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VIRGIN & THE MICROPROCESSORDate: 04.16.01 Author:B. Katz One hundred years ago, almost to the hour, Henry
Adams stood in the center of the Great Exposition in Paris, transfixed
by a towering, 40-foot electrical generator.
"He found himself lying in the Gallery of Machines," Adams wrote of
himself in the third person, "his historical neck broken by the sudden
irruption of new forces." It was 1900, and time itself seemed to have
slowed down to ease the passing of the century.
As he grew accustomed to the presence of the machine, its
massive flywheel spinning invisibly and almost noiselessly, Adams noted
that "he began to feel the dynamo as a moral force, much as the early
Christians felt the Cross." This rush of emotion was disturbing to him
but also exhilarating, and it prompted a profound meditation on the
spiritual condition of the Americans in an age of silent forces and
invisible rays and vibrations imperceptible to the senses. Once it was
the Virgin that had refracted the mysterious energy of the cosmos,
imparting meaning to men's lives and inspiring them to build a
civilization. Now it was the machine. The scale and the raw power of
the dynamo left him feeling as if he were floating in space and
disconnected from the flow of time, and he longed for some sense of
spiritual connectedness: "Before the end," he confessed, "one began to
pray to it."
Adams stood, as we do again today, at the threshold of a new
era, one whose technological underpinning (the electrical current)
seemed to separate it from the preceding century of steam by an
unbridgeable gulf. What prompted his revelation was not simply the
appearance of a new and unprecedented technology, however, but a
cultural inversion of apocalyptic dimensions. He believed that among
the Americans, technology had usurped the role once assigned to
religion. Adams was certainly on the right track, but he did not get it
quite right. The truth is, they have simply changed places.
The prevailing wisdom has it that with the growth of an
enlightened, rationalistic culture, bathed in the luminous clarity of
science, we have lost the need for religion. Indeed, it seems
unarguable that science, having kept largely to itself since Galileo's
run-in with the Cardinals, has again stepped forth to answer the great
questions once claimed by theology. An orbiting space telescope can,
like Moses upon Mount Sinai, gaze into the face of the Infinite.
Particle accelerators permit physicists to re-experience the moment of
Creation. Within the next couple of years genomics will have
more-or-less settled the matter of Destiny and resolved the Meaning of
Life. But human beings have a spiritual core, and even in these
disenchanted times they have found a way to combat their cosmic
loneliness and bind themselves to the
universe.
For evidence that the fires of religion still blaze in the
public sphere we must look beyond the obvious battlegrounds - prayer in
the schools, the right to life (and death), the moment of conception or
the evolution of species - for these are mere skirmishes in a crusade
of millennial proportions. It is rather the shopping center, the mail
order catalog and the museum gift shop that testify to the profanation
of the sacred and the sacralization of everyday life. The commodity now
inspires our deepest reverence, while the religious icon has become an
object of collection, connoisseurship and museum display. What is
taking place today, at the dawn of the millennium, is nothing less than
a religious conversion on a scale not seen since Constantine set out to
convert the Roman Empire under the sign of the Cross. Marx (of all
people!) pretty much nailed it when he preached, in the sermon known as
the Communist Manifesto, "All that is solid melts into air, all that is
sacred is profaned, and man is at last forced to face with sober senses
his real conditions of life."
This cultural inversion takes two distinct forms. On the one
hand, there is almost no religious icon of any culture that has not
been commandeered by the tourist, the collector or the decorator. A
carved effigy of St. Francis, snatched from a church in rural Ecuador,
now presides beatifically over the television room. In the study a
shiva-linga functions admirably as a paperweight, while a Tibetan
mandala hangs over the bathtub. In the garden, next to a serene bronze
Buddha, sits a casting of Moorish calligraphy - a
fragment of Qur'anic verse, no doubt - purchased for a song at gift
shop downtown. Ripped from the native environments that imparted to
them their original significance, they have been recontextualized in
the domestic ecology of the home and given a secondary meaning that is
entirely secular. The islander's god becomes the urbanite's souvenir,
but that is just the beginning.
For a century, now, museums have appointed themselves
guardians of endangered cultures, much as zoos take care that pandas
and bald eagles do not tip into extinction. But "primitive" peoples (to
use one of the loathsome euphemisms of our time) are so because they
have not learned the modern trick of separating religion from the
fabric of everyday life. "To work is to pray," instructed St. Benedict
at the beginning of the Christian era, and the same may be said, in
most traditional cultures, of cooking, hunting, wrestling, weaving and
the cosmetic adornment of the body. The godless curator who displays a
bit of Yemenite filigree or a canoe paddle from the Sepik River is a
blasphemer, his act a form of museological defilement.
