The 21st Century Dark Ages: On Historical Rhymes, Faith in Science & The Limits of Technicians

1. OUR DISSONANT HISTORICAL RHYME

History does indeed rhyme¹, but as we sit at the start of the 21st century human civilization is quickly experiencing monumental changes which represent an inflection point that will determine what kind of brave new world our children will be born into. While still rhyming with our past, we are composing a new historical musical genre that is vastly more complex, technical, degenerative, and dissonant than those of our ancestors.

Intended for curious philosophers of all walks of life, in this text I argue that human civilization—for the first time now coalesced into a truly globalized, universal history—is slipping deeper into a novel type of scientific dark age characterized by significant and dangerous global economic, intellectual, and cultural decline. Led and bedazzled by un-elected techno-scientific experts, both our political leaders and the distracted masses they oversee have remained stubbornly unconscious of the development of this despotic technocracy, in great part due to misguided and narrow-sighted assessments of the sources of oppression we experience in contemporary life.

We are on Plato’s ship of fools and our captains, with techno-scientific Rasputins at their side, are driving us all towards oblivion with their zealous obsession to prove their mastery of navigation by achieving ever more complex technical feats. Into the stars we go!

As I, the author, have no professional, political, or otherwise collective affiliations other than being a fellow human being, I write from the depths of my heart with the most loving intentions. This regrettably, but necessarily difficult position is intended as a treatise of hope in a post-modern world in which things are unfortunately often perceived in reverse, inside-out, upside-down—the ugly is seen as beautiful and the beautiful as ugly, the transgressive as righteous, and the righteous as transgressive.

History shows us that when the human condition worsens, growing numbers are invariably “awakened” to their reality in one form or another and seek out ways to avoid or challenge their oppressors. When and if we wake up, it takes some time for our eyes to adjust and for the grogginess to dissipate, and this is precisely the point in thought where we align and entrust our destiny to religion, government, or other collective forms of thought and action. None of us are exempt from this taking this leap of faith.

In our attempts to identify our oppressors and bring them into sight—whether they be individuals, collective, ideological, or even a material, environmental form of oppression such as hunger—many, like flies drawn to the bright, hypnotic, flickering flame of a lamp, fall prey to rhetorical and technological spectacles that cannot be sustained for any extended period without unnatural supports. Instead of leading us out into the natural, nurturing warmth of the sun or the glimmering of the stars as our ancient physiology is inclined to do, these artificial, man-made lamp-lights draw us into dark rooms poorly adapted to our needs and with no way out. These “flames” are but distractions that, throughout history, have always burned out themselves and their followers.

In the history of philosophy, early civilization’s notions of materialism and empiricism enabled us to measure, build, and observe more precisely, eventually evolving into our modern-day natural sciences made up of chemistry, biology, physics, and mathematics which are fundamentally based on philosophical materialism, or physicalism. Physicalism and the modern quantitative sciences are centered around the categorical closure that reality is made exclusively of physical matter—the elements of the periodic table—that in one way or another can be sensed, observed, or measured. Put simply, physicalism posits that “what my net can’t catch isn’t fish”².

Before physicalism became widely accepted among the general public, during Europe’s medieval dark ages religion and submission to biblical faith was society’s principal mechanism and guiding force, our Prime Directive. As positivist notions of progress and the Enlightenment spread, physicalism and the quantitative sciences gradually displaced theology and metaphysical inquiry of the intangible. The undeniable efficacy and precise, repeatable outcomes offered by the symbiotic relationship between scientific experimentation and technical development served to enshrine empiricism as a new sort of divine revelation, and technology as a seemingly miraculous manifestation of physicalism. In the process, we not only pushed aside creation stories from theology, but even our rich, wise, ancient philosophical tradition and all qualitative, non-empirical systems of thought.

In other words, in to today’s epoch, empiricism is divine revelation. Science and technology are religion. Universities and technical institutes are the church. Scientists and technicians are the clergy.

This unfortunately bitter interpretation is intended as an aid to help pull our vision away from techno-scientific cult’s hypnotic artificial lamp-light of quantitative progress above all else. In today’s society, he who questions or speaks against the incessant march of technological progress is a heretic. Red pill or blue pill? The choice is yours; the consequences are ours. Let us hereticate!

2. A BRIEF CRITIQUE OF PROGRESS

Let us take a prudent first step and simply note the fact that believers of the “law of progress” now constitute the overwhelming majority of global leadership and the culture we have been raised in. What exactly does progress even mean?

