Awaken the Amnesiacs 4: The New Millennium's Gothic Moment

BBC Four's show, The Art of Gothic: Britain's Midnight Hour (6 November 2014) explained how the 18th and 19th century explosion of science and industry inspired a Gothic counter-movement, a critical moral debate on the implications of unbridled rationalism. The BBC show highlighted the English painting, An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768) by Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-1797), which portrayed the Gothic fear of scientists' experiments. Rationalists' destruction of spiritual concerns created horror. In the painting, the scientist is slowly pumping air out of a bell jar, in which a bird (symbolizing the Holy Spirit) is trapped. The scientist is suffocating the bird to demonstrate its dependence on oxygen. Image Source: Wiki.

The Awaken the Amnesiacs series on this blog explains why and how the human interaction with high technology is taking on spiritual dimensions. In today's post, I discuss the Gothic moment at which undue rationalism carries within itself the seeds of its own undoing. The rational, when overindulged, becomes anti-rational.

Any undertaking, done in the name of 'cutting edge change' will involve a confident, progressive agent. It is easy to criticize our forebears for their blind spots, and more difficult to see our own. In an earlier post, The Night of First Ages, I quoted an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899) in the 2005 King Kong screenplay. The characters in King Kong are on a voyage to make a movie on a remote island. On the way, Jimmy, the ship's boy, reads Heart of Darkness, narrated by Conrad's protagonist, Charles Marlow. Marlow is on a journey to find an ivory trader, Kurtz, on the Congo River. Jimmy asks: "Why does Marlow keep going up the river? Why doesn't he turn back?"

The Heart of Darkness scene from King Kong (2005) © Universal Pictures depicts the wall between ego and id, or between the conscious-rational and unconscious-anti-rational parts of the human mind. Reproduced under Fair Use. Video Source: Youtube.

The ship's first mate remarks that Marlow keeps searching for Kurtz, without realizing how deep he is getting into the dark side of human nature, because Marlow believes he is civilized. 'Civilized' characters like Marlow and Kurtz are amnesiacs, who think their own savagery is no longer a threat, something from a long lost, bygone era of sticks and stones. In their hubris, they unconsciously become more savage as they push forward as self-appointed bearers of 'progress': "We could not understand because we were too far ... and could not remember ... because we were traveling in the night of first ages ... of those ages that are gone ... leaving hardly a sign, and no memories. We are accustomed to look ... upon the shackled form of a conquered monster ... but there ... there you could look at a thing monstrous and free."

Jimmy realizes, "It's not an adventure story ... is it Mr. Hayes?" To which the first mate responds, "No Jimmy, it's not." The nested novel-to-movie-to-film metafiction in King Kong should be a message to its audience; as is the metahistorical fact that Heart of Darkness was based on a true story and the character Kurtz was based on a real person. The metafiction and metahistory of Heart of Darkness, embedded inside King Kong, reveal our amnesia. In blindly pursuing the singularity, why don't we turn back? Why don't we see that the history of the new Millennium is not an adventure story? It is because we expect the monster inside ourselves to be shackled. On the Internet and in research labs, the monster is not shackled.

Scientists and technologists have reached a Gothic moment because there is a gap between their practice and the way they are perceived in mass media as progressive actors. When they work with the scientific method, they live with uncertainty. They test hypotheses which, if proven, are accepted until falsified or refined. At the same time, we live in a period when a cult of secular rationalism has supplanted mass religions to furnish the prevailing story of global civilization. Scientific method and rationality are equated with humanism, enlightenment, advanced education, and hyper-progress. Scientists and technologists occupy exalted social positions as perceived experts. In this capacity, they are less cautious. They are little aware that when they become public gurus or market their findings with mythical labels, they tap into that part of secular rationalism that functions like a religion, rather than a considered quantification of reality.

Despite recent triumphs and headlines, there are signs of amnesia among today's scientists, technologists, and technophiles. They press ahead as experts and progressive actors, even when their impact on society starts to become surreal, or when their followers become cultish. They do not stop to reconsider their position, even when, as I put it in this post, "a nearly-unstoppable faith in, and optimism about, rampant technology" gives rise to "a heart-tearing soul-sickness which emerges from that intermingling of the virtual and the real."

Scientists are frank about how much they do not and cannot know. The Guardian: "It is perhaps a sign of the health of modern science that the harbingers of so much doubt have met with such acclaim." The current situation is serious: physicists have reached the analytical limits of scientific inquiry for two reasons. They discovered that they can only observe and measure the tiny part of the universe which absorbs light radiation. When they do measure that tiny portion, they have confirmed that they change it at the sub-atomic level. We can only see a tiny portion of reality, and we change that reality when we look at it. Together, these issues trap us in a self-referential bubble of perception.

