Intellectualizing the Machine

Next, in my description of the operation of the Machine:

The tool-making creature concomitantly develops the faculties of intelligence.  I should probably try to make something clear.  I have chosen the rather clumsy notion of the Machine to describe the system of our experiences that we must faithfully analyze.  Conceptually, I might choose the Body or the Organism as labels for the system that surrounds us, but I believe such notions would carry untenable connotations of amity or communal purpose.  (And the System would carry still more connotations of purpose.)  The Machine, however, can (I hope) be understandable as an unforgiving collective that can manifest simultaneously in cohesion or non-cohesion.  The parts often grind together.

So I have thrown together clumsily the rather disparate notions of the individual creature’s “body and available materials” and the animate and inanimate elements inherent in “the tool-making creature.”  This disparity, however, must pale next to the necessity that confronts us yet: incorporating into the concept of the Machine the crucial role of the disembodied apprehension of thought.  At least we believe that thoughts are disembodied or incorporeal.  In fact, the very notion that we “believe” something presumes that our apprehension of a concept can stand apart from the reality that the belief posits, and that the test of any belief is its persistence even as the basis for its ostensible validity is removed or remote.

When dealing with matters of religion, it is often held to be incumbent upon the religious to answer the contention that religious belief serves purposes—psychological support, group cohesion, power structures, and many others—each pregnant with potential to subsume truth-seeking (the hallowed goal of intellect) into the service of less-elevated ends.  The straightforward application of intelligence militates toward this end—it is a fatuous sentiment to say, as some of the religious will, that belief can proceed in frictionless harmony with knowledge.

In Mark 9 there is the timeless plea, “I believe; help thou mine unbelief.”  There is no pretense in the gospels that belief glides in harmony with thought.  Belief is part of the machine.  Indeed, belief is itself a machine—fueled by desire, producing comfort, and boxed in by our own limitations and by the fact that the larger Machine impinges upon us constantly, demanding incessantly that we decide (or ride upon filed-away decisions about) what we will tend toward, and what we will tend away from.

Intellect can be claimed to be more basic (and less psychologically “base”) than belief.  It is no slight to religion to admit this.  What is of real concern, however, is the pitfall of considering intellect itself as something standing outside the parameters of the Machine.  Intellect itself serves purposes—surely there is no slight in saying this—and intellect itself is a machine.  Religious belief (with its analogs in “non-religious” worldviews) is only by degree more describable than intellect by “what we will tend toward, and what we will tend away from.”

Indeed, the machine-quality of intellect is found not in what it embraces, but in what it learns to shun.  Fundamentally, intellect posits an existence defined by dimensions.  As I wrote in the previous post, we are harried constantly, in our individual and collective thought lives, with “the unfortunate tendency to concoct an ‘existence’ of our neatly-defined finitude imagined as it might exist in a lattice of (imagined) infinities.”  This is what I have tried to address with “roused, readied, reaped”—we exist in a temporal and spatial milieu that curls in upon itself, that finds its references in itself, and that finds the validation of its concepts in the persistence of phenomena across time and space.  The experiences of our lives factored by quantities of time or space—our reachings-out across time and space to the experiences of our fellow creatures—are essentially our experiences factored by one—by identity.  There is no time and no space but as mechanisms of the greater Machine.

To say (as I imagine some might), that my description of reality does not make sense, is beside the point.  The existence of reality does not make sense.  There is available to us—virtually by definition—no reason why anything should exist.  Fortunately, there is however available to us the capacity to employ thought in manners that we have come to treat as counter-intuitive.  My contentions about the teachings of Jesus rely on such approaches, and for what it is worth my contentions seem hardly more likely to satisfy the religious than the non-religious.

The whole idea of what Jesus was trying to teach in the gospels (or perhaps more importantly, what Jesus was trying to do by teaching in the gospels) is addressed constantly by proponents and by critics of the gospels.  Jesus went around teaching for three or so years, and what he presented as a belief “system" has been kicked around ever since.  The denominations have massaged Jesus’ teachings into what many have called—perhaps quite revealingly—“salvation economies.”  Critics have set about dismantling those economies (or “systems,” or whatever.)  It has even become a trend for believers to expect that a stage of their religious lives might be characterized by their “deconstructing” (and usually reconstructing) their belief systems.

