Since the Enlightenment, the West has been a predominantly left-brain type of society, with an emphasis on rationality, analysis, and perhaps most significantly, efficiency. Artificial intelligence, we are told, will make our lives more efficient. Technologies throughout the last couple of centuries have promised the same luxuries, from the automobile to the microwave, but as impressive and helpful as many of these advancements have proved, we still are starved for something deeper, for meaning, beauty, and God. Science and technology were hailed as the saviors of mankind, but instead, they’ve helped to push out crucial aspects of the human experience.
The Marvelous and the Wonderful
Our secular, materialistic worldview can blind us to the possibility of mystery, religious experience (the “numinous”) and the deep knowledge available in the “right-brain” mediums, like art, poetry, music, and literature. And yet the world never became “disenchanted,” as journalist Rod Dreher reminded me in his new book, Living in Wonder. We just no longer have the eyes to see the marvelous and the wonderful within our world. Or at least, those qualities can be harder to see in a scientistic culture.
Dreher refers to the work of the British cultural critic Ian McGilchrist. In his chapter “Enchanted Mind, Enchanted Matter,” he writes,
We in the West have privileged the left-brain way of knowing. We have prioritized the abstract over the concrete, diminishing right-brain methods of knowledge as subjective and therefore second-rate. Science, mathematics, and empirical reasoning (left brain) have crowded out poetry, art, and religion (right brain) as ways of knowing.
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When we analyze and “dissect” everything, we end up fragmenting our world into atomized parts, lacking a larger story structure or meta narrative needed to make sense of the world and cosmos as a whole. That’s why Dreher appeals to the need for encountering the world as a mystery, something we can never fully comprehend but which we can nonetheless participate in.
Is the Tide Turning?
More writers and intellectuals are recognizing the need for mystery and wonder, and furthermore, appealing to religion as a way to recover a sense of meaning in the secular age. A new article from The Free Press profiles several prominent intellectual and public figures who have come around to God. Peter Savodnik, like Dreher, discusses the rise of the “new atheism” and the concomitant ascendance of the internet. He writes,
The new atheism coincided, not coincidentally, with the rise of the internet — the apotheosis of our emerging hyper-scientific, hyperrational moment, one in which every problem could be solved, every hurdle could be overcome, every disease cured. It was only a matter of the right pitch deck and enough seed capital. “People are looking for new gods, to use a phrase of Heidegger’s, and, given our technological fetish, it would make sense if these new gods showed up as a kind of new tech,” Crawford said. “You get the gods you’re looking for.”
That’s Matthew Crawford, author of The World Beyond Your Head, which talks about the struggle to pay attention in a digital and fractured world. Crawford began his faith journey as an agnostic but eventually converted to the Anglican Church. Savodnik also references Jordan Peterson, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Paul Kingsnorth as a few of the other unlikely prophets who have noted the shortcomings of the purely materialistic conception of existence. Some of these people are Christians, while others remain undecided. One thing is certain, though: Rejecting God is not the key to freedom and progress. The untethered embrace of technology and science, without moral underpinnings, can scrape away the depths of human life and experience. The militance of the new atheists has largely faltered as the West sputters for a recovery of meaning, as we pick up the wreckage left by a rejection of faith.
A New Way Forward
With AI and its attendant hype and promises, a nationwide epidemic of anxiety and depression caused in large part by the smartphone, can we recover the right side of the brain? Can we get beyond our obsession with efficiency and technological ease and reconnect with beauty, nature, and the transcendent? While there might not be a culture-wide renewal of faith yet, some significant voices are heralding a new way forward. For me, simply picking up a novel or reading a book like Living in Wonder is a way to awaken the dormant appetites for meaning and beauty. Going on long walks at the park or through a forest can disentangle a person from the clamor of the technological society. Enjoying relationships for their own sake is another way to reject the “Machine,” the term Paul Kingsnorth uses to describe the all-encompassing organism of efficiency, technology, and commodity ruling our present age. Our world is already enchanted. The question is, can we retrain our eyes to see it?
Cross-posted at Mind Matters News.