Reflections on my book from 2012 Of Gods and Gaia: Men as Gods Gambling with the Earth
Ideas about body and soul, mind and consciousness, have always elicited discussion, becoming more and more controversial in time in the clash of scientific discoveries and moral beliefs. There is now a pronounced tendency to dispense with normative assumptions of human nature in our neurocentric age. The notion of the self is criticised as an illusion, whilst it is even doubted whether it is meaningful to refer to such a thing as human nature as anything other than a culturally-bound projection.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church describes the human being as being created in God’s image and as one person with both a body and a soul. The Catholic Church upholds the sacredness of all human life, establishing the dignity of the human person as the foundation of a moral vision for society.
Ideas of what it is to be a human being are worthy of our exploration, and not just for personal reasons but for social reasons. How the human being is defined and regarded shapes the culture and practices of a society. Denying that there is such a thing as an essential human nature is a denaturalisation that is also a demoralisation and a dehumanisation. The loss of a normative philosophical anthropology here subverts the fundamental unity and equality of the members of the human species, allowing some to prevail over and predate on others.
The religious conception rests the fundamental unity and equality of human beings on their equal relation to the one transcendent God. The human community of friends and equals is God’s dream arising from before the creation of the world (cf. Eph 1:3-14). In this dream, the eternal Son begotten of God the Father takes flesh and blood form, involving more than neurobiological processes of blood, bone, and sinews, but encompassing most of all heart and soul. This is a familial conception, identifying human beings as a familial species. The great family of a common humanity is enabled to discover its true meaning through the mystery of giving life and, from there, sustaining life. Said Rabbi Akiva, 'If a man and a woman are worthy, the Divine presence rests between them.' (Talmud, Genesis Rabbah 68:4.) The ability of the family to initiate its members into a common human brotherhood and sisterhood, nurturing, sustaining, extending, and enriching such familial relations is a socio-political treasure that serves to inform and orient social policies and institutional purposes beyond instrumental and monetary calculation.
All human beings grow together as distinct beings in the awareness of sharing a common origin in God’s love and originary act. In the Christian religion the begetting of the Son is the ineffable mystery of the eternal union between “bringing into being” and “benevolent love” within the life of the Triune God. Such views have been repudiated by the liveliest minds of an age raised on the sufficiency of science and scientific explanation. There is no evidence to sustain such a belief, rendering familial notions of the fundamental unity and equality of human beings doubtful. Many discuss whether it even makes sense to refer to such a thing as human nature. The world is either all physical creation and biological imperatives or cultural and social creation, mere projection within power relations.
A renewed proclamation of this revelation may well be required in a civilisation which is losing sight of what it is to be human. It is easy to blame the naturalisation attendent on the scientific revolution here, but this is far too simplistic. The problem is not naturalism as such but reductionism, particularly the reductionism associated with the bogus metaphysics of mechanicism – 'man the machine.' Inevitably, such notions seeped into practical life, with Marx coming to criticize the capital system as a dehumanisation within an alienated mode of production and Max Weber arguing that the modern rationalized order proceeds 'without regard to persons.' That impersonalism is an expression of a metaphysics that reduces the human being to mechanistic processes and imperatives. Contemporary culture and human community is crying — “groaning as if in labour pains” (cf. Rom 8:22) — for spiritual rebirth, a rebirth in the Spirit, with God redeeming all those who feel lost, abandoned, discarded, or hopelessly estranged from their true selves as well as from others. The mystery of Christ dying on the cross “for us and for our salvation” and Christ's resurrection as “the firstborn of many brothers” (Rom 8:29) underlines the extent to which God’s passion is directed to the redemption and full flourishing of all human beings on a condition of their common, innate, and universal humanity.
