A long deeply thoughtful discussion with an architect friend posted to the Internet during 1996 began with the question of how architecture contributes to the design of cyberspace. It proceeded to the question of learning the design processes and technologies which transition between profane spaces and sacred spaces; which touch the transcendental realm so that we can ascend to the sacred, our heart’s proper desire, and distinguish it from the profane. Some excellent aids to understanding these topics are: Philip Sherrard’s The Sacred in Life and Art and Louis Bouyer’s Liturgy and Architecture. This is a long essay, so it has been split into two parts. Part II is here. It contains real gems on technology, ideology, worship and culture. Part I Sections include:
- Cyber-Chartres as a Demarcated Region in Cyberspace to Nourish the Culture of Life
- Embodied Reason vs. Disembodied Ideology
- Spiritual Aspects of the Mind-Body Relation
- Common Origin of the Internet and the Gothic Cathedral
- Symbolism and the Modern Ziggurat
- The Birth of Culture
- World Surveillance State
- Technology Carrying Ideology and Directing Worship
Cyber-Chartres as a Demarcated Region in Cyberspace to Nourish the Culture of Life
G.W.F Hegel, in his Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, refers to architecture as “Symbolic art with its aspiration, its disquiet, its mystery and its sublimity.” He says that it:
[P]ioneers the way for the adequate realization of the God [Hegel is referring to the Unity-in-Trinity idea], and in this its service bestows hard toil upon existing nature, in order to disentangle it from the jungle of finitude and the abortiveness of chance. By this means it levels a space for the God, gives form to his external surroundings, and builds him his temple as a fit place for concentration of spirit, and for its direction to the mind’s absolute objects. It raises an enclosure round the assembly of those gathered together, as a defense against the threatening of the storm, against rain, the hurricane, and wild beasts, and reveals the will to assemble, although externally, yet in conformity with principles of art. For the limit of architecture lies precisely in this point, that it retains the spiritual as an inward existence over against the external forms of the art, and consequently must refer to what has soul only as to something other than its own creations. Architecture, however, as we have seen, has purified the external world, and endowed it with symmetrical order and with affinity to mind; and the temple of the God, the house of his community, stands ready.
How does architecture contribute to the design of cyberspace? Is there a Cyber-Chartres in the making somewhere along the line? How can a region be demarcated in cyberspace for the Unity idea, for concentration of spirit and its direction to our mind’s absolute objects? An enclosure round a moral polity, a defense against those of Disembodied Ideology who would destroy by default, a purification of cyberspace, worthy of aesthetically drawing in those with an affinity for Embodied Reason.
Alexis DeTocqueville said, in Democracy in America, “The human understanding more easily invents new things than new words...” This is because we can all objectively see the same thing, but the meaning of our words can only be interpreted uniquely, subjectively. A dictionary we all agree consensually to use is helpful, but even such agreement is founded on mostly unexamined presuppositions that have crept into us during our subjective, unique life experiences. Regardless of the traditions of where we come from, we all see the same wheel, but we don’t “see” the same word.
Another way of looking at this, is to address the content of what is brought into the cybernexus, how it is altered in the eddies and currents pre-existing it, and what the course of the river will be after the content has been absorbed. We get back to the idea of Embodied Reason, which states that the world is not remade every second, as opposed to Disembodied Ideology, which states that the world is remade every second.
I have this wonderful quote from Tocqueville, when he talks about the indirect influence that a genius can have on the destiny of nations:
Alexis DeTocqueville said, in Democracy in America, “The human understanding more easily invents new things than new words...” This is because we can all objectively see the same thing, but the meaning of our words can only be interpreted uniquely, subjectively. A dictionary we all agree consensually to use is helpful, but even such agreement is founded on mostly unexamined presuppositions that have crept into us during our subjective, unique life experiences. Regardless of the traditions of where we come from, we all see the same wheel, but we don’t “see” the same word.
Another way of looking at this, is to address the content of what is brought into the cybernexus, how it is altered in the eddies and currents pre-existing it, and what the course of the river will be after the content has been absorbed. We get back to the idea of Embodied Reason, which states that the world is not remade every second, as opposed to Disembodied Ideology, which states that the world is remade every second.
I have this wonderful quote from Tocqueville, when he talks about the indirect influence that a genius can have on the destiny of nations:
[T]he geographical position of the country, which he is unable to change, a social condition which arose without his cooperation, customs and opinions which he cannot trace to their source, and an origin with which he is unacquainted exercise so irresistible an influence over the courses of society that he is himself borne away by the current after an ineffectual resistance. Like the navigator, he may direct the vessel which bears him, but he can neither change its structure, nor raise the winds, nor lull the waters that swell beneath him.
I read this, and immediately thought of the conjunction of free will and necessity, which is vitality, or George Santayana’s “vital liberty.” Clearly, there is an affinity between vitality and navigation, as we chart a course through life. There is also an affinity to design, in that we do have some impact on the shape of the vessel that carries us along in life, and this brings me back around to the topic of the architecture of cyberspace. We can do some shaping of cyberspace, to provide an aesthetically attractive vessel, to carry us on a given portion of life’s course. We do not feel compelled to adopt the compost-modern philosophy in architecture (or literature) which defaults to the navigational stance of “Steady as she drifts.” We can construct vessels that will bring us to islands of high culture amidst the turbulent sea of post-civilization.
A.N. Whitehead’s position is that philosophy is all about making things “self-evident,” his thesis is elucidated in Modes of Thought:
A.N. Whitehead’s position is that philosophy is all about making things “self-evident,” his thesis is elucidated in Modes of Thought:
My thesis is that when we realize ourselves as engaged in a process of penetration, we have a fuller self-knowledge than when we feel a completion of the job of intelligence.... The sense of completion, which has already been mentioned, arises from the self-evidence in our understanding. In fact, self-evidence is understanding. The sense of penetration, which also clings to our experience of intelligibility, has to do with the growth of understanding. To feel the completion apart from any sense of growth, is in fact to fail in understanding. Unless proof has produced self-evidence and thereby rendered itself unnecessary, it has issued in a second-rate state of mind, producing action devoid of understanding. Self-evidence is the basic fact on which all greatness supports itself. But proof is one of the routes by which self-evidence is often obtained. As an example of this doctrine, in philosophical writings proof should be at a minimum. The whole effort should be to display the self-evidence of basic truths, concerning the nature of things and their connection.
