Religious Imagination as the Future Unfolds
Published in Noema by Nathan Gardels
Jonathan Zawada for Noema Magazine
The more science reveals, the greater the mystery of what we don’t know.
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At the core of the religious imagination is a sense of the sacred, a “reverence for being,” in the phrase of the Nobel-winning poet Czesław Miłosz, which respects the deeper pattern that connects all things beyond their appearances. However ineffable, it confers transcendent meaning and purpose to existence. It shapes the parameters of moral order, defining the values and norms of what is permissible and what is “set off and restricted” — as its Latin root, sacer, conveys — in order for the tribe, the society, the civilization, the species or the whole planet to survive and flourish.
“Culture, when it loses its sacred sense, loses all sense,” says Kołakowski. Absent a sense of the sacred in the age we are entering, all that is left is a lethal brew of nihilism and technological prowess that will end badly both for humans and the planet.
The First Axial Age
Karl Jaspers was best known for his study of the so-called Axial Age when all the great religions and philosophies were born in relative simultaneity over two millennia ago — Confucianism in China, the Upanishads and Buddhism in India, Homer’s Greece and the Hebrew prophets. Jaspers saw these civilizations arising in the long wake of what he called “the first Promethean Age” of man’s appropriation of fire and earliest inventions. Writing in 1949, he thought the world was entering the “second Promethean Age” with the spread of industrialization and other advances in technology and science, notably the nuclear bomb.
The New ‘AIxial’ Age
Today, a case can be made that we are on the cusp of a new pivotal age as Jaspers intuited but could not then foresee how it might unfold. What has changed is that the highly advanced quality of transcendence and theoretic culture enabled by the epoch of written language is both surpassing and turning in on itself, marking a decisive break from the first Axial Age legacy.What Peter Sloterdijk calls “immunitary reason” — the survival-protective impulse of the species — has recognized that climate change, one consequence of Anthropocene arrogance derived from human dis-embeddedness from nature, now threatens the basis of existence. It is a dialectical irony that this new awareness is only possible because a new symbolic competency has arrived on the scene through planetary-scale computation, enabled by artificial intelligence, that unveils the Earth to the heretofore limited scope of human apprehension as one self-regulating organism sustained by the entwinement of multiple intelligences, from microbes to forests as well as humans.
As Benjamin Bratton puts it, “The models that we have of climate change are ones that emerge from supercomputing simulations of Earth’s past, present and future. This is a self-disclosure of Earth’s intelligence and agency, accomplished by thinking through and with a computational model.”
This self-disclosure implies a “re-embedding” of the axial transcendence that nourished the religious imagination millennia ago back into encompassing nature and relational community, this time out of knowledge instead of ignorance, if human civilization and the planetary ecosystem are to survive. In short, the comprehending amplitude enabled by AI portends that it may play a similar role in fostering a “New AIxial Age” that written language did the first time around.
Such a reincarnation necessarily decenters humans in the cosmos and opens the way to “planetary sapience” — the synthesized intelligence of all lifeforms that are part and parcel of one self-regulating system and to which human technological capacities must align.
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Here, “planetary reason” conjoins with the religious imagination in what we might call the quest for “planetary homeostasis” as the new ground of the sacred. Drawing from the work of Antonio Damasio on the biological origins of culture, just as all organisms strive to survive by seeking equilibrium with their environment, on a planetary level this entails the evolved impulse toward equilibrium among all lifeforms that allows the ecology of existence to flourish. My speculation is that this revelation will anchor the spiritual condition of humanity in the centuries to come.