Secular Ironies: From Pantheism to Hubristic Progress

The tragic heroism of our technological flight from the divine wilderness

Irony is likely at the core of all profound secular truths.

You’ll recall that irony is the opposition between something’s intended and literal meanings. What we suppose is the case turns out to be the very opposite of what’s actually happening. Ironically, for example, a fire station might burn down. What was supposed to prevent fires succumbs to fire.

This conflict between our aims and the objective facts is the very structure of existential humiliation, the maximizing of bathos, or of a humiliating anticlimax by the science-centered picture of the world.

Here, then, are two profound secular ironies.

The irony of scientific pantheism

There’s irony in how science disenchants nature by eliminating theistic religions as rational options, while re-enchanting nature by demonstrating the sublime depth of nature’s creativity. By assuming atheism or at least deism, in pragmatically taking every observable event to have a natural explanation, science nevertheless effectively divinizes the self-creating and self-evolving universe.

Science explores the furthest reaches of nature’s creativity, from the subatomic to the galactic and the intergalactic levels of complexification and evolution, all while discarding gods and miracles for having negative explanatory value. But this means that every causal relation posited by a scientific model is monstrously counterintuitive. Nature, the universal wilderness is mindless, inhuman, and amoral, on the one hand, and spectacularly creative and ordered, on the other.

Scientific theories explain how each state of a natural system follows from the previous one. Our models posit elements, forces, dimensions, quantities, mechanisms, processes, cycles, and conditions, and we use them to predict the probability of what will happen because of certain prior events that are construed as causes. We say X causes Y or we say this phenomenon is part of that larger system.

But every nuance of those scientific explanations is saturated with weirdness, given the subjective human mindset.

We evolved to expect minds and societies because we’re adapted to read indicators of inner, mental states, and we flourish only within social groups. What we found, though, when we set aside our intuitions and our dogmatic traditions and when we looked beyond our planet which is rife with living things is an objective, unconscious, nonliving universe. Even within each organism is a micro world of cells and molecules and atoms, not a social or psychological world of spirits or gods or designed purposes.

Yet the ubiquity of sheer physical objects in nature is a catastrophe for human understanding. Scientists can predict how objects behave, and we can exploit that behaviour with technology, but that’s far from assimilating objects, as such, to the terms with which we’re most familiar and comfortable. Scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and logicians use artificial languages to avoid the subjective connotations and metaphors that make natural languages second nature to us. But that academic compartmentalization may also preserve our mental health by holding at bay the alien monstrousness of the world in which we’re embedded.

A godless cosmos can only be monstrously divine. Each objective system unfolds for no reason, even as the abundant natural patterns seem to conform to a set of laws that can’t constitute a plan. What exactly is a natural necessity or probability that isn’t chosen or deliberately ordained? Wouldn’t the ultimate forces and elements that violate our social instincts by mindlessly generating the natural order be functionally demonic or at least inhuman? How is the absurdity of this zombie-like shuffling between unplanned natural stages not a perfect cosmic horror?

The first secular irony, then, is that in killing God, modern reason (including science, philosophy, and industry) found a divine abomination to take God’s place. The universe is awesome in the colossal range of its self-organizing powers, but the very obviousness of all that natural physicality can only alienate intelligent social animals like us.

The early modern thinkers in Europe, from Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton to Descartes, Locke, and Kant were able to escape this horror because they settled in the halfway house of deism or agnosticism. As science has gone on to naturalize all phenomena in our grasp, those quasi-religious compromises have come to seem disingenuous and dishonourable, which leaves us with the alienation from nature’s sheer, revolting physicality.

The humanistic displacement of pristine nature

Luckily, a second irony comes to the modern world’s rescue. We found another way of coping with the spooky wilderness.

Again, the first way consisted of a couple of arbitrary abstractions. We just posited a benevolent, human-like mind as the universe’s first cause, and reaffirmed science’s authority by banishing that deity from interfering with the natural order. Thus, both religious faith and scientific reason could be happy. Scientists need tolerate only that one initial miracle, and we could retain our sanity and our pride, without having to face a wholly alien cosmos.

Or we proclaimed the answer’s unknowability. Maybe there’s a God and maybe there’s not, but we’ll never know so we can believe whatever we like. It’s not a scientific question, so it’s left as a personal, faith-based decision.