Philosophy is the attempt to make manifest the fundamental evidence as to the nature of things. Upon the presupposition of this evidence, all understanding rests. A correctly verbalized philosophy mobilizes this basic experience which all premises presuppose. It makes the content of the human mind manageable; it adds meaning to fragmentary details; it discloses disjunctions and conjunctions, consistencies and inconsistencies. Philosophy is either self-evident, or it is not philosophy. The attempt of any philosophic discourse should be to produce self-evidence. Of course it is impossible to achieve any such aim.
So we are clearly aiming at the impossible, tilting at windmills. But, it is necessary to tilt at windmills, n’est pas? We grow, or we die even though we still breathe.
Embodied Reason vs. Disembodied Ideology
The dominant ideology that is “in the air” is scientific nihilism. With the rise of the superstitious Bohr interpretation of QM, and the mystic promotion of the Big Bang-then-Big Crunch/Heat Death quantum cosmology, modern humans have been bereft of the existence of purpose and meaning in any aspect of their lives, if they want to claim to be rational. We’re reduced back to living as animals, we’ve turned from gazing in wonder at the stars and we are staring fixedly at the mud. Scientific self-decapitation has spread around the world in the form of entropic death-worship, this is what’s “in the air.” The image of a rotten exterior concealing a rational interior comes to mind when you juxtapose the cultural depravity surrounding us with the scientific “truths” that are granted sole authority by the world elite.
What I see so clearly, from a discussion of compost-modern architecture, is the sloppy, rotten, dirty exterior of “Do your own thing” and “Let it all hang out” covering the empty, enraged interior of the liberal mind, the labyrinth where soulless jack-booted bureaucrats hide in. The flower-children’s freedom of expression covering the hippie residue’s iron-fisted totalitarianism, the shadowy forerunner of which are the witch-hunts of political correctness. The conservative reaction to the liberal’s success at taking over the shapers of society (the media, the churches, and the educational system), is one of awe. Simultaneously, there is an entirely normal reaction of revulsion at the degradation and abasement inherent in the exterior of latter-day liberalism, and fear of the rationalistic iron fist inside the filthy exterior. The rational technology of the V-chip floating inside the Hollywood programming cesspool? What an insidious compost-modern solution, softening us up for more globalist control subtleties, no doubt.
Some quotes from A.N. Whitehead on the mind-body relation, free trade and the architecture of cyberspace from Adventures of Ideas:
What I see so clearly, from a discussion of compost-modern architecture, is the sloppy, rotten, dirty exterior of “Do your own thing” and “Let it all hang out” covering the empty, enraged interior of the liberal mind, the labyrinth where soulless jack-booted bureaucrats hide in. The flower-children’s freedom of expression covering the hippie residue’s iron-fisted totalitarianism, the shadowy forerunner of which are the witch-hunts of political correctness. The conservative reaction to the liberal’s success at taking over the shapers of society (the media, the churches, and the educational system), is one of awe. Simultaneously, there is an entirely normal reaction of revulsion at the degradation and abasement inherent in the exterior of latter-day liberalism, and fear of the rationalistic iron fist inside the filthy exterior. The rational technology of the V-chip floating inside the Hollywood programming cesspool? What an insidious compost-modern solution, softening us up for more globalist control subtleties, no doubt.
Some quotes from A.N. Whitehead on the mind-body relation, free trade and the architecture of cyberspace from Adventures of Ideas:
The individualistic liberalism of the nineteenth century has collapsed, quite unexpectedly. So long as the trading middle classes were dominant as the group to be satisfied, its doctrines were self-evident. As soon as industrialism and education produced in large numbers the modern type of artisan, its whole basis was widely challenged. Again the necessity for large capital, with the aid of legal ingenuity produced the commercial corporation with limited liability. The introduction into the arena of this new type of “person” has considerably modified the effective meaning of the characteristic liberal doctrine of contractual freedom. It is one thing to claim such freedom as a natural right for human persons, and quite another to claim it for corporate persons. Today private property is mainly a legal fiction, and apart from such legal determination its outlines are completely indefinite. There is a striking analogy between the hazy notions of justice in Plato’s Republic, and the hazy notions of private property today. The modern artisan, like Thrasymachus of old, is apt to define it as “the will of the stronger.” The whole concept of absolute individuals with absolute rights, and with a contractual power of forming fully defined external relations, has broken down. The human being is inseparable from its environment in each occasion of its existence.
The libertarian free-traders are exposed as believers that corporate rights trump individual rights. A multinational corporation’s rights to dump American workers in favor of third world neo-serfs, working in conditions that would be appalling in this country, trump the individual rights of those neo-serfs since they are not within our national borders, they are outside of our protections. The right to maximize profits by escaping national standards of moral behavior reigns supreme. Again a convergence with the socialist/liberal leftists who believe that grievance group rights trump individual rights. Individual rights lose out irregardless of starting ideological positions. Within America, individual rights can only be regained by a twin assault on both group rights and corporate rights, a pox on both their houses.
The favorite doctrine of the shift from a customary basis for society to a contractual basis, is founded on shallow sociology. There is no escape from customary status. In terms of high-grade human society, there is always the customary fact as an essential element in the meaning of every contractual obligation. There can be no contract which does not presuppose custom, and no custom leaving no loophole for spontaneous contract. It is this truth that gives vitality to the Anglo-American Common Law. It is an instrument, in the hands of skilled experts, for the interpretation of explicit contract in terms of implicit status. No code of verbal statement can ever exhaust the shifting background or presupposed fact. But contract is a mode of expression for spontaneity. Otherwise it is meaningless, a futile gesture of consciousness. In the end nothing is effective except massively coordinated inheritance. Sporadic spontaneity is composed of flashes mutually thwarting each other. Ideas have to be sustained, disentangled, diffused, and coordinated with the background. Finally they pass into exemplification in action.