Decorated Harvard psychologist, Steven Pinker, provides a prime example of optimistic views that the spread of European Enlightenment values—liberty, progress, tolerance, fraternity, constitutional government, and separation of church and state—has allowed us unparalleled levels of human well-being³. Like many other zealously optimistic techno-scientific clergy, for Pinker, the litmus test to observe human progress towards improved well-being is exclusively based on empirical measurements, data, and numbers, such as indicators on literacy rates, poverty correlated to income, education correlated to level of study, and freedom correlated to democratic forms of government. Implicit in these correlations are some unfortunate assumptions that can be addressed as follows.

By correlating literacy with progress, we assume that being able to read is good, without mention or regard for what the reader actually reads. Let’s hope it isn’t only Mao Zedung’s Little Red Book or Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf!

Similar narrow logic is applied to indicators correlating ownership of physical devices and technologies such as electricity, telecommunications, and personal computers to human well-being. As in the previous example on literacy, these types of assessments rarely attempt to address the specific applications or the content channeled through these mediums. The social impacts of using electricity for lighting versus an electric chair, for example, are clearly radically different, so it is quite an over-simplification to claim that more is better without qualification or regards to the prevalence of their uses.

On poverty, we assume it impossible to have above-average income and live in poverty. The wise know that poverty can take on many forms and is not exclusively a monetary affair or material state of being. A rich man who ceaselessly needs to acquire more material wealth is condemned to perpetual poverty.

On education, we assume that anybody who has not studied at accredited institutions is uneducated. We know that most of our ancestors and even many notable contemporaries never received a modern, Humboldtian education like ours, but this didn’t make them any less intelligent, astute, or most importantly, wise.

On freedom, the assumption is made that democratic forms of government are not only more free, but objectively better than any other. This is pure historical idealism which has no place for discussion in objective scientific inquiry. The concept of freedom is so vastly complex that even philosophers find it difficult to give a clear definition and address it comprehensively.

Pinker’s notion of progress equates more with better regardless of context, but to do so despite evidence to the contrary is to be no better than a beast that gorges itself full of food until the point of illness. It is precisely the rational part of the human consciousness that tells a person to stop eating before falling ill, usually based on previous experience of some sort. To not do so would be shortsighted and lead to unnecessary suffering. While serving only as a small sample, the statements provided grant some basic orientation on how we can begin to unpackage and recognize the limits of some of the audacious claims being made by technocrats.

We surely agree on the undeniably practical and effective power of reducing complex phenomena into data so as to have “hard facts” upon which to test and apply techniques, but while physicalism and its manifestations in science and technology have granted us unimaginable control over nature and enabled us to attain untold material wealth—meaning, it works!—in our 21st century dark age, empiricism and positivist progress have arrogantly invaded and displaced all other fields of human knowledge, thought, and action based on the claim of a superior, virtually divine truth. Like all other comprehensive and systematic worldviews, philosophical empiricism claims to be the only reliable approach to revealing reality and, in turn, the true, universal human condition.

In fact, our contemporary landscape of modern political “ism’s,”—liberalism, socialism, capitalism, communism, fascism, anarchism, etc.—as well as the underlying techniques which sustain them—government, bureaucracy, propaganda, economics, war, etc.—all share their roots in the very idea of systematic, repeatable techniques as ascertained from empirical revelation. Rather than acting in the name of “moving,” or pleasing a biblical God, our modern-day collective actions are directed towards literally moving abstract numbers and data-points, such as gross domestic product (GDP), gross national happiness (GNH), or maybe the worst, the Big Mac Index. Yes, these all really exist.

Following the line of logic set by positivists who maintain that the physical human brain creates, and therefore appears prior to the metaphysical mind, political and historical materialists similarly maintain that physical, material conditions create and give form to our metaphysical, collective ideas, not the other way around. This fundamentally empirical position has been adopted by world leadership and is propagated in our education and media. The fact that secular political “ism’s” have largely overtaken all former bodies of thought and systems of collectivization supports the thesis that physicalism is now hegemonic.

Monarchies justified and reinforced their governments with the approval of the church and divine right. Modern day nation states are justified in the name of science and technology, and blessed by the clergy of technical progress operating out of universities. The medieval church blessed our kings and awed the public with stunningly beautiful, epic cathedrals and just as stunningly wretched, depraved tools of war and torture. Our current governments have become technocracies under the contemporary clergy of scientists and technicians wielding the spectacles of material abundance, rocketry, genetic engineering, computing, and only more horribly powerful, apocalyptic instruments of war that now threaten our very existence as a species.

