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1. Give up the dream of Paradise on Earth.
The sight of the rubble of Hiroshima killed the comforting narrative that the progress of science and technology leads to universal happiness; the sound of frozen corpses thrown on sledges in the Gulag destroyed the utopian story of humans instituting a perfect political order; the smell of burning bodies in Auschwitz annihilated Nietzsche’s myth that the ascendance of the Overman, the perfect race, will raise humankind to a new level of existence.
Bacon and Descartes imagined a glorious future for humans after we “make ourselves, as it were, the lords and masters of nature;”[i] however, the ever-ascending arc of science and technology turned out to be not under human control. Physicists, neuroscientists, and computer and genetic engineers are the new sorcerer’s apprentices, having summoned great forces that they now cannot either control or banish. Science and technology became the masters and possessors of us.
No one knows how molecular nanotechnology, genetic engineering, and artificial intelligence will transform human life, not the engineers at M.I.T., the geneticists at Stanford, or the computer scientists in Silicon Valley. Perhaps the ever-ascending arc of science and technology is headed to superintelligence, maybe to a thermonuclear war that annihilates humankind, or possibly to a severe climate change that destroys Homo sapiens and most other creatures.
2. Abandon the technology that mimics your spiritual nature.
The Screen does not bring you the world, although you do have the capacity to be connected to all that is.[ii] Of all the natural creatures, only humans can grasp a whole. Animals do not grasp what things are; as a result, their innate responses are keyed to a few external stimuli. A deaf turkey hen pecks all her own chicks to death as soon as they are hatched. A jackdaw, a medium-sized member of the crow family, will take a fluttering black cloth for another jackdaw. Chimpanzees perceive the shape, size, color, and design of stuffed toys, yet are frightened by such “drolly, unnatural”[iii] things and cannot see they are harmless pieces of cloth and wood. The scientific study of animal perception demonstrates that an animal’s world is not the world we see at all, but more closely resembles “a small, poorly furnished room.”[iv]
To begin to realize your spiritual nature disconnect from the Screen and connect to the immediate physical world, to the taste of an excellent Burgundy, to the silence after a fresh snowfall, to the wonder and mystery of nature, to the perfection of Mozart’s Misericordias Domini (K. 222) that touches the transcendent.
3. Reject the truncation of love induced by capitalism.
You are not a commodity or a profit-maximizing creature living a beggarly existence. Learn to give generously and to love without desiring a reward. Self-interested love directed to the acquisition of material goods ends with individual unhappiness and social catastrophe, as life under the Dome amply demonstrates. A life of service to others, not the attainment of wealth and status, is a genuinely human life.
To love without the desire for reward is how God loves everyone, including Dome Dwellers. If an isolated individual attempts to love the way God does, he will enter into genuine friendship with Him, and eventually, he will love his enemies and pray for those who persecute him, even though he can never be friends with them. God loves all persons, for “He makes His sun rise on the evil and the good, and sends rains on the just and on the unjust.”[v] By loving the way God does, Dome dwellers “become partakers of the divine nature.”[vi] Many Church Fathers were fond of telling their brethren, “God became man, so man might become God.” The aim of human life is union with God and deification, not the acquisition of more and more material goods.
Endnotes
[i] Descartes, Discourse on Method, Part Six, pp. 142-143.
[ii] See George Stanciu, “Wonder and Love: How Scientists Neglect God and Man,” http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2016/06/wonder-love-why-scientists-neglect-god-man.html.
[iii] Wolfgang Kohler, The Mentality of Apes, trans. Ella Winter (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931), pp. 320-321.
[iv] Jacob von Uexküll, quoted by Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis Culture, p. 85.
[v] Matthew 5:45. RSV
[vi] 2 Peter 1:4. RSV