This sounds like the Embodied Reason vs. Disembodied Ideology discussion all over again. “Massively coordinated inheritance” is what must be architecturally designed into cyberspace to make it effective. The ideas germinated and grown in cyberspace still must pass into our geographical communities, to be exemplified by action.
A good working definition of a “Chartrian” is that he is Embodied, that is, just as mind and body are conjoined, so are the social relations of an “artifact” (the facts of its creation, use, and maintenance) conjoined with the subjective feelings towards that “artifact.”
This is the idea behind e-cash and encryption. Also the idea behind getting the political powers that be, that control the military and police powers of the State, to avert their gaze from the activities in protected on-line enclaves, for the sake of the preservation of tiny bits of independent thought in the world. E-cash and encryption are coming along substantially better than the political protection end of things. Everybody does not need control of these enclaves, quality counts here, not quantity.
Tocqueville blamed the very foundation of our democracy, “In the principle of equality I very clearly discern two tendencies; one leading the mind of every man to untried thoughts, the other prohibiting him from thinking at all.”
Again, Tocqueville points to this as an endemic problem, “It may be foreseen that a democratic people will not easily give credence to divine missions; that they will laugh at modern prophets; and that they will seek to discover the chief arbiter of their belief within, and not beyond, the limits of their kind.” Man is the measure of all things, it sunk the Greeks, it sunk the Romans, it’s sinking us, it is disembodied.
A good working definition of a “Chartrian” is that he is Embodied, that is, just as mind and body are conjoined, so are the social relations of an “artifact” (the facts of its creation, use, and maintenance) conjoined with the subjective feelings towards that “artifact.”
This is the idea behind e-cash and encryption. Also the idea behind getting the political powers that be, that control the military and police powers of the State, to avert their gaze from the activities in protected on-line enclaves, for the sake of the preservation of tiny bits of independent thought in the world. E-cash and encryption are coming along substantially better than the political protection end of things. Everybody does not need control of these enclaves, quality counts here, not quantity.
Tocqueville blamed the very foundation of our democracy, “In the principle of equality I very clearly discern two tendencies; one leading the mind of every man to untried thoughts, the other prohibiting him from thinking at all.”
Again, Tocqueville points to this as an endemic problem, “It may be foreseen that a democratic people will not easily give credence to divine missions; that they will laugh at modern prophets; and that they will seek to discover the chief arbiter of their belief within, and not beyond, the limits of their kind.” Man is the measure of all things, it sunk the Greeks, it sunk the Romans, it’s sinking us, it is disembodied.
Spiritual Aspects of the Mind-Body Relation
The spiritual aspects of the mind-body relation pertain directly to Cyber-Chartres. I am posting some quotes by J. Scott Kelso, from his book Dynamic Patterns on this relation from a scientific viewpoint. His terminology may be unfamiliar, but it will be seen that some major changes in the scientific outlook are soon to be “in the air”:
For me, however, the greatest drawback to understanding the mind-body problem is the very absence of a common vocabulary and theoretical framework within which to couch mental, brain, and behavioral events. Without commensurate description, how is it possible to see the interconnections? And, without a common conceptual language to reconcile the mental and the physical, how can psychology be called a science? My view is that accurate description is not enough for a science of behavior, whether of brains or people. Necessary perhaps, but not sufficient. I doubt very much that naturally occurring behaviors are the place to find laws of behavioral and neurological organization. Rather, most naturalistic behavior is simply too complicated to yield fundamental principles. The latter, after all, are hidden from us and takes, I believe, either special strategies or pure serendipity (of the Archimedes in the bathtub kind) to reveal them. Relatedly, description and explanation are obviously not the same. Explanation demands theory and a coupling of theory to experiment.
This is a breath of fresh air, most physicists insist that they can only “describe” what happens, and that it’s the height of irrationality to expect an explanation from them. At least some scientists still know what science is. I suspect that explanation is simply too hard for latter-day physicists to accomplish, so they sweep the notion under the rug and hope the taxpayers who cough up grant money don’t notice that gigantic bump in the carpet that keeps tripping them.
Of course, these days the characterization of mental life is dictated by a machine metaphor: the brain is viewed by many as a sophisticated computer whose software is the mind. Laymen and scientists alike are prone to describing almost any activity as involving “information processing.” Certainly one can model some of the functions of the brain on a computer as we do, say, with the weather, but that should not make us believe that the brain, any more than the weather, is a computer. Yet many, in my view, take the machine metaphor far too literally. Computers and servomechanisms are not natural systems but artifacts whose characteristics are not especially relevant to understanding living things. Supplanting artifactual machine views of mind and action with the language of dynamical systems and the concepts of self-organization may be easier said than done, but that is the journey we embark on here. In self-organizing systems, contents and representations emerge from the systemic tendency of open, nonequilibrium systems to form patterns.
This mind-as-machine or mind-as-computer scientists are simply intellectually bankrupt. Our schools are turning out brains trained to understand fuzzy logic, except the brains only end up being fuzzy and not logical.
What then are the barriers to understanding brain and behavioral complexity? Reductionism alone is bankrupt, and systems models - at least of the entire nervous system - are so full of holes that the emperor might as well be naked. Here I reiterate a central premise of the present approach: no single level of description has ontological priority over any other. How then might levels be related? One problem is that each level has its own jargon that is familiar only to the specialists who speak it. The virtually insurmountable task seems to be one of translating back and forth among the many languages that separate molecular biology and behavior. Maybe some multilingual genius will show up. And I propose just one language to cut across biophysicese, biochemese, neurophyiologese, and psychologese: the language of pattern-forming dynamical systems. Putting my metaphysics out front, the linkage between coherent events at different scales of observation from the cell membrane to the cerebral cortex is by virtue of shared dynamics, not because any single level is more or less fundamental than any other.
