys or goths.

Such terms suffice for defining the essence of these groups while avoiding the scientifically pretentious and metaphysically grandiose accociations of ‘culture’.

The more serious use of the term ‘culture’ designates alleged ‘horizons of discovery’: nations, languages, religions. But there is, and always has been, dialogue and cooperation as well as misunderstanding and conflict between ‘cultures’ thus understood (more properly: ‘civilizations’). They are then not ‘horizons of discovery’ strictly speaking since they discover each other. So, to say nothing of uses of the concept destructive to the arts and international relations, the term seems inane. After all, even the relations of husbands and wives, products of an identical social milieu, are characterized by exactly the same modes of interaction (dialogue, cooperation, misunderstanding, conflict) and we do not refer to them as ‘cultures’.

Furthermore, as recently as the 1960s, at least in the New York bohemian ‘sub-culture’ in which l was raised, the term ‘culture’ referred only to what a person had who was well read and familiar with western painting, music and history, and, if possible, foreign languages and the arts and history of other civilizations. ‘Culture’, according to this definition, was the result of cultivation, just as vegetables and flowers are the result of cultivating your garden, not closed systems of being.

The new, the present use of the term ‘culture’ and the metaphysics it expresses, which l call neo-fascist, has led us into the nihilistic individualism which prompts this conferance.

Our civilization is collapsing: are there surviving fragments of the old society, like Christianity, still living in the hearts and minds of some groups? Might these be looked to for a civilizational renewal? Might they be an antidote to the nihilistic individualism which has rendered us vulnerable to the incoherant neo-fascist authoritarianism swiftly drowning out the remaining echos of western civilization with racialist and chemical noise?

Islam is providing such an antidote, hovever adiquately, to a segment of the world’s population which can certainly not be labeled a ‘subculture’. From the perspective of, say, the 1920s, this is surprising. How many, among those Muslims ungifted with prophetic vission, forsaw the enthusiasm thier sleepy religion, then reduced to a charming and toothless local color in a western dominated world, would inspire a century later?

So it may be with Christianity. There are yet in existance remnants of noble families who still draw pride from the partisipation of their distant ancestors in the crusades. The struggle with Islam, though hardly the only source of Christian vigour and creativity, certainly was one of them; and here we are, once again, living in cities, still often dominated by the towers of a cathedral or a church’s spire.

Similar causes provoke similar effects. Movements, however small, such as white identarians are springing up. Their enemies have labled them ‘islamophobes’. It is impossible to say, but such things are at least a possible beginning of a new crusade. The ‘war on terror’ is a miserable falier — yet another inadiquate response by the emerging techno-global elite in the endless list of their fumbled interactions with the human reality they are so eager to eliminate. Meanwhile, it might eventully be felt by growing numbers of people, that a Christian responce should be tried.

Such an eventuality would not be the influence of a sub-culture on whatever that roiling, incoherant mass of nihilistic individuals some may refer to as ‘our culture’ (think how Hegel would cringe to hear them!), but a welling up, a recoloration, a reordering of those things which, in perverted, diluted and twisted forms, still constitute the bedrock of our civilizational heritage.

That heritage is more than just a set of particularities which might as well be another. It is profound understandings of reality itself, poured into the communal basin by the guiding spirets of our civilization over millenia. This civilizational water of life is not a racial prerogative, it is a western privalige, open to, and accepted by uncounted easterners and southerners over the centuries. Nor is it a paradigme or precursor of a ‘global culture’ because it is not a straight jacket of rules and rituals, but, as Jesus said of himself; the way and the life; movement that is neither escape nor destruction, a gathering of experience that is neither frivolous nor wanting in gratitude.

The finite nature of humanity guarantees that there will always be multiple legitimate ways of being, because convincing to many humans in their finitude. Rejection of Jesus can always be one of these, for just as Christians cannot necessarily save themselves from their coreligionnaires who misuse religion as a sourse of pride, so prideful rejection of the message of Jesus (to say nothing of other kinds) will never cease.

My reaction, then, to the first question (the difference between subculture and religion, and the specific elements that shape each) is that the catagory ‘culture’, even as it might apply to religion, is not helpful. There are fads, fassions, movements and attitudes fostered in different parts of society, such as the army, the academy, the lower middle classes or various more or less irrelevant social backwaters, and then there are permanent and fundamental problems and questions which face humanity, our reactions to which structure how we come to grips with reality and construct major institutions such as churches and political systems. An institution like the Church, then, is different in essence from a fad. It has it’s root in the most basic aspects of human interaction with the real.