In the aftermath of Nietzsche's 'death of God,' with people identifying the abandonment of God and religion as a declaration of independence, such notions seem hopelessly outdated, relics of an age that is beyond recovery. What is all too timely, however, is division, hatred, and inhumanity. For all of the age's much vaunted scientific and material progress, enmity in human relations prevails over amity. Independence of God and religion has not produced a human autonomy that is compatible with solidarity, the very opposite in fact. Modern human beings have felt themselves to be sufficiently god-like as to be able to go it alone, discarding God and connections to enfolded within the love of God to determine existence for themselves. The result is a world in which each asserts the right to determine the good as they see fit, effectively becoming a god in themselves, the arbiter of all truth and justice. The result is a world of rival gods engaged in an endless war of all against all, cancelling one another out. We may live in a post-Christian civilisation but not a post-religious one. The condition which best describes the age is one of a secular religiosity which divides human beings according to personal preferences, self-created identities, and political and ideological commitments. The idea of a common humanity united by the same God, and with it the idea of the human family as a community, has been lost. There is, therefore, a need to renew a lively awareness of God’s passion for humanity and its world. Human beings were made by God “in his image” – “male and female” (Gen 1:27) – as spiritual and sentient beings, both conscious and free. The family is the primary place where all creation speaks with God and bears witness to God's Love. The family is the place which brings us to life and nurtures and sustains life, giving us a foretaste of the heavenly home that constitures our destiny (cf. 2 Cor 5:1), our 'true native land' (Aquinas) where we will live fully our communion with all others and, ultimately, with God. The human species is a family with a common origin and a common goal, a community whose attainment “is hidden, with Christ, in God” (Col 3:1-4).
Paradoxically, a humanism which declares its independence from God has resulted in an inhumanism in which human beings are seen as no more than purposeless balls of meat whirling in meaningless space, related in instrumental means-to-ends to reduce love of neighbour to criteria of economic self-interest and political convenience or to “certain doctrinal or moral points based on specific ideological options” (Evangelii Gaudium, 39). The age is calling us to restore the humanism of the life that bursts forth from God’s passion for human beings qua human beings, affirming a common humanity. The normative commitment to valuing, supporting and defending the life of each and every human being equally is ultimately motivated by God’s unconditional love. Such is God's promise to each and all together.
It's not a fashionable notion. It's not a scientifically defensible notion, either.
Consciousness was once tied closely to moral identity and the notion of innate conscience but in the seventeenth century consciousness began to take on its uniquely modern sense with the emergence of new theories of mind, involving debates over the transparency of the mental, animal consciousness, and innate ideas. In time, a philosophical division opened up between the psychological or phenomenal aspects of thought and the moral sensibility.
Man a Machine (L'homme Machine) was published by French physician and philosopher Julien Offray de La Mettrie in 1747. In this work of materialist philosophy, La Mettrie took the logical next step in extending Descartes' argument that animals are machines, mere automatons responding to external stimuli, to human beings. Karl Popper refers to the continued dominance of La Mettrie's mechanical conception of human beings into the contemporary age:
"Yet the doctrine that man is a machine was argued most forcefully in 1751, long before the theory of evolution became generally accepted, by de La Mettrie; and the theory of evolution gave the problem an even sharper edge, by suggesting there may be no clear distinction between living matter and dead matter. And, in spite of the victory of the new quantum theory, and the conversion of so many physicists to indeterminism, de La Mettrie's doctrine that man is a machine has perhaps more defenders than before among physicists, biologists and philosophers; especially in the form of the thesis that man is a computer."
Popper, K.: Of Clouds and Clocks, included in Objective Knowledge, revised, 1978, p. 224.
