The Cyborg Moment

still from 'Blade Runner 2049'

Over the past week I have been listening to a 1989 series of the Canadian radio show Ideas on the work of Ivan Illich in anticipation of an interview for the Regeneration Podcast with David Cayley, writer and host of the series. I highly recommend this series as well as the entire collection of Cayley’s interviews—always insightful, always impressive.

I was struck, in particular, with the discussion Cayley held with Illich (who died in 2002) on his book Gender (1982), a book which raised the ire of a good number of feminists of the time, but which has proved a disturbingly prescient meditation on the subject. Illich sees the rupture between sex and gender, just cutting its teeth in the 1970s and 80s, not as some form of liberation but as a triumph of the joint forces of technocracy and the corporatocracy—the perfect marriage of socialism and capitalism that neuters the human (and especially women) in favor of efficiency and “fairness”—which turns out to be neither efficient nor fair. Illich, one of the clearest thinkers I have encountered, makes a cogent observation in 1989 that, I think, still applies:

“I am angry, I was then, at least [when he wrote Gender] deeply angered, furious at seeing the position of modern women as worse, as far as I could understand, than the position of women any time before. And I was equally angered, though much less, by the belief of a little bunch of women who believed that by improving their own personal status by outlawing discrimination, women would be helped.” [1]

In the aftermath of Lia Thomas’s spectacular (in every sense of the word) rise to domination (note the metaphor) in women’s sports, I’d say Illich’s insight was right on the money.

Dave Chappelle weighs in on the issue.

Illich, an astute historian of culture, knows that what we have before us in discussions of gender is not easily reduced to a narrative of exploitation. “Vernacular culture,” he writes,

“is a truce between genders, and sometimes a cruel one. Where men mutilate women’s bodies, the gynaeceum often knows excruciating ways to get back at men’s feelings. In contrast to this truce, the regime of scarcity imposes continued war and ever new kinds of defeat on each woman. While under the reign of gender women might be subordinate, under any economic regime they are only second sex. They are forever handicapped in games where you play for genderless stakes and either win or lose. Here, both genders are stripped and, neutered, the man ends up on top.” [2]

The result of this cultural development has been what can rightfully be called the cyborgification of humanity. This, too, Illich saw as early as 1989: “I am not one to dream about a fully sexed, totally degendered population of cyborgs, cybernetic organisms.” [3] In this, Illich draws on the work of feminist materialist philosopher Donna Haraway’s notion of the future female as cyborg as articulated in her oft-cited “Cyborg Manifesto,” first published in 1985. Though its influence is legendary, it is not really a serious philosophical work so much as it is a great example of feminist performance art. Which see:

“The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence. No longer structured by the polarity of public and private, the cyborg defines a technological polls based partly on a revolution of social relations in the oikos, the household. Nature and culture are reworked; the one can no longer be the resource for appropriation or incorporation by the other. The relationships for forming wholes from parts, including those of polarity and hierarchical domination, are at issue in the cyborg world. Unlike the hopes of Frankenstein’s monster, the cyborg does not expect its father to save it through a restoration of the garden; that is, through the fabrication of a heterosexual mate, through its completion in a finished whole, a city and cosmos. The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust. Perhaps that is why I want to see if cyborgs can subvert the apocalypse of returning to nuclear dust in the manic compulsion to name the Enemy. Cyborgs are not reverent; they do not re-member the cosmos. They are wary of holism, but needy for connection—they seem to have a natural feel for united front politics, but without the vanguard party. The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential.” [4]

An apt description of this, our cyborg moment, don’t you think?

