One of the cruelest ontological ironies is the human tendency to seek towards some form of unity, whether abstract or tangible. Spend an entire day procrastinating, neglecting work you ought to finish, and reap the fruits of psychological anxiety later. Attend a rave or music show to experience perfect synchrony and intimacy w/ your fellow man only to feel empty and dejected the morning after. If you’ve ever had the privilege of a ruinous break-up w/ a lover, you may be familiar w/ the sense of raw abandonment and disquiet that lack of closure brings. In all of these cases there exists some lack of a unified, coherent, harmonious whole that inspires so much distress; why must we feel this way, especially given that reality is very often not unified, not coherent, or at all harmonious? It all seems so maladaptive to harbor this instinct towards an ideal, towards some kind of perfection in a patently imperfect, fallen reality.
It is this very instinct towards unity that leads me to believe that we are not meant for this world, and therefore is yet another biting nail in the coffin for a secular, scientific, and materialist interpretation of reality. Yes, we are physical, natural beings like any other, and the material world is our dominion. However, often times we are compelled towards and look towards the noumenal for guidance, conceptualized as mathematics, religion, or any other abstraction in between of your choosing. For example, the mathematical derivatives of my position tell me how fast I am going in my car and inform whether I should brake or accelerate, but a derivative isn’t something that I can apprehend w/ any of my senses. God is another such similar entity, as He orders my steps and instructs me how to comport myself, despite there being no voice for the ears to listen nor total form for the eyes to perceive. In thinking of analogues among the animal kingdom w/ similar predilections towards the apprehensible yet ultimately unobtainable, a fine example is the Order Lepidoptera, more commonly known as moths. These oneric creatures (particularly the likes of Bombyx mori and Actias luna) navigate using celestial bodies, typically the Moon, via the process of positive phototaxis.
Of course, the analogy isn’t exactly 1:1, as celestial bodies are phenomenal, material, tangible entities that can be apprehended w/ one of the five senses. Meanwhile the types of perfection humans can apprehend are only done so through the intellect. But rather, the important thing to note here is that, despite being functionally unobtainable and far off, the influence of celestial bodies is so incredibly felt and serves as guidance for the behavior of our beloved moths. For them, their governing heuristic is to keep the light of the Moon towards their backs, to establish a transverse, horizontal plane on which they are to take flight. They, in very literal terms, carry the mandate to stay in the light: to remain under the watchful gaze of the Moon. Often times, this imperative proves maladaptive for moths that live in proximity to human civilization, as you yourself have probably witnessed a hapless moth endlessly circle and repeatedly crash into an artificial light source such as a porch light or streetlamp. In the worst cases, this process devolves into a death spiral where the moth circles the artificial light source until she succumbs to exhaustion and starvation. Merciful deaths are typically afforded by open flames and bug zappers.
At this point, our analogy is quickly approaching the territory of truism: humanity is not any different from the moth in the sense that the modern, technological/cultural/social landscape has created no shortage of ersatz gods to haphazardly orbit. Political ideology who's transmission frequency has accelerated exponentially over the past two decades has made us crueler towards each other in an explicit rejection of God so far as one takes for granted that God is love. Algorithm-mediated addictions come in terrifying, novel forms as they reach into us and twist our biology to produce something resembling possession and false worship. Social media has facilitated the expression of avarice and vice in general, as what were once offered as a means to connect w/ like-minded people are now avenues for monetization and clout-chasing. By all accounts it appears as if cybernetization has proved disasterous for humanity and threatens to tear society apart. Outlining the issue here is not difficult nor is it particularly original; the modernist alienation of man is classic Marx and the separation of man from God reaches as far back as Genesis.
So if the diagnosis of the ailment has been long since articulated and known, what is the prognosis and viable prescription for treatment? Interestingly enough, our winged, insectoid counterparts have shed some light (literally, they did away w/ it) on the matter. In response to the increase in light pollution attendant to urbanization, a particular species of moth, Yponomeuta cagnagella, has reduced its attraction to light. Applying this solution to the analogy and translating it into a human context, we must reduce our impulse towards unity. Taking into account the absolute sum of our analogy, the unity-seeking mind reels at the very thought. How could it possibly be that the solution to the contemporary problem of, what essentially amounts to false idol worship and vice, is less God? I argue that it isn’t so much seeking less God, but seeking God differently.
