Digital makes us hyper-conceptual and generates all kinds of intellectual discussion, but in truth, it makes us stupid. Compression to binary logic—to ones and zeros—is stupid; it crushes nuance and poetry; it is a simulacrum of a forest. This is why, as Marshal McLuhan suggested, we need to take media fasts. Digital doesn’t like indeterminacy, mystery—what can’t be pinned down to easy language memes. But, I would argue—most of what matters in our lives is indeterminacy.
Sometimes you have to drop out of the game to tune into what really matters. It’s too easy today to become a voice for this or that ideological egregore. We can’t generate novel thinking from within the mechanism of the problem—in the noisy space of ideology. That’s why I stopped blogging on contemporary happenings some time ago. I got pretty bored of ‘reacting’ to ‘the feed'. It was making me lose a sense of Indeterminacy, mystery and magic.
Being outside the superstructure is actually the only way we can see this clearly—with sufficient distance. It’s good to be an alien, to be unfashionable—to look at the future through a rearview mirror in the positive sense—to get out of the stupidity of ‘the now’. Let us be a stranger in a strange land—like Ivan Illich, who considered himself a man of the 12th Century. We need to clash with the automatisms and unquestioned certainties of the present. This means passing over whatever fashionable theory of everything—metamodernism, for instance—is on the table.
Instead of another theory of ‘theory of everything’, how about a ‘theory of nothing’? As the Buddhists say, nothing is not a mere void—it is NO-THING. There are no discrete things, really—because nothing exists outside of a relationship. This is the good news of divine ignorance. It is the humble feeling you get when you watch a caterpillar wash a raindrop off its wing. It is the fact that we don’t know anything at all about anything. Indeterminacy means choice and possibility. Nothing is everything!
Everything sufficiently deep is religious and unfashionable—and good religion confronts paradox and indeterminacy. Even science is religion and has its beautiful metaphysics. Furthermore, materialism, humanism, and ‘dataism’, I would argue, are actually forms of religious mysticism—in the positive and negative sense. My beef is with the all-pervasive literalism and scientism of the day, with hyper-conceptuality masquerading as depth—and the pseudo-rationality that scientism tends to promote—a form of dogmatic religion without metaphysics or paradox.
The spiritual task is to ‘liberate the holy sparks from the shells of convention’, as the Jewish tradition would have it. The mystic uses what Tibetans call ‘twilight language’—stuff that doesn’t make sense to the surface of the mind. Mystical language tends towards the apophatic—negation of the negation— the destruction of parasitical conceptuality. Like poetry—it is actually not irrational; it is embodied. It bypasses the abstract mind, which, left to its own devices, is fundamentally schizoid.
Religious language and poetry are hyperreal—more real than real. It is just not ‘literal’, which dives the people who want to capture the world in their theories off their rockers. How fragile these new atheists and movements of pseudo-rationality really are! That is because they are actually as virulent as the bible thumpers, which they rave against.
When we lose our religion, we substitute one for another—humans are homo religiosus by nature. Religion is a theory of nothing. It is a mystery. Let us break through the intense illusion of modernity that we are rational beings more than religious ones. Rationality is just the surface—the suburb—of experience, not the centre of our lives. The cloud of unknowing is a lot bigger than we are.
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