When physicists determined that 96 per cent of the universe is unobservable and exists in the forms of dark matter and dark energy, scientists at CERN and other labs set out to breach those limits. Particle physicists, who deal with measurable knowns, stand at the edge of the methodological line, with a high point being their 4 July 2012 discovery of the Higgs Boson or 'God particle.' In 2012, Russia Today interviewed Aleksey Filippenko, an astrophysicist and Professor of Astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, who admitted that the 'God particle' raised more questions than answers:

"Let me start by saying that I am going to discuss the universe only from the perspective of a scientist, from an intellectual perspective. I am not going to be talking about whether there is spiritual God or a personal God or a purpose to the universe – these are questions that scientists can’t address. My own belief is that once you have the laws of physics the universe just keeps going on its own. And it could even be that the laws of physics are all that you need in order to get the universe to start from the very beginning – the “Big Bang”. ...

The Higgs boson helps to complete what is called the Standard Model of particle physics. There is a way we have to try to understand – electrons and quarks and neutrino and other kinds of particles. And Higgs boson was kind of a missing piece of the puzzle. Which, if it were not there, would mean that we would have to kind of start over. But the fact that it appears to have been found completes our picture of the Standard Model of particle physics. That is not to say that we understand everything. We don’t yet understand how gravity fits in with particle physics. Other than the fact that gravity pulls particles together. We also do not understand things like dark energy. The universe seems to be filled with a dark energy that is expanding the universe faster and faster – I helped to discover that. And the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics was given to the team leaders last year for that discovery.

So, we don’t understand the dark energy. There is also something called dark matter. It may or may not be some kind of fundamental particles that could be part of the Standard Model – we don’t yet understand. The Higgs boson is a very important discovery. But it does not solve all the questions that remain in physics. But it is a very important discovery. In a sense, it would have been more exciting as a scientist to me if it were not there because it would mean that we were not correct in our view of the universe. The surprises are more fun than the expected discoveries. ...

I don’t think scientists will ever truly understand creation because I don’t think we will know where the laws of physics came from. But given a universe, given a universe can arise I think some day we may well understand dark energy and dark matter and the other constituents of the universe. We only discovered dark energy 14 years ago – the accelerating expansion of the universe. So it is no surprise that we don’t yet fully understand dark energy. Dark matter was only conceived a few decades ago. So again, we don’t yet fully know what dark matter is. But we have not been investigating it for very long. I mean, in hundreds of years who knows what we will know. We might have a full inventory of what is in the universe and how everything behaves. So we will know a lot. But we won’t quite know why it all happened and why there is something other than nothing.

Why are there any mathematical laws of physics rather than just nothing at all? I don’t know whether we will ever understand that. Scientists are only well-aware of 4 per cent of the universe – that is, we understand pretty well the nature of 4 per cent of the universe. The stuff that is made of atoms. Ninety-six per cent of the universe is made out of dark matter and dark energy. And although we know they are present we don’t know what their detailed properties are or why they are there. Or what exactly is going on."

On the other side of the line stand theoretical physicists, who deal with unmeasurable unknowns using mathematics. Astrophysicists stand, somewhat unhappily, on both sides of the line. A 2011 book by Richard Panek, The 4 Per Cent Universe, emphasized that scientific measurements begin to break down at dark energy and dark matter. The conventional wisdom is that as discoveries, knowledge, and tools improve, the scientific method will expand and continue. But this underestimates the problem of scientific methodological analyses - and for researchers in all disciplines who use them. It is not just a question of having insufficient tools to measure and quantify reality. It is a question of not being able to comprehend the findings. The Smithsonian: "'We have a complete inventory of the universe,' Sean Carroll, a California Institute of Technology cosmologist, has said, 'and it makes no sense.'"

Apollo 18 (2011) faux found footage movie explained why 'we've never gone back to the moon.' The film was a huge box office hit. The real reasons for canceled Apollo missions were political, technical and funding challenges. Image Source: Movie Blogger.

Just as physicists hit a wall, big science stumbled elsewhere as well. In one generation, the space age promised and failed to produce space station cities, moon pod villages, and colonists on Mars. Lunar settlements remain technical concepts, and China's 2013 lander, Yutu, made the first soft landing on the moon since 1976. On the Internet, lunar exploration has become the dismal stuff of conspiracy theory and cinematic legend. Nor did the atomic age solve the energy crisis, or bring us cold fusion. Instead, it vomited up the radioactive fallout of nuclear disasters and inexplicable dark matter. Geneticists were supposed to cure cancer and the common cold, not produce human-animal hybrid chimeras which scare the public. These generalizations do not account for the realities of research and funding; but they explain why mass sympathy and confidence in big science waned over the past generation.

