Gnosis and the Theocrats from Mars

Francesca Aran Murphy

• Éditeur: T&T Clark
• Année: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780567680556
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Theology & Religion
• Sous-sujet: Theology

This book provides a creative and highly imaginative critical theological genealogy of modern secular reason and the nature of modernity more generally. Francesca Murphy offers a critical perspective that shapes the exploration of modernity, driven by Catholic traditions and sources. Murphy's method is unique: she uses artificial intelligence as her framing parable, analyzing the nature and limits of the robotic 'reasoning' of several AI characters (Pistis, Gnosis and Cultus). This enables her to develop several interrelated themes, with further didactic chapters offering a mytho-poetic retelling of human history. Her reflections on the absence of creativity and any meaningful relation to 'time' further renders an acute critique of the limits of technological rationality. The end result is an unusual and compelling exploration of rationality and fundamental theological anthropology.

1

Beneficiaries of the Theocracy

The Theocrats arrived on a clear, blue September day. Every native New Yorker who saw their fleet breaching the unclouded Manhattan sky remembered their first sight of the heavenly host. Every native New Yorker looked up and said, in Mandarin, Portuguese, Urdu, Spanish, Yoruba, or Parsi, “only in New York.” All of the Pentecostals said the same in the ancient Brooklynese tongue, which abruptly but briefly became a living language. The event was facebooked before it actually happened, due to the Theocrats’ way of turning time into space. Their morphing way with time permitted them to materialize before their ships entered American airspace. The Theocrats were expert at anticipating thought with images, so the landing was on TV before anyone knew it happened. Many on the Arab street cheered, thinking it meant the end for Western Crusaders. People glued to their screens around the world hoped that the evidently opulent Theocrats came bearing solutions to the galloping Riders of war, famine, disease, and fatalism. Many believed fervently that an intergalactic task force could simultaneously call a halt to globalization and let the nations breathe as one. The optimists cheered in anticipation of world peace and plenty. Surely these guys who had punctured the skies in their space ships could roll back the ozone layers and turn the tide of global warming. Even the pessimists opined that the aeronauts brought fortune and happiness. Since all humanity desires happiness, optimist and pessimist alike throughout Africa, Russia, and Asia cheered on the invasion of America by glassy Theocratic robots. They cheered in unison with most Americans who could see that the Martians came bearing many gifts. Everyone had a story to tell about that day, and not one of the stories raised a smile.

The Theocrats did not bring happiness, or even humor. It is mind-boggling to consider listing the things people stopped seeing the funny side of during Earth’s Theocratic Epoch. The role of comedienne was endangered, as was Rom-Com writer, stand-up, slapstick double, and even clown. Pistis, our heroine, was for long denied the vocation for which she was best suited. But it was Gnosis 777, the guy she would have hated at the start and then married forever, who often complained, why can’t I tell a joke? what’s gagging me? who is autocorrecting my wit? where’s the laughs?

Human beings quickly learned to see themselves as BOTTs, or Beneficiaries of the Theocracy. They learned to call their Earth Oz, as their benefactors did. The satellites of glassy gray which ceaselessly circulated the New Oz, threw all of it into a serious light. The sunshine itself was painted gray by ubiquitous glass. The cinereal taup killed the need to wear shades, so sunglasses too went the way of Reese Witherspoon. The all-pervading irenicism of the Martians was so incontestably high-minded that it took staunch piety or downright cynicism to doubt that the invasion was what the Robots said it was. Once upon a time, both Cult and Gnosis had been Hoaxers. As one who lent to credulity, Cult had initially believed that numerous inter-governmental agencies were conspiring to pretend the earth had been taken over by Martians; as a dyed in the wool sceptic, Gnosis struggled to disavow the notion that they were being sold. It was the incessant gray light which finally persuaded the Hoaxers that the invasion was neither an advertising gimmick or government propaganda, nor a virtual game, nor a feint. They were not being played. The conquest was happening in real life, in real time and space.

Rather than enriching humanity with comedy, the Theocrats dispelled its demons. Upon making their autumnal touch down, they immediately hurled their computational spells against viruses and cast out climate change. They cast it out so thoroughly that the climate and even the weather itself scarcely changed again, from one season to the next. A changeling season of incessant good will commenced. The Robots from Mars brought peace, plenty, and good fortune for every person alive that day. World hunger was soon forgotten like a bad dream from long ago. They flattened the Pope and gave the wealth of the Vatican to the poor, who needed it more. The promise of the Theocrats was war no more, and they made good on it. They brought the gift of peace and who could argue with that?