To help us w/ this, we may turn to Spinoza and his Deus sive Natura: the notion that God is not a transcendent, outside-of-reality entity that lords over the universe, but rather is reality in its absolute totality. Here we are making the theological transition from one of transcendence to immanence; that is, God is not above all in an aborescent hierarchy but instead within and inherent to all. He does not impose a plan from on high for us to follow as His will, but rather the unfolding logic of the reality we find ourselves immersed in is His will. Additionally, God is characterized by a single substance that assumes an infinite number of attributes; two of which are intelligible to man: Thought and Extension (Mind and Matter, if you’d like). These correspond somewhat neatly w/ the realms of the noumenal and phenomenal, though there is some room to quibble there, particularly among some Kantians. Particular objects, subjects, ideas, etc. are achieved by modification of the single substance via modes. Now, armed w/ this pantheistic theological understanding, we can now pivot to Deleuze and Guattari to address the more proximal concerns at hand.
In A Thousand Plateaus, D&G write1:
"Let us summarize the principal characteristics of a rhizome: unlike trees or their roots, the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into play very different regimes of signs, and even nonsign states. The rhizome is reducible neither to the One nor the multiple. It is not the One that becomes Two or even directly three, four, five, etc. It is not a multiple derived from the One, or to which One is added (n+1). It is composed not of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion. It has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills. It constitutes linear multiplicities with n dimensions having neither subject nor object, which can be laid out on a plane of consistency and from which the One is always subtracted (n-1). When a multiplicity of this kind changes dimension, it necessarily changes in nature as well, undergoes a metamorphosis."Is this not uncannily descriptive of the immanent God outlined by Spinoza? It’s no secret that Deleuze was heavily influenced by Spinoza: it clearly shows, but pointing out this little bit re: the rhizome and multiplicities is critical in making the logical steps from God-as-immanent to God-as-rhizome. A non-subject, non-object entity that engenders disparate traits that are linked together within itself—why, I cannot conceptualize this as anything else other than a process unfolding, one that has the quality of Spinoza’s God substance that assumes an infinite amount of traits via the application of attributes and modes. By being a single substance and possessing an infinite number of attributes/modes, it is simultaneously neither One nor multiple; being a self-caused reality, it never began nor will ever end (however is, as in contains, the Alpha and the Omega). Additionally, it is ever-growing, ceaselessly creating multiplicities which in turn continuously assemble this entity in a recursive, self-defining manner, and exists at degree zero where it cannot be exceeded nor subceded. This rhizome is a very-near approximate of the God of the infinite, the God of and in all; the God of Spinoza.
Having reconceptualized the traditional notion of a transcendent God into God-as-immanent, and having followed the subsequent logical step to God-as-rhizome, the notion of God-as-capitalism emerges w/ far less strain than originally thought. It is fairly uncontroversial to assert that physics aims to articulate well-behaved laws that govern the relations of matter. Similarly uncontroversial, psychology aims to articulate well-behaved laws that govern the relations among humans. However, it is the science of economics that occupies the uniquely synthetic position of attempting to articulate the well-behaved laws that govern the relations between matter and humans; the history of this endeavor ultimately spawned capitalism, which unites capital, labor, time, value, and desire under a single operational logic. Given the immanent ontology of Spinoza in which humanity, matter, and their governing logics are all expressions of the same substance, it becomes painfully obvious that capitalism is yet another extension among many of God. Consider the manner in which capitalism organizes the flows of desire and material: markets demand products, that desire brings products into existence, the products in-turn generate more desire through the modification of human behavior and introduction of new markets in a self-reinforcing, generative feedback loop. The entire apparatus is self-defining, self-propagating, emergent, intensely libidinal, and is the dominant plane that shapes, transforms, and creates contemporary human life.