In other words, physics has no precedence over neurophysiology, there is no such thing as a “theory of everything,” because “everything” hasn’t been invented by mind yet, nor will it ever be. There are no stand-alone “fundamental” laws in science anywhere to be seen. It is a whole, unfragmented.
Self-organized matter, cracking itself into meaningfully coherent modes whose time-dependent behavior expresses the mind itself. Instead of trying to reduce biology and psychology to chemistry and physics, the task now is to extend our physical understanding of the organization of living things. But there is a huge void in our knowledge of what single cells do versus what many of them do when they cooperate. That’s why it is crucial to discover the laws and principles of coordination in living things. It is this coordination that lies at the root of understanding ourselves and the world we live in. I think this advice [to study neurons] is misguided and that the real solution to the mind-brain-body problem rests in how information is to be conceived in living things, in general, and the brain in particular. The pattern dynamics contain couplings that are quite independent of the physical medium through which they are realized. They are, strictly speaking, informational structure. (Though not, I hasten to add, in the purely syntactic sense of information used by physicists and engineers.) Theoretically, “the will,” or willing, has no meaning outside its influence on the order parameters or pattern variables. To be informationally meaningful, any conscious thought, will or intention must be expressed, in this theory, in terms of relevant pattern variables. Intending a behavior or learning a behavior or perceptually specifying a behavior means sculpting the coordination dynamics.
If thoughts, according to theory, must be expressed in terms of... collective variables that characterize dynamic patterns of spatiotemporal activity in the brain, then the following conclusion appears logically inescapable: an order parameter isomorphism connects mind and body, will and brain, mental and neural events. Mind itself is a spatiotemporal pattern that molds the metastable dynamic patterns of the brain. Mind-body dualism is replaced by a single isomorphism, the heart of which is semantically meaningful pattern variables.
Meaning is inherent in the universe, or you cannot discover “mind” or “consciousness” at all. When Disembodied Ideology pretends that the universe is remade each second, it overthrows the authority of history, and consequently destroys the meaning and context that can only come from an understanding of history. Absent meaning and context, you are faced with roving gangs of youth, intent on securing material pleasures of the moment at the expense of the structural integrity of your skull, or wandering herds of youth, seeking the next fix of booze, drugs or sex to pass the time until they die, at the expense of the taxpayer’s or consumer’s pocketbook to pay for the adverse societal effects of their “victimless” crimes.
Privately sordid lives produce deceptive, crud worldviews. The movements of the body are inseparable from the thoughts of the mind. Purity of our bodily movements is a prerequisite to purity of our worldviews.
Another good resource for understanding the spiritual aspect of the mind-body relation is William Poteat’s Recovering the Ground. He weaves in Eric Voegelin’s ideas and Michael Polanyi’s ideas with Plato’s idea of metaxy, the link between the immanent mind-body and the transcendent realm.
Privately sordid lives produce deceptive, crud worldviews. The movements of the body are inseparable from the thoughts of the mind. Purity of our bodily movements is a prerequisite to purity of our worldviews.
Another good resource for understanding the spiritual aspect of the mind-body relation is William Poteat’s Recovering the Ground. He weaves in Eric Voegelin’s ideas and Michael Polanyi’s ideas with Plato’s idea of metaxy, the link between the immanent mind-body and the transcendent realm.
Common Origin of the Internet and the Gothic Cathedral
The origins of the notion of Cyber-Chartres go way back, to recap from my history paper:
Spengler first defines our quest for meaning and knowledge, “All modes of comprehending the world may, in the last analysis, be described as Morphology.” Then he predicts the outcome of our quest with uncanny accuracy: “The final issue to which the Faustian wisdom tends... is the dissolution of all knowledge into a vast system of morphological relationships.... An infinitesimal music of the boundless world-space - that is the deep unresting longing of this soul...” He is referring here to the interdisciplinary linkage of all scientific and technical knowledge, in combination with everything worth preserving on the humanities side, all connected through hypertext in cyberspace! All human knowledge available on demand to everyone, this was one of the original aims of Western Culture.

Our immense cyberspace network is being constructed solely to fulfill the vision of the early Western Culture of 1050-1300, “Cyber-Chartres” is literally what is going on here. We had been discussing Summa Theologica: Thomas Aquinas - Chartres Cathedral - more convergences. I didn’t choose Chartres by accident!
As Ralph Waldo Emerson said in The Conduct of Life: “Behind every individual closes organization; before him opens liberty, - the Better, the Best.... Liberation of the will from the sheaths and clogs of organization which he has outgrown, is the end and aim of this world....” The key is “outgrown.” Growth “outgrows” what was in the past. Stasis only works when the environment doesn’t change too much. But the more powerful our minds become, the greater the rate of change in the environment, making stasis a less adaptive strategy to pursue.
Tocqueville wrote, “It profits a state but little to be affluent and free if it is perpetually exposed to be pillaged or subjugated; its manufactures and commerce are of small advantage if another nation has the empire of the seas and gives the law in all the markets of the globe.” Who gives the law in the markets, so that “free trade” occurs? Free to whom? The little guy’s ox always gets gored by nameless, faceless bureaucrats cutting deals and ginning up regulations in faraway Brussels, or New York, or Tokyo. Who will “give the law” to protect Cyber-Chartres from the destroyers?
As Ralph Waldo Emerson said in The Conduct of Life: “Behind every individual closes organization; before him opens liberty, - the Better, the Best.... Liberation of the will from the sheaths and clogs of organization which he has outgrown, is the end and aim of this world....” The key is “outgrown.” Growth “outgrows” what was in the past. Stasis only works when the environment doesn’t change too much. But the more powerful our minds become, the greater the rate of change in the environment, making stasis a less adaptive strategy to pursue.