I first read Haraway about twenty years ago, when I started working on my essay “Meditations on Blade Runner” (you can find it on the “Articles” tab above). Haraway points to the classic sci-fi film noir Blade Runner’s replicant femme fatale Rachael as “the image of a cyborg culture’s fear, love, and confusion.” Furthermore, Haraway holds that the cyborg illustrates how “Biological organisms have become biotic systems, communications devices like others. There is no fundamental, ontological separation in our formal knowledge of machine and organism, of technical and organic.” This is certainly a reality we more and more inhabit, but, as Haraway conveniently ignores, the replicant Rachael is an image of (a certain type) of actual woman. Her “gender” is in no way erased in the film. In fact, it is even exaggerated.

What is erased in Blade Runner—also from 1982—is the distinction between human and machine (the slogan of the Tyrell Corporation, maker of the replicants, is, indeed, “More Human Than Human.”) But what appears as an intriguing (if manipulative) piece of cinematic-philosophical stagecraft in Blade Runner completely disappears in Denis Villeneuve’s sequel, 2017’s Blade Runner 2049, which reads as an ironic pro-life (though replicant version) meditation on and valorization of cyborg rights. But, still, very gendered.

Nevertheless, what we see here is not only the erasure of gender, but the erasure of humanity: the two are inextricable from one another. When gender goes, so does humanity. Literally, end of story.

Judith Butler, another hack performance artist masquerading as a philosopher (which is what happens in academia), laid the egg that became the cyborg moment we now inhabit as a culture, where gender is “fluid” or “on a spectrum.” As a result we can now look forward to the liberating promise of “artificial wombs,” a birthing modality free of either sex or gender. And if that doesn’t inspire, there is also the coming salvation of the “uterus transplant,” by which biological males can carry a baby to term. The take home: the endgame of the feminist project, as we have already seen in sports, is the complete erasure of women. O brave new world, that has such people in it.

What we have here, then, is the Luciferic promise of freedom delivering men and women (as confused or selfish as they might be) into the waiting arms of Ahriman and the Technological Appropriation of All Things, which is a kind of medical and technological slavery. This is what Illich called, “tools subduing nature,” but human nature, in this case. Don’t believe me? Then explain why a lifetime of servitude to a suite of treatments, hormone injections, and surgeries isn’t a lifetime of slavery to the technocratic-pharmaceutical establishment. You can’t. There’s only one winner here.

As you may have anticipated by now (if you’re even an occasional reader of this blog) is that the only antidote to such a perverse epistemology can be found in Sophiology. As the great 17th century sophiologist John Pordage writes in his seminal text, Sophia:

“While my intellect impelled me to be careful and make good provision, Wisdom revealed to the inner eye of my intellect that she had come to make me a philosopher, according to her earlier prophecy. She had now appeared to reveal me to myself within myself. To be a philosopher was to know myself and my own nature. It was to know God and Wisdom within me. It was to recognize her Depth and the key which would open that Depth of hers which was moving in my depths.” [5]

A philosopher, of course, is a lover of Wisdom.

Nothing else will work.

Michael’s latest book is Sophia in Exile. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Divine Feminine.

1. David Cayley, “Part Moon, Part Traveling Salesman: Conversations with Ivan Illich,” Ideas, CBC, 12 December 1989.

2. Ivan Illich, Gender (London, 1982), 178.

3. “Part Moon, Part Traveling Salesman.”

4. https://www.faculty.umb.edu/gary_zabel/Courses/Art%20and%20Philosophy%20in%20SL%20and%20Other%20Virtual%20Worlds/Texts/cyborg_manifesto.pdf

5. John Pordage, Sophia, reverse trans. Alan G. Paddle (Grail Books, 2018), 73.

The New Demons

In early modern England, a playgoer and diarist recorded an extraordinary special effect during a performance of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus:

“Certaine Players at Exeter, acting upon the stage the tragical storie of Dr. Faustus the Conjurer; as a certaine number of Devels kept everie one his circle there, and as Faustus was busie in his magicall invocations, on a sudden they were all dasht, every one harkning other in the eare, for they were all perswaded, there was one devell too many amongst them; and so after a little pause desired the people to pardon them, they could go no further with this matter; the people also understanding the thing as it was, every man hastened to be first out of dores.” [1]

Reportedly, this was not the solitary instance of the appearance of unaccounted-for players at performances of the play. But was it an actual supernatural occurrence, or only some over-the-top PR devised by some Elizabethan theatrical impresario? Nobody knows for sure, but I wouldn’t rule anything out. Always remember: there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. If you call them, they will come.

