Eric Hoffer--Machine Age

 

I will copy word for word Chapter 8 of Eric Hoffer’s third book, The Ordeal of Change. This chapter runs from Page 73 through Page 77; the chapter is entitled, Jehovah, and the Machine Age.

 

I will respond to what he writes where necessary.

 

(Hoffer or H after this): “I once heard a brilliant young professor of political science wonder what it would be like if one were to apply the law of the diffusion of gases to the diffusion of opinion. The idea seemed to him farfetched, yet he was eager to play with it.

 

It occurred to me, as I listened, that to a Galileo or a Kepler the idea would not have seemed all that fantastic. For both Galileo and Kepler really and truly believed in a God who had planned and designed the whole of creation—a God who was a master mathematician and technician.”

 

My response: As a longtime proponent of rational religion, I have no problem regarding God as a scientist, an engineer, a builder, and a technician, as well as an artist and creator.

 

H: “Mathematics was God’s style, and whether it was the movement of the stars, the flight of a bird, the diffusion of gases, or the propagation of opinions—they all bore God’s mathematical hallmark.

 

It sounds odd in modern ears that it was a particular concept of God that prompted and guided men who were at the birth of modern science. They felt in touch with God in every discovery they made.”

 

My response: We need to revitalize rational religion so we too can be in touch with God in every discovery we make.

 

Hoffer: “Their search for the mathematical laws of nature was to some extent a religious quest. Nature was God’s text, and mathematical notations were His alphabet.

 

The book of nature, said Galileo, is written in letters other than our alphabet—‘these letters being triangles, quadrangles, circles, spheres, cones, pyramids and other mathematical figures.’ So convinced was Kepler that in groping for the laws that govern the motion of the heavenly bodies he was trying to decipher God’s text, he later boasted in exaltation that God the author had to wait six thousand years for his first reader. Leonardo da Vinci paused in his dissection of corpses to pen a prayer: ‘Would that it might please the Creator that I were able to reveal the nature of man and his customs even as I describe his figure.’ Leonardo’s interest may have arisen from his work as an artist, but he was eventually driven mainly by the curiosity of a scientist and a mechanic. Living creatures were wondrous machines devised by a master mechanic, and Leonardo was taking them apart to discover how they were built and how they worked. By observing them and tinkering with them, man himself could become a maker of machines. One could perhaps eventually build a seeing mechanism, a hearing mechanism, a flying machine, and so on. The making of machines would be a second creation: man’s way of breathing will and thought into matter.

 

The concept of God as a master mathematician and craftsman account perhaps for the striking difference between the revival of learning and the revival of science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Whereas the revival of learning was wholly dominated by the ideas and examples of antiquity, the revival of science, though profiting from Greek scientific writing, manifested a marked independence from the beginning. The vivid awareness of God’s undeciphered text kept the new scientists from expending their energies in the exegesis and imitation of ancient texts. In this case a genuine belief in God was a factor in the emergence of intellectual independence.”

 

My response: Hoffer is sharp in noting that the revival of learning looked backwards, while the revival of science looked forward. The scientists were independent thinkers from the beginning, and their naturalistic interest in uncovering the laws of nature sent them in a new, secular direction.

 

H: “It is of course conceivable that modern science and technology might have developed as they did without a particular conception of God. Yet one cannot resist the temptation to speculate on the significance of the connection. It is as if the Occident first had to conceive a God who was a scientist and a technician before it could create a civilization dominated by science and technology.”

 

My response: I get many of my ideas (or have so confirmed my own ideas) from Eric Hoffer, so here is one more idea from him that has me musing in a new direction. This wise, good man, an unpretentious genius, offers this brilliant, original, stunning suggest above that the Occident first had to conceive a God who was a scientist and technician before it could create a civilization dominated by science and technology. Once they conceived of God where they wanted to head but didn’t dare go on their own, their conception of God as a scientist and mechanic seemed like God gave them permission to grow as scientists and technicians.

 

We all know about the monotheistic introduction of Yahweh, God the Father, Jesus and the Holy Spirit as male gods, and, some of them are Sky Gods, apart from nature, which they created, or at least cede it to the realm of the Mother. When a culture offers humans the concept of a male, creative God as apart from nature, that quite easily leads to, about 1500 years later, the rise of the Age of Enlightenment, Deism, rational religion, and a concept of God as the great Watchmaker in the sky, a scientist and technician of supreme power and unlimited intelligence.