Tocqueville wrote, “It profits a state but little to be affluent and free if it is perpetually exposed to be pillaged or subjugated; its manufactures and commerce are of small advantage if another nation has the empire of the seas and gives the law in all the markets of the globe.” Who gives the law in the markets, so that “free trade” occurs? Free to whom? The little guy’s ox always gets gored by nameless, faceless bureaucrats cutting deals and ginning up regulations in faraway Brussels, or New York, or Tokyo. Who will “give the law” to protect Cyber-Chartres from the destroyers?
Symbolism and the Modern Ziggurat
Sometimes I think that conformist individuals, who already look so furtively towards authority to find out what’s ok to say, to do, to think, will become a majority in the future. There will come a time when they will stop questioning, and just plod along silently. This would be the natural outcome of the Enlightenment project, a camouflaged philosophical stockyard, the appearance of unlimited freedom coexisting with the reality of a liberty made to order for them by the “unapproachable” ones sitting at the top of the skyscrapers. There was a short science fiction story written in 1951, “The Marching Morons” by C.M. Kornbluth (republished in His Share of Glory, 1997) about a time when the 5% of the cognitive elite removed themselves from sight and managed the rest of the 95% of the world remotely.
Who sits in the offices, the penthouse suites, at the top of our modern skyscrapers? The international bankers, the bureaucratic globalists, the multinational corporate chieftains presiding over an empire of first-world “knowledge workers” coordinating third-world interchangeable “warm bodies” or neo-serfs. The Mayan Temple, the Sumerian Ziggurat in downtown America! Nothing changes. When AT&T lays off 40,000 employees, it should be viewed properly as a ritual of human sacrifice to propitiate the god Mammon.
Discussions of Cyberspace Architecture and High Art combined with discussions of Form and Spirit, and the restlessness of the world under the global surveillance state, keeps the focus on ants and “teeming masses of sheep” (as the globalists term them).
The conversation I had today, was with someone who was sure that individuals all over the world were getting extremely restless to take down the existing structures of power and money. (He was a Korean immigrant newspaper vendor with limited English, starved for political discussion.) I explained the recurring form of the Ziggurat in all the great cities around the world, and how the “high ones” in the penthouse offices appeased the god of money by laying off workers in a modernized ritual of human sacrifice. He saw this instantly, and commented how things haven’t changed for humanity in 5,000 years. This must be a “self-evident” truth that crosses cultures.
I said that psychologically, when you are one of those on top, you look out your window at the individuals on the streets below, and you can’t help but think of them as ants. It is simply an overpowering image. Sitting on top of the skyscrapers, making decisions that literally are the springs of action directing the world of today, allows the image of sheep, of those you are impacting, to creep into your subconscious thoughts. The individuals below are sheep and ants, that is the psychological mind-set of those above, no matter how noble-minded you were prior to your journey up the steps of the Ziggurat. You have all the details of each and every one of the ants and sheep there at your fingertips, on your computer, courtesy of the global surveillance state. Such power in the hands of the priests, they’re extracting involuntary confessions.
He said, but love will break the structures of power and money, and overthrow those on top, we need only love one another. I said, but the skyscrapers will still be there, those that overthrow the existing “high ones” will ascend floor-by-floor to sit at the top in their turn. The same psychological mind-set will arrive.
What makes a civilization turn away from the form of the “high ones” atop the Ziggurats performing rituals of human sacrifice to appease the gods? Why do some cultures live on the farm, or in the forest, or in sprawling villages never producing the temple structures from whence the “high ones” act as mediators between the masses and the gods? What is the form of spirituality that makes ambitious individuals not desire to climb the Ziggurat, or get promoted upstairs, floor by floor, to arrive at the penthouse offices of our downtown financial temples? When will the downtown skyscrapers be utterly abandoned? Isn’t the medieval castle-and-cathedral form better for the nurturing of culture?
The “high ones” atop the downtown skyscrapers seem to have a voice, is it that the sheep down below can only bleat? Or that the ants are too busy scurrying around building colonies to speak? Are the politically correct banalities uttered in that pseudo-pompous, hushed cadence, that pass for public discourse today, simply nothing more than sheep-bleatings? Is all the discourse in Cyberspace merely sheep-bleatings? The “unapproachable ones” atop the modern Ziggurats have granted the ants and sheep a made-to-order liberty in which they are allowed to be only ants and sheep, in exchange for the appearance of absolute individual freedom.
Who sits in the offices, the penthouse suites, at the top of our modern skyscrapers? The international bankers, the bureaucratic globalists, the multinational corporate chieftains presiding over an empire of first-world “knowledge workers” coordinating third-world interchangeable “warm bodies” or neo-serfs. The Mayan Temple, the Sumerian Ziggurat in downtown America! Nothing changes. When AT&T lays off 40,000 employees, it should be viewed properly as a ritual of human sacrifice to propitiate the god Mammon.
Discussions of Cyberspace Architecture and High Art combined with discussions of Form and Spirit, and the restlessness of the world under the global surveillance state, keeps the focus on ants and “teeming masses of sheep” (as the globalists term them).
The conversation I had today, was with someone who was sure that individuals all over the world were getting extremely restless to take down the existing structures of power and money. (He was a Korean immigrant newspaper vendor with limited English, starved for political discussion.) I explained the recurring form of the Ziggurat in all the great cities around the world, and how the “high ones” in the penthouse offices appeased the god of money by laying off workers in a modernized ritual of human sacrifice. He saw this instantly, and commented how things haven’t changed for humanity in 5,000 years. This must be a “self-evident” truth that crosses cultures.
I said that psychologically, when you are one of those on top, you look out your window at the individuals on the streets below, and you can’t help but think of them as ants. It is simply an overpowering image. Sitting on top of the skyscrapers, making decisions that literally are the springs of action directing the world of today, allows the image of sheep, of those you are impacting, to creep into your subconscious thoughts. The individuals below are sheep and ants, that is the psychological mind-set of those above, no matter how noble-minded you were prior to your journey up the steps of the Ziggurat. You have all the details of each and every one of the ants and sheep there at your fingertips, on your computer, courtesy of the global surveillance state. Such power in the hands of the priests, they’re extracting involuntary confessions.