I offer the above as a preamble to the point I want to make with respect to the division of humanity into active elites and acted-upon masses which increasingly characterises the contemporary world. Democracy is not merely in abeyance, it is in retreat, along with the respect for common humanity upon which it is predicated. It is impossible to think much of democracy when one thinks so little of so many. When it comes to political and social affairs we are often too close to issues and events to be able to see them clearly. There is, therefore, a need to pull back a little and seek the bigger picture. There is no bigger picture than humanity in relation to God, except a cold and indifferent nature which, in being pointless is also pictureless. The existence of a personal God confers meaning in a way that nature and the operation of its processes without concern for human affairs does not. Seeing the bigger picture means contemplating humanity and what it is to be human. Historically, those who have endeavoured to see places, persons, and things in the large have tended to find that what began as reasoning about human nature, its existence and implications, led almost inexorably to the contemplation and, even, recognition of the divine. This being so it should come as no surprise that in losing sight of God we have come to lose sight of the individual human being and what a human being actually is. That, of course, is a contentious view that would be thoroughly rejected by those who take their stand on biological reality. My concern here is neither to prove nor to persuade with respect to the existence of God or otherwise. I am engaged in the more humble task of asking how moral reasoning leading to true answers binding is at all can be possible beyond mere natural imperatives.
If nature is all that there is, and human beings no more than natural imperatives concerning survival and reproduction before inevitable death, and if the world is, as a disenchanting science claims it to be, objectively valueless, purposeless, and meaningless, then we are entitled to ask the point of anything. We are also entitled to ask what is involved in a naturalisation in which nature comes to be mechanised, instrumentalised, and reified through the scientific voice, with knowledge abstracted from the thing and things known and rendered the possession and monopoly of some over against others.
It is in this context that past and seemingly arcane discussions of human nature become suddenly present and pertinent. These observations are prompted by a growing realisation that nature and human nature are being conceived in ways that are abstracted from actual nature. The scientific and technological revolutions may well have seemed parallel with the democratic revolution, but may also part company when some narrow knowledge/power elite raise themselves above a common humanity – now considered a 'herd' to be controlled rather than a 'family' to commune with – and aggrandize themselves at the expense of others. The heart is being ripped out of the commons – the political and ethical commons as well as the physical commons – and, deep down, people know it to be wrong and seek to express their unease. The discontented are overruled by those who claim to possess an expertise that the common people lack. The knowledge/power elite claim a distinctive insight into the workings of nature, including human nature, and this claim to expertise entails also a claim to unquestionable, unanswerable, and unarguable authority. Such people speak in imperative voice and rule with authoritative force.
It is in light of this that it is worth contemplating what it is to be human and what it is to be divine. Past discussions make it clear that this is as old as humanity, and that controversies of human rights are not new but as old as humanity. What is new is that way that human rights have been divorced from their roots in natural law and are now deemed not to be natural rights innate to each and all on account of their common humanity but political rights conferred by the state and the prevailing political community in time and place, equally, withdrawn by the state.
The problem with the political conception is that it renders the whole notion of rights rootless, a mere function of power relations in time and place. Historically, such relations have been asymmetrical in being based on a very uneven distribution of power and resources. Indeed, the movement towards equality in social relationships has been motivated by the egalitarian ideal implicit in the notion of natural rights, the idea that each and all are united in sharing a common human dignity and worth.
The problems arise when the members of a narrow group come to consider themselves to be superior to everyone else and seek to raise themselves above society and above the common 'herd.' So much of what is happening within contemporary environmentalism is driven by an anti-democrative assumption that a narrow group in possession of knowledge and technique are superior to the uncredentialed masses. This is the antithesis of an ecology based on the emergence and evolution of organic forms and is instead rooted in the mechanicistic conceptions of nature and human nature adumbrated above. In fine, instead of an organic change over time there is an attempt to engineer change from above and from without on the part of a narrow group of individuals. Such people are managerialists and technocrats claiming a superior insight over the mass of people.
In recent decades we have seen the rise of technocrats taking the place of actual politicians in recent decades. We can go back to Tony Blair's ditching of socialism with his claim that 'it's not ideology that matters but what works.' And technocrats advance their claim to power and authority on their claim that they know how to make things work. (And make people work, too, given the way that they treat human subjects and citizens as 'things' to manage, manipulate, and control). This is evidence of what Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue exposed as a bureaucratic ideology, involving the serving of material interests and power through politically neutral claims of efficiency and competence grace of a certain knowledge and expertise. This is the ideology that accompanies the systematic erosion of democracy in the contemporary world, with networks of experts supplanting the citizen voice in one key area after another. Democracy, it is claimed, is too slow and messy a political affair to ensure effective decision-making. That claim has two parts: 1) the individual members of the demos, with their own views as to how they should be governed and how common affairs are to be managed, are not fit for efficient purpose ('that's the problem with democracy,' one Green influencer and one-time social media 'friend' commented, 'not enough people know stuff.' It follows that the solution is a politics in which only those who know enough of the right stuff get to make the decisions. Which brings me to the second part of the claim: 2) since politics is about dissensus and disagreement, requiring dialogue and negotiation, politics itself is not fit for the purposes of those who make truth and knowledge the idols to be served.