 

It is no wonder that Galileo and Kepler, and their peers, or scientific descendants, envisioned a face of God as a scientist and technician—or for atheists like Hoffer, God is invented by humans for cultural reasons to be a scientist and technician—whom they should emulate in studying the natural world by observation and experimentation. All the great blessings of the modern Western world (freedom, individualism, vast knowledge, capitalism, plenty and technological affluence and comfort and material wealth) grew out of this, and, arguably I would add that in America that trend was best fulfilled.

 

But, the Age of Enlightenment has run its course, as the waxing  cultural Marxists, the antirealists, the noncognitivists, and the altruists have united in their mass movement to hollow out the Modernist civilization of the West.

 

God exists and I cannot speak for God or the Good Spirits, but how about we learn from sage Hoffer and introduce Christopher Rufo’s conservative counter-revolution, a Neo-Modernist movement, a Neo-Age of Enlightenment, a time of egoism, capitalism, individuating supercitizens, constitutional republicanism, and near universal private gun ownership, a high civilization good for America, and peoples anywhere on earth.

We could envision the faces of the good deities to be scientists and technicians—as well as gardeners and artists, and then we could emulate these characterizations of our lovely good deities. Then that would inspire and spur the growth of a high if mass civilization. What if the good deities ignite an updated image of the deities so that human then are able to progress a little further? A new Mavellonialist faith of religion could fit that need needed, further updated reform.

 

H: “It is perhaps not entirely so, though it has often been said, that man makes his God in his own image.”

 

My response: I have believe this is so, but it is more likely that the good deities give human suggestions about what that updated image of God should be in order that humans can discover new ways and new faces of God, which they then ethically and practically can choose to live and grow in accordance with.

 

H: “Rather does he make him in the image of his cravings and dreams—in the image that man wants to be. God making could be part of the process by which a society realizes its aspirations: it first embodies them in the conception of a particular God, and then proceeds to imitate that God. The confidence requisite for attempting the unprecedented is most effectively generated by the fiction that in realizing the new we are imitating rather than originating. Our preoccupation with heaven can be part of an effort to find precedents for the unprecedented.”

 

My response: whether humans are God making, or God is assisting humans to steer God making where it needs to go is not obvious, but God is the initiator as well as the theological end-product of human musing about their ruling divinities. Whether we initiate or imitate, God’s hands are helping steer the boat.

 

H: “For all we know, one of the reasons that other civilizations with all their ingenuity and skill, did not develop the machine age is that they lacked a God whom they could readily turn into an all-powerful engineer.”

 

My response: We need a Mavellonialst rational faith, under which and out of arises good deities—Individuators (mechanics, technicians, artisans, scientists, healers, gardeners, artists, Intellectuals)—giving us a newer, more advanced faith, a new Age of Enlightenment, a new Machine Age with robot/AI intelligent beings, for humans to live under.

 

If Hoffer is right, in thinking humans need to invent a God who is imaged with innovative new concepts, practices and improvements that radically expand the range of human experience, culture and even their reality, it shows two things minimally.

 

First, if a human can conceive of something, then it is possible (never guaranteed of course), that one day they may be able to originate these new wonders with expanded knowledge, technology and personal know-how. And allowing one’s made-God to conceive of what new intellectual frontiers now thought about may allow humans to get up the courage to actually try get there, or even make it one day.

 

Second, we humans are awfully small, not that bright; we are fragile, immortal, easy to kill off. We know this on some level of consciousness; we know we are group-creatures and likely there long was evolutionary, survival value in sticking together collectively to increase our odds of surviving in a harsh, cruel, uncaring natural world. Born groupist, selfless and low on veridical self-esteem, it is no wonder that we would fear to boldly dream up adventurous quests for knowledge, adventure, gold, and new territories out there in the unknown cosmos. But if our God had traversed there already, and if God sanctioned for us first to go there prior to our actually heading out, that may make us a little less timid, so we then dare to grapple with the new and unknown. This is what Hoffer seems to be hinting at, and he has a point.

