24AR29-39

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AR 29:39 - Overestimating technology's potential influence?

In this issue:

MEANING - the headwaters in which "we must make our stand"?

 + "mystical truths are not information, and inner work is always inconvenient"

WORLDVIEW - "better answers to offer than the great theologians?"

Apologia Report 29:39 (1,680)
October 19, 2024

MEANING

"iThink Therefore iAm: Technology’s transformation of human existence is rendering conservatism irrelevant" by Brad Littlejohn (American Compass, Sep 4 '24) -- "The digitization of our lives is transforming human existence in ways incompatible with conservative conceptions of flourishing." (Imagine initially learning of this as it is mechanically read aloud using a first-generation text-to-voice software monotone.)

   This "has rendered many basic conservative instincts simply nonsensical, especially concerns about family, morality, and sexuality. In the age of TikTok, the Judeo-Christian tradition is not just becoming discredited, but altogether inaccessible.

   "The social acid of the smartphone era is dissolving six fundamental pillars of conservatism: Limits, Tradition, Patience, Dependence, Embeddedness, and Embodiment. In stressing these themes for centuries, conservatives have sought to tether human action to the limits of human nature, insisting that individuals and polities alike cultivate the virtues of self-restraint. ...

   "If technology promises a transcendence of natural constraints, why should we shackle ourselves with social and political ones? ...

   "This mindset is inseparable from the one that has little compunction about legalizing drugs, performing mastectomies on healthy young girls, and, when our battered bodies no longer serve their use as pleasure-maximizing machines, quietly euthanizing them.

   "The recent implosion of the pro-life movement powerfully illustrates the challenge. Within two years of Roe vs. Wade’s long-awaited reversal, the Republican Party excised abortion restriction from its platform. Many activists felt stabbed in the back by political operatives, but the leadership in Milwaukee was just doing what party leadership does: trying to win elections. ...

   "With each passing year, a new class of high school graduates enters the electorate - marinated in the digital culture, and increasingly anxious and lonely, as Jonathan Haidt has documented in The Anxious Generation <www.tinyurl.com/ahd47an5> and his Substack, After Babel. On almost any measure of youth mental health, graphs have a hockey stick shape with an inflection point around 2010. Graphs of young adult support for progressive causes have a similar shape. ...

   "But the silver lining is this: If the road to political renewal for social conservatives must run through tech policy, this is a road on which we are likely to meet unexpected allies. If tech policy is the new family policy, conservatives may have a chance to build a bipartisan coalition for the first time in a generation. ...

   "Our problem is not lack of policy options, but lack of will to pursue them.

   "The hour thus demands a mindset shift from conservative lawmakers. To date, they’ve grumbled about the “woke” priorities of Big Tech, but treated these as unrelated to the industry’s basic business model, asking why the CEOs can’t stop the preaching and get back to profit. But the profit model is inherently progressive, persuading users to adopt a disembedded, disembodied, de-natured vision of themselves as mere bundles of desire. Conservatives need the courage to call out the business model of Big Tech as inherently exploitative, Sackler-style capitalism. ...

   "Social conservatives cannot afford to be economic libertarians any longer, if that means ceding the political landscape to Apple and Alphabet. Culture may be upstream of politics, but technology is upstream of culture, and it is in those headwaters that we must make our stand." <www.tinyurl.com/bdz98mbh>

   (Littlejohn, it would seem, is assuming a lot. - RP)

"Should We Be Receiving Mystical Truths on Our Phones?" by Ross Simonini (New York Times, Sep 10 '24) -- introducing "Sadhguru, the chosen name of Vasudev, now 67. [He] has become one of the most prominent spiritual figures of the internet era. His Isha Foundation, started in 1992, is now an empire of yoga instruction and environmental activism, with tens of millions of followers across YouTube, social media, a podcast and a proprietary app. The foundation’s physical center in Coimbatore, India, is the size of a small town, with a school, ashram and temple. Isha has also expanded into the United States with the Institute of Inner Sciences in McMinnville, Tenn., a rural location chosen for its proximity to several major American cities. Sadhguru intends to develop the 17,000 acres of the institute into a community of 20,000 to 30,000 people." (Imagine the local gossip! - RP)

   "Despite his mystical experiences, he seems more like an approachable celebrity than a hermetic cult leader. He has done interviews with Joe Rogan, Logan Paul and Matthew McConaughey and has counseled Will Smith and SZA. His online persona balances wisdom with a sarcasm that undercuts the image of the overserious guru. ... But it is the scandals of yoga that usually characterize the American skepticism toward the guru, from acts of political bioterrorism by Osho’s followers to allegations of sexual abuse against Bikram Choudhury.

