NO BOOK THAT I’m aware of is quite like Meghan O’Gieblyn’s God, Human, Animal, Machine. Her omnivorous interests range over philosophy of mind, historical accounts of religious disenchantment, and the theological basis of transhumanist ideology, all in the service of analyzing how cultural metaphors for individuality have evolved over the centuries. Human beings have been described as both clocks and computers, and O’Gieblyn performs an examination of the perils in this thinking. Readers never lose sight of O’Gieblyn herself as a personality, even as she brings to bear subjects as diverse as quantum mechanics, Calvinism, and Dostoyevsky’s existentialism. Throughout the book, she is a brilliant interlocutor who presents complex theories, disciplines, arguments, and ideas with seeming ease.
Lots in here. O'Gieblyn went to Moody Bible Institute, one of the Harvards of American Fundamentalism, ironic as that sounds. I went to a friendly competitor out of high school but ended up studying American religion. I understand this analysis very well.ED SIMON: Much of God, Human, Animal, Machine deals with the contested historical hypothesis that modernity is a long account of disenchantment. How useful do you still find that concept to be? Is there a model to move beyond contemporary secularity? Is re-enchantment or neo-enchantment even possible? Would we want those things even if they were?
MEGHAN O’GIEBLYN: I’m interested in how disenchantment narratives function as modern mythology — a kind of origin story of how we came to occupy the present, or as an explanation (maybe even a theodicy) of what went wrong with modernity, which usually has something to do with the dominance of science and technology. We often think about the longing for re-enchantment as an eschewal of science and reason, which is to say a form of nostalgia or regression. What I end up exploring in the book, though, is how science and technology are often drawn into the project of re-enchantment. In the philosophy of mind, there’s been a lot of enthusiasm lately for panpsychism — the idea that all matter is conscious — which was for a long time on the fringe of consciousness studies. Or you could look to the rise of social AI, like Alexa or Siri, and the pervasiveness of smart technologies. The fact that we’re increasingly interacting socially with inanimate objects recalls an animist cosmology where ordinary tools are inhabited by spirits and humans maintain reciprocal relationships with them.
I think all of us are exhausted by anthropocentrism. It’s nice to envision a world where we aren’t the only conscious beings lording over a world of dead matter. And there’s a very simplistic critique of the disenchantment thesis that argues that science and technology are just as awe-inspiring as the spiritual doctrines they’ve displaced. Bruno Latour said something along these lines, in the early ’90s: “Is Boyle’s air pump any less strange than the Arapesh spirit houses?” But the trauma of disenchantment isn’t just the lack of magic or wonder in the world. What’s so destabilizing about disenchantment — and I say this as someone who experienced it very acutely in my own deconversion — is the fact that the world, without a religious framework, is devoid of intrinsic purpose and meaning. And that’s something that can’t (or rather shouldn’t) be addressed by technical and scientific disciplines.
Lots of aspects of our society with a façade of so-called secularism are deeply infused with religion. O'Gieblyn may be on to something. This is why I make claims like, "religion is not the problem. Conservatism is the problem."