Fads, fassions and movements have their source in meer ad hoc restlessness, petty insatisfactions and ambitions. Even if their aesthetics and attitudes seep into other areas of society, such influences are never more than flavors of larger influences already at work. The hippy movement, for example, rather than a suigenerous ‘sub-culture’ infecting the larger society with strange and original concepts, was only a new flavor of permanent tendancies in American and western society, previously expressed by, e.g. emigration to the new world, contact with native Americans and rouseauian admiration for ‘natural’ man, and such theorists as Thoreau. Essentially the hippy movement was just another bid for personel freedom combined with an idealised nostalgia for a simpler, more natural and freer life. A present expression of this same impulse is the Pepper movement which also idealises independance and escape from society. Or the Goths; what characterizes them in essence other than a confused lust to distinguish themselves yet to belong, to be excitingly original and transgresive yet to cultivate a chic attitude of ennuie and psudo philosophic indifference to ordinary concerns? Such essentially paltry bids to construct a simulacre of superiority in a pose of aloof withdrawal and stylish differentiation is a mania which regularly coagulates in privaledged sectors of society.

The first part of the second question concerns how religion is used by other social institutions for their own purposes. One might look first to how certain clergy use religion for non religious purposes! The pedophilia, liberation theology or feminism of certain prelats are current examples; history provides myriade others of clerical interference in politics, morals and art. The use believers — members of this or that movement, institution or club — make of their religion is just the other side of this coin. Fundamentally it’s always a matter of religious prestige cleverly transposed to a non-religious arena, in order to effectuate a purpose proper to the latter.

Regarding the second part of the second question: the roll of religion in the shift from a Christian society based on divine transcendence to the universal society based on techno-ideological principles: a model of such an evolution is the shift from Art to ‘contemporary art’. This was effectuated in the 1960s but grew out of tensions within the discipline of painting in particular dating back to the French revolution. The essential aspect, however, was the growing conviction in the minds of a majority of painters that certain non painting considerations should determine painting’s future — particularly the ideology of progress as well a resurgence, in the minds of early non-objective painters like Kandinski, of certain religious principles.

Likewise in music with Arnold Schoenberg who, also influenced by the non musical ideology of progress, became convinced that tonality was condemned by History. These evolutions, alleged to be natural and historical or in whatever way necessary and good, resulted in nothing less than the destruction of two of the greatest monuments of western civilization: painting and musical composition. It suffices to glance at the literal piles of garbage presented in Art Museums, or to hear the random noise presented in Concert Halls, to realise the sad truth of this assertion. Unfortunately the very notions about what painting and music are, which prevailed for all time prior to the 20th century and were based in reality, have been, for several generations now, replaced by others which have nothing to do with painting and music and the realities in which they are grounded. Here is a triumphant example of religious influence flooding another area of life!

What happened to art in the 1960s is now happening to the rest of society. The reality based notions upon which society, up until now, has always been based, are being overturned in favor of racialist, neo-fascistic gender fluidity and post truth ‘truth’. We are witness to the overthrow of coherant norms of Law, Justice and History and, incredible as it seems, find ourselves on the verge of the social equivalent of garbage heaps as art and random noise as music.

How is religion responsible for this phenomenon? Religion is that which we hold higher than ourselves, be it God, enlightenment within maya, science, or a vision of ourselves as cosmicly central. If this is the case it is also the case that religion determines everything, including the global techno-ideological society. Is not the globalist techno-ideological society really an ideal which promesses salvation? What sort of salvation? Salvation in atheist form: universal justice and equality, maximization of desire fulfillment through technological powers and elimination of moral barriers, and the satisfaction of being on the right side of the war to save the planet from the menace of traditional man (understood as white and male only). It is a paradise, a cause greater than ourselves. It is a religion which has its priests (green and anti-racism activists) and its rites (bicycle riding and composting). which confer upon its believers its version of sainthood. Religion does not ‘play a roll’ in all this, religion is its essence!

Still, we might ask what roll Christianity, so central to western society until so recently, has played in this evolution? For even if few west europeans remain church goers, Christianity cannot be said to have been totally eliminated from western society. Marxism, though non-christian in its materialist and mechanistic character, is ‘christian’ in its goal of human salvation and it’s ideal of human equality. The salvation may be physical rather than spiritual and the equality may be according to human justice rather than residing in the eyes of God, but such ideals, even in some distorted form, are absent from most eastern or southern civilizations.

What, then, are the Christian ingredient of such radical ideals as gender fluidity? There is, as amazing as it may seem, a Christian ideal which, though perverted and deformed, lurks at the heart of this abomination, namely: freedom. Where the Christian was free to escape his sin and guilt to become justified before God and so look forward with confidant hope to eternel felicity, so the gender fluid individual is free to escape artificial social constructions and their barriers of shame, as well as his arbitrarily assigned corporal envelope, to achieve felicity in the perfect harmony of body and spiret. This harmony may only be a stunted and paltry version of the reconciliation of earth and heaven in Christian salvation, but it is a version of it.

Likewise man’s technical domination of the world, exemplified most dramatically in his pretention to the power of destroying or saving the planet, is not unrelated to God’s gift to man of, in a famous chapter of the Bible, dominion over the earth, as well as the freedom to oppose Him.

God cast man out of Eden to prevent his tasting of the fruit of the Tree of Life and gaining immortality. He then set an angel, armed with a sword of flame, to guard forever the portal of Eden. Our technological assault on Eden to, at long last, taste of the fruit of the Tree of Life; is it not an extention, however illegitimate, of the biblical myth?