One thing is clear, however, as we survey the record of technocrats taking the place of politicians: for all of the claims to competence, these people are utterly incompetent, limping from one bad decision to another and leaving a trail of disaster behind them. You can start with Blair if you like, but recent years offer sufficient evidence of the political stupidity of the technocrats, the people who are still insisting that Covid Lockdown was a success and a good template to follow for a climate lockdown, the people hankering after 'green' (digital/central) banking, social credit systems, the centralisation of command and control in the hands of people like them. Looking at Trudeau, Adern, Macron, and now Sunak, it's little wonder that such people seek to bring the curtain down on democracy and politics – they are incompetents who can't bear the scrutiny. Note the ease with which they move through jobs in politics, and then into the ever expanding extra-political global sector dominated by the not-for-profit acronym gang who seek to constrain governance and ensure compliance by a thick and heavy net of rules and regulations. That's how the techno-bureaucratic 'classless' class take control under the corporate form. At last, very late in the day, critics are beginning to call it for what it is - corporate tyranny. 'Progressives' of liberal, leftist, and green persuasion have been played like fiddles, failing to see the extent to which their ideals, principles, and causes have been appropriated, diverted, and perverted. When people on the receiving end of corporate power protest, the 'progressive' ideologues and activists have been quick to shout 'far right.' We are being gamed and groomed, triggered and trolled by masters of the art. The daily controversies - the inanities and insanities of identity politics - are a smokescreen to divert attention from where the real changes are being planned and effected. But one thing is abundantly clear, the technocrats are inept in everything except one thing - extending and embedding their power. They are also thoroughly inhuman. And either reason is sufficient to ensure that they should be nowhere near power and decision-making.
I would go further to argue that we are living in an age of self-proclaimed gods. This development was always implicit in the notion that human beings are entitled to choose the good as they see fit. This results in an endless war between rival goods, with victory going to the most wealthy and powerful – those who have the resources to rule as gods over all others. The ultra rich and powerful, those who are members of the big corporate structures that govern the world, have acquired the power and influence of gods and are able to demand the things that gods always want, which is unconditional loyalty, sacrifice, and worship. The coming technocratic age is the age of 'men as gods,' but only of some men, the rich and powerful, not of a common humanity made in the image of God. The sacrifice being demanded is a bundle made not merely of liberties and rights, but also of what it is to be a human being; what we are expected to offer up to the gods is nothing less than our humanity. And the worship that is demanded entails the acceptance of our dependence and subordination in a hierarchically ordered society.
These new gods take the form of the self-made idols human beings have worship since ancient days; in Marx's idiom, they are the alien powers of state, capital, commodities, money and institutions of all kinds, human creations which have come to escape the conscious control of the their creators and acquire an existential significance. The rich and powerful, the planetary engineers, managers, and technocrats, are the personifications of alien power, these impersonal alein gods. Nevertheless, as personifications, the members of this narrow elite are self-proclaimed deities and actively demand worship, loyalty, and sacrifice on the part of all those they seek to rule. They want the mass of the common people to need them and depend on them for all the necessities of social existence. It's the ancient story of false gods in the service of power and control. The ancient gods demanded that those subject to them actively and openly demonstrate their need for them, and lived in terror of their not being needed by the human beings they sought to rule. It follows that human independence, both individually and collectively, affirming the unity of autonomy and solidarity, is to be actively undermined and extirpated. The rule of the narrow group, however defined, is always secured by the same means: desocialisation, demoralisation, dehumanisation, desolidarisation, and division, all of which deny humanity the healthy and vital sociality it needs in order to flourish well.