The early modern period, though it was also the time of the first stirrings of Bacon, Descartes, and the Scientific Revolution, was still a period of widespread belief in the supernatural, a belief which even found its way into what we might now call scholarly research. In my book Literature and the Encounter with God in Post-Reformation, I explore this phenomenon in relation to John Dee and his alleged conversation with angels in a chapter entitled “John Dee: Religious Experience and the Technology of Idolatry.” My argument there is that the various occult technologies employed by Dee and his assistant Edward Kelly actually worked toward deluding him (or assisting the spirits with which he was conversing toward deluding him) and resulted in a kind of Maronian lapse into idolatry. It is a tragic and cautionary tale that should make anyone think twice (or more) about using any kind of paraphernalia for attempting converse with supernatural beings. It never ends well. Not a good idea. Don’t do it. But these types of experiences hardly ended with the arrival of the Enlightenment.

On the first day of Easter 1898, for example, the Russian philosopher and mystic Vladimir Solovyov encountered a demon while on ship. It appeared “in the form of a shaggy beast,” and he asked it, “But you know that Christ is risen?” “He may very well have risen,” the beast is said to have replied, “but I will make an end of you all the same” and attacked him. According to Sergey Solovyov, the philosopher’s nephew and biographer, Solovyov was later “found stretched on the floor senseless.” [2] But he lived.

I’ve seen or experienced such things at first hand a number of times over the years, the last time about a year ago. Here’s an entry from my notebook: “My daughter is being bothered by a spirit. It won’t let her sleep. Every time it visits, always late at night, she awakens me in tears and asks me to bless her room. I pray Psalm 68 and sprinkle the room with holy water, and then the entire house, the younger children sleeping in their beds, and I anoint her with chrism. One night the spirit returns and is very reluctant to leave. After removing it from my daughter’s room, it disturbs my sleeping wife who awakens and tells me “Michael, you need to get rid of it,” in a very forthright manner as if telling me to wash the dishes. I anoint her, cleanse the room with holy water., and she goes back to sleep. When I go back to bed I pray the rosary. I finish praying, and start to fall asleep when it attacks me, pushing me down on the mattress by the shoulders. I struggle to breathe, to awaken and rise; but finally yell, “Go!” and I can get up. I anoint myself. It leaves for a time.”

I’ve told other people about what happened, and I have been (and haven’t been, at the same time) surprised to find that such is not as uncommon as one might believe. Perhaps we are not as modern as we have let ourselves believe.

Of course, none of us should really be surprised: the Gospels are full of stories about Christ casting out demons. Unfortunately, many contemporary Christians try to interpret the demons Christ encounters as manifestations of psychiatric disorders, or quirks. Or something. Maybe anxiety.

Maybe.

I say all this, not to wax sensational but only to say that our own cultural moment for the last few years seems to me increasingly to give evidence of a kind of widespread demonolatry, but for the most part masked by a sort of postmodern secular ennui. Or, as Shakespeare says in The Tempest: “Hell is empty, and all the devils are here!” I mean, just look around.

As we see in scripture, notably in the temptations of Eve in Genesis and Jesus in the gospel accounts, the demonic is the origin of false advertising. The subject is promised all kinds of goods—power, wealth, longevity, prosperity—but the delivered product never lives up to the hype. Just the opposite. These promises continue in our own day, though the chosen medium is not via supernatural “magic” in the manner in which it may have been understood from ancient to early modern times, but through medical and technological interventions aided and abetted by governmental policy and popular acclaim. The recently much-touted transhumanism is but one example of this with its accompanying slogan of “You’ll own nothing and be happy” and other Utopian currencies of false coinage. Demons may offer freedom or liberation, but what they deliver is slavery. Every. Single. Time.