Anybody having studied or experienced the spread of ideologies understands that ideas do indeed also materialize and form our physical reality. The same occurs in consciousness insomuch as the brain creates the mind, but the metaphysical mind is also what creates our understanding of the physical brain itself, so we can never definitively separate the two from one another. To the contrary, positivist empirical revelation and its techno-scientific clergy has formed categorical closures insisting on the exclusively material nature of reality, and this has far-reaching consequences.

Like most deeper reflection in the age of entertainment, many rigorous, noteworthy critiques of Pinker’s thesis have been drowned out and ignored by the roaring noise of rhetoric and spectacle that serves as an easy escape from our darkening reality. How can religion, philosophy, or history even attempt to compete with technical splendor as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos launch cars and billionaires into outer space?

Despite the ever-so-many illusions, the fact remains; there is no empirical method of observation available to support a comprehensive, stable theory of qualitative elements of the human condition. In other words, numbers will never be able to completely reveal reality since we necessarily live a human existence in which facts and information are strung together with semantic meaning and qualitative, metaphysical concepts like beauty and ugliness, right and wrong, good and bad, false and true.

3. SCIENTISTS STEPPING BACK FROM THE SCOPE

We have just touched on what it is that positivist empirical observation is missing: the qualitative, the metaphysical. It would be to our peril to ignore these facets of our existence, but what can we even do about this dilemma? Aren’t we doomed to failure if true progress consists of finding shared meaning and action based on the intangible? Won’t that just bring us back into the original, medieval dark ages when everything and seemingly anything was done in the name of God? In continuing and attempting to address these valid questions, even if only indirectly, we should acknowledge two facts too often forgotten or overlooked.

First and foremost, there will always be more that we do not know than that which we do know. There is, in other words, always more that remains to be known or discovered than what is already known, and this is true on both the individual and collective level. Any objections to this statement are rhetorical illusion, and only a sincere, indemonstrable faith can assume that science will one day allow us to understand or reveal the initial act or movement of creation that set the universe in motion, and thereby our entire reality. Similarly, medicine may never be able to claim to attain an ultimate, full, complete understanding of the human body.

Secondly, the instant a scientist steps outside of the laboratory and beyond the techniques of scientific hypothesis and testing, or measurement; the very moment that this is done, they are stepping outside the reliable boundaries of the empirical sciences and into the jurisdiction of philosophy, politics, and even theology.

Overstepping one’s personal area of expertise in the public sphere was not such a grave problem in the past, particularly in light of the fact that scholarship was reserved for a literate minority and understood to consist of a relatively balanced and complete understanding of all possible fields of human knowledge, including the arts. Even as late as the 18th century, prominent leaders acted simultaneously as a scientist, entrepreneur, politician, and philosopher, in stark contrast to today’s supposedly enlightened political buffoons who know little other than how to create spectacle and manipulate public opinion.

We are now faced with unprecedented problems our ancestors never fathomed due to exponential growth in the depth and complexity of all fields of knowledge, particularly techno-scientific empiricism which has displaced all other schools and systems of knowledge under the auspices of being the one, absolute, capital “T” Truth—the king of all ways of knowing.

As the scientific method and empirical techniques have developed in recent centuries, scientists have become incredibly proficient at breaking down natural phenomena into the smallest observable parts—the cell, atom, molecule, quark, particle, ad infinitum—as well as peering ever further into outer space and galaxies strewn across the universe.

The scientific method is to our mind’s eye as a telescope or microscope is to our biological eyes. These marvelous laboratory tools enable us gaze further into the stars and deeper into previously invisible micro-worlds, but we must remember that while operating these instruments the user’s vision of their immediate surroundings are necessarily reduced or even completely eliminated.

The point here is that there is a Faustian bargain in which we both increase and diminish our options when we use a telescope, microscope, “empiriscope,” or any other perception-altering tool or technique. In addition to modifying what is within sight, these instruments change the blurry, indefinite outer-rim that determines your available scope of vision. By simultaneously enhancing and limiting our natural sight—and in the case of empiricism, thought—our inability to take a step back from our tools is distorting our perception of reality in ways we are only beginning to understand. We can only hope that there is no imminent or encroaching danger while we, the scientists, remain blissfully oblivious to our immediate human dimensions as we stare into alien worlds through a scope-altering tube.

