Remembering the Sacredness of the Human Being
An answer to an increasingly nihilistic world-view that grew out of post-modernism and a call to resist the Machine and virtual reality.
I have been following and enamored of the work by Paul Kingsnorth of late and I am intrigued by his exploration of how technology interacts with humanity, and vice versa. He calls it the Machine, a concept which Kingsnorth borrows and expands upon from Lewis Mumford. Kingsnorth defines the Machine simply as, “…the system of power and technology which now entwines us all.” Last May, Kingsnorth published an essay Blanched Sun Blinded Man on Substack as part of an ongoing essay series to describe, understand, and move beyond the Machine. As much as I hate not to go to the primary source, I want to share the Mumford quote that Kingsnorth quoted:
With this new ‘megatechnics’ the dominant minority will create a uniform, all-enveloping, super-planetary structure, designed for automatic operation. Instead of functioning actively as an autonomous personality, man will become a passive, purposeless, machine-conditioned animal whose proper functions, as technicians now interpret man’s role, will either be fed into the machine or strictly limited and controlled for the benefit of depersonalised, collective organisations.
Wow! Matrix anyone? Kingsnorth goes on to discuss the organizations responsible for this spread, that is, mega-corporations. What sends a chill down my spine as I read Mumford’s assertion is two things: he is right, and we are already there.
We are indeed, “machine-conditioned animals” whose data is fed into the machine of social media. When it comes to social media, we are the product, and the algorithms and their masters are feeding our data to other corporations and using it to manipulate us. That’s no secret anymore, documentaries like The Social Network and the work of organizations like the Center for Humane Technology, have ripped away the curtain. More recently, the Twitter Files covered by The Free Press and Matt Taibbi revealed government pressure and compliance on Twitter’s part to control and suppress the COVID narrative and censor anyone that deviated from the CDC guidelines, regardless of whether what was being censored were true – there were even documented incidents where tweets were suppressed that used the CDC’s own data. Being “problematic” was enough to silence and shadow ban reputable scientists, doctors, and researchers that disagreed. The alarms are sounding, but what are we doing about it at the individual level?
There was an estimated 4.26 billion people using social media in 2021, and there are estimates that that number will grow to 6 billion by 2027. We are willing lambs to the slaughter that lie down before the blade. Not only that, but many people have become passive and purposeless – without hope - and social media exacerbates that. As I mentioned in my first essay, depression is up and meaningless abounds in a relative, post-modern world. At the heart of post-modernism is the belief that absolute truth does not exist and nothing has any meaning, it’s all subjective.
Our passivity can be likened to zombieism. We are surrounded by zombies and are even zombified ourselves. You need only to sit in a public space and people watch to see the mindless scrolling that takes place at a baffling rate. When people are idle in their cars at stoplights, they’re on their phones. When people are walking downtown, they’re on their phones. When people sit, waiting for something, they’re on their phones. People will fasten their eyes on their screens and wander around mindlessly bumping into things and risking their lives at unchecked crosswalks.
We are willing participants in the Machine. It’s the ouroboros, personified, a feedback loop. Many of us cannot stand a moment without checking our phones. We’ve been defanged and mollified with an opiate so potent we do not know what to do with ourselves without it. This is all to say that many have willingly given up part of their humanity because their attention is so trained on something so empty. They are worshipers of the Machine and the image it projects to them about themselves and world. The vast majority who are enthralled by social media – and thrall means slavery - are idol worshipping. I used to scoff at the mention of idol worship. What was the big deal? I didn’t understand it at the time, but now that I understand a little more (though by no means perfectly) about the metaphysical implications of idol worship I know that it is truly dehumanizing. But what makes us human?
First, I want to make clear that answering such a question would take a lifetime, and that many before me have done a far better job and are for more intelligent, informed, and enlightened than me. But to simplify, there are two main approaches that have been taken through the ages of human thought that have been the most influential: scientific and religious.
If we started with the science of what makes us human, we’d wind up with an evolutionary tale from small mouse-like mammal to our ape ancestors who began walking upright, whose brains grew from scavenging and eating animal bone marrow, who became tool makers, and hunters and gatherers, who migrated out of Africa and spread and diversified throughout the world. We could talk about the discovery of the gene and the mapping of the human genome. We could delve into what we look like at the atomic and molecular levels as carbon-based organisms. Or wonder at our perfect anatomy and examine the bones, ligaments, tissues, vital organs, and structures that make up our bodies. All of this would be true, but it doesn’t tell us what humans areor how to be or act in the world. It is not enough, it is inadequate, and it reduces us to the sum of our parts.