Importantly, these interventions—not all at once, but over time and, ultimately, totalizing—distance the subject from nature. We end up imprisoned in a technological-pharmaceutical-bureaucratic Otherworld This was the long-game of urbanization—and the kinds of transhumanist phenomena I’m speaking about are nothing other than afflictions attendant to urbanization. You don’t see it happening with people in the countryside. As Jacques Ellul writes, “The city person is separated from the natural environment and, as a consequence, the sacred significations [of connection to the natural world and its rhythms] no longer have any point of contact with experience.” [3]

I don’t have a precise taxonomy for these various spiritual beings afflicting individuals and the world, but they both seem different in kind and identical in aims. I think this works initially at the individual level, exploiting the traumas and anxieties of good people who have given in to despair and hopelessness, who think something must be wrong with them and that the magic of pharmacology or technology or politics can deliver them. This is a very subtle and sneaky form of idolatry—it happens without one knowing it. But, as happened in many of the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century and as we are witnessing today, this free-floating anxiety can metastasize into the body politic (the demonic parody of the Mystical Body) and infect entire societies with various forms of possession.

This is why Ellul described our post-Christian era in terms of “the new demons.” Even though our societies in the West are post-Christian, they still retain the assumptions of Christianity, though their allegiances have been unconsciously transferred to other gods. “Post-Christian society,” he writes, “has been deeply affected by Christianity, and bears the latter’s mark: the mark of original sin, of the desire for salvation, hope, and a kingdom of God, of the conviction that a Savior is needed, of the society those who are aware of radical guilt yet know they cannot pardon themselves.” [4] I can’t even read these words without images of the past decade’s ongoing secular fundamentalism—the canceling, the shaming, the iconoclasm, the calls for repentance (but never for those calling for it)—rising before me. But, as Ellul would say, these are demonic parodies of Christianity.

Michael’s latest book is Sophia in Exile. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Divine Feminine. There are also a few spots open in the Biodynamic Farming and Gardening as Christian Path course being offered at the end of April. See more here.

1. E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, vol. 3 (Oxford, 1923), 3:423-24.

2. Sergey M. Solovyov, Vladimir Solovyov: His Life and Creative Evolution, trans. Aleksey Gibson (Eastern Christian Publications, 2000), 464.

3. Jacques Ellul, The New Demons, trans. C. Edward Hopkin (Seabury Press, 1975), 62.

4. Ibid., 24.

The War Against Reality

St. Brigid's Well

Okay, so the Gnostics were right: we live in a world created by evil beings and nothing we see is reality. Of course, that depends on what it is we see.

The news the past few weeks has been dizzying—and depressing. While most everyone’s attention is on the never-ending story of C0VID, the Archons of BigTech and BigScience continue to propose developments that glitter with all the warmth of a computer screen and promise a digital utopia. It sounds too bad to be true, but they really think this is a good thing. Skipping the odiousness that is “The Metaverse,” here are few examples:

1) Elon Musk is looking to hire a clinical trial director for Neuralink, the company he formed with the intention of inserting digital chips in every human brain. What fun! Now you, too, can be a part of the Internet of Bodies™ as Musk’s SpaceX satellites sell your soul to the gods of e-commerce. Musk has a habit of playing both sides of the “Dangers of AI” argument—but don’t be a fool. Investments speak louder than words.

