Lairs of God: Spirituality After Silicon Valley
Paul Laffoley, The Fictive Analysis of the Klein Bottle, 1987, 37 1/2" x 37 1/2", oil, acrylic, and letters on canvas
“May God us keep/from single vision and Newton’s sleep,” prayed Blake. And the prayer, we might say, was answered. Newton’s sleep gave way to Einstein’s nightmare: the canonization of the alpha and the omega of the split atom. Technology, Heidegger proposed, is in itself neither demonic nor divine, but is a “way of revealing.” The essence of the revelation, however, remains mysterious. What are the promises implicit and explicit in the Gospel of Apple? With all the space (which the microchip seems intent on transforming into the equivalent of time) devoted even in the literary press to questions rising around the increasing hegemony of computers and word processors, are we to assume technology has been humanized? Or has humanity been technologized? When we reflect on machines, what is it we are reflecting on? Is the ghost in the machine a plausible substitute for a shapelier muse? Or does it aim merely to keep us amused? More specifically, how in 1987 is the spiritual life affected by the (divinization of the) computer?
Old questions which, we feel, deserve a few new replies. . .