He said, but love will break the structures of power and money, and overthrow those on top, we need only love one another. I said, but the skyscrapers will still be there, those that overthrow the existing “high ones” will ascend floor-by-floor to sit at the top in their turn. The same psychological mind-set will arrive.
What makes a civilization turn away from the form of the “high ones” atop the Ziggurats performing rituals of human sacrifice to appease the gods? Why do some cultures live on the farm, or in the forest, or in sprawling villages never producing the temple structures from whence the “high ones” act as mediators between the masses and the gods? What is the form of spirituality that makes ambitious individuals not desire to climb the Ziggurat, or get promoted upstairs, floor by floor, to arrive at the penthouse offices of our downtown financial temples? When will the downtown skyscrapers be utterly abandoned? Isn’t the medieval castle-and-cathedral form better for the nurturing of culture?
The “high ones” atop the downtown skyscrapers seem to have a voice, is it that the sheep down below can only bleat? Or that the ants are too busy scurrying around building colonies to speak? Are the politically correct banalities uttered in that pseudo-pompous, hushed cadence, that pass for public discourse today, simply nothing more than sheep-bleatings? Is all the discourse in Cyberspace merely sheep-bleatings? The “unapproachable ones” atop the modern Ziggurats have granted the ants and sheep a made-to-order liberty in which they are allowed to be only ants and sheep, in exchange for the appearance of absolute individual freedom.
The Birth of Culture
After discussing Allan Gowans’ thesis about the High Arts abandoning their role, I will add this passage from Spengler’s Decline of the West, it connects quite clearly: “A Culture is born in the moment when a great soul awakens out of the proto-spirituality of ever-childish humanity, and detaches itself, a form from the formless, a bounded and mortal thing from the boundless and enduring.”
Ever-childish humanity, indeed! Chalk up a lot of the misguided myths along the lines of the science fiction “brain-in-a-vat” to our natural childishness. But these misguided myths clearly belong to the category of proto-spirituality leading us to the next culture. How can a new channel of High Art be opened up, after the old channels were effectively closed off by the Enlightenment hundreds of years ago? Do we not need “a great soul” to awaken “out of the proto-spirituality of ever-childish humanity,” and detach itself, “a form from the formless, a bounded and mortal thing from the boundless and enduring?”
Ever-childish humanity, indeed! Chalk up a lot of the misguided myths along the lines of the science fiction “brain-in-a-vat” to our natural childishness. But these misguided myths clearly belong to the category of proto-spirituality leading us to the next culture. How can a new channel of High Art be opened up, after the old channels were effectively closed off by the Enlightenment hundreds of years ago? Do we not need “a great soul” to awaken “out of the proto-spirituality of ever-childish humanity,” and detach itself, “a form from the formless, a bounded and mortal thing from the boundless and enduring?”
But its living existence, that sequence of great epochs which define and display the stages of fulfillment, is an inner passionate struggle to maintain the Idea against the powers of Chaos without and the unconscious muttering deep-down within. It is not only the artist who struggles against the resistance of the material and the stifling of the idea within him. Every Culture stands in a deeply-symbolical, almost in a mystical, relation to the Extended, the space, in which and through which it strives to actualize itself.
Space, again. Cyberspace is the modern vision of the “Extended.” The global surveillance state which is swiftly reducing all of us to ants, is forcing us to turn inward for “Extension.” We are seen, tracked, and controlled outside. Absent a frontier, absent space to dream in, and move in, humanity implodes into a stagnant dogmatic sinkhole. We are reaching out, through cyberspace, with all the force of an amoeba wiggling around in search of food. It’s necessity.
The aim once attained - the idea, the entire content of inner possibilities, fulfilled and made externally actual - the Culture suddenly hardens, it mortifies, its blood congeals, its force breaks down, and it becomes Civilization, the thing which we feel and understand in the words Egypticism, Byzantinism, Mandarinism. This - the inward and outward fulfillment, the finality, that awaits every living Culture - is the purport of all the historic ‘declines,’ amongst them that decline of the Classical which we know so well and fully, and another decline, entirely comparable to it in course and duration, which will occupy the first centuries of the coming millennium but is heralded already and sensible in and around us today - the decline of the West.
Of course High Art abandons its functions when it has “congealed.” The entire field of human endeavor defaults to the search for power in order to obtain money, or the search for money to obtain power. All other channels are gummed up. All I see around me is Celebrity Worship or Authority Worship, or else the pursuit of positions of Celebrity or Authority.
I think of knowledge as being the conjunction of value and fact. Each culture brings different values to bear on the same facts, hence, each culture has different knowledge of the same facts. When we describe the technological progression from face-to-face, to print, to cyberspace as being descending levels of abstraction, winding down into a version of Dante’s hell, we are really talking about a change in the nature of the facts. Technology changes facts, culture changes values. Same culture, same values has a different knowledge of the same content when technology has altered the presentational facts of the content.
This is an odd connection here. Generally speaking, spirit and concreteness are quite in opposition to each other, yet we seem to be throwing them together. Concreteness brings more facts into play, but spirit brings more values into play. Knowledge is altered in both cases, but not necessarily degraded. The needs of each succeeding generation do change, knowledge must be continually sifted and sifted again, to make it valuable to the requirements of the day, and to the formation of dreams for tomorrow.
Plato made the case that only speech should be allowed in the Republic, that print should be discouraged because it is so subject to harmful misinterpretation. Text and speech are very different, suitable for very different purposes. Who’s to say which purposes are more important, or more worthy? A big problem today is the denaturing of time, where everything that goes on the web or into someone’s hard drive, never disappears. It is why Plato thought the written word to be truly dangerous, a seductive artifact, that face-to-face speech is what was vital and safe.
