“It is always a hidden place, the way into it is not obvious, the geography is as much spiritual as physical. If you should happen upon it, your strongest certainty is not that you have discovered it but returned to it. In a single great episode of light, you remember everything.” … He did not pause then so much as wait, as one might before a telegraph sounder, for some affirmation from the far invisible.
— Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day
In a comment on an earlier post someone asked me how the work of David L. Schindler and Michael Hanby relates to my project on Anthropocene theology. It’s a good question, and I’m going to answer it here by painting with a pretty broad brush.
In works like this and this, Schindler and Hanby do something quite legitimate and often valuable: as Catholic theologians, they assume that Magisterial teaching and Holy Tradition are adequate to the interpretation of this moment, as they are to every moment, in human history; and they seek to discover and then communicate the ways that that is so.
There are other projects which do something similar, though perhaps in less theologically conservative ways: see, for instance, the essays in this excellent collection on transhumanism — a phenomenon related to but largely distinct from posthumanism. Speaking quite generally, we can say that these scholars share with Schindler and Hanby share an interest in finding out out what theology has to say to, and about, technological modernity.
My project is rather different in that I am going to try to listen to both the anxieties and the hopes of the Anthropocene world and allow them to speak back to theology. In this endeavor writers like Thomas Pynchon are actually more important than the self-proclaimed priests and prophets of a New Order — the Kevin Kellys and Ray Kurzweils — because they make elaborate contrapuntal compositions that capture much of the complexity of living within a world that feels both anthropocentric and (necessarily, I argue) posthuman.
Now, I wouldn’t be doing this project if I didn’t think that Christianity has something to say to the Anthropocene world. But precisely what it has to say is something I want to be patient about discovering. I need to be sure I can tune fairly precisely to those frequencies before I attempt to transmit messages along them.
Not incidentally, I consider it a very good omen that this long essay on Christianity and transhumanism appeared just as I was beginning these posts. I’ll have more to say about Meghan O’Gieblyn’s essay, but for now I’d just like to note that this is not the first example I’ve seen of a strangely smooth transition from an extremely conservative (essentially fundamentalist) religious context to some kind of post-condition — the locus classicus for this kind of thing is Michael Warner’s brilliant essay “Tongues Untied,” which concerns how Warner transitioned from a “teenage fundamentalist” to a “queer atheist intellectual” — which, it turns out, spolier alert, is not nearly as great a transition as others might think.