The scientific method—and more precisely, the scientific community of individuals among whose minds the scientific method resides in physical reality—prides itself on being objective and open to perpetual review when presented with conclusions from sound reasoning and logical testing of hypotheses. In the words of Oppenheimer, “There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors”. Will the scientists look up from their laboratory equipment, their “scopes,” if someone, maybe even a non-technician, a plebe using their natural sight, their naked eye, taps their shoulder with a warning of impending carnal danger?

Despite having little notion of continuity or history, scientists and technicians consider their clerical caste to be the only one capable of understanding and interpreting divine revelation and establishing the providence of the church on Earth. Unfortunately, the increasingly specialized division of labor has resulted in a techno-scientific pseudo-clergy that knows close to nothing about, for example, the advent of human language or the printing press, morality, ethics, industrialization, or political ideologies, and even less about their broader philosophical and social impacts. The more we specialize, the deeper runs the division not only of labor, but of thought and mind as well.

Just as it would be hopelessly futile for a modern-day philosopher, for instance, to act as an astronomer, architect, or surgeon by assuming their functions and taking hold of their tools of the trade, scientists and technicians are generally gravely ill-equipped to address qualitative, metaphysical human affairs and ignorantly arrogant about the imposition of scientific positivism upon all forms of knowledge and reality. Techno-scientific endeavoring has completely displaced, and thereby forced into submission huge swaths of knowledge and philosophy from religion, the humanities, social sciences, and even psychology and other sciences of the mind, since they are not, and cannot be understood based on empirical, quantitative observation and analysis alone.

The arts of systematic inquiry of qualitative reality we have inherited from theology, philosophy, and history may have severe limitations and pitfalls, but it is precisely because they address the unquantifiable, higher-level, sum of the parts of human affairs—the collective social personality or gestalt—that they continue to be and will forever remain so valuable and necessary to our survival. Systematic study based on empiricism alone will never be enough to explain the metaphysical human social dimension and reality, which is why the laws of science cannot be applied to history or politics.

Like a single word out of context, scientific facts have no purpose or true meaning on their own, and they must be used semantically to give them said purpose and meaning. It goes without saying, there is nothing in either words or facts themselves to dictate where or how they should be used either within a sentence or group politics, respectively. Despite the fact that semantic meaning cannot be attributed to scientific facts without context rooted in the universal human dimension and reality, nearly all of our collective decisions are being made by oligarchies of technocrats who claim the right to rule based on “truths,” each in their respective, short-sighted field of expertise.

Again we find ourselves at the point in thought where the mysteries of the human mind and consciousness come into play; the point at which scientists, technicians, and their followers fall prey to artificial lamp-lights guiding their understanding and application of objectively meaningless, empirical facts and techniques. Not even the supposedly objective techno-scientific clergy themselves are above or free from these inner, mental, and therefore immaterial forces which, as far as we know, are eternal and universal. Human power dynamics, love, desire, justice, compassion, stupidity, mental fortitude, and even notions of a soul represent the universal metaphysical forces that, throughout time, have shaped human history, ideas, and activity; that is, civilization itself.

Physicalists can write off these aspects of our existence as mere romantic notions or mysticism, but if we listen attentively to our history and sages—if we actually stand on the shoulders of giants rather than ignore them—it is clear that these forces have been a key part of humanity since our primordial beginnings. As far as we know, love is real, eternal, and therefore objectively more true than our perpetually-changing scientific facts, nonetheless we remain slaves to empiricism and the dogma of quantification which reduces our understanding of love to soulless mechanical biochemical operations and natural selection.

The techno-scientific cult and its followers say, “If it can be done, it will be done!” Wisdom and its adherents will beg the question, “Should it be done?”

4. OXYMORONS: MACHINE “LEARNING,” ARTIFICIAL “INTELLIGENCE” & “LIFE” AS DATA

Welcoming in the new millennium, the first moment of the year 2000 was in fact a non-event, but one which nonetheless posed gravely serious questions and concerns; the year 2000 problem, popularly known as Y2K.

