Human or Inhuman? - Quareness Series 144th "Lecture".
Sometimes I wonder if we humans have largely forgotten our spiritual origins and that our human nature has a transcendent source. We appear to ordinarily identify with only part of what/who we are and to be mostly unconscious of the totality of ourselves which includes a spiritual kernal. Nevertheless this kernal surely remains the foundation of our being and our relationship with it would seem to hold the secret of true happiness for us.
Our modern world increasingly encourages us to pay little attention to those wisdom traditions of yore that could serve to rouse our remembering. Indeed the overall thrust of contemporary culture tends toward distraction, fragmentation and dispersion of consciousness. We can see this particularly with our current era digital revolution which continues to carry this tendency to an extreme of inducing the distractedness and self-forgetfulness that our spirituality has traditionally tried to protect us from. And many (most?) of us are continually failing to notice how corrosive this trend can be to that vital human task of remembering the totality of who we are.
Towards the end of his life the late French philosopher and sociologist Jean-Francois Lyotard came to wonder what might happen if what is "proper" to humankind were to be inhabited by the inhuman (= that which is hostile to humanity). In this he distinguished between the inhumanity of our social, political and economic systems and that "infinitely secretive" type that invades the soul and holds it hostage. It's this latter kind that now seems to carry the greater risk for us as our relationship with digital devices becomes ever more intimate. Our personal level susceptibility has been exploited by the direction taken by our digital technologies, which has been unwaveringly towards accommodating themselves within the human sphere. They have adapted themselves to the human body as well as the human soul in becoming physically smaller and lighter and at the same time more powerful and capable.
Those early computers were so large that we had to stand in front of them or even walk around them in order to operate them. When desktop models became available, we could sit before them and engage in a face-to-face manner. And quite quickly thereafter it became possible to carry computers in our pockets (e.g. smart phones) and to wear them (e.g. smart watches and glasses). At each stage the interface between them and us has become more "human friendly" whilst at the same time we have inwardly adjusted to constantly relating to them 24/7. As the computer has thus been moulding itself to the contours of the human body and soul, our own inner life has been moulded towards a greater degree of computer compatibility affecting our language, thought processes and daily habits. This evolving intertwining symbiosis has seen us grow more dependent on the computer and the logical next step could be biological integration...soon. Even though human beings are the inventors, manufacturers and eager consumers of these digital technologies, it's not a "one way street"...the "inhuman" is also seeking to be realised within the human.
Our species has always had a tendency to fall away from our essential nature. In pre-industrial humanity this tendency was conceived as a potentially dangerous descent to the animal or bestial level through being captives of our untransformed instinctual drives and passions...to fall into the sub-human. For our industrial and post-industrial age the primary danger lies less in our succumbing to those instincts and passions than in falling for the cold inhumanity of the machine with its compassionless unfeeling algorithm...to fall into the inhuman. Whilst both of these tendencies may be inherent within us, the greater peril to our wellbeing going forward probably comes from the inhuman with its goal of supplanting the human. Surely we have need of a greater awareness of this colonisation process and the gravity of the threat involved for us, should we fail to ground ourselves in the authentically human.
In hoping to live humanly we will likely need to strengthen our sense of identifying with that spiritual kernal mentioned earlier. We will need to consciously engage in the arduous work of inner transformation in order to bring about a change in those inclinations and deep-seated habits of thought which draw us away from that essential remembrance and become inwardly aligned with what those wisdom traditions point to as the true centre of our being. And this moral re-rooting effort inevitably has to involve a shift in the quality of our thinking from reliance on a results-focussed, discursive orientation that runs along from one thought to another, towards setting greater value on the stillness and open receptivity of contemplation.
Our technologies today are based on the hyperactive automation of logical analysis, calculation and problem solving, and are fundamentally discursive and result-oriented. Contemplation, on the other hand, brings a stillness to the mind which cannot be automated and can only be engaged in for its own sake. And such stillness enables us to gain insights into deeper meaning...insights which can well up from our imagination as powerful archetypal images or ideas and intuitions that can illuminate a question or life situation from a more comprehensive standpoint.
Through contemplation, involving opening of access to the soul within ("the mind's eye"), we can become aware of what is invisible to the physical eye. And this more interior source of knowing unconditioned by habits of thought and opinion, can guide us towards a sense of greater moral certainty and ideals to inspire our actions. An action may only be fully our own when we have carried back its origin to this contemplative part of ourselves (the centre of our spiritual intelligence) and once thus sourced is entirely free because it has been chosen from the centre rather than from the periphery.
In our Western wisdom tradition, the defining characteristic of any action that is truly human is that it is free, precisely because it stems from this originating source. For Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas and Rudolf Steiner alike, we cannot adequately conceive of what it means to live humanly if we exclude freedom which belongs to the essence of human nature. This is so despite the practical difficulty for each of us in constantly trying to live up to the ideal, not helped by our digital technologies because of their tendency to scatter the soul and introduce a dark undertow with which we must constantly contend.
This premise of true freedom (movement back to the centre) is not given to us on a plate...like any real freedom, it has to be earned. We have to engage in the work of inner transformation which involves permeating the everyday self and its obsessions, fantasies and desires with clearly conceived aims that spring from the inmost source of who we are. In Christian mysticism this inner work is called theosis ("making divine"). For the Italian poet Dante Alighieri it involved transumanare ("to transhumanise")...a good fit for the fact that our core human striving must be to overcome ourselves so that we go beyond the "merely human living" at the periphery of who we are. Interestingly "transhumanism" today is more often defined as a materialistic ideology that seeks to technologically "enhance" the human being, failing to grasp that to go beyond the "merely human" is possible only by grounding ourselves in the transcendent...which requires dedicated soul-work sustained by the spiritual discipline of coming back to the still point at the centre of our being. The price that the digital revolution now in train (and driven by this narrow contemporary idea of transhumanism) threatens to extract from us is that we lose our ability to know the meaning and purpose of spiritual life, and even our ability to understand the language of our wisdom traditions. Ultimately we could lose our very humanity if, overcome by a collective amnesia regarding what it means to realise our deeper human potential, we succumb to the inhuman.
Nature itself would seem to have a similar type of interiority to which Lyotard's question might also apply...what if what is "proper" to nature were to be inhabited by that which is hostile to nature e.g. if the living world were to be infiltrated by a force inimical to life. One price already (and continuing to be) extracted by the digital revolution is a swamping of the natural environment with a complex mix of artificially generated electromagnetic fields exposing all living organisms on the planet to doses of radiation far in excess of natural background levels. Increasing exposure to such could well have some serious negative effects which may fly "under the radar" so to speak. The current roll out of 5G, for example, in helping to establish a global "electronic ecosystem" to service the technological aspirations and desires of "smart tone" enthusiasts, will also enable greater monitoring and control of natural ecosystems and living creatures.
There are two basic and long acknowledged aspects of nature...visible and invisible, manifest and unmanifest. The physical forms we see in the world around us arise from non-perceptible creative and formative forces which have to be taken into account in order to understand things in their wholeness. These are the subtle forces which carry the energies of life and a major challenge we face today is to overcome our collective de-sensitisation to such. And this necessarily involves trying to free ourselves from that now dominant utilitarian stance towards nature which prioritises data-collection and analysis and forever seeking for practical results whilst being closed to humanity's and nature's interiority. Dare I say we're in urgent need of a different kind of consciousness...one that is more open, empathetic and receptive, or as yer man Johann Wolfgang von Goethe advised "our full attention must be focused on the task of listening to nature, to overhear the secret of her process".
When we open ourselves to such listening we can readily see that all of creation speaks of a transcendent spiritual intelligence as its source. Our mystical traditions have long understood that a loving contemplation of living creatures naturally leads on to contemplation of this greater spiritual intelligence from which they issue and upon which they ultimately depend. And this core intelligence dwells within all...the "cosmic logos" lives at the very heart of both nature and the human soul. However, contemporary conditions make it very difficult for these perspectives to be taken seriously. The incursion of the inhuman has allowed the ultilitarian mind to break free of the moral and spiritual constraints that once kept it in bounds. With the burgeoning electronics industry and the drive to forge a "smart planet", a force hostile to nature is insinuating itself into nature's heart. What we're now witnessing are the early stages of a vastly ambitious project to implement a redesign of the world in order to satisfy the requirements of a ruthlessly technological consciousness that seemingly has lost connection with its spiritual roots...with little sense of the sacredness of life, nor of the spiritual responsibilities of human beings towards nature.
Of all creatures on Earth, it looks like it's us human beings alone who may have the possibility of selflessly entering into the inner nature of another creature. We can place ourselves imaginatively and empathetically into the being of another thereby allowing for the possibility of beholding the other in their truth. By regularly practising this opening of the inner eye/heart, we can help to build up a "spiritual ecosystem" as counterbalance to the "electronic ecosystem" currently being established. And through this mode of knowing each of us can contribute something positive and life-affirming to the world in giving to nature the gift of our conscious recognition of its sacred ground.
In truth we depend on nature for our survival which in turn depends on the quality of our knowing and relating through which we may bring spiritual light to the world. And in a spirit of optimism may I suggest that as time passes it will become clearer that the struggle for a human future is at the same time a struggle for nature's future as we get to witness a growing opening of our minds...hopefully before "the point of no return".
Sean.
Dean of Quareness.
July, 2021.