Nerds, Fascists, Machines
“I believe myself and my children all to be mere machines. Automatons at large in the universe. Every person I meet is also a machine — a big bag of skin full of biomolecules interacting according to describable and knowable rules.” –MIT professor Rodney Brooks, as quoted in American Nerd: The Story of My People.
There — that’s it! That’s the eureka moment, the thought that ties together American Nerd and American Fascists. That’s the problem with Richard Dawkins’ thinking: The notion that we are reducible to machines but at the same time gods unto ourselves. How can that be? If we are mere predictable, manageable, uncreated collections of “biomolecules” then our minds are not godlike — far from it. Our minds are no more godlike than the computer facing me right now. If we are machines, our mind are just programmed to regurgitate output based on input, and there is no divine spark, externally bestowed or internally generated. That we are programmed without a Programmer is just a biochemical accident, something for which we can neither take pride nor give thanks. There is nothing of what would be called sentience. There is no Cartesian being, because we degenerate in this model from thinking animals to functioning machines.
I don’t mean to say we’re created, or programmed, or any of that et cetera. I have plenty of doubts on that score. But this become a glaring inconsistency in the militant atheist scientist credo; it undermines their ironclad conviction that we are the highest evolution and therefore somehow gods. They cannot stake their ideological legitimacy on raw reason, logic, or unmitigated biochemical evolutionary theory and then appropriate the godhood they have rejected from other systems of belief. If there is no God, if there is no supernatural divinity, then we are no more divine than that figment of Christian imagination. To see that ilk’s model through to the end, all divinity must leach out of the world. There may be wondrous accidents, to be sure, spectacular coincidences in nebulae and platypuses and chemosynthetic ocean life, but they remain accidents and coincidences nonetheless. They are events on a scale of probability, and if we stand on that spectrum we are as accidental as nebulae and a good deal less exciting.
That Old Longing
Seeking peace and quiet, I wandered into the Methodist temple on Clark, where I soon found myself flipping through a hymnal. The lyrics are so familiar. It is an alarming comfort, or a comfortable alarm, to realize that Catholic and Protestant rites and songs have so much in common – that, in fact, so many of our songs are the same. “As the deer longs for flowing streams…” Perusing these hymns aroused an old, forgotten, presumed-dead twinge in my heart. I felt that longing in my heartstrings, the soul’s reaching out to God: I wanted to believe, to feel that connection again, wanted it so much that the sensation resembled resistance more than longing. But then I flipped to other hymns – can I really believe that Jesus rose from the dead, and more, that he died to save our sins? No. I’ve stopped believing one can ransom another, let alone assume the guilt of all who ever lived. We make our salvation or redemption. We are our damnation or our salvation.
But what of God? What of creation, of that faith, of the belief in love and the rightness of the soul’s longing for the divine? Been thinking about the mystic’s dream a lot lately, and about how I used to dream it, used to want nothing more than to spend eternity at God’s feet, transfixed by the beauty of the Divine. It is a beautiful thought, colored with something terrifying and vast. What abysses did I – do I – harbor that I seek such annihilation, such infinities, such absolutes?
I incline towards God when I am empty. I have been stripped once again. It is hard to get away from feeling like a husk, from feeling like something pretty and hollow, maybe like one of those brightly painted papier-mâché eggs. How and with what am I looking to God to fill me? Is that a sexual metaphor? Aw, God, you old slyboots. Is the mystic’s longing really just the fever dream of a thwarted nymphomaniac?
