Welcome to Remain Human. Here I explore philosophical and cultural themes with the goal of gaining insight on what it takes to remain human in an age of rapid change. Today's article is about the silent rise of a new form of worship, the wish for oblivion, what that looks like in today's cultural landscape and the implications.
The Altar of Oblivion
The West has entered a new age of worship. The altar constructed is one made from the remnants of past spiritual expeditions.
The foundation of the West is built upon a mythic understanding of the world. The earliest notions of spiritual unity in the West was through the belief in animism, attributing spirits to natural phenomena. Rituals around these beliefs, like ones tied to life and death, allowed early settlers in the region to lay down the spiritual framework for subsequent peoples.
The Greeks introduced the heroic ideal which explored individual excellence, courage and glory often through defying the fate of the Gods. Religious practices celebrating heroic aspirations and communal integrity served to create a strong community identity. The Romans, who focused their religious practices around civic representation, merged Hellenistic traditions, arts, and culture with their own to create Greco-Roman thought. Greek heroism was tempered by a reallocation of myth and story for civic duty and State stability. Emperors were worshiped and heroism morphed into imperial duty and sacrifice.
This civic representation, along with a growing messianic expectation within Judea, laid the groundwork for Christianity, spread by the apostles through small cities within the Roman Empire. From these small pockets of religious observation came a shift of identification. Monotheism, piety, charity, and universalism spread throughout the West. With the Edict of Milan by Constantine, Christianity became Rome’s official religion.
After the Western Roman Empire’s collapse in 476 AD, Europe fragmented into feudal societies, but the Catholic Church emerged as a unifying force, preserving knowledge and fostering stability through Christian doctrine. Over centuries, Scholasticism’s reasoned theology and the Renaissance’s revival of classical texts began to challenge the Church’s dogmatic control. This rise in rationalism, coupled with the Protestant Reformation paved the way for the Scientific Revolution’s empirical challenge to traditional authority.
The United States of America, the West's Great Experiment, was born from a synthesis of Judeo-Christian spirituality, Classical ideals, Enlightenment principles and ancient spirit. This gave rise to secularism where a pursuit of knowledge and rational thought meant to liberate humanity, lead to the first Great Sacrifice made to Oblivion, that of meaning.
The Erosion of Meaning
Rationalism reigned under the idea that it would evolve collective thought. While we have experienced progress in some ways, we have sacrificed cultural identity to do so. Religion was a social adhesive. Without it, we place our sense of meaning in whatever is holding us together.
In modernity, the glue was the grand narratives surrounding the pursuit of knowledge, science, and reason for the greater good. In postmodernity, ambiguity, relativism and deconstructionist thought lead to the tearing down of grand narratives in favor of segregation through reductionist ideas of identity. This localized the idea of the "tribe" while destabilizing existing cultural institutions.
Through further industrialization and the rapid advancement of technology we enter a new age where unfulfilled quests for meaning are met with a revival in compelling narratives around culture, a welcomed change.
Subverting Life
We reject value and purpose and worship oblivion.
We embrace ambiguity and worship oblivion.
We devalue the effectiveness of life and the excellence hidden within us and worship oblivion.
We ignore history and worship oblivion.
We wish to be replaced and worship oblivion.
We subvert life by denying the aspects of humanity that allow us to be vital and vibrant members of our community and our culture. Where are the heroes? Where have the courageous men and women gone who stood by their values or replaced them with stronger ones they found along the way?
We are surrendering to the machine. We are kneeling to the apathy of a digitized humanity. We are forfeiting our cultural identity and therefore isolating ourselves for a promise of indifference.
No harm, no foul?
We deny life by denying the deepest parts of ourselves. If we live too long on the surface we'll forget there was anything more to us than our superficial qualities.
The Consequences of Nothingness
A society needs unifying forces to be productive. Those that don’t entertain those forces splinter and disappear. So, what happens when a society unifies under a banner of nothingness? A society that has sacrificed meaning for Oblivion is rewarded with isolationism, civic and communal disengagement, weakened resilience to crisis, and self-defeating endeavors.
We see younger generations dehumanized by new technologies which exacerbates feelings of rootlessness. One possible solution is that we connect with a larger community, a global community, but in reality, what we're doing is displacing communal responsibility to nullify local, vital culture. Another possible solution is the creation of subcultures to address the decay of the recent dominating culture. However, this increases alienation and division among those sharing the same physical space.
Human Pathways
Aren't we tired of feeling so separated from each other and the world we live in? The Automated Age is here. We're seeing exponential growth in technology and industry through the utilization of AI. We're exploring quantum computing and advanced robotics in meaningful ways, ways that will impact society and as a result shape culture.
It's time we move away from the lack of narrative, the emptying of community, the rejection of mystery, and the refusal of cultural hierarchies. Let's find pathways that affirm humanity instead of remaining on ones that deny it. We need a new heroic ideal, one built from the same spiritual materials used to create the United State of America, but fitted for the Automated Age.
We can leverage technology to create and support healthy relationships with automation and artificial intelligence. We can switch from doom-and-gloom nihilism to localized positivism. We can seek clarity instead of victory.
There are many ways forward.
There is no reason for any generation to be set in its ways. Instead, we must facilitate healthy debate and conversation around spirituality, philosophy, politics, and culture to allow for a transfer of successful ideas from the established group to the budding group.
Imagine what it would look like to worship vitality instead of oblivion, to participate in a cult of life-affirming individuals instead of a community of self-sacrificial hypocrites.
We can celebrate human life. We can build strong families, act as stewards of Nature, create resilient communities, differ on a variety of issues while uniting under a few great causes, and share extraordinary stories.
We need only participate in igniting a series of shifts within our own mindsets to influence the environment around us, shifts that involve establishing a positive outlook on life, a filter for what does not resonate, and a curious mind.
A spark of courage can create a hero.