Pre-Vatican II Catholics had more ties to concreteness through the Magisterium and the Tridentine Mass. For Protestants, the text of the Bible alone sufficed for everything, as interpreted by the authority of the Holy Spirit in each individual. The whole Protestant Revolution was a continuation of the Disembodiment arising from the proto-spirituality of the Chartres Cathedral and Scholasticism epoch. Extension, Space, was placed at the pinnacle of spirituality in this epoch, and this is where the modern myths of today, come from. Perfectibility, the Protestant Ethic, the unbounded power of capitalism reaching outward and inward, the “brain-in-a-vat,” nanotechnology’s Material Abundance freeing Spirit to roam at will, they’re all of a set piece.
I think of knowledge as being the conjunction of value and fact. Each culture brings different values to bear on the same facts, hence, each culture has different knowledge of the same facts. When we describe the technological progression from face-to-face, to print, to cyberspace as being descending levels of abstraction, winding down into a version of Dante’s hell, we are really talking about a change in the nature of the facts. Technology changes facts, culture changes values. Same culture, same values has a different knowledge of the same content when technology has altered the presentational facts of the content.
This is an odd connection here. Generally speaking, spirit and concreteness are quite in opposition to each other, yet we seem to be throwing them together. Concreteness brings more facts into play, but spirit brings more values into play. Knowledge is altered in both cases, but not necessarily degraded. The needs of each succeeding generation do change, knowledge must be continually sifted and sifted again, to make it valuable to the requirements of the day, and to the formation of dreams for tomorrow.
Plato made the case that only speech should be allowed in the Republic, that print should be discouraged because it is so subject to harmful misinterpretation. Text and speech are very different, suitable for very different purposes. Who’s to say which purposes are more important, or more worthy? A big problem today is the denaturing of time, where everything that goes on the web or into someone’s hard drive, never disappears. It is why Plato thought the written word to be truly dangerous, a seductive artifact, that face-to-face speech is what was vital and safe.
Pre-Vatican II Catholics had more ties to concreteness through the Magisterium and the Tridentine Mass. For Protestants, the text of the Bible alone sufficed for everything, as interpreted by the authority of the Holy Spirit in each individual. The whole Protestant Revolution was a continuation of the Disembodiment arising from the proto-spirituality of the Chartres Cathedral and Scholasticism epoch. Extension, Space, was placed at the pinnacle of spirituality in this epoch, and this is where the modern myths of today, come from. Perfectibility, the Protestant Ethic, the unbounded power of capitalism reaching outward and inward, the “brain-in-a-vat,” nanotechnology’s Material Abundance freeing Spirit to roam at will, they’re all of a set piece.
World Surveillance State
The jet trails in our skies is the visible “net” that is part and parcel of the made-to-order liberty that has been fashioned for us by the “high ones” while we feel the exhilaration of whizzing along the “free”way in our apparent absolute freedom. Above that visible “net” of jet trails left by the lofty, impatient functionaries zipping to important meetings, is another truly scary “net” of the spy satellites [of the Deep State]. In a 1996 TV interview with a retiring Admiral, he stated that by 2000, our battlefield commanders will have at their fingertips, every human movement over the whole battlefield in real-time, day or night, clear or cloudy, anywhere on the face of the earth. This really brought home to me how this upper tier “net” seals us all in! I sure am glad this Admiral was on my side, such an extraordinary amount of power at one’s command, I feel a lot safer at night now!
I think of the “obscenity” of Communist monolithic buildings, the Disembodied Ideology school of architecture, in Bucharest, in Warsaw, in Beijing, in Moscow. Hideous things, why haven’t they been utterly cast down and the earth sown with salt where they once stood? Because the Disembodied Ideology holds the ex-Communist populations still in thrall, it has not gone away. I once wouldn’t believe that the Cold War would be over until the Berlin Wall was torn down. Now I don’t believe it will be over until every monumental building of Communist origin is destroyed without a trace. Those politicians occupying these buildings cannot help but fall back into the bad old ways, everything in their surrounding screams at them to exercise gangster power.
It is not just that the binary machine language underlying all cyberspace is unitary, it is that universal translation services or software will be coming “on-line” soon, that will enable anyone, anywhere to communicate to anyone else, and have the communications show up on your computer in the language and the style you have specified. The translations will be transparent. A unity of humanity, poised to do what else? leave earth for good. Too hemmed in here under the tiers of “nets.” And if it proves too difficult to get away from earth, we’ll have some extremely upset people on our hands.
I think of the “obscenity” of Communist monolithic buildings, the Disembodied Ideology school of architecture, in Bucharest, in Warsaw, in Beijing, in Moscow. Hideous things, why haven’t they been utterly cast down and the earth sown with salt where they once stood? Because the Disembodied Ideology holds the ex-Communist populations still in thrall, it has not gone away. I once wouldn’t believe that the Cold War would be over until the Berlin Wall was torn down. Now I don’t believe it will be over until every monumental building of Communist origin is destroyed without a trace. Those politicians occupying these buildings cannot help but fall back into the bad old ways, everything in their surrounding screams at them to exercise gangster power.
It is not just that the binary machine language underlying all cyberspace is unitary, it is that universal translation services or software will be coming “on-line” soon, that will enable anyone, anywhere to communicate to anyone else, and have the communications show up on your computer in the language and the style you have specified. The translations will be transparent. A unity of humanity, poised to do what else? leave earth for good. Too hemmed in here under the tiers of “nets.” And if it proves too difficult to get away from earth, we’ll have some extremely upset people on our hands.
Technology Carrying Ideology and Directing Worship
Let me digress on “technology” and “artifact” to attempt to reach an understanding of our position on the moral neutrality of technology. “Seductive artifacts” are not immoral or evil by themselves, seductive, yes, evil, no. The good or evil still comes from that act of turning to the sky or to the mud, an absolute morality. However, I willingly grant that the mud can be made to look like candy, and the sky can be threatening or gray. Great effort must be made to discover that the candy is really mud, and then discarded, like the Communist monolithic structures. Seduction by deception is different than seduction by truth.
There is a strong affinity between space, morality, purpose, function, mutability. Space is appearance, not substance (or ‘form’). Sticks and bricks have as strong an affinity to time (via time’s connection to matter) as they do to space. No one speaks of cybertime, just cyberspace, yet cybertime is where substance comes into play. On the other hand, space does have an affinity to capital (via space’s connection with energy), because capital, or money, is symbolic energy (or ‘frozen desire’).