There is a war being waged not merely on democracy but on humanity, turning notions of what it is to be a human being on their head. It is a war that is being waged on human autonomy and solidarity, upon the ability of human beings to live by their own efforts in relation to one another, achieving independence in the context of a mutuality and interdependence. The view would surprise conservative critics of Marx as a statist socialist, but a critical and non-obscurantist reading reveals Marx to be committed to a society of freely associated individuals who have reclaimed their social powers from their alien creations, the alien gods of state and capital, organising them as social powers independent of all false collectivities, including what Marx denounced as 'the abstraction of the political state'(Critique of Hegel's Doctrine of the State). This is the socialism that I support. It also savours a great deal of the conservatism of Burke and Tocqueville. It is a vision of a personal and co-responsibility in the context of individual self-control within a social self-government. The free individuals of such a society are able to step away from 'the system' and 'the machine' and cease working for 'the Man,' pursuing freedom and happiness by their own efforts without having to ask for or need help from anyone other than their compatriots. Free individuals are the managerialists' nightmare, the terror of self-proclaimed deities, for the reason that they seek to live flourishing lives in independence of others' interference, expertise, and patronage. Such individuals are always on collision course with those who seek to rule as gods. It turns out that our 'men as gods,' our would-be universal planetary controllers, are idols of money and power within alienative relations of production. The new gods demanding sacrifice and worship are virulently anti-human and pro-machine. The 'men as gods' who are the personifications of these alien powers are pro-machine by way of a metaphysical imperative; specifically, they are pro the particular machines they have the technology to make and resources to run and have persuaded themselves – and seek to persuade others – that the common human family – the human being as such - is sub-optimal and not fit to exist in the new technocratic age to come. The commitment to planetary engineering will involve the engineering not only of external nature and its processes but of human beings, merging people the technology for which they hold the patents, copyrights, and trademarks. With planetary engineering comes also planetary management, with Weber's 'iron cage' upgraded as a digital cage of 24/7 surveillance of every human action and transaction, good behaviour rewarded and bad behaviour penalised. The standards of good and bad here will be determined not in accordance with objective moral standards relating to the human being but in terms of the the requirements of the 'climate' regime, all environmentally licensed, ordered, and sanctioned by 'the science.'
Such views constitute a continuation and final confirmation of the dehumanisation inherent in the modern declaration of human independence from God and the natural and right way. The story of 'men as gods' is the story of self-made man and his undoing. This undoing stems from an original failure to understand and value what it is to be human, a failure to accept the commonality, egality, and amity implicit in the idea of humanity, the idea that all human beings are entitled to respect on account of being human and are entitled to the same liberties, rights, and aspirations. The religious view of humanity possesses a humility and a sanity that is lacking in notions of 'men as gods,' affirming that human beings are made in the likeness of God and can aspire to and share in the divine without supplanting it or creating it in their own image. The human species is prone to the fatal conceit in which some, on account of knowledge, power, and wealth, come to see themselves as omniscient and omnipotent, having a poor and miserable view of the capacities of their fellow humans. So contemptuous are they of others that they come to see them as less-than-human or, claiming possession of a superior intelligence and technology, all-too-human. The common mass of humanity are deemed unworthy of the demands of the new gods and are denigrated, devalued,and, given the chance, discarded. It is one of the great failings of the human species that, in their brainy brilliance, some may come to persuade themselves they are members of the few entitled to rule, the few who, in straitened environmental circumstances, are worth saving. The great mass, of course, are no more than a 'herd' that is to be discarded. Note the recurring theme of overpopulation in environmental circles and the lazy assumption that the planet would be healthier the less human beings there are.