Instead, if we turn to religion, such as Christianity (which I must rely on as I am a Westerner and it is the foundation of our culture and one of the most influential religions in history), we’d hear something completely different. Humans are part divine, made in the image of God – that is made with intelligence and a mind. What a remarkable thought! We have souls that are immortal, at the core of a flawed, fallen, temporal body that is easily tempted by almost anything from lust to greed to sloth to pride – oh wait, that sounds familiar... We are imperfect but worthy of forgiveness. We are tempted by so many things that turn us into mean, selfish narcissists because we have free will, but we are also kind, generous, loving, and selfless. We can make choices and decisions that affect our lives, and those around us. Everything we do pulls us closer towards good or evil. But what is most important here to note is that human life is sacred. That is not a scientific concept, it is a Judeo-Christian one and it is at the heart of how we deal with and interact with each other in the West. It’s distilled in law and society itself. C. S. Lewis, writer and Christian apologetic puts it best,
It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all of our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.
This is a call to remember human dignity and sanctity. Every single human life is precious, from the richest to the poorest, from the most athletic to the most disabled, from the healthiest to the sickest, from the kindest to the meanest. We must recall this about every individual we interact and conduct ourselves with that embodied wisdom and believe me, I know it’s no easy task, but we are guided intuitively by something to do so.
Lewis argues at the beginning of Mere Christianity that we act as if there is a universal Law of Nature because of how we expect people to treat us and how we know how we are supposed to behave. We have a sense of right and wrong, whether we want to admit it or not, because we have a sense of being wronged when we have been treated unfairly and we expect people to treat us fairly. Lewis states,
… the law which is peculiar to his human nature, the law he does not share with animals or vegetables or inorganic things, is the one he can disobey if he chooses.
This law is called the Law of Nature because people thought that everyone knew it by nature and did not need to be taught it…By taking the race as a whole, they thought that the human idea of decent behavior was obvious to every one [sic].
Let’s take a simple example. Say you are driving around a grocery store parking lot in search of a parking space. It’s a busy time of day and the lot is packed. You find a woman getting ready to leave, stop your car, and put on your blinker to indicate you are waiting for the spot. As the woman pulls out, someone else swoops in and takes the parking spot even though you were there first, and they have seen your blinker. How do you feel? I imagine this has happened to all of us at some point. Outrage and anger fill your heart. How dare they!? Didn’t they see the blinker? I was here first. It’s not fair!
We function every day in the West in relative safety and predictability. We expect good behavior and human decency from the people around us, even if we ourselves do not always uphold the same. For the most part this works, if it didn’t, we would have a lot more chaos, but I observe most people obeying traffic laws and not running over cyclists in the middle of the road. We also feel badly when we have behaved poorly (that is, if we have a conscious). What does this say about us? Lewis argues that it says we believe inherently in right and wrong, that we know fair treatment of another is the right thing to do because human life is special, and that the notion was placed there by a higher intelligence: God.
I don’t want to argue about variations in culture (they exist but the concept of good and evil is universal), or nature vs. nurture, or even discuss whether God exists. I want to focus on how we act towards one another, and ourselves, and how that implies that we believe human life has value and this is in defiance of a post-modern narrative that would have you believe all is relative and nothing has meaning, not even human life. Such ideology has a satanic spirit to it, and it is the path of nihilism. It will sink you into the depths of darkness and lead you toward justifying all sorts of horrors. If you don’t believe me, just examine the manifestos of past school shooters. They were all nihilists. Katherine Dee, Default Friend, does an amazing job of documenting and reporting this phenomenon. She states,
The perpetrators of mass shootings are simply the most visible and violent emblems and exponents of our nihilism. Not always, but often, they are the ones who cannot see the value of civilization or society or even life itself. They are suffocating under the weight of what they view as the purposelessness of it all.
Their collective worldview has much more in common with Unabomber Ted Kaczynski’s than that of a neo-Nazi or woman-hater. But they tend to be more extreme than Kaczynski was. Kaczynski criticized contemporary society’s “surrogate activities” and “artificial goals”—what he viewed as the inauthenticity of the modern era. But Kaczynski imagined that if we could only strip away the artifice, we might be able to return to a more meaningful state, one in which human beings relate to each other as human beings, not robots.