The Y2K bug was a potentially fatal error in the underlying code responsible for the operation of countless electrical and computing devices embedded throughout the infrastructure of industrialized nations. Transportation systems, public utilities, and nearly all modern industries—the life-sustaining umbilical chords of technological society—have been developed and largely automated thanks to these devices. As a clever solution to former limitations in on-device memory, instead of taking up 4 bits of memory by recording the year of dates as ‘1999,’ developers programmed devices with the less memory-intensive 2-bit format of ’99’.

A previously unimaginable problem arose: what will the machines understand by ’00,’ the year 1900, 2000, or maybe even nothing at all? Most importantly, what will the consequences be? At the time the 2-bit solution to this pseudo-problem was developed, the Achilles heel in the system either never occurred to the technicians or, like so many other important things in life, it was simply overlooked for the sake of two wretchedly useful quantitative concepts: time and money. Ultimately, Y2K only caused a few minor problems and industrial society continued chugging along in the same direction in our march towards progress.

In hindsight, fortunately we can brush off the Y2K scare as silly and irrelevant, a sort of modern-day prank in the likes of Orson Welles’ 1934 radio drama, The War of the Worlds, but many respected engineers and early programmers—the very people who built these technological systems—were deeply concerned about the potential for a chain reaction of system failures that could seriously cripple industrial society as we know it. Let’s hope and pray we can only be so lucky the next time we are faced with a similar conundrum.

Moving forward into the early 2000s, we witnessed a great leap forward in networking and the dissemination of Internet technologies among the general public, thereby surpassing and converging all past media formats into a singular “information highway;” a human hive-mind of sorts. In 2020, over 50% of the global population—4 billion people—connected to the Internet hive-mind. Education, entertainment, news, public forums of all types, and even medical care are all increasingly recorded and delivered electronically, and social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic has only provoked an exponential increase in this trend. It took approximately 85 years for land-line telephony to reach 60% of US households, while it took only 15 years for Internet penetration to reach the same level. As things stand, it is nearly guaranteed that humanity’s fate will be inextricably linked to the Internet, much like how electricity, plumbing, and printed media set the course of civilization up until now.

Impressive advances in computing power, storage, and networking have led to a technical Renaissance in the uses and sheer amount of data available, and the now truly globalized economy has shifted from the age of industry to the digital information age as populations connect to the Internet. This change is evidenced when economists call data “the new oil,” meaning the new fuel and lubricant with which we will push progress along, while industrialists have coined the term “the fourth industrial revolution,” or Industry 4.0, as they prepare business roadmaps for ever-more projects and funding to bridge fields of engineering like robotics, computing, and automation in order to further boost industrial efficiency and control. The Davos Manifesto 2020 on “The Universal Purpose of a Company in the Fourth Industrial Revolution” defines one of the main objectives of enterprises to be that “it continuously expands the frontiers of knowledge, innovation and technology to improve people’s well-being”⁴. Does this affirmation make any sense if expanding knowledge, innovation, and technology do precisely the opposite and actually harm our well-being?

Many of today’s most influential multinationals are technology players—Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet aka Google, Facebook, and Alibaba—which operate business models largely focused on ephemeral software, algorithms, and data that can be leveraged for improved sales via ad-targeting, customer segmentation, and other computational guile to achieve higher returns on investments. Curiously enough, the religiosity of the techno-scientific clergy leading these endeavors is apparent in the preacher-like public image of prominent tech entrepreneurs, such as Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, who tend to appear publicly to discuss the meaning of life and future of humanity more than for specific products or strictly business-related purposes.

It is interesting to look at the popular oxymorons of “artificial intelligence,” “machine learning,” “smart machines,” and the like, so many of which are all the hype in the press and among the corporate giants claiming that these technologies represent the most promising source of regeneration for civilization moving into the future. The frivolous misuse of words like “intelligence” and “learning” shows a deep, fundamental misunderstanding of their long-held meaning.

With machine learning, is “teaching” a computer anything like teaching a human or any other biological being? Is it even possible for a machine to be “intelligent” if it is never able to fully experience biological human life which emanates from consciousness and awareness of our own mortality? With no means to understand qualitative elements of the human reality, how can a machine “learn” or be “intelligent” with regards to making someone happy or doing something well, both of which are metaphysical concepts with no quantitative basis?