   "Sadhguru seems to be aware of the uneven history of past yogic communities and has a few of his own scandals, including questions about his wife’s process of yogic death and his purported encroachment upon Indian forests. So he actively distances himself from the history of yoga controversies, joking that “guru is a four-letter word” and explaining that his name is a description for a self-made guru without formal lineage. ...

   "Sadhguru began offering Isha’s foundational program, Shambhavi Mahamudra Kriya, online during the pandemic, a time when people were hungry for structures of meaning. Like many spiritual systems, Isha Yoga provides a total regulation of schedule, diet, thought and community. Shambhavi puts this all together, assembling a variety of yogic techniques into a fairly simple and convenient package for the neophyte.

   "I learned the practice over four days, at home.... Despite the casual environs, the program demanded constant rigor and participation. ...

   "Nevertheless, when the ritual ended, the reverie began to dissolve. I closed the Isha window and there was my desktop, speckled with bills and other icons of anxiety. ...

   "I continued the practice daily with careful precision and after months, felt a little better, as I often have with meditation. I kept on for a year, adding more advanced Isha practices, but felt none of the bliss described in so many Reddit testimonials. Furthermore, problems arose in relation to this work: neurological, muscular and psychological, and I began to feel that the training had not prepared me for these possibilities. ...

   "The internet puts social media and therapy apps on the same plane. It anticipates our desires and convinces us that all knowledge is just a click away. But as any guru will tell you, mystical truths are not information, and inner work is always inconvenient." <www.tinyurl.com/5x5hn7nm> (registration required)

 ---

WORLDVIEW

"In the academic sphere of the history of religion, there are two 'elephants in the room.' Both are set on trampling the discipline to death, but neither are truly acknowledged." The first is what might be described as postmodernism feuds. The second involves "many scholars of religion ... themselves believers who often sedulously avoid the appearance of faith commitments lest they be considered unfit to make historical judgements."

   The latter bunch are the focus of "Reality Is Strange" by Francis Young (First Things, Aug 8 '24), who reports "There is a growing movement in the discipline ... to get a conversation started about ontological reality. These scholars reject the orthodoxy of recent decades that approached every phenomenon as culturally constructed and shunted ultimate questions into the realm of the unaskable. Jeffrey Kripal is one such scholar, and How to Think Impossibly <www.tinyurl.com/42aehp64> is his latest contribution to a bold effort to grapple with the notion that people who experience the impossible might actually be telling the truth.

   "Kripal argues that there is plenty of evidence that the impossible happens. Not just the 'soft' claim that people genuinely experience the impossible, but also the 'hard' claim that impossible events actually happen. ...

   "The term 'impossible' is, for Kripal, a convenient stand-in for more contested terms like 'supernatural' and 'paranormal' - although Kripal does not actually think the supposedly impossible is really impossible at all. How to Think Impossibly is a manifesto for a radical overhaul of our systems of knowledge, in the light of Kripal's conviction that human existence and reality are not limited to the realm of the physical. ...

   "As the author himself acknowledges, Kripal draws inspiration from the Gnostics of the early centuries of Christianity, and How to Think Impossibly is inflected by a certain hostility to organized religion in general and Catholicism in particular. Kripal outlines how a new, integrated worldview where the sciences and humanities are accorded equal explanatory power might replace the knowledge economy of today's universities. He argues for a revival of a non-religious 'New Age' spirituality bridging the sciences and humanities, advocating a monist conception of the universe in which human consciousness is not distinct from reality itself. ...

   "If Kripal is right that reality is not as secular materialism tells us it is (and I suspect he is) then religious believers ought to be the first to offer an alternative outlook, rather than providing cover for the materialists by shepherding any dissent from secular orthodoxies into the realm of personal religious belief. If the spiritual world is truly real, that matters - with all the disturbing consequences that follow.

   "Jeffrey Kripal's How to Think Impossibly correctly diagnoses a genuine and pressing problem: the failure of Enlightenment-derived models of what reality is and the sorts of things we are taught to believe can and cannot happen. ...

   "Kripal's prescription and belief that such phenomena arise ultimately from a self that is one with the universe seems a return to the past rather than a genuinely new departure (or, as Kripal insists, an anticipation of a future form of human consciousness). It is unclear to me why ancient Gnostics, Buddhist mystics, nineteenth-century Spiritualists, and modern UFO contactees have better answers to offer than the great theologians." <www.tinyurl.com/4s5yk8tj>

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