Another day at Boston Dynamics. Image Source: RAND Corporation.

Where big science stumbled, big tech was supposed to bail us out. In the public mind, if not in reality, the torch passed in the 1990s from big science to big technology. Over the past fifteen years, interest shifted from space exploration and cosmology - to computers, gadgets and the Internet. Technologists promised transhumanism, posthumanism, artificial intelligence, and the Singularity. This was why 'singularity' became the evangelical buzzword of technophiles between 2003 and 2012, and remains fashionable with its own cluster of personalities. Silicon Valley became one of the most powerful places on earth. High tech would launch us exponentially toward a gnostic, mind-opening, theophanic moment of transcendence.

Enter the computer programmers, designers and engineers. We would remake ourselves on the clock, rework our societies and the whole world, and finally efficiently manage resources. The Internet, conceived by the scientists at CERN, was rationalistic in its construction. Unfortunately, it is anti-rational in its execution; it exploits users' unconscious impulses and forms a giant collective mind. We did not get a robot-supported Valhalla. Instead, we got 9-million-hit Roomba cat videos, cyber-bullies, social-media-supported home invasions, remote-controlled brain-to-brain interfaces, and Boston Dynamics cheerfully preparing its Second Variety military hardware for World War III. The technological revolution began to give way to the surveillance revolution.

Sex slaves are tattooed or branded by traffickers with the pimp's name, or symbols such as bar codes, keys and crowns to show ownership. Snopes found that only some of these tattoos are marks of slavery. Images Sources: Independent, Daily Mail, Snopes, KPBS.

Due to the Web, child porn is now part of the cultural mainstream, as is child trafficking, child sex tourism, and a revival of slavery and the slave trade. Studies confirm that free online pornography is a gateway drug which depicts and advertises real world sex slaves. Those images, gifs and videos are free for a reason: because they make their production money back in the billions. Online porn increases demand for, and access to, sex slaves. Free online porn changed social values and turned vice into a virtue. Comments from a tattoo artist under an Independent article indicate that sex slavery tattoo reports prompted a fad at his tattoo salon, with free patrons asking for slavery branding because they thought it was cool.

Image Source: tumblr.

Image Source: Room 42.

This confusion is typical of Millennial reverse psychology. Other online forums show the bleed-over from the horrific reality to fashion, as with the tattoo of the Greek word δοῦλος (doulos). The word means 'servant' or 'slave,' and is sought by some ink enthusiasts to proclaim or embrace their 'slavery' in society as their counter-intuitive, and sometimes neo-Christian, assertion of self-identity. Some Etsy sellers offer temporary 'slave' transfer tattoos to party people and clubbers. Whatever the logic, slavery is not being seen as a monstrosity; it is becoming normalized and mainstream.  Conversely, real sex slaves who escape the industry often change their tattoos to declare their freedom. These fads are spurred by online media.

On 27 July 2011, the UK's Advertising Standards Bureau ruled against menswear magnate Roger David, for using sex slave imagery, including a bar code tattoo which spells 'slave' on a model. David defended his New Love Club ad, above, as an anti-student loans message and an "ironic patriotic comment on capitalist recruitment and identity." He also said: "The woman used in the campaign was 18 years of age. The relevant audience of this advertisement is young men. Roger David strongly believes that young men would relate to this image, and would not see it as shocking or exploitative." He abused a technicality to continue to run the ad. Image Source: Melinda Tankard Reist.

There are over 21 million slaves at work today, more, it is believed, than at any other time in history, and their trade is enabled by the Internet. Every 15 seconds, someone becomes a slave in the Millennial world. Many of them are sex slaves, but others work to build the gadgets we desire; they also work in agriculture, food and clothing production, domestic work, and construction. One Youtube video cites 2012 statistics from the UN's International Labour Organization's Global Estimate of Forced Labour: forced prostitution accounts for 22 per cent of human trafficking; 10 per cent of slavery is state-imposed; and 68 per cent is forced labour exploitation. On 21 January 2016, The Daily Beast reported that child slaves in the Democratic Republic of Congo mine the cobalt used by Apple, Sony and 14 other companies to make mobile phone lithium batteries. We are all connected, but anti-slavery activists see how, exactly, in ways that are more real than virtual.