For instance, a robot or computer will fail miserably if presented with the task of cooking not just a meal but a good meal since artificial animism is unable to sense or feel the universal need of organic, biological life to both eat and expel waste to sustain itself. In order to perform the task, one must understand or share the subjective cultural and physiological dimensions of taste and smell which form every human’s dietary habits. Similarly, a machine encharged with making people happy would most likely study observable, quantifiable vital signs defined as indicators of happiness (e.g., dopamine) and might very well administer drugs—opiates, for example—to ensure that the subject’s key indicators match this programmed definition. Most would agree that being drugged with opiates is a far cry from what we would call happiness.

Today’s nascent self-improving machines with capabilities known as “artificial intelligence” are typically trained by ingesting “big data” through techniques known as “data science”. Just as combinations of 0’s and 1’s which are seemingly unintelligible to the human eye form the underlying basis of all computing, big data consists vast sets of apparently unrelated data points being processed together in order to distill even more valuable data and previously unseen correlations. In their practical applications, machine learning is almost exclusively used to boost operational efficiency and to sharpen the blade of commercial and political propaganda, such as social media algorithms which decide what content to present each viewer so as to keep them on the platform for as long as possible.

As humans have always understood it, intelligence and learning are inseparably linked to being aware or conscious, and fancy computations and calculations of 0’s and 1’s do not constitute anything even remotely close to the complexity of biological awareness, much less the human consciousness. Again, the relationship between our physical universe and the human mind still represents one of the great mysteries of the universe, but with new tools and techniques at their disposal, generation after generation of tinkerers makes renewed attempts at assembling some new form of artificial intelligence; a clay golem, a Frankenstein, which as we all know takes on a perturbed life of it’s own beyond the maker’s imagination and original intention.

In the human social realm, a particular individual’s character—something by its very nature immaterial, nebulous, and more a way of being than a material “thing”—cannot be understood by studying individual parts, in this case cells, atoms, or even more complex physical features like height or skin tone. Contrary to this belief, in the name of 19th century science anthropological criminologists gathered data by measuring craniums, noses, and other physical attributes in order to correlate certain attributes with, for example, intelligence and increased likelihood of devious anti-social behavior. With seemingly objective scientific data in hand, we had empirical evidence and, hence, rational reason to collectively target, suppress, and exclude “inferior” individuals, races, and minorities. Most of us are well aware of, and indeed should never forget the hideous consequences of this philosophy as it culminated in the holocaust of Jews, gypsies, and other minorities in the 20th century. In a similar, albeit much more subtle fashion, today’s data scientists collect and process data with surgical precision in order to target and manipulate the public with propaganda and to calculate whether we are worthy of loans, parole from incarceration, medical treatments, and important matters in many other critical areas of life.

Much like an individual’s character is to the physical human body and its cells, the mysteries of our collective social and political character cannot be unlocked by breaking down observable, empirical elements into smaller parts or gathering and processing more data. Nonetheless, in the confusing eschatology of our techno-scientific religion, the final atonement consists of two interrelated event horizons only seriously contemplated by faithful futurologists and in the entertaining anecdotes of science fiction.

The technocratic clergy envision a near-future in which technical solutions will enable us “cure the disease of death” and shed our mortal coil to conquer immortality, thereby elevating ourselves to the status of gods. The clergy’s suggested paths towards human immortality rely on combinations of advances in biological organ harvesting (e.g., growing clone body parts to serve as replacements), fusion of the human body with machine parts (e.g., human cyborgs with technological implants), or uploading the human mind into the digital realm for replication and permanent safekeeping. In the latter case of total digitalization of a biological being, the claim that a human personality can be uploaded to a machine is based on the assumption that electrical, digital avatars are the same as the organic biological person on every perceivable level and for all intents and purposes. In other words, the endeavor assumes that human character—the sum of the parts of trillions of cells and human experiences—can be fully observed, broken down, and at the smallest level, translated via digitization into 0’s and 1’s, or whatever unforeseeable new units of measurement scientists come up with.

Though clearly less desirable, there is also real potential that continued technological development will lead to what is known as “the singularity,” in which artificial intelligence as the mind and robotics as the body combine to form a new, technically superior, conscious-like being, representing an event horizon after which point humans would cede control to our new machine masters—that is, the total and absolute submission of humans to machines, or eventually even the extinction of humans with machines spreading across the universe as our distant descendants. In popular culture, these hypothetical futures have been frequently contemplated in science fiction films like Terminator and The Matrix. Whoever or whatever becomes the apex species to reign above all the lower life forms and the material world, we can only hope that it keeps alive a grain of our seemingly invisible, qualitative aspects of humanity.