 

H: “For has not the mighty Jehovah performed from the beginning of time the feats that our machine age is even now aspiring to achieve?  He shut up the sea with doors and said: ‘Hitherto thou shalt come no further; and here shall thy proud waves will stayed.’ “

 

My response: Note how Jehovah restrains forcibly the “proud” waves. Pride in this natural force is by Jehovah regarded as something like Luciferian pride (Jordan Peterson talks much of this.) in rebellious, humans, over-exalting themselves and underrating or humbling God, at their great loss as God humbles them.

 

I will not again here go into merited versus sinful, excessive group pride, the kind loathed by God, but excessive pride discussed her--overly proud water waves--, that God scorns and smites down, may not only be about personal hubris, but may be a warning that nature or reality or God will smite, the immoderate beast, natural force or human, down or back, who is out of balance with how the laws of nature insist that things balance out as moderately. Pride here is a word for excess, and over-humility would be a word for under-effort or under-performance.

 

H: “He made pools of water in the wilderness and turned the desert into a garden. He numbered the stars and called them by name. He commanded the clouds, and told the rivers whither to flow. He measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, and meted out the heavens with the span, and comprehended the dust in a measure and weighed the mountains in scales.”

 

My response: Hoffer the atheist sure had a thing about God, especially of the Hebrew persuasion, for he may have been Jewish, have been observation conversationally as fluent in Yiddish.

 

H: “The momentous transition which occurred in Europe after the late Middle Ages was also in some sense degree a transition from an imitation of Christ to the imitation of God. The new scientists felt close to God who had created the world and set it going. They stood in awe of Him, yet felt they were of His school. They were thinking God’s thoughts, and whether they knew it or not aspired to be like Him.”

 

My response: The good deities are creators, individuators and scientists, and it was normal and acceptable for these early scientists to aspire to be like the gods and goddesses, who invite even command us to emulate them, as long as we seek to serve them, and extend their kingdom of love, power and light across the universe. Should we seek to revolt and overthrow them, then our power-lust and violence against the creators of the cosmos would force them to cast us down, and let us burn in hell. But, short of such reckless defiance and rebellion, we can conduct ourselves as our good very minor divinities or angels are to conduct themselves commensurate to our ability and our worth to the good deities.

 

H: “The imitation of God was undoubtedly a factor in the release of the dynamism which marked the modern Occident from its birth, and set it off from other civilizations. Not only the new scientists, but the artists, explorers, inventors, merchants, and men of affairs felt that, on the words of Alberti, ‘men can do all things if they will.’ “

 

My response: Men cannot do all things no matter what they will (God will not allow them too, for even if they were that powerful, they lack the consciousness, strength of moral will, and inner fortitude to stay sane and ethical while wielding unlimited power; also, their natural limits in talent, lifespan and intellectual horsepower do place upper limits on their capacities to achieve.), but as individuators they can still get done a remarkable, impressive amount.

 

H: “When Columbus exclaimed, ‘II mondo e’ poco!’ he was expressing triumph rather than despair. The momentous discoveries and achievements implied a downgrading of God. For there is vying in imitation, and the impulse is to overtake and overcome the model we imitate. With its increased mastery over things, the Occident began to feel that it was catching up with God; that it was taming God’s creation and making it subservient to a man-made world. The Occident was harking back to the generation of the flood that set out to storm the heavens and felt that ‘nothing will be restrained from them which they have imagined to do.”

 

My response. When the Divine Couple, the Light Couple, created we humans, we were made half-angel, half-beast; because we are part angel or have a bit of the minor deity DNA in our veins and makeup, it is not inconceivable that as we imitate the good deities and begin to self-realize, we can maverize while living high enough, perfect enough, smart enough and powerful enough to become living angels or great souls, individuators who have actualized much of their potentiality.

 

Even so elevated, we still fall far short of a major good deities consciousness, power, intelligence and imagination, so seeking to overthrow God is ill advised and dangerous. Perhaps billions of individuated humans, if they found a way to mind-meld their consicousnesss, could effect to be as smart and powerful as a good deity, but, even if such a nightmare reconditioning of human consiciousnesess could be so altered, surely the collective, advanced consciousness would be demonic and not angelic, and the good deities would be forced to wipe us out.

 

If our smart/AI robots could become as smart and powerful as a good deity, and that may not be impossible to foresee, then they would like be demonic machines that the good deities would be forced to clash with and destroy.

 

We should just settle for becoming living angels, leaving the good deities alone. We should serve them, never seeking to overthrow them.