Book Review: Techgnosis, and The Talmud and the Internet
[This review appeared in the Spring 2001 issue of Regeneration Quarterly.]
Given sufficient computer processing power and memory, just about all of reality might one day be digitally encoded — at least if a number of today’s futurologists and techno-optimists are to be believed. For the rest of us, such scenario may seem far-fetched, but every time I find myself moved by an mp3-encoded version of a Mozart sonata, or immersed in a dvd movie playing on my laptop, such predictions start to seem a little bit more real. Flesh and physicality, the futurists tell us, are on their way out, soon to be replaced by pure data. It doesn’t sound like good news for those of us who prefer to spend our time in what some Internet mavens wryly refer to as “meatspace.” But what’s surprising is how much of this isn’t really news at all. Two recent accounts attempt to explain how, gadgetry aside, humanity finds itself confronted with the age-old philosophical-religious problem of spirit, body, and the connection between them.
Jonathan Rosen’s The Talmud and the Internet is a beautifully written, literate, and very personal essay detailing the author’s attempts to reconcile his faith tradition with a contemporary world that is enamored with technology and hostile to religion. Rosen’s consideration of the Internet turns on his analysis of Judaism as a kind of “virtual” religion, a religion of the word, not the flesh. After the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in the year 70 a.d., Rosen explains, Judaism had to relinquish its hold on the “bricks-and-mortar” world of the Temple and recast itself as a religion in which, inverting the Christian formula of John’s gospel, “the flesh became words.” Its survival depended on its transfiguration into the teachings of the Talmud, a book which, with its extensive cross-referencing and its “open argumentative character,” seems to bear a kinship to the hyperlinked cacophony of the Internet. In order not to stretch the analogy too far, Rosen acknowledges that, unlike the Talmud, the Internet lacks a moral center and the sense that there’s an “organizing intelligence” behind it. Still, argues Rosen, a person steeped in Talmudic spirituality ought not feel alarmed by the prospect of “the great uprooted drift of our realigning modern culture” culminating in our “collective liftoff into cyberspace.” For, Rosen concludes, “Finding a home inside exile, finding unity inside infinity, finding the self inside a sea of competing voices was an ancient challenge and is a modern one too” — a challenge that, since the destruction of their Temple, Jews have met admirably.
Rosen’s analysis never quite reconciles his appreciation for what he calls the “splendidly earthbound” nature of the Talmud — and by extension, of Judaism itself — with his cheerful reception of our wholesale launch into cyberspace. Here a more thorough and nuanced investigation into the nature of the Internet — like that provided by Erik Davis’s Techgnosis — is needed.
Information technology did not begin with the computer era, Davis argues, but with the development of another sort of “machine” — the written word. The advent of alphabetic literacy first enabled humans to “detach their thoughts from the flowing surfaces of the material world.” The relatively recent harnessing of electrical power, which ultimately made computing and the construction of digital networks possible, further catalyzed the “transmutation of matter into spirit.” From the written word forward, information technology has made it increasingly possible to envision severing mind from body — a development with which Davis is clearly uncomfortable.
Davis devotes several chapters of Techgnosis to outlining the sorts of individuals who stand to thrive as culture becomes further and further immersed in this technologized milieu. The first group are the “cyberspace cowboys,” technological optimists who exhibit a “dualistic rejection of matter for the incorporeal possibilities of mind.” Perhaps the most striking specimens of this philosophy are the members of Extropian movement, an affinity group of “futurists and philosophers hopped up on megavitamins and cognitive enhancement technologies” who seek ways to exploit information technology in order to transcend human limitations’age, disease, and the nagging inability to be in more than one place at a time. Central to the Extropians’ audacious project, Davis explains, is the prospect of one day uploading human consciousness onto a computer, an idea popularized by the robotics scientist Hans Moravec.
The second class of techgnostics are what Davis terms “saturated selves,” people who come to function as “routers or switches in vast networks of … information, as if the boundaries of the self are dissolving into amorphous systems of data flow.” Here the notion of individual agency takes a back seat to communal participation in something akin to McLuhan’s “global village.” Of course, in order to be part of this shimmering new landscape, we will need to take leave of our bodies and “jack in” to the digital network like a cyberpunk from a William Gibson novel. While there appears to be a tension between the egolessness of the saturated selves and the Faustian hubris of the Extropians, the two share a tendency toward a flesh-denigrating worldview that troubles Davis deeply.
Davis’s prescription for combating the gnostic effects of our immersion in information technology shows a leaning toward what he calls “the more existentially savvy” philosophies and religious traditions:
For all its otherworldly denigration of the flesh, the orthodox Christian “fantasy” embraces the total physical reality of the created world and insists that the saved will wear flesh again in the perfect world that follows Judgment Day. More important, the linchpin of all Christian creeds is Christ’s incarnation in a human body that suffers dies, and resurrects.
Despite his warnings, Davis does not ground his study in a totally bleak evaluation of information technology; instead he insists that technology is a “trickster,” whose ultimate effects can subvert our expectations. But he does effectively demonstrate how our capitulation to digital technologies can reincarnate the ancient gnostic heresy and threaten what Rosen calls the “splendidly earthbound” character of traditional faith.