All of this presumes to know what Jesus was doing.  Jesus was apparently not convinced that anyone knew what he was doing.  The Gospel of John illustrates this quite starkly.  The gospel as a story essentially begins with Jesus laughing (good naturedly, it would seem) at Nathanael, “Because I said unto thee, I saw thee under the fig tree, believest thou?”  The same gospel draws toward its close with Jesus saying to his disciples, “Do ye now believe?  Behold, the hour cometh, yea, is now come, that ye shall be scattered, every man to his own, and shall leave me alone . . . .”  Jesus does not seem to be very convinced.  (Nor does Jesus refrain here from his habit of toying with the dimensions of time and space.)

Of course, the gospels tell the story of the Resurrection (though in Mark the story is arguably incomplete.)  In Matthew especially, the Resurrection is foretold, apparently quite definitively: “From that time forth began Jesus to shew unto his disciples, how that he must go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised again the third day.”  Yet in John—which stints not to describe the disciples’ continual befuddlement—we have the disciples described on the morning of the Resurrection: “For as yet they knew not the scripture, that he must rise again from the dead.”

Even to view the gospels charitably, we must conclude that Jesus’ teachings were incredibly slow to penetrate the minds of his disciples.  It is therefore somewhat painful to have it contended today that the teachings of Jesus—delivered by him over three years to dedicated disciples in a religion-soaked environment, delivered to disciples behaving as though their eternal souls hung in the balance, disciples hand-picked by Jesus—are teachings that could not be comprehended by Jesus’ own students, yet those teachings are such as can be successfully—and salvifically—passed from one stranger to another over ten minutes in a train station.

Indeed, a train would be a fitting metaphor for the machine-like quality of the thought processes that enable us to survive the continual intellectual assaults the world directs at us.  We think of time and space because we resolve to think of time and space, and yet it is only a convention that our thoughts need to be directed so and—most importantly, whether we are religious or not—that we ought to train ourselves that way.  Jesus sought to train his disciples another way.

It has been the source of perennial controversy that Jesus said that the end of all things would be seen by the generation of his day.  Some have said that the gospel use of (Greek) “generation” was really meant to indicate “race,” but to entertain such contentions requires a latitude of translation that might infect innumerable corners of the gospels (to say nothing of the fact that—since Jesus was an Aramaic-speaker—we are arguing about translations of translations.)  Some have said that he was looking ahead to a future generation.  Some have said that Jesus was describing how his contemporaries—or at least some of them—would witness a type of the end in the coming Roman onslaught.

Time and space set aside—not really a very wild notion where religion is concerned—it appears that to Jesus there is only one generation: the generation of Adam, if you will.  Time and space, as I have said, meant little or nothing to Jesus.  Who was the high priest during some episode; who, of either David or the Messiah, had to be the ancestor; who was Jesus’ mother or sisters or brothers; who—Abraham or the devil--was the father of a crowd of Jews; who of the Patriarchs, once living, could ever be considered dead; who could claim to be a child of the ancients and not escape blood-guilt as though participating real-time in the very deeds?  We could even throw in John the Baptist, proclaiming that God might raise up from the stones children for Abraham.  Or that the Baptist was Elijah.

The Machine of existence devours all that we can conceptualize, and encompasses potentially infinitudes of infinities that we might never conceptualize.  If we are truly to consider the existence of God and the existence of God’s salvation, then—as I contend Jesus teaches—God does not merely save us from predicaments that we can imagine, or even from postulations of predicaments that we extrapolate from every dimension that we can imagine.  As I will try to develop later, dimensions and dimension-oriented thinking lead inevitably to impiety.  Too much of our religious life has been built on, “If God exists, then this” or “If God exists, then that.”  It should really be, “If God exists, then everything.”