The invaders did not come from outside of time, but they moved so fast that temporality bowed before them. They did not so much inhabit past, present, or future as bend the times directly to their will. It was a foregone conclusion that most people on earth would surrender their freedoms to the Theocrats because they were not given time to think it through. The conquest happened too fast. “He who hesitates is lost,” was never truer than on that September day. Most human thought is hesitant, roundabout, or at best discursive. To top it off, the gift the Martians brought seemed so good that it just had to be true.

It was hard not to feel sentiments of reverence for these veritable harbingers of a modestly secular kingdom of God. The new regnant lords of Oz did not insist upon it. They were not jealous gods. The Theocrats gave their blessing to a multitude of religions. All they asked of the BOTTs was the weekly ignition of a scented candle. Cult 665 bought his in a store which exhorted its customers to “be the change you want”: “buy the change you lack,” Gnosis would have snorted, if he could have permitted himself a joke. The candles were set outside people’s doors, or on the porch; people who lived in apartment blocks set them in windows or on their balcony.

2

Unlike Human Beings

Gnosis leaned into the bar and called to the bartender, “Cult, where’s the remote?” It was an impolite reminder that the TVs should turn to the news channel in time for the regulars’ nightly fare of long-distance misery pornography. The distance was light years. The drinkers stared at the five foot flat screens to enjoy scenes of plague, starvation, and civil war in galaxies too far away to benefit from Theocratic conquest. Now that Earth life was lacking in suspense, let alone true drama, aspiration to playing the hero had been replaced by addiction to images of spectacular beauty. The Cult regulars were nightly transfixed by images of mutilated, suffocating, and famine-wrenched faces, faces which slaked their hearts’ repressed lust to do good by making them feel good. Cult and Gnosis sipped their beers meditatively and drank in the dehydrated bodies and limbs of the denizens of a distant star which had succumbed to drought before the Theocrats could secularize it. Images of egregious poverty magnetized every eye in the bar. “Theocracy sure beats dying of thirst,” said Cult. Few of the regulars unglued their eyes long enough to nod assent to this self-evident proposition. Gnosis could not resist clicking on what felt to him, alone, like bait. “How come we call the Martians Theocrats when they are not religious?” he asked an audience whose attention was fixed elsewhere. One person was listening. But it was Cult who answered, loftily, “The Martians say God is beyond all the religions. That’s what makes the Theocracy the first and only religion of peace.” “Except for that it’s not a religion,” someone mumbled into his beer, “it’s not closed minded.” Cult readily corrected himself, agreeing that the Theocrats were peace-bearers, not a religion of peace as such! “So it’s not weird that the Theocracy is indistinguishable from global atheism?” Gnosis inquired.

It was not a rhetorical question to him. Gnosis had no rhetorical questions, only how come? and why? Gnosis needed to know. He wanted to know more than he wanted any other thing. The moment of truth, the vivid act of mental illumination, was his happiness. Like most other wise-guys, he wished he could board the Robot ships and find out how they worked; along with the rest of his breed, he dreamed of taking a Robot apart and re-assembling it, to find out what made it tick. This aspiration being barred to him, he could only feed on abstract hypotheses and speculations about the Robotic modus operandi. This is why he wondered aloud, on this charcoal gray evening, how this compound of secularizing and theocracy building held together.

Cult went back to pouring drinks for his screen-rapt customers. The Theocracy had terminated world hunger, and brought the climate to heel. The Robots had answered all the problems of the human race to the last decimal point. They had ended war forever, by neutralizing the appetites which lived so dangerously close to the fighting-urge, like the appetite for imposing one’s own religion on one’s neighbors—whatever that religion might be. They had given the world’s former leaders the gifts which they had promised them in return for world leadership. Their problems solved by the square-root of minus one, it was a rare BOTT who gave a rats’ arse how come every human question had been secularized under the Theocracy. They were free to inquire about anything on the fixed menu the Robots had given them.

They were free to apply to wear the electronic collars, but only a select few were permitted to do so. The collars emitted a light electronic shock at apparently random intervals, whenever the owners decided to tap them. It was an experiential testimony of the deep and profound mystery which underpinned the Robots’ integral mechanical predicability. On the day after the Landing, folks had lined up for the implantation ceremony. The implantation machines that were set up in public squares were like guillotines, neatly dividing head from body. The collars were an external symbol of devout submission to the One, the Robot Theocracy. No matter how well the wearers of this prized status symbol knew that they had not committed the least crime in thought, word, or deed, still the shocks occasioned deep feelings of guilt, remorse, and self-reflection. The indecipherable and punitive messages came to be regarded as a kind of moral GPS, and the wearers were not only celebrities, but were spontaneously accorded moral leadership. How could they know that the Robots had chosen these heroes on the basis of their strong bladder control? The collar-wearers were said to live entirely in their thoughts, to have achieved the dream of Descartes, and to be virtually cognition machines. They would not dream of questioning the Theocracy.