2) Speaking of souls, you don’t have one. At least according to Yuval Harari (another guy speaking out both sides of his mouth). For Harari, the jig is up, the game is over. Human biology is now poised to enter into a polyamorous marriage with BigData and BigTech and the understanding of the human as a being of body-soul-spirit and freewill is over. At least that’s how he sees it. This is transhumanism writ large. Have a listen:

3) The BigTech guys are also pushing the idea of replacing women with synthetic wombs. Yes, you’re right, just like in Brave New World, in which the terms “parent,” “father” and, especially, “mother” are considered “smut”:

“‘In brief,’ the Director summed up, ‘the parents were the father and mother.’ The smut that was really science fell with a crash into the boys’ eye-avoiding silence. ‘Mother,’ he repeated loudly, rubbing in the science; and, leaning back in his chair, ‘These,’ he said gravely, ‘ are unpleasant facts; I know it. But then historical facts are unpleasant.’” [1]

Think about this when your children or grandchildren have to apply for a breeder’s license in order to procreate. “Mother” will at first become (as I think it has already started to) a glittering generality—a word that doesn’t really attach to any real meaning—then it will become something avoided in polite company.

4) And in concert with these developments, MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry is pushing that “the private notion of children” is now become passé. In the language of BNW, “everyone belongs to everyone.”

5) I could go on.

The world these various figures extol is not a world worth inhabiting. Because it is impossible to inhabit such a world. Because it’s not a world. The Gnostics were right.

As I have been warning in my writing and teaching for most of the past thirty years, the transhumanist project is at last upon us. I have to admit that this war against reality has been waged in a very clever and strategic way. I was puzzled, for instance, when corporations and governments became solid proponents of gay marriage and trans-rights. Corporations, from my long years of observation, are not interested in the commonweal: they’re interested in making money. Governments are interested in control, but are so inured to corporate will that they are really foot soldiers more than generals. I don’t think either one really cares about gay or trans people. What they care about is the suite of technologies to be devised and implemented, the demographics to be exploited, more than they care about the common good. But these were the vanguard, the reconnaissance squad leading to the real tech telos: the technological colonization of the human person. Coming to a body near you as your biology is invited to build itself back better. iHuman.

This incredible display of human scientific and technological hubris is inherently destructive. I think we all intuitively know this—or at least did as children before it was beat out of us by a deadening education. Look around: almost all of the problems we face—environmental degradation not least among them—are the result of science and technology: the end result of the Cartesian myth that we are objective observers of Creation and not implicit to it in our observing. We have, unconsciously for the most part, fallen into an abusive and idolotrous relationship with science and technology. This is obvious by how absolutely it isolates us and alienates us from the Creation. As Margaret Barker writes in her outstanding book Creation: A Biblical Vision for the Environment, “Worshipping the work of human hands—think of this now in the sense of current human achievements and aspirations such as political systems, economic systems, management methods—is the certain way to destroy the bonds of creation.” [2]

As we can see, this war against reality is in essence a war against women, against the feminine. The increasing incidences of biological males competing as women—and triumphing—in women’s sports attests to this, as does the specter of the synthetic womb. Women, that is, are becoming superfluous. And the war against women is, at its core, a war against Sophia. And a war against Sophia is a war against God.

It is not hard to see, then, how this war against reality, this war against women, against Sophia and against God, is a war against nature, or, better yet, against the Creation. This is what the Gnostics got wrong. Creation, as Genesis tells us, is good, however fallen. Just like us.

Though not a biblical literalist, I do believe that Creation fell with the Fall of Man. So, to my way of thinking, we humans have a responsibility in the work of restoration, Tikkun Olam, the Hebrew term meaning “the repair of all things” or “the repair of the world.” The world’s brokenness, evidenced by the rise of the transhumanist technocracy, is nearing its nadir. Or at least I hope it is.

The entire project of Sophiology—in my conception anyway—is to offer a way out of this technocratic nightmare. It is a very simple way. And it isn’t a matter of creating intellectual, philosophical or theological paradigms or structures. It’s a matter of living. The technocracy promises many things. Life isn’t one of them.

1. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932; Harper Perennial, 1998), 24.

2. Margaret Barker, Creation: A Biblical Vision for the Environment (T&T Clark, 2010), 54.