Despite the potentially grim prospects of continued technological advances and the fundamental differences between electronic computing and biological consciousness, humanity is enchanted by techno-scientific spells more than ever before. To the extent that leaders and the general public remain technologically and spiritually illiterate, we find it hard to challenge the bold claims made by the techno-scientific clergy, especially as they present us with an endless slew of new discoveries, promises, and dazzling inventions that indeed work marvelously well on command.

Are today’s scientists and technologists completely unaware of the fables about the clay golem, Frankenstein, the Fountain of Youth, and the Tower of Babel? Have we all forgotten the doomed endeavors of Spanish explorers that ran their crews and expeditions into oblivion in search of immortality?

5. HU(WO)MAN(LGBTQ+)ITY IN THE POST-MODERN AGE

What does this new act in our collective human opera look and sound like? How will it determine civilization’s metaphorical music and dance of the future? As evidence to the claim that we are living in a 21st century scientific dark age, what might we say is the universal human reality in our post-modern technological society?

• As we satisfy our basic material needs, our mental and spiritual world becomes increasingly desolate and unbearable, and we look to fill artificial needs that multiply into infinity.

• As our towns grow into mega-cities where “culture” unites us in mass gatherings, physical isolation, loneliness, and division have become pandemic.

• As the economy becomes truly global and the measurable standard of living improves in developing countries, the rules of the game are set by entrenched oligarchies operating fiat currencies with nothing in our physical reality to back them up as they continue to expand their share of the world’s financial and material wealth.

• As global literacy increases and information flows more freely than ever before, ignorance and radicalism have little problem finding new adherents, and wisdom has become ever more rare. Rather than standing on the shoulders of giants, we are sitting on the ground with our backs turned against the metaphorical giant of collective human wisdom.

• As technology enables us to virtually visit any one, any where, and at any time, many are never truly present with others and their immediate surroundings, and an astonishing number of people limit their social interaction to the lame digital translation of reality into 0’s and 1’s. With our virtual avatars present everywhere at all times, our physical human form finds itself nowhere forever.

• As we are seemingly freer than ever and have autonomy to decide who we are and want to be, including not only cultural and ideological affiliations but even gender and race, the trade-off has been the loss of invaluable, long-held, ancestral traditions of identity and family. We have abandoned our history and with a broad brush stroke labeled any cultural continuity as inferior, backward, and having no place in a “civilized” society.

• As we conquer space, time, and step further into the stars, the more disconnected and negligent we have become with each other and the only planet we call home.

• As we discover more and more scientific facts, it becomes harder and harder to find any semblance of shared purpose, meaning, or truth.

• As we subdue and domesticate the forces of nature, mankind becomes its own greatest existential threat to existence.

Although today’s increasingly secular society tends to view religion as the epitome of thoughtless dogma, we have largely failed to see how physicalism is also severely limiting our scope of thought and action, bringing us to this dark corner of history. As the clergy of the secular church working via universities, technical institutes, and large enterprises, today’s scientists and technicians are propagating a new form of despotic group-think that radically limits our understanding of human nature and reality to the natural sciences and the physically observable. The danger in this dynamic resides in the fact that the quantitative sciences can proceed without much difficulty even if physicists or engineers, for instance, happen to have an incorrect understanding of human nature, while social inquiry, on the other hand, is effectively stunted when we have a mistaken or lacking understanding of human nature.

Both political leaders and the average man now zealously follow these modern-day preachers and wholly accept their eschatological visions of what will redeem the human race from pain, discomfort, death, and, ultimately, apocalypse, which science posits as the time when our galaxy’s sun will supernova. As things stand, it appears to be infinitely more likely that man himself will bring about his own demise in search of solutions to particular problems before ever reaching this incomprehensibly distant point in time.

In the fields of energy and weaponry, the development of nuclear fission and the atomic bomb represented one of the pivotal moments of our past century, marking the paradigm shift from the modern to the post-modern age in which humans now represent our own greatest existential threat. Since the past century, techno-scientific advances have clearly increased in speed and scope, but social inquiry has been severely retarded and limited to applications for narrow political or economic purposes. The result is that humanity is held hostage by the dangerous cycle in which politics and propaganda engineer mass support, government and large enterprises furnish materials, and technologies are ultimately made reality by optimistic technicians excited to get their hands on state-of-the-art facilities and equipment to achieve technical feats and ensure their own personal well-being. To make matters worse, most techno-scientific advances take place behind closed doors without any public oversight or accountability. Despite his initially naive position as a technician pushing forward the frontiers of science, J. Robert Oppenheimer was horrified when he witnessed the atomic bombs he helped create put to use against innocent humans in Japan, famously saying “I have become death, the destroyer of worlds”.

