Post-Luddite

Through the scalpel of love, its undisciplined brutality as a general abstraction, the monotheist severed the Earth from himself. Could history have birthed itself as merely a first, accidental thought of history in humans, blooming forward by the strength of its own roots -- "there is history" -- a thought, and so, it came to be from humans, but instantaneously hardened as a thing-in-itself. Such an idea as a linear history of progression could not be un-thought. The idea hardened and grew in the fertile soil of humanity's collective consciousness as an especially virile meme.

The idea of history simply needed to be thought, and, like a spark in a dried, golden forest, everything became ablaze and forever altered. Was it the monotheist that thought beyond the polytheist's circularity of nature which tore the world into a beginning and an end? The love of God denies the material world, and in doing so, allows space for the idea of history to exist supernaturally. The idea of history itself was enough to propagate history through the humans who believed in a history and acted as physical vessels for the idea to express itself. The idea was created through one material brain, but upon its creation, it became a self-sufficient creator by the very composition of the thought; and, as Hegel philosophy illuminates, the Idea finds itself revealed through acts of man that formulate history, leading to the eventual fullness of the Idea -- Providence.

For a moment, let us suppose all of this is true. We can say the accelerating advancement of humanity since the formation of a progressive history through a first, creative, accidental thought of history distinct from earlier pagan or tribal notions of repetitive, circular history is actually not the Godless, absurd and meaningless age of science and technology as it is popularly thought. We live now in the highest ascent and fulfillment of Providence. For doesn't modern man find himself slowly disappearing as a thing of nature, doesn't he forsake the Earth, the body, and death in the name of ideas and abstractions? The many ways we can alter the body through technology, the way we can manipulate the Earth to our goals, and the way we exist as a disembodied mind throughout the globe through the Internet are defining features of our age. Is not all technology the manifestations of ideas beyond the material? Do we not find that this technology of the abstract is also rapidly taking up less and less material space and doing more and more immaterial, abstract things? The days of vacuum tubes have been replaced by an age of microscopic chips. Within only a few decades, the physical size of technology has shrunk to unprecedented proportions.

We are not in Godless times (!) to contradict most believers that scream about secularism and dwindling attendance at church. We have become so pious, and abstraction has become so powerful that it has been normalized; we are so blind and removed from a pre-historical and non-monotheistic world that we deem ourselves Godless and atheists out of sheer inability to see with eyes that are monotheistic but cannot glance upon themselves to see who the bearers really are. Science and technology as they are today are the unveiling of an idea that began with the love of God. These silent, silicone saints that appear in every human space and room now, sanctify them, connecting them to something greater -- this may be the unrealized legacy of the monotheist's God. Technology's highest pursuit is the development of more, refined technology, and science's is the development of an pure science -- technology for the sake of technology and science for the sake of science.

Then what does it mean to really be an atheist? Atheism has one virtue and one belief, which is the belief and desire to experiment. It is no longer the senseless adherence to science and the hope of technological salvation, nor was it ever. Any notion of salvation, a belief found in modern conception of technological advancement, is undeniably monotheistic. It founds itself on the belief that there are things in the world that must be rebuilt (redeemed), and tacitly, there are things that are broken (sinful). Atheism in its true sense should be the daring, the striving to live without the societal monolith of God and his many hidden, faceless angels that populate our world in the most beguiling of forms. Atheism must be a willingness to find through experimentation what few pockets remain of an untouched, unhistorical, old-yet-new world exist and to grow these pockets.

How will we receive the Earth again? It is not with a belief in technology and science as redeemers. The atheists that proselytize in the name of science are the purer Christians that harbor such disdain for their old world brothers thumping their Bible's. How will we reunite ourselves with a Godless nature and the purest witness to the material we can achieve? Can we stop the eventual outcome of our total convergence with technological Providence and absolute loss of our material selves, becoming so pious that we no longer have eyes to see that which is beyond pious?

The modern day needs barbarians, not of the North, South, East or West, but barbarians of the spirit that are willing to lose everything in the name of what modern man and his technology has deemed worthless -- dust.

Part I: Escapist's Care

What is the greatest act of political revolution? To cease being yourself.

Joining political movements, solidarity amongst the disenfranchised, acts of terrorism and violence, they will continuously come short of their goals. History of the past 150 years have told that story much better than I. Do we even really know our transgressors anymore? There is no longer a boss to strike against but only pathetic lackeys of the management class, that deserve pity sooner than revolt; the state dissolves daily under the pressure of globalized capitalism's transnational corporations and no longer does it make sense to hold your own government accountable for what are now global problems, far outreaching the abilities of the state; our "comrades" are hungry imbeciles assembling poisonous toys for our children in the pursuit of an anonymous currency. Knowledge, where once a bringer of enlightenment and freedom, is now revealed as the cruel servant of vicious powers that extend the vision and space of exercised power.

Power and the powerful are vanishing horizons rapidly disappearing, and we are the senseless cartographers scrambling to capture the outlines of our enemies. But we can still grasp one thing in the darkness and revolt against it -- the self. One's own identity, the self, the I is taken traditionally to be natural manifestation of an essence; originally, a person's essence came from the Christian notion of the soul, now, in the age of Scientism, the new, unbridled dogmatism births identity from the genome. The resulting layperson's response to Scientism is that "I do these things because it's essentially my biological nature." This person, in his mind, cannot cease to be himself or herself; they are without control of their identity. They reject the call to cease to be yourself.

But biological essentialism cannot explain identity truly. Biology can explain why a human eats eggs instead of rocks, but it cannot explain why a person would choose to eat rocks instead of eggs. Biology and the rigorous sciences wrongly assume that their development and success have been the death knell and eventual destruction of philosophy or Wissenschaft (i.e. soft science). Biology is limited by material facts which are finite, and must have ideally one causal explanation to remain rigorous and objective; the rigorous sciences will, given enough time, develop an ultimate mathematical theorem to explain everything, ending science, but an unwritten conclusion of the theorem will be it was written. The conclusion of science in its final, complete theorem will end with drinking and conversation -- philosophy in its purest mode!

Identity is comprised of the accidents, the choices, of history and culture. Identity has no natural history, but rather, it is a secondary physical reality, a mode of the material, that exists in a near imperceptible way between people that offers no proper quantities to be measured. As the qualitative experience of a color does not make itself measurable to science, history and its resulting formation of identity is qualitatively relational and does not offer itself up to a rigorous science.

(More to come -- like a good torturer I add an artistic pause between the pain)