Deism or agnosticism rescued those of us with centrist, compromising inclinations. However, those who are condemned to philosophize at all costs or who aren’t interest in any such high-flown reasoning required a more sure-fire remedy. This we obtained with the practical side of modern progress.

What we did, of course, was to deepen the artificial barrier between the fragile human mind and the inhuman wilderness. We embarked on a project of disappearing nature, of surrounding ourselves with the refuge of civilization, including our cities, machines, gadgets, tools, arts, ideologies, worldviews, and social organizations. We did this so we could fully extricate ourselves from our Edenic phase in the Stone Age in which we were content to live as naïve clever animals in our evolutionary habitat.

To be sure, we had at our disposal the primitive remedy of surviving by engaging in childlike play. We projected our mental and social categories onto nature, perceiving nature as wholly alive and ready to negotiate, convincing ourselves there were pantheons of gods and angels out there, and ghosts and fairies around every corner.

The second irony begins, then, with the fact that whereas the ancients only imagined that the wilderness is teeming with mentality and with purpose, modernity uses technoscience and capitalistic industry to drastically accelerate the physical transformation of nature into an artificial environment that’s programmed to serve us and to reflect our intentions and values back at us. The ancients only fantasized about eternal paradise in an afterlife, whereas the modern transhumanists aim to build that paradise with technology.

What matters to late-modernists isn’t the fantasy of life after physical death, but our historic maturation after our species’ earlier periods of childish self-indulgence and ignorance. As indoctrinated consumers, of course, we’re still often self-indulgent and perhaps even narcissistic, but unlike priests and their religious flocks, scientists, engineers, and industrialists are applying their humanistic audacity to the business of improving on reality.

The existential audacity of modern progress

The Anthropocene is the period in which we attempt to master the wilderness not just by pretending nature isn’t inhuman or by training ourselves to engage seriously with a host of invisible friends. Instead, we learn to delay our gratification, sacrificing our naïve self-confidence as we investigate the extent and the nuances of nature’s godless causal order so we can exploit nature’s pivot points and humanize the planet.

Again, there are two kinds of humanization, the psychological and the technological. The first proceeds, for example, with religion’s familiar techniques of personifying natural processes, as when we take for granted a friendly, mind-first ontology that reverses the cosmicist upshot of philosophical naturalism.

The second kind of humanization is a feat of engineering rather than just of childlike impudence. To be sure, modernity is based on the humanistic audacity of Faustian, Promethean, or so-called Satanic hubris. Whereas Satanism in the premodern Christian context is the evil undermining of God’s creation, the operable, reality-based primordial “sin” or potentially self-destructive ambition is to transmogrify “God” (i.e. Nature) itself. This is done via the increasing know-how to turn the monstrosity of the impersonal, universal wasteland (including outer space and as many planets and stars as possible) into a techno-wonderland.

That artificial wonderland of our extended phenotype entails an extension of our psychotype too. We “progress” in the modern age by extending our bodies (with technology) and our minds (with the computer programs and symbols that animate and manage the artificial shell). Our worldviews and cultures bring the human world to life, and those cityscapes are meant to distract and to addict us so that we forget about the grim implications of nature’s godlessness.

The natural universe becomes the totality of “God” itself, not the creation of a transcendent, perfect person. God or the divine power, then, is the absurd imperfection we see beyond our humanizations. God is the cosmic order that unfolds mindlessly and amorally, the grotesque, zombie-like self-assembling of matter and energy and space and time, which evidently produces, in due course, living things like us.

We’re left with the choice between:

• (a) retreating to the carefree fantasies of the old theistic religions, betraying the modern intellectual sensibilities,
• (b) marveling at the horror of the real divinity, which is Nature, and submitting, chastened and humiliated, to evolution’s tyranny,
• (c) undertaking the potentially vain venture of existentially revolting against that real divine power.

In the case of (c), which most forms of secularism assume, we implicitly condemn all of nature to succumb to humanity’s cancerous wrath. Shocked and disgusted by the “death of God,” by the maturation or secularizing of the human psyche into its tragically heroic phase, we modernists are appalled by God’s ironic reality. What we presumed was a friendly, fair parent in the sky turned out to be just the sky and the rest of nature’s living-dead appendages.

The child’s God is a utopian fantasy that must be served, whereas the adult’s God is a hideous abomination that must be destroyed.

Die Leere sieht durch unsere Augen und ist entsetzt.