Whether it is developing more efficient tools of death or escaping existential threats like global warming or mortality, the techno-scientific clergy offers an easy-to-understand, quick fix to particular problems. To provide some specific examples, electricity solves the limitations of darkness and labor, motor vehicles solve the issues of time and space, and opiates solve pain. The efficiency of these solutions is unquestionable, but we are also aware of the serious, unintended, and often detrimental trade-offs of the widespread use of electricity and motor vehicles (e.g., increased consumption and dependence on fossil fuels, pollution, etc.) and opiate use for pain management (e.g., addiction, psychosis), respectively. At the advent of every new technology, we are never fully capable of anticipating what new problems might arise precisely because we solved another, more immediate and pressing problem. We can only ponder, what might be the unintended consequences of merging man with machine or colonizing distant planets in order to survive the eventual supernova of our solar system? Upon achieving these goals, will there be any place for humans to exist as we know ourselves to be today?

Despite whatever personal beliefs you or I may hold, as we advance in time and are written into the annals of history like our ancestors before us, our age will be remembered in a broad brush stroke as a single, unitary mono in terms of the great empires, institutions, and macro-historical processes that shape our period. How will the humanity of the future remember us as the inhabitants of the early-21st century? Will they see our times as a continuation of the age of progress and part of an incessant, linear improvement in the human condition? On the contrary, is it possible that we are in the midst of a scientific dark age leading to some unforeseen disaster which future generations will judge us harshly for having allowed occur? If Rome could last 500 years, what will throw the wrench inside our gears?

We cannot even attempt to understand where we are coming from or where we are going without an adequate philosophy of history and the metaphysical mind, but it seems hopeless to expect that influential community figures and leaders begin seriously considering the shortcomings and limitations of our current understanding of reality and how this impacts how we decide to move forward as a species. While seemingly futile, it would be wise for us to remain prudent and weary of prescriptive technological solutions inciting action based on the faith that science and technology will redeem the human race before we reach a new calamity that overshadows the disasters and catastrophes that afflicted the past.

With all the unresolved gaps, contradictions, and shortcomings of the quantitative sciences and the eternal fact that there always remains more to be learned than what is already known, it may very well be that we will never be able to properly explain or predict the mystery of the human individual and collective by purely outward empirical observation and revelation. In our age of information overload, it is more critical than ever that we learn to discern between fact and truth, knowledge and wisdom. It would be at our own peril to call a child with Wikipedia wise or to ignore the lessons of history and our sages.

We must somehow find a way to take a step back from the dogmatic application of the empirical, quantitative sciences which has created a powerful tunnel-vision that makes us the tools of our tools rather than their masters. As the adage goes, “To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. We still have the opportunity to contemplate the quickly changing landscape of tools and think more deeply about the potential consequences of techno-scientific progress on humanity before acting.

We cannot unsee what has been seen. We cannot undiscover or unlearn what has been discovered and learned. Maybe we will continue amusing ourselves to death while our captains direct our ship of fools into artificial lamp-lights that will char us crispy like bugs. In the words of Kurt Vonnegut, “Those who live by electronics, die by electronics. Sic semper tyrannis”⁵.

At this present historical junction, we are assembling a choir and setting our instruments to the tune of a dissonant sort of technical electronic death metal while our conductors are unaware of our immediate human reality as they stare into tubes and collect ever more data and discover ever more “objective” facts. Nay, I say! Before we reach the point of no return, let us get back in tune with the poetic epic, the mysterious opera that is human history and find a viable, regenerative rhythm that allows us to continue composing beautiful melodies far into the future.

1. Mark Twain is often attributed with having said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes”. ↩

2. Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, ‘Selective Subjectivism’, The Philosophy of Physical Science (1938, 2012), 16. ↩

3. Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (2018). Bill Gates tweeted praise for Pinker’s publication, calling it “my new favorite book,” which led to the publisher moving forward the release date to capture on the publicity. ↩

4. World Economic Forum, Davos Manifesto 2020: The Universal Purpose of a Company in the Fourth Industrial Revolution (2019) ↩

5. Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano (1952) ↩