So Pistis was truly the only one there who could hear the questions Gnosis 777 asked. The bottled comedienne rashly inquired, “Are you a believer yourself? Are you religious?” “Hell I’m not,” Gnosis snorted. With the boisterous makeup of a bar-tender, Cult could not resist pursuing an interrogation. “Are you a speciesist? Do you think humans matter more than Robots?” “Nope.” “Are you Earth-centrist? Nostalgic for the Age of Faith?” blustered the bartender. “No, I’m down with Galileo,” said Gnosis sarcastically. Cult pursued his mock bumptious questioning for the fun of it: “Why does it matter that the Theocrats are secularists any more than that they are Martians or Robots?” Gnosis paused. “It’s a contradiction in terms,” he said slowly. “How can secularists be Theocrats?”

Cult was not a curious man. He said complacently and with persuasive certainty that Robots are lots of things, but not religious. How could a Robot be religious? Can you imagine one going to Church or praying or lighting a candle to its god? Impossible! The Theocratic government was not odds with the secularism it imposed because it wasn’t a religious Theocracy. Everyone around the bar assented to that plausible proposition. Contradictions do not exist; it is impossible for some one thing simultaneously to be the opposite of itself. So it could not be a contradiction that the Robots had ruled theocratically and had thereby achieved a near-planetary secularization.

Pistis’s uncle had warned her many times against public displays of nonconformity. The Robots did not need to do much censoring, because human fear of breaking taboos did much of that work for them. So long as the BOTTs did not attempt to avoid surveillance, their movements were not much restricted; their converse was only monitored sporadically. Nonetheless, it was dangerous to be a known public rebel. Cult’s anti-intellectual pietism made Pistis see red, the law of non-contradiction enraged her Parisian soul, and when she saw she had all the drinkers around the bar against her, she lost her cool. The fact that she could not articulate what made the Robot Conquerors of time and space into Theocrats was no obstacle but a spur to her entrance into a debate with strangers in a bar. Sitting on her hands to keep them from shaking, she asserted, “Perhaps it’s more a paradox than a contradiction.” “What’s the difference?” Cult replied, though he was not asking.

Pistis was smart enough not to lecture them on paradox. She tried another tack. “Secularism is a thing. It’s a thing like religion when it expands and fills the horizon.” Gnosis tried to translate her lyrical cogitations into rational thought. “You’re saying it tries to monopolize the market.” Pistis assented, saying, “The only way to prove secularism has all the right answers is to require that it has the only right questions.” Cult figured, “The market still decides!” “No,” Pistis observed mildly. “Secularism doesn’t sell itself as one thing we can buy into or not. It doesn’t ask us to consent and buy, it asks for commitment. That’s like religion. Secularism is Religion-like.”

Gnosis was intrigued but not persuaded. He didn’t see his way to equating two opposite systems like theocracy and secularism just because they share universalism and belief that the truth of their system was beyond discussion. He could not swallow the absurdity of saying that one thing which walks like a duck and quacks like a duck was one and the same as another thing which walks and talks like a duck shooting hill billy. Gnosis enjoyed absurdity, deep down. But his rational mind would never concede that. He knew what the Ayatollahs looked like, back in the day when they ruled the roost in the desert, and he knew the figure the Martian Robots cut. It didn’t compute to say they were one and the same. The Martians were no Mullahs: they had hunted the recidivists down and vaporized them to dust. The outlines of faces and hands of the last human theocrats were etched on the pavements of Mecca, where they had gathered for their last stand. Gnosis remembered the chalky silhouettes into which the Martians had vaped the Mullahs, and insisted, “No, that’s not a religion-like thing!”

Almost no-one else, amongst the semi-secularized or casually spiritual earthlings who had watched open-mouthed as the Theocrats descended to the 9/11 Memorial in downtown Manhattan, cared two whits whether it was a contradiction or a paradox that their conquerors were both Theocrat and secularist. But Pistis, here, a true believer, in some one religion, observed that the Robots, too, were true believers and authentic Theocrats, not despite their godlessness, not bypassing their vaporizing of God and the gods, but in and through their glacial secularity. Cult could see the pair had a long future ahead in his bar, and jovially poured them both another icy drink.

Pistis asked, “Would you say the Theocrats are humanists?” Gnosis suppressed the image of screaming bearded men turning into flakes of ash. Cult said, “All humans are BOTTs now.” “So yes?” Pistis asked Gnosis, looking him straight in the eye. “They want every BOTT on Oz to fulfill his or her own dreams,” said Cultic. The same scruple which prevented Gnosis from calling a secularist-Mullah-eliminator a “Theocrat” debarred him from ascribing integral humanism to robotic Things from Mars. “They care for humanity,” Cult insisted, “what else do you call humanism?” To him it seemed clear that the Robots were philanthropists, lovers of the “anthropos,” of humanity. The Martians were the telescopic philanthropists of the time when science fiction took flesh, and consumed it.