We tolerate these desecrations in the name of art. Or
ethnology. Or
multiculturalism. Or any of a dozen other non-sectarian sects and
non-denominational denominations. After all, do not our concert halls
resound with requiems, masses and polyphonic chants? Does not the Bible
supply the subject matter for entire wings of the Uffizi and the Met?
But that is just the point. Icons, relics and other holy things have
been siphoned from the cloistered halls of the church to fill the
bustling market square outside, and the First Amendment is powerless to
intervene: they delight our senses, calm our nerves, fill our museums
and decorate our houses. The one thing we do not do is pray to them.
That activity is reserved for an entirely different class of
devotional article: the commodity and its ultimate, metaphysical
double, the brand that sanctifies it. What gave the medieval relic its
hypnotic power over the pilgrim, what allows the brass bell, the prayer
shawl or the incense-burner to nullify the senses and focus the gaze of
the penitent upon the infinite, is the absence of even the faintest
suggestion of utility. This is why an appropriately ordained cleric
need only murmur an incantation or consume a ritual meal in order to
transform an ordinary beer mug into a holy chalice, a bathmat into a
prayer rug, a vacant lot into consecrated burial ground or a peasant
girl into a saint. The act of sanctification projects their formerly
mundane functionality onto a higher realm and irrevocably distorts the
mechanism by which economic value is determined. But the same may be
said of the trademarked sneakers, the designer-monogrammed luggage and
the vast array of niche-marketed, color-coordinated branded
accoutrements without which the savvy business traveler might just as
well stay home. Useless, every one of them. But like all religious
fetishes since the beginning of time, useless in a manner that renders
them utterly indispensable.
The objects that fill our closets and our garages, clutter our
desktops and our medicine cabinets are, in an absurdly literal sense,
"articles of faith." It is not that we cannot live without them, but
that we cannot imagine living without them. They have, in the manner of
every genuine religious experience, colonized the imagination, captured
the soul and invaded the interiority of
consciousness. A few hours off-line when the server crashes is frankly
no big
deal, but the anxiety of a few hours off-line is experienced as a form
of
excommunication. Fortunately we have recourse to pagers, cell-phones,
e-mail,
voice-mail, PDAs and FedEx, which function more-or-less as prayer beads
and
rosaries did in bygone times: to tide us over until the Sabbath, the
day of
rest when one finally has the leisure to visit one's storage locker in
peace.
This explains why the outlet mall today - and its
e-counterpart in the palpably near future - is able to combine with
such powerful effect the atmosphere of the Bible Belt revival meeting
and the architecture of the gothic cathedral. Early Adopters surge
through these places, speaking in tongues and casting off their
inhibitions, while performing superhuman miracles of retail
consumption. High above them, with all the radiance of the stained
glass windows at Chartres and Amiens, video screens blaze with scenes
from the lives of the saints, whose exemplary performances on the
basketball court, the fashion runway or the corporate boardroom would
be unthinkable except under the sign of a Swoosh or a pair of Golden
Arches. Brand loyalty is the equivalent today of religious orthodoxy;
to rip off a label, as many idolaters still do, is an act of
desecration. To defer consumption until the post-holiday season is to
commit an outright apostasy.
Andrew Carnegie, not otherwise known for his theological
acumen, observed that "upon the sacredness of property civilization
itself depends." From an
empirical point of view he was absolutely correct. Property, according
to the
homespun philosophy which Carnegie quite appropriately called his
"Gospel of
Wealth," is not just the moral force conjured by Henry Adams, but the
agent of holy transcendence. Because they draw us toward a world that
lies forever
beyond our mortal reach, our accumulations serve as lenses through
which we
gaze upon the deepest mysteries of creation. Freud, in one of his most
enduring images, described the "oceanic feeling" of immediate
connectedness to the universe that believers seem to experience but
which he, as a man of
science, could not locate within himself. Today we are all but drowning
in an
oceanic tide of products, brilliantly designed and divinely engineered,
and we treasure them with a love that is pure. It is here that we find
our gods and our heroes, that we search for redemption and salvation,
for a glimpse of the infinite, for the key to immortality. It is the
paradox of American civilization that the commodity has stepped forward
to fill the spiritual void engendered by the pursuit of the commodity.
"Symbol or energy," wrote Henry Adams, "the Virgin had acted as the greatest
force the Western world ever felt, and had drawn man's activities to herself
more strongly than any other power." The task of the present, this utterly
bizarre present, with all its millennial fervor and fever, is to follow the
track of that energy, to find out where it came from and where it is going.
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