More on this later, when I get into the creation sequence of “function-design-form.” What are we creating in cyberspace and cybertime anyway? I have described humanism as directing energy jointly in space and technicism as arranging matter in time. From this, you can see that capital, as ‘symbolic energy’, falls squarely in the humanism side. The creation sequence is analogous to the governance sequence of “morality-politics-rationality.” Humanism - capital - begins with pure morals and proceeds through a political process to technicism - artifact - with pure reason.
Technology is not morally neutral when it still is in the midst of the political and design processes of governance and creation, but by the time it results in a fixed artifact, there is only rationality in it, no morality whatsoever, unless the artifact becomes mutable again and the human will comes into play once more. So I’ve abandoned my previous position that “technology is morally neutral” in favor of the more precise position that “fixed artifacts are morally neutral.” There’s not a lick of rationality in pure morality, nor is there a lick of morality in pure rationality, but neither purity has any isolated existence at all except as abstractions in our feeble brains. Human volition must be present in technological processes for morality to come into play at all.
To get at an understanding of “artifact” vs. “technology” and where we are ultimately headed with our design and governance processes, I am going to quote some from my history paper:
There is a strong affinity between space, morality, purpose, function, mutability. Space is appearance, not substance (or ‘form’). Sticks and bricks have as strong an affinity to time (via time’s connection to matter) as they do to space. No one speaks of cybertime, just cyberspace, yet cybertime is where substance comes into play. On the other hand, space does have an affinity to capital (via space’s connection with energy), because capital, or money, is symbolic energy (or ‘frozen desire’).
More on this later, when I get into the creation sequence of “function-design-form.” What are we creating in cyberspace and cybertime anyway? I have described humanism as directing energy jointly in space and technicism as arranging matter in time. From this, you can see that capital, as ‘symbolic energy’, falls squarely in the humanism side. The creation sequence is analogous to the governance sequence of “morality-politics-rationality.” Humanism - capital - begins with pure morals and proceeds through a political process to technicism - artifact - with pure reason.
Technology is not morally neutral when it still is in the midst of the political and design processes of governance and creation, but by the time it results in a fixed artifact, there is only rationality in it, no morality whatsoever, unless the artifact becomes mutable again and the human will comes into play once more. So I’ve abandoned my previous position that “technology is morally neutral” in favor of the more precise position that “fixed artifacts are morally neutral.” There’s not a lick of rationality in pure morality, nor is there a lick of morality in pure rationality, but neither purity has any isolated existence at all except as abstractions in our feeble brains. Human volition must be present in technological processes for morality to come into play at all.
To get at an understanding of “artifact” vs. “technology” and where we are ultimately headed with our design and governance processes, I am going to quote some from my history paper:
My definition of humanism is: Social (consensual) mediation between subjective self and objective nature evolving in the direction of their conjunction by means of sharing and remembering human purposes used to evaluate truth (interpreting maps of objective nature) and as a catalyst for approaching ever closer to truth (improving maps of objective nature).
My definition of technicism is: Physical (mechanical) mediation between subjective self and objective nature evolving in the direction of their conjunction by means of better approximation of truth (improving maps of objective nature) and as a catalyst for enriching evaluations of truth (interpreting maps of objective nature).
Humanism supplies the vision or the functions and initiates the design process. Technicism supplies the knowledge of what designs result in which forms. Technicism is thus both science and technology…. The conjunction of humanism and technicism is closely linked to adaptability, design, and meaning. All are related to expanding consensual reality through increasing conceptual connections and trust between greater and greater numbers of individuals.
I think cyberspace increases trust in society at large, and I believe firmly that increasing trust is key to the refinement of our concepts, and hence to our evolution of consciousness. I know you can sense the conceptual fermentation occurring in cyberspace, you just have to ignore a lot of garbage to distill the good stuff.
The larger picture, this adaptability, this evolution in the direction of the conjunction of our subjective self and objective nature, or, if you prefer, in the direction of the Logos, the Mediator between the Holy Spirit and the Father boils down to this:
The larger picture, this adaptability, this evolution in the direction of the conjunction of our subjective self and objective nature, or, if you prefer, in the direction of the Logos, the Mediator between the Holy Spirit and the Father boils down to this:
The requirements for individual perfectibility are: the ability to control the immediate environment at will, to ensure our indefinite longevity under ordinary conditions; and extreme physical and mental mutability, to ensure our ability to master all possible novel environments. In other words, we must become “a perpetual living mirror of the universe.”
This last paragraph is part of the ideological presuppositions of cyberspace: perfectibility. Belief in spiritual immortality has been very badly eroded in the world today, due to science’s efforts to focus on what can be materially experimented on. Belief in the future possibility of physical indefinite longevity is the natural outgrowth of this Enlightenment culture we have inherited. These two camps are at least looking forward, unlike the nihilists who only look to the momentary pleasures of the present while they wait to die. Cyberspace is seen in a very hopeful, positive, optimistic way by those with hope for the future, whether it’s a future of physical indefinite longevity for themselves directly, or, more traditionally, for themselves indirectly through their children. Nihilists don’t give a rip about the future, hence, the culture of death, abortion, birth control, euthanasia, ‘unfertility.’ Children are powerfully seduced by cyberspace, not just because it’s mud dressed up as candy, but because of the inchoate sense of hope for the future, for increased trust and conceptual refinements.
Artifacts carrying ideology and directing worship are powerful concepts, I see this Cyber-Chartres link and see the possibilities for both forms of life - on the Ziggurat and off the Ziggurat - to be encouraged on-line.
Part II is here.
Reilly Jones © 2001
Artifacts carrying ideology and directing worship are powerful concepts, I see this Cyber-Chartres link and see the possibilities for both forms of life - on the Ziggurat and off the Ziggurat - to be encouraged on-line.
Part II is here.
Reilly Jones © 2001