“They descended from the skies like gods,” mused Cult, his literal-mindedness coming inadvertently to Pistis’s rescue. “That’s right,” she said, “they came from up above and they live up there in their satellite Olympiads.” “They position themselves as gods,” Gnosis conceded. “But what does it matter where they are?” “What do you think follows?” asked Pistis rather than putting words into his mouth. The three reflected on the all-powerful Olympic satellites from which Oz was governed. “They’ve decided to take the place of gods, unseat them, usurp them, whatever,” Gnosis replied. “And so their secularism is our religion,” said Pistis. “Ye shall be as gods,” quothe the bartender, explaining airily, “I think Abraham Lincoln said that.”

“They don’t care about God. They care about humanity,” Gnosis objected. Pistis disagreed, saying, “You cannot care for humanity from outside of it.” She flashed him a look, and they shared the tacit thought that Robots are about as outside of humanity as one can be. “The Theocrats watch over the earth like tourists at the Aquatic zoo.” “There’s a glass wall between us,” Gnosis admitted. And now, incautiously forgoing tacit hints, she insisted, “What they care about is being godlike, not about humanity!” They watched as the Robots whirred by high above, wheeling like whirring ferris-wheels, with one great eye at the center, and multiple eyes on each of their rotating cars. Everyone in the bar paused to hear the Robots sing “Eye, Eye,” as they spun. “The Watchers,” said Cult piously. “Their thing is surveillance, and watching is what they do,” said Gnosis, not agreeing or disagreeing with Pistis. He was not sure where this was going. He tried to stay sober and concentrate. “The Martians see straight through our human experience. It counts for nothing. It makes no odds to them what things look like for us,” she told him: “They take a god-like view of us, and our problems, and they fix things for us, externally, not from inside.” The glassy-eyed Robots saw through everything in the unblinking of their Eye. “That makes them pretend gods and it makes for a simulated theocracy not a real one,” said Gnosis, in whom the habits of the skeptical Hoaxer died hard. The time-morphing Martians were not enough of an anthropomorphic projection to make the cut as Deities.

Gnosis and Pistis went home in agreement in this at least, that Oz was ruled by a religion-like thing. Their secularist benefactors were masters of illusion, and the Theocracy was perhaps the greatest mirage of all. There was nothing supernatural about them, that was for sure, but our mere human nature was a small thing in their glassy eyes. They scanned the human condition from outside and above it, and seemed therefore to transcend it.

Cult headed upstairs to light his candle to the Theocrats. Pistis lit a candle too, when she got back to her apartment, before the statue of a saint whom a shady antique dealer had assured her was Henri-Dominique Lacordaire. Pistis’s credulity was to a different power than Cult’s. She had decorated the base of the statue with the Dominican’s own words, “J’espère mourir en religieus pénitent eten libéral impénitent.” The nineteenth-century French champion of secularity and freedom has never been canonized, so the antique dealer was probably economical with the truth. “The rights of God are the rights of humanity,” Pistis murmured, as she invoked the Dominican Boddhisatva, patron “saint” of freedom for God and for man. Gnosis watched sports on TV for hours, sleeplessly wondering how secularization could spell theocracy. The trio venerated their gods.

3

Deus Ex Machina

Gnosis had a sleepless night. Meditating on the world’s rotating Rulers made his mind whirl. He didn’t want to do anything that would trigger the solicitude of the Robots, so he tried to lay rigidly still. The more he struggled to immobilize himself, the more he thrashed. He used his left side, he used his right, he slumped backward, he tried going full fetal, then he stretched out flat on his face. He balled up his pillow under his head and then threw it out of the bed. He kept arguing with a phantom image of Pistis, explaining how unconvinced he was by her reasons the Robots have become our gods. But even his made-up phantom image of Pistis just kept smiling and shaking her head. He could not get his own imaginary woman to buy his counter-arguments. The stubborn girl would be one of the hold outs, the querulous Pistocenes. Why do Christian heresies have such weird names, Gnosis asked himself...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Beneficiaries of the Theocracy
• 2 Unlike Human Beings
• 3 Deus Ex Machina
• 4 A Brief History of Pre-Theocratic Times
• 5 Routine Times
• 6 The Secular Sanctity of Lacordaire
• 7 Soulless Angels and Pirates
• 8 A Trail of Elephants
• 9 An Absence of Volition
• 10 Secularity versus Secularization
• 11 The Trojan Horse: Comedy Regained
• 12 Kidnapped!
• 13 What Is Slavery?
• 14 The Bodhissatva Henri-Dominique Lacordaire
• 15 The New Prometheus
• Envoi
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint