New Gods for a New Time
We cede the trajectory of time to the gods we create. We need to hold them accountable to delivering the future they prophesy.
Humans have always invented gods to make sure time has meaning
This is the first in a series of essays on the shaping of time by the way we create, deploy, and invest in technology. I’ve been in this world for thirty years, and it has always been obsessed with taking over the historical trajectory of time. We will need a lot of technological innovation if we are to chart a more peaceful and prosperous course for humanity—a humanity that has become an open question because it has become a project unto itself.
For a longer treatment of this topic, see my longer posts at Time as Practice.
Gods and Time
Humans have always relied on gods to make time meaningful.
When ancient Mesopotamian court astronomers looked to the night sky, they believed the gods were sending omens—signs about future events. They maintained volumes of cuneiform tablets with the sanctioned interpretations and the corresponding rituals for adjusting to the coming future.
When the Aztecs made regular human sacrifices, they were feeding their gods in the hope was that these gods would keep the Sun rising each day.
When Aristotle, modernity’s model of rational inquiry, looked to the heavens to ask why they seem to rotate uniformly and eternally, he theorized an ‘unmoved mover’ making it all happen. Some later Christians would see a virtuous pagan’s premonition of God in the unmoved mover.
In Mark’s gospel (the earliest gospel), the first spoken words of the Messiah announce a change in the nature of time:
The time [kairos] has come to fruition and the kingdom of God has come near. Turn your attention to the good news and believe. (Mark 1:15) (1)
When Constantine made Christianity into the official religion of the empire, newly empowered bishops turned the ritual of Kalends into Christmas as the anchor for a new liturgical calendar. It came with a host of new feast days to overwhelm any opposing festivals, newly branded as either ‘heresy’ or ‘pagan’.
Medieval Christianity turned this calendar into intricate and imposing astronomical clocks across Europe. The one at Strasbourg Cathedral (completed 1574) includes ‘a celestial globe, calendars, a device to calculate the date of Easter, automaton figures for each day of the week, and paintings depicting Christian religious scenes, including the creation of the Universe, original sin, redemption, resurrection and the Last Judgment. An angel turned an hourglass over.’ (2)
Was this clock designed for population control through spectacle? Yes. Was it a deeply rational coordinating of materials and motion synchronized with the motion of the cosmos? Yes. Was it a very real experience of a meaningful connection with this vast universe? Also yes. All are true. Science, religion, and myth are not yet separate disciplines in the sixteenth century.
As Protestantism swept across Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, so did ‘the Puritan watch’—an austere, personal timepiece that encouraged the devout not to idle away this life. Time became a private, personal resource not to be wasted.
When the Enlightenment promised open-ended progress where each generation lives better than the last, God became explicitly a ‘clockmaker’ who guaranteed that the human capacity for mathematical reason could decipher the mechanics of this clockwork universe. We’re accustomed to think of this as the emergence of a rational atheism, but as many have pointed out, believing in a mathematical universe is a profound act of faith and myth-making.
As gods die off, we create new ones to reset the trajectory of time. Today, AI and its creators are being characterized as godlike, and their prophecies explicitly lay out a linear composition of time that requires equally profound acts of faith and belief.
Yet their invocations ring hollow. Is this because, in our atheistic modernity, God is supposed to be dead? Is this just fundraising hyperbole that we should ignore or mock?
Big Tech’s Gods
If we look for myths that are trying to repair our time out of joint, we will find them in the prophets of Big Tech. They are offering a very bizarre vision of disembodied godlike rationality straight out of Descartes along with messianic promises of superabundance.
Technology brought us from the Stone Age to the Agricultural Age and then to the Industrial Age. From here, the path to the Intelligence Age is paved with compute, energy, and human will…. a defining characteristic of the Intelligence Age will be massive prosperity. (3)
To lay out history as a linear progression of Ages, and to say that the thing you believe and invest in—technology—is the driver of progress is nothing short of myth-making and prophecy.
Are they right to do so? Is this all bad news? What critical code should we marshal to make a case?
Right or wrong, AI and biotech are happening and should continue to happen. We will need a whole lot of innovation if we are to have an abundant future. But broad-based prosperity won’t happen without a moral compass tuned to our time.
Deification
The invocation of messianic gods has been part of our high tech revolution at least since the post-war period.
In 1966, Heidegger looked at our technological age and declared, ‘Only a god can save us.’ Two years later, Stewart Brand took the bait: ‘We are as gods and might as well get good at it.’
These statements live in the long shadow of Nietzsche’s warning about our murdering of God: ‘Isn’t the magnitude of this deed too big for us? Don’t we have to become gods ourselves just to be worthy of it?’
For Google’s resident futurist, Ray Kurzweil, God cannot be dead because we haven’t yet given birth to Him: ‘Does God exist? I would say not yet.’
As Big Tech sets the trajectory of history in its own image, we have to ask what is its vision of humanity? What gods will it worship? How will it set a moral compass?
When Peter Thiel, a confessed Christian, hesitates to answer a pointed question from another confessed Christian, Ross Douthat, ‘You would prefer the human race to endure, right?’, how are we to hear the stammering of Thiel’s hesitation? (4)
Perhaps we should hear it with the ears of Achilles who warned us of the consequences when the gods are indifferent to the lives of mortals:
The gods have spun for all unlucky mortals
a life of grief, while nothing troubles them. (24.525-26, Wilson trans.)
Gods only deserve to exist if they actually orient us to a better future for all of humanity, including the earth we inhabit.
The Death of God
When Nietzsche prophesied that God was dead, he was expressing fear, not triumph. Without God as the basis for a moral compass, he didn’t think we were up to the challenge of orienting to a better future:
What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? (5)
Time that cannot move forward is nihilistic, whether that stasis is chaotic and turbulent (Lucretius) or simply an unproductive repetition of an infinite task (Sisyphus).
This was Nietzsche’s prophecy, which he knew was too early: ‘This tremendous event [the killing of God] is still on its way and wandering—it hasn’t yet reached the ears of human beings’.
It may not have reached our ears yet. Claims about god and time often appear to us as delusional noise, but simply ignoring the prophecies won’t help us orient them to fulfilling their promises.
Orientation
Let me repeat: we will need a whole lot of technological innovation if we are to address the challenges we face as a species. Some will get rich, and that is perfectly reasonable and perhaps necessary. The price of their wealth, however, should be actually delivering their prophecies of unprecedented abundance, not just shareholder value.
We will also need to rejuvenate our capacity to create progress toward an abundant future. But this cannot be a straight line toward an end that only a few humans devise on everyone’s behalf.
Am I optimistic or pessimistic? Neither. Optimism and pessimism are refuges for those who think that they can see the future. My crystal ball is not that clear, and they are of limited help with rejuvenating our moral compass. We have to learn once again to create narratives of the future we want. And yes, those stories will have a whole lot of myth, religion, and gods—because they are stories.
1 For a word-for-word English translation from the original Greek, see Bible Hub’s interlinear translation. I use ‘turn your attention’ rather than the more standard ‘repent’ for the Greek word metanoite. Translating metanoite as ‘repent’ has a long and controversial history.
2 David Rooney, About Time: The History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks, pages 34-5. For his discussion of the Protestant watch, see page 40.
3 From Sam Altman’s blogpost on The Intelligence Age
4 Thiel’s stammering hesitance has gotten a lot of attention. See Douthat’s interview with Thiel on Douthat’s Interesting Times podcast.
5 Nietzsche’s classic statement of the death of God is in The Gay Science, §125. It is short and easy to read, but easily misunderstood when reduced to a triumphant slogan.