By Wayne Allensworth
It’s difficult to imagine now, but when the Apollo 11 lunar module set down in the Sea of Tranquility all those years ago, Americans were fixed on their TV screens, awed, fascinated, and, in some cases, disoriented by the momentous conclusion of the space race. I recall gathering with neighbors around a TV and watching the somewhat grainy broadcast with the sense of adventure and curiosity only children can muster. We had conquered space, or so it seemed at the time, before it became apparent that Star Trek-level interstellar travel was most likely a fantasy. Humans are finite, time-bound creatures whose limits are quite apparent to older people — and have become more apparent to yours truly as time passes, and old friends and family pass away. At some point, I realized humans probably wouldn’t travel the 25 trillion miles to Alpha Centauri anytime soon, or any time at all. Limits define us and are necessary, both for our identity and for meaning.
That doesn’t mean that the Apollo program wasted our time, effort, and money. It is in our nature to explore, to learn, to seek challenges, and to satiate our curiosity. And the space program, the race to the Moon proclaimed by JFK in 1962, served a very useful, earthly purpose: It channeled the West’s competition with the Soviets into something that didn’t involve missile strikes. In that way, it was something like a sporting event. And the space race had propaganda value, with the capitalist West demonstrating its technical superiority to the communist East. In Houston, we took a great deal of pride that mission control was in our hometown. Portraits of the astronauts hung on my wall, and I eagerly awaited any news about the space program. Unfortunately, the nascent hubris in post-modern man’s soul wouldn’t be humbled by the limitations of what was possible in space.
These days, the dreamers are fixated on something more like a post-human nightmare with “trans-humanism” the goal. Melding humanity with machines is truly a ghoulish and demonic goal worthy of a horror story, the goal apparently being to dissolve human identity and the very limitations that make us human along with the “barriers” — the milieu of custom, habit, morals, and social behaviors — that make society habitable and functional. But that has been the Adversary’s goal since he legendarily whispered sweet nothings into the ear of Nimrod, who took up the challenge of defying and displacing God with the Tower of Babel, which could only be built by a Leviathan state.
Again, the Moon landing disoriented some of us. As I recall, my great-grandmother, a saintly woman if there ever was one, was stunned into disbelief, and even wondered aloud whether the Moon shot was blasphemous. It was not something that occurred to most of us, but I understand now. She was born in the 19th century, lived on a family homestead, was probably amazed by the first automobiles, and then by the dizzying avalanche of disorienting change in the 20th Century, change made possible by industrialization and urbanization facilitated by new technologies. The dissolution of the old world occurred far too fast for any society to absorb, and the depth and speed of the transformational whirlwind concomitantly spurred the fragmentation of community in the anonymous pool of mass society. Globalism is a natural outgrowth of the Tower of Babel mentality, and the globalists seek the de facto dissolution of nations. These phenomena are related in a chain of causation and upheaval. It’s not surprising that ever-present social subversives allied themselves with “managerial” technocrats to make the most of what their propaganda painted as a purely positive phenomenon.
“Change” became an ally of the “progress” that had long painted extant social norms, complex structures that had evolved through millennia of human experience, as nothing but “barriers” to humanity freeing itself from the bonds of traditional morality and a familiar social milieu. A social milieu that facilitates the development and realization of our personalities within the structures of family and community. The modern fixation on reductionism, of reducing complex phenomena to nothing more than a collection of parts, is part and parcel of what Iain McGilchrist characterizes as the dominance of a Left Hemisphere machine view of reality. Humans are just another variety of machine, or “meat computer,” that can be, so to speak, re-programmed. Robert Nisbett once wrote of the “idea of progress” that possessed intellectuals and then society at large, a teleological ideology that had replaced a Christian view of history and mankind’s progression. The “end of history” is being arranged by managerial bureaucrats, not the Second Coming. “Change” was always and everywhere good. But that assumption raises the question of whether every change is beneficial, of whether “progress” equals improvement, the reinvigoration of society, or of whether the rapid, revolutionary rate of change is too much for humanity to adapt to.
Challenges and contradictions in our lives present us with Jacob’s Ladder to climb toward heaven. We face one challenge, then another, but it need not be the Sisyphean futility of existential absurdity. All hierarchies, which are inevitable, can degenerate into tyranny. The archetypical benevolent father can follow the lie and become a tyrant. The loving and nurturing maternal figure can become a smothering mother who strangles her child’s development. But the hierarchies and models for spiritual development — the hero’s journey in Jordan Peterson’s work — are necessary and if properly maintained and nurtured through work and self-limitation, the “sacrifice” Peterson places at the center of his ideas, ultimately beneficial. Because of Lucifer’s pride, especially intellectual pride, we lose sight of this and place our faith in the “engineers,” the builders of a technological Tower of Babel that attacks society’s core.
Yes, change of some sort or another is inevitable. But something fundamental at the core of being is preserved within the boundaries of beneficial adaptation. For good reason, the old saw about throwing the baby out with the bath water is always present in our collective unconscious. We intuitively know that adaptations have to be measured, change considered, and the beneficial core preserved. Call it sociological morphology. A sort of friction in the natural world spurs on evolutionary adaptations. Both elements — a capacity for beneficial adaptation and preservation of the vital core — are necessary. Thoughtful conservatives have always understood this. So have the agents of Pandemonium. The adaptive brakes have been off for a long time, the core attacked and ridiculed. We have lost our sense of boundaries and, not surprisingly, in many cases, our sanity.
References:
Careless worshippers of technology. … The presumptuous engineers who are Cain’s grandchildren then take it upon themselves to build the Tower of Babel, a monument to the pride and self-aggrandizement of the tyrant who wishes to take the place of what is transcendently sovereign. But the inhabitants of the monstrous state soon find themselves unable to communicate with each other. … When the proper foundation is carelessly destroyed…everyone becomes inarticulate, and everything undefined
— Jordan Peterson, We Who Wrestle with God
It is said, the entire archaic library should be … replaced. Replaced with what? There’s the rub. By the insistence that sex (Freud, Darwin, Dawkins … the Marquis de Sade) or power (Marx, Foucault) rules instead?
— Jordan Peterson, We Who Wrestle with God
It is the case that the process of mutation is genuinely random in at least some of its aspects. … But DNA is very good at repairing itself. This turns out to be especially the case when the genes that have been subject to transformational change are crucial to the production of forms and function that would compromise survival or reproductive fitness if damaged. In such cases, the repair processes function with essentially perfect accuracy. Variation is allowed, by contrast, on the fringe, with regards to functions that are not crucial. So even in the molecular domain on which life depends there is conservation of the center, with allowable experimentation on the margin. … This is a truly revolutionary finding, transforming as it does our understanding of the hypothetically random nature of evolution. … If the center is conserved across mutational transformation, the progression forward is hardly random.
— Jordan Peterson, We Who Wrestle with God
The longing for a sublime fusion between man and machine has today taken on a kind of messianic fervor. “Our species has been rapidly acquiring superpowers in the form of unprecedented levels of control over our bodies, brains, built environments and ecosystems,” writes Elise Bohan of Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute. Just as Marx predicted, humanity has risen up to reshape its environment in the image of its machines — and now, say the prophets of a cyborg future, man himself must become the object of his own unsparing optimization. “We’re loath to admit it, but the world is not set up for ape-brained meatsacks any more,” declares Bohan. … These are no longer the fever dreams of a few tech enthusiasts or Soviet fanatics.
— (Spencer A. Klavan, Light of the Mind, Light of the World: Illuminating Science Through Faith)
Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood. For thirty-two years, he worked as an analyst and Russia area expert in the US intelligence community.
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