Many
of the most recent articles in this column have focused on the many people in
the modern world who are increasingly mimicking robotic behavior in order to
fit in with the technological processes created by the machines, computers and
robots that surround them. Nevertheless,
there are people who fight against these robotic influences by creating
coherent non-conforming cultural groupings.
These non-conformists are in many cases fighting back against succumbing
to the pathological influences of the sensory distortion created by modern
technology. These are not the isolated
suffering canaries in the coal mine that have been mentioned recently, the
people who involuntarily are incapable of properly becoming robotic and who
suffer from being misfits as a result of their sensitivity to sensory
distortion.
The
people I want to focus on in this article are people who, as much as possible,
try to go back to a pre-modern life order with a greatly reduced interaction
with modern technology. They have an
ideology that helps defend them psychologically against technological
seduction. The core of that ideology is
religious fundamentalism. All over the
world there are people who embrace the most orthodox strains of their religion
today and who use it as a vehicle to shut out the robotizing influences of
modern technology. This is done through
the psychological posture of conative acceleration – the speeding up of the
will. A person generates as many defined
discrete stimuli of religious fundamentalism as he is able to in his mind, in
order to shut out the defined discrete stimuli emanating from all the
technological processes and events that are occurring in the field of experience
around him.
But
here is the key: by generating so many defined discrete stimuli in his mind, so
many rigid rules, rites and rituals to shut out what surrounds him, the rigid
brittle behavior of machines invades his mind, only by a different pathway. The religious fundamentalist becomes like his
adversaries – the secular adherents of modern technological society – in the
process of fighting against the influences of modern technology and pushing it
away. The religious fundamentalist
develops a brittle rigid adherence to his religion, becoming totally immersed
in the minutiae of the religious rules.
This
modern fundamentalist expression of religion has a different flavor from the
traditional expression of religion in earlier times. Before the technological takeover of the
human living environment, the major adversary of religious humans was the
tendency within them to slip into animalistic lusts which were considered to be
sinful. Focusing on defined discrete religious
precepts helped to prevent religious devotees from losing their strongly
defined human sense of self and becoming gradually undifferentiated as they
lost themselves in the flowing blendable continual stimuli of the excesses of
their animalistic pleasures: gluttony, drunkenness, fornication, greedy
accumulation of wealth, random violence.
Traditional religious people in the past were concerned with
transcending above their own animal natures.
But because their animal natures were constantly being stimulated by the
flowing blendable continual stimuli in their organic traditional living
environments, most traditional religious people focused on moderating and
channeling their animal natures rather than totally repressing them. Yes, there were ascetics, but these
represented a small percentage of the population. Most traditional religious people accepted
the fact that their transcendence was limited and that they were still
basically a part of the natural world. Even
as they fought so hard to be different from the lower animals, stimulation of
their animal natures was so constant that they merged to some extent with the
environment that they fought.
Nevertheless,
they did not fight against technological progress. Traditional religious peoples in the Middle
East, Asia, Africa and Latin America built empires based on their technological
advances and perceived their technology as the foundation of the transcendent
civilizations they created. Religious
governments in Europe used the technological superiority found in their ships
and armaments to conquer less technologically advance societies first in Europe
and then all over the world and thus to carry the transcendent word of their
religions to the people in these societies.
In most cases, nonwestern religions were blended with the religions of
the conquerors or else allowed to co-exist with the religions of the
conquerors. Polytheistic religions
absorbed the God of the conqueror into their pantheon. In Latin America, African gods were merged
with Christian saints to form new syncretistic religions like Voodoo, Santeria,
Candomble, Macumba, and Umbanda.
Yes,
there were situations when two conquering religions fought wars with each
other, as in the Crusades, but it was with regard to conflicting transcending
visions to suppress animal tendencies rather than conflicting systems of rigid
life rules. Fundamentalists today are
concerned with defined discrete rigid mechanistic life rules that they control
and that allow them to block out or contain the mechanistic robotic processes
of the complex machines that surround them.
So
what is the problem with people joining fundamentalist religions. The problem is that these religions really
don’t help people to effectively fight off the robotic influences that move
people away from a balanced human essence.
Fundamentalist religions basically become another form of turning people
into robots. If humans are entities that
should absorb a balanced configuration of defined discrete stimuli, on the one
hand, and flowing blendable continual stimuli on the other, in order to develop
balanced senses of self, then we can say that fundamentalists fall into a
pattern of absorbing an excess of defined discrete stimuli in terms of rigid
rules and rigid ideological precepts. In
other words, fundamentalism causes people to move away from an essential basic
balanced humanity, rather than towards it.
Fundamentalists
today are fighting very different kinds of environmental adversaries than the
traditional religion practitioners from the past. And just like the traditional religion
practitioners became somewhat animalistic in fighting off the more primitive
influences in their more organic natural living environments – savage in the
ways they conquered more primitive non-believers, slaughtering and massacring
opponents – so the fundamentalists today become somewhat robotic in fighting
off the robotic influences in their modern technological living environment
Now
it is true there are fundamentalist groups today, particularly in the Middle
East who still think in terms of physical conquest of other peoples and dealing
ruthlessly with adversaries.
Nevertheless, the focus in their daily lives is on a rigid, robotic,
puritanical following of religious rules and rites. One could say these groups are hybrids of the
old and the new. Along with dealing with
the adversaries represented by their neighbors of different religious persuasions,
these groups grapple with the larger technological environment which interferes
with their capacity and their desire to leave strong organic imprints. The fact that they are hybrids does not mean
that these more aggressive fundamentalist groups are balanced between their
animal and robot sides. It means simply
that they are very volatile as they are pulled strongly in two opposite
directions.
In
previous articles, I discussed how people become what they use today – how they
become like the complex machines that they seem to control and manipulate, but
that in some ways actually control and manipulate them. In the same way, people can become what they
fight against, bleed into what their adversaries are. Fundamentalists become robotic. Traditional religious practitioners became and
become savage. Fighting stimulates
engagement with the adversary and, in the process of trying to make and
preserve imprints on the adversary, fighting with certain weapons with certain
strategies and in certain ways, the adversary makes and preserves imprints on
the fighter, which in turn help to configure the fighter’s responses.
And
all this blurring is due to the fact that the world is not just filled with
measurable defined discrete stimuli, but also has flowing blendable continual
stimuli. And when the flowing blendable
continual stimuli are diminished as a result of the world becoming covered with
modern technology, these stimuli are still manufactured in our minds to try to
provide some unity to the configurations of phenomena in our fields of experience. Unfortunately, as is the case with many of
the Middle East fundamentalists and their technological environment, that
attempted unity of experience may not succeed.
It is hard for people to unite traditional ways and modern technological
processes. This can lead to a rejection
of one’s field of experience altogether and ultimately an attempt to destroy
what’s in it including many of the people.
© 2015 Laurence Mesirow
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