Idolatry 2.0: How technology is replacing religion and what you can do about it.
Pt II of "To make a god whose god is us"
Moses wandered the desert for 40 years with a rabble of loosely-connected families.
Nominally, they were free, but they were still enslaved to the old ways of doing things.
False beliefs and human sacrifice.
Of letting a hunk of precious metal or carved stone statues decide their fate and their behavior.
Of deceiving themselves as to the true nature of reality, so that they didn’t have to confront their own weaknesses, fears, and inadequacies.
So the prophet bent on founding a better civilization than the one ruled by hidden knowledge and superstition fear had to devise a replacement for the old belief system.
One that respected not the image of God, but God’s word.
And so he founded a new religion by claiming divine inspiration from the old one.
Religion as a way of mastering the Placebo Effect
In part I, we covered how humans have always been desperate for comfort over what we can’t control. We get so desperate that we devise cruel and strange rituals to inadvertently trigger our own placebo effect, which ends up confirming our own bias that omnipotent entities are on our side so long as we do whatever they demand.
This is what Moses stood against.
This is why he had to make a big show of the magic tablets, which he claims he didn’t write, but which came to him from an omniscient, objective, omnipotent source while atop the highest point in the land.
Suspend your faith for a moment. Believe whichever explanation you want (or create your own).* Any explanation will do, because that’s not what matters for this discussion.
What matters is what changed: Moses took his people from acting however they thought an arbitrary deity would want them to act, to following a deity with clear instructions for how they ought to act.
His commandments had to be big stone tablets because they needed to replace golden calves and bronze figurines and impressively large fires. Not to mention all the drama that comes with sacrificing living things and divining their entrails.
I should note that Moses wasn’t the only one who evolved religion in this way. The Taoists would eventually take on the governmental role of regulating sacrificial offerings, replacing blood with incense, fruit, and occasionally cooked meat or alcohol. The Romans banned human sacrifice throughout their empire and demanded that their subjects follow the Roman legal code, which they held to be sacred.
In all instances, the state evolved out of religion and then gradually replaced many of its roles with more predictable systems of governance and conduct.
Worship as Unquestioning Veneration
While a people who submit to laws derived from nature and precedent are much freer than those who submit to whatever is found in the guts of some unlucky animal that the priests happened to kill that day, laws can never account for all the extenuating circumstances that arise in reality. So they become too rigid.
The biggest problem with laws as an operating system for society is that to apply them equally across all instances is to allow for great cruelty in certain specific instances.
For example, we can all think of at least one instance where “Thou Shalt Not Kill” might deserve a caveat, i.e. in instances of self defense, or to protect children, or in accidents involving heavy machinery malfunctions. But make too many exceptions, and the law stops seeming like the impartial Word of God and more like a bunch of stuff somebody made up. People stop feeling like murder is not okay, and more like murder is okay for whoever has power to decide. Hard to hold a society together after most people feel this way.
So you end up in a catch 22: make no exceptions and the law seems draconian and tyrannical. Make too many exceptions and the law seems corrupt and prejudiced. In both cases, the law, i.e. unquestionably fair authority we must all submit to in order to make this work starts to seem unjust.
To solve this, many societies left room for God. They told stories of angels intervening to stop injustice or punish the unjust. The residue can be found in the myths we tell ourselves wherever the law and politics cross.
Supreme Court Justices might have independent political views, but they leave them outside the courtroom when deliberating cases. The death penalty allows the condemned enough time and appeals that the state has never executed an innocent person. Basically, God or morality always prevails.
Considering that seven paragraphs ago we were talking about societies which killed innocent people because it seemed like that might help change the weather or explain what the universe was thinking, I think it’s safe to say that any system people make is far from perfect and whatever institution we put our faith in is less than reliable.
The gap between why people do what they do and what they end up achieving is smaller, to be sure, but it’s still a fairly big one. So you could say that a society built on holy laws, stories, and scriptures is a better guide for reality than totems and sacrifices, but there’s still a danger of mistaking the ritual for reality. It still requires unquestioning obedience, which means we still run the risk of blindly following our imagined authorities off a cliff.
But what if Moses was fine with flawed laws because he never wanted them to be the final word?
What if the Ten commandments weren’t the be all end all, what if what was carved in stone wasn’t intended to be the final word, just a step in the right direction of what humanity could and should be:
Self-guided individuals with clear notions of right and wrong who don’t need laws to worship because they are fully capable of governing themselves?
The Torah as primitive chatbot: How our situation relates
Moses’s Isrealites were free, just as we are free, but the natural impulse is to seek comfort by resisting change and building a more elaborate cage. Knowing the quality of human material he had to work with, Moses knew the best he could do was ensure what they built at least brought them closer to reality.
But technology appears to be pushing us in the opposite direction.
Every few years, their marketers proselytize the arrival of the artificial intelligent-designed utopia with all the conviction of a born-again convert. It knows what you want and will deliver it near-instantaneously! Comfort for the lonely! Resources for the poor! Answers for the perplexed! And you don’t even need to pray!
Given how enmeshed tech has become in our lives, it’s undeniable that it has satisfied many of our desires better than its predecessors–religion and government.
5 Ways Tech 1Up-ed Religion and Is Replacing It
A.I. —> a source of ultimate authority that always knows what everyone is doing
Video games and Streaming Platforms—> inhabitable mythology
Cancel Culture and cyberbullying —> sacrifice & stoning, i.e. collective justice
Social Media —> the church community
Online courses, drop shipping, and (insert latest internet fad to manifest your prayers here) —> Rituals and Ceremonies
This allows Tech to be the best at “social control”
In many ways, tech appears to tangibly deliver on promises religion could only write you a check for, to be cashed after you’re dead.
The resulting faith we place in tech’s ability to solve all our problems, be they the challenges of actually getting ChatGPT to form logical arguments, helping us find love, or reversing climate change, makes technology our de facto religion.
One that’s necessary for an increasingly pluralistic global society. In the same way that the Romans tolerated nearly all religious practices so long as subjects also worshipped Caesar and the state so as to maintain their empire, the internet is as fragmented and “all things to all people” as it needs to be to prevent us from disintegrating as a society should we enter into discourse and discover that many of us actually have very few values in common.
All this has made the internet far more effective at keeping us from acting out on our baser impulses than either the church (or temple, synagogue, mosque, etc.) or state could.
The problem is that technology only appears to deliver on many of its promises.
A.I. is not actually intelligent, we’ve just created programs which are so good at mimicking language that they’ve deceived many into thinking it is. Video games and Netflix don’t develop us metaphysically the way myths are supposed to when unpacked and coupled with firsthand experience. Cancel culture and cyberbullying mask the deeper problems their scapegoats represent. Social media makes us lonelier than ever. And most online fads are scams.
What we’re getting once again is the illusion of all-knowing omnipotence. Another idol that, like so many laws carved in stone, cannot produce what we truly need and is therefore a false idol.
If as Nietzsche says, God**truly is dead, then we’ve got a real Weekend at Bernie’s meets Million Dollar Man situation here. We keep trying to rebuild Him and pretend He’s very much alive for everyone else.
What’s so wrong with it if it works? Nothing, assuming you don’t value your soul.
Part III next week: How Tech Disconnects Your Intuition From Reality
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*Some of my favorite explanations for Moses’s inpsiration:
Moses tapped into the collective consciousness and it told him to do all that he did as a way of helping the people in his charge, and ultimately all of humanity.
(The Jungian interpretation)He is such a massive cynical genius that he devised and concocted all of this as one brilliant power-play to hoodwink all the proles into obeying the priests. (Historical Marxist interpretation, also Atheist)
He didn’t exist, but is an archetype of the priests who pulled these sorts of shenanigans to rewrite history in their favor and get people to obey them. A kind of fairytale meant to explain the actions of people like your least favorite uncle or boss. (Atheist interpretation)
Moses was tripping, and the Ten Commandments were a fever dream brought on by years adjudicating petty squabbles amongst the exiled slaves he spent decades wandering the desert with. Basically, these were the ten things he was constantly having to tell the Jews over and over again. (Jordan Peterson explanation)
Moses is everything the bible says he is and more.
(Traditional Christian interpretation)
** aka not the vast infinite consciousness some call God, but our finite construct of the universe as stern-yet-loving parental figure God