All of this has been greeted by technophiles with denial or blame-casting. Moral blurriness around slavery may derive from the underlying loss of sovereign will in the face of technology. Most founders of the technorati did not want computers and gadgets to transform the citizenry into addicted, monitored slaves in an authoritarian technocracy. Nor was technological speculation supposed to inflate economies past the productive capabilities of the human condition, leading to recessions, and promising wars. But that is what is happening. On a deeper level, even the most independently-minded technophiles are profoundly and unconsciously submissive to the technology they use; if there is a problem with it, it must come from the NSA or GCHQ spying on them, not from some secret, unconsidered capitulation inside their own souls.

Again, it is important to distinguish between actual research in science and technology, such as the 1 February 2016 report - Bright sparks shed new light on the dark matter riddle - and the separate, psychological impacts of that research. Scientific and technological research questions grow out of a cultural environment and research results become cultural artefacts. Despite experts' efforts to talk clearly to a lay audience - as here - the gaps around rational investigations and the narrative of ultra-progress are filled with pseudoscience and frenetic online community building. In those communities, the Internet reinforces confirmation biases. In a previous post, I described the background of 'Indigo Children.' Their members genuinely believe that they are superhuman:

"For those who don’t know, Indigos are a special set of souls born between roughly the mid-1970’s to the mid-1990’s. You are only 75% human, with the other 25% of your DNA coming from your home realm, which can be from this world, or another, or from the nonphysical realms."

These ridiculous pseudo-genetic-alien-soul beliefs are conveyed in friendly messages of spiritual self-empowerment. They are incredibly dangerous. Not everyone goes the Indigo route, of course, but most virtualists share an instinctive anti-materialism as their philosophical starting point. They share as well an unconscious submissiveness to the technological environment, sometimes combined with delusional, semi-conscious messianism. The technologically empowered are super-powerful agents of the future, whose pseudoscientific interpretations and technological know-how endow them with enhanced abilities - even the right and the mandate - to fix the problems of the world as they see fit. At the same time, they really mean well and they see themselves as agents of progress.

Traffic sign warns drivers against tech-immersed pedestrians in Sweden. Image Source: Reg Saddler.

With these blind spots, big tech is hitting the wall, too. The future we ordered was not in stock. Instead we got a different future, which looks a bit like the one we wanted, but is not as good. This is why there is some debate about how to make sense of that which makes no sense. Because we are so busy selling our souls, we are obliged to understand the world with tools additional to the scientific method. Atheists dismiss this question as part of the tired debate between evangelicalism and secular progressivism. Alternatives to that superficial argument involve asking philosophical questions about what types of cognition are valid and invalid when we approach the unknowable and unforeseeable.

Other fields may shed light on the Gothic turn from the rational to the anti-rational. Medievalist and novelist C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), pondered this concern not through his Christian apologetics, but in terms of linguistics and semiotics. His famous science fiction Space Trilogy of novels developed that idea:

"Lewis' view [was] that the symbolic and mythopoeic imagination is the primary language of the human mind and that scientific and technological analysis is a later development. In the essay Bluspels and Flalansferes: A Semantic Nightmare [1969] he argues that, though reason is the organ of truth, imagination is the organ of meaning."

Thus, scientists might find theoretical and mathematical truths in dark matter and dark energy, but they won't necessarily know what they mean. Technologists may try to liberate us with blockchains, but they may be shocked by what will ensue from their innovations. Millennial techno-libertarians who worship the rationalism of the 18th century should consider that they are part of the new Millennium's Gothic moment. Future posts will examine how Lewis's mythopoeic terms and other, non-scientific rationalist disciplines offer ways of understanding this moment; the next post in this series begins with perceptual theory in the visual arts.

The Gothic movement in art and writing warned against unfettered science; one of its most famous examples was Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein. Shelley told the story one night at Lord Byron's house on the shores of Lake Geneva; she based Frankenstein on scientists' attempts to use electricity to revive corpses and transfer souls between bodies in actual experiments. The Daily Mail saw similarities between Shelley's story and a presentation at Oxford University in the summer of 2009, at which, "Professor Henry Markram, a doctor-turned-computer engineer, announced that his team would create the world's first artificial conscious and intelligent mind by 2018." See his transhuman Blue Brain Project, "an attempt to create a synthetic brain by reverse-engineering mammalian brain circuitry." The Blue Brain Project is also based at Lake Geneva and due to issue results 200 years after Mary Shelley published Frankenstein. Image Source: Wiki.

See all my posts in the series, Awaken the Amnesiacs.