By contrast, the mass shooter has given up on any stripping away. You can tear down “The System” all you want. You will never find meaning. That’s because meaning no longer exists. It may have once. But no longer. If Kaczynski was hostile to technology and industrialization, the mass shooter is convinced that the juggernaut of progress has already won, that even if we could free our “feral selves” from the shackles of modern norms, as the Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza put it, there would be nothing underneath. Just blackness. A great gaping hole. For many mass shooters, the only reasonable response to this hole is death—the complete extermination of life. Not just theirs. Not just that of the children they mow down. But humanity.
I cannot think of a nightmare darker and more horrifying than the maw of nihilism opening to consume the post-modern mind. But it does and it has happened, far too often. Nihilism is truly a demonic philosophy that infects the mind like a virus. It is the antithesis of the human being as sacred and life as precious. When a human being believes nothing matters, the most extreme among them turns to the slaughter of innocents because they think it a mercy considering what they see as the cruel realities of life. Dee highlighted part of Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto about a desire for people to return to relating to humans as humans and not as robots. I want to make it clear that I by no means sympathize with the Unabomber, what he did was atrocious. But I cannot help but wonder about that statement. It’s a desire to recall the sacredness of human life and a rebellion against the Machine. Of course, that is NOT how anyone should ever go about restoring the axiom of the immortal soul. We must return to these roots of the foundation of Western culture where we embody the concept of human life as scared. The vestiges are still there if you know where to look.
For example, there wouldn’t be international human rights laws if this was not true, we would not have a court system to mete out justice, we wouldn’t be trying to “Save the Children” or provide humanitarian relief world-wide through NGOs if we didn’t in the deepest parts of ourselves believe truly that human life was special and significant and precious and sacred. I think we still believe we are worth saving and helping. But I also think the problem is that we do not recognize that we are still acting out the belief that human life is sacred, nor do we know or acknowledge its origins because Christianity itself has largely fallen out of favor for various reasons including claims of misogyny, suppression, patriarchy, the list goes on. But humans are flawed, and we can try to live by doing good but it’s not as easy as we think. Temptation, especially today, is everywhere. I recently heard a Christian explain that the doctrines, virtues, commandments, and morals of Christianity were right but people being flawed so often carried them out for the wrong reasons throughout history. It’s the individual that is flawed, not the Christian logos.
So why is the dominance of the Machine and our interaction with it so dehumanizing? Because it reduces us to something less than human. It commoditizes us, valuing us for the data we produce and how we interact with it causes us to play into this. We in turn do the same to ourselves, reducing ourselves to an image to be bought and sold. Much of our interaction with social media breeds idol worship-like acts because it shifts our attention from the sacredness of the human individual and, therefore its connection to a higher power, to an artificial image propped up to feed our pride.
I deleted Instagram last September because I got so tired of seeing people prostitute themselves literarily and symbolically. When we interact with social media, our full human selves are filtered, edited, and pushed through a sieve to come out as something augmented. We write false stories that glorify victimhood or only show what people think of as “the good life,” – all of it abridged. It is built to make us crave the dopamine rush of likes and it keeps us coming back again and again. More and more, I hear of young women (and men) using it to sell access to provocative images of themselves or sex acts. Of course, there are apps for this as well, OnlyFans comes to mind, and it is all so degrading. The human being is worth so much more. Do people think so little of themselves that they must sell their bodies over and over again to supporters through Instagram and OnlyFans? There are other ways to make a living and I’d like to add here that there are many good examples of entrepreneurs who have established businesses and found success on Instagram and Facebook while avoiding the dehumanizing element.
My biggest problem with how most of us interact with social media is that it replaces reality for far too many. We can represent our “identities” in ever increasing artificial ways. It’s the beginning of society moving into the Metaverse and is redolent of Ready Player One - which personally I found to be a horrifying possibility. It disembodies us and turns the real human body and scared soul into something less than the made-up version of ourselves we put online. We are being trained to live our lives in virtual reality. But it is not real, and it is not reality, and it pulls us further and further away from the firm earth, the open sky, and real human interaction – in-person, unfiltered, and imperfect, but REAL. Let us not reduce our sacred selves to an image on a screen or sacrifice our real lives to our avatars. Let us recall our sacred souls, the part of us that really makes us human and let us remember to see it in others.