One thing that is striking is just how stupid the technocrats are. This, of course, is something that Hayek exposed when writing of 'the fatal conceit.' The technocrats routinely criticise democracy as a tardy and messy mechanism that obstructs or prevents effective decision making leading to optimal outcomes. The case for technocracy over democracy rests on the competence of the technocrats. What is most striking about the political record of technocrats, however, is just how incompetent they are. This is not surprising. The technocrats form a narrow group of the same kind of people with the same kind of thoughts and interests. If the intellectual is skilled in reasoning well to poor conclusions, a lot of them together are even more skilled – the claim to knowledge and competence succumbs easily to the errors of groupthink. Further, there is the fact that even the smartest among us are still nowhere near understanding the human consciousness, what it is, where it comes from, and what it is capable of. What it is to be human still eludes the scientific mind, and more than likely always will, because it is not a scientific question, it is a moral question that is capable of being answered only through acts of moral agency. And yet there are bio-technologists out there who are conceited enough to declare that the human is not fit for purpose and is to be tweaked with circuit boards and rewired. And what cannot be made to fit – or simply refuses to conform – will be driven from society, cut off digitally, denied access to the means of everday living, and subject to the social murder of excommunication. This is the social strangulation of those deemed beyond the pale for having deviated from the mainstream narrative.
The most rational members of humanity have often been the most prone to rationalization. Aristotle famously defined human beings as rational beings, opening the Metaphysics with the claim that 'all men desire to know.' Aristotle also argued in the Politics that since certain human beings were slaves by nature then it would involve no injustice to enslave them. Those who were natural slaves shared in the reason that is common to humanity to the extent of recognising it without yet having it.
The 'rational freedom' which is at the heart of my philosophical work is a critical appropriation of Plato and Aristotle in light of a normative philosophical anthropology which values the rational and moral capacities of all human beings qua being human. Rational freedom affirms that the freedom of each is conditional upon and coexistent with the freedom of all human beings. The view is inherently democratic and seeks to check the periodic attempts on the part of a wealthy and powerful few who determine, time and again, to set aside the rights and freedoms of the mass of people. Rational freedom as defined above is a species of the natural law, affirming that natural rights are grounded in the natural law. The removal of the rights and liberties of some is predicated on the ending of the natural law, with claims relating specifically to individual persons being supplanted by vague and abstract notions of equity. The implication is that human rights don't matter because human beings don't matter in themselves, only in relation to some larger purpose determined by our new gods.
In Politics as a Vocation (1918) Max Weber described capitalist modernity as an “iron cage” within which the ostensibly free individuals of liberal society are confined. It seemed an extreme view, but it had the merit of detailing the processes involved in human incarceration. The confinement is all the more effective in being at least as internal as external, embracing the very subjectivity of the individual so that the bars of the cage are internal and hence unseen. It would seem somewhat redundant to predict the emergence of a digital cage confining one and all, a digital enslavement facilitated by the ICT revolution and sustained by round the clock surveillance of our every action and transaction. The cage has long since been constructed, and the technology for its upgrade already exists.
Aristotle rationalised the slavery of some, the many even, as natural. If we dislike that conclusion, at least Aristotle gave us the means to contest it through a recognition that there is such a thing as a human nature, with attributes that all human beings share in common. Aristotle also argued that human beings are rational and social beings, which seems a healthy basis from which to proceed. We are already slaves to our alien powers and gods, and it is part of our predicament that many 'free' individuals do not comprehend the depth of their enslavement, or merely rationalize it themselves as the natural and inevitable way of things. We are just beginning to see the cage that Weber described a century ago, now that it is taking new and even more totalising form. We need to recover the idea of human nature and discuss what it is to be human and alive.
Desocialise, destabilize, and demoralise human beings enough, and they will lose the will to fight and accept their chains. Instead of free and independent citizens who are capable of living off their own, dependent on nothing and no-one, that new gods want servants and worshippers who go along with imperatives, edicts, and mandates, people who are pliable and easy to manipulate and manage by way of fear, people who are willing, even, to sacrifice the life, liberty, and happiness of themselves and their families in order to obey the "authorities" and appease the gods. And all the time the authorities are searching for fears to tap into and channel.