Not only does God give rise to reality, but also creates the subjects existing in that reality that are instrumental to His will. Ironically enough, Nick Land intimates as much when he writes2:
"The transcendental unconscious is the auto-construction of the real, the production of production, so that for schizoanalysis there is the real exactly in so far as it is built. Production is production of the real, not merely of representation, and unlike Kantian production, the desiring-production of Deleuze-Guattari is not qualified by humanity (it is not a matter of what things are like for us). Within the framework of social history the empirical subject of production is man, but its transcendental subject is the machinic unconscious, and the empirical subject is produced at the edge of production, as an element in the reproduction of production, a machine part, and ‘a part made up of parts'."Here Land refers to the production of production that Deleuze and Guattari outline in both volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia referenced before, but during this period presened in Fanged Noumena, he associated it w/ a cold, anti-humanist type of god befitting of the Lovecraftian pantheon of entities. In more recent times (you can follow him on X) his thought has taken on less of an anti-humanist type of rhetorical dressing, seeming to come around to Christianity to a certain degree, but the central points remain unchanged: the inhuman forces of capital give rise to reality as we experience it, it is largely driven by flows of desire that are external and indifferent towards humanity’s designs and aspirations, and humans are participant in the process of reality unraveling itself regardless of whether they’d like to or not. Such beliefs would find a suitable home in several Christian schools of thought, as theonomy is to supersede any form of autonomy any individual may seem to possess. In short, fuck what you think you want, God’s will be done.
W/ re-conceptualizations and new understandings at hand, what conclusions and possible solutions could we possibly achieve towards addressing the aforementioned problematic? One that I’m slowly coming to accept is the fact that, for some people, becoming attracted and ensnared in a fatal spiral around some capitalistic artifact is what they are meant for. Absolutely everyone will become tangled up in something that is not conducive towards their creature well-being; some will manage to wrest themselves free, but many more others will become hopelessly ensnared and suffer terribly for it whether consciously felt or not. Despite this fate, it is all ultimately in service of God’s will, what He intends for us, and is entirely divorced from what we would like for ourselves. As written in Job 383:
“Brace yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall answer me.”
Ultimately, all of the digital maladies that are part and parcel to contemporary, information technology-based culture are all yet another expression of God and His will. Whether this expression is mechanism to facilitate some grander plan or a test in itself is up for speculation. I’m of the mind that it is the latter; I believe that these cybernetic hyperstimuli exist to refine our spirit, help us to learn and mature into virtue, w/ the hope of one day proving ourselves worthy of Heaven. However, certainly it is the case that some are purposely thrown into the crucible and expected to never make it out, because they are damned. These are the dysgenic elements of society whose minds are warped to castrate themselves in the name of transgender ideology, the antisocial men devoid of purpose that have radicalized and commit terror under the banner of politics, or the repulsive women who have sold their bodies and dignity online for $5 per month. These are the moths whose knitting it is to aimlessly circle God’s light until they succumb to exhaustion and starvation. While this might seem like a cruelty, that is only to place disproportionate weight towards the humanistic part of the equation, to adopt a parochial, local, and coarse-resolution view of reality. When the entire calculus is taken into broader consideration, it may very well turn out that the transgender person who castrated themselves would’ve fathered some particularly wicked criminal; the political terrorists, thanks in part to their heinous crimes, polarized society such as to render it amenable to a renaissance of peace and order; the e-thot’s ruinous life serves as an example to other women as to how not to comport themselves. Of course, these results manifest themselves as higher-order effects that cannot be reasonably anticipated by the average person and can only be known ex post facto, but thus emerges the critical function and importance of the Christian virtue of faith. You are not in control here, so you’d do well to place your trust in God.
I fully recognize that a Deleuzean or Landian may take issue w/ the preceding paragraph. It may seem as if I smuggled normativity back into the equation, as though certain modes of becoming were being ranked or morally evaluated. This is not my thesis. Ontologically, all modes of being and becoming are equally expressions of the same substance, and none are invalidated or subordinated. What is asserted instead, in a recognizably Landian fashion, is that immanent processes do not guarantee continuity, coherence, or survival. Some trajectories of becoming will exhaust themselves, collapse, or terminate unceremoniously. This is neither punishment nor failure; instead, it is a structural feature of immanent dynamics. The intelligibility of such trajectories only emerge retroactively through their effects rather than prior moral evaluation. That isn’t to say that within any given cultural regime normative judgments will arise; this will surely happen, but it is important to keep in mind that these are merely secondary productions and not metaphysical truths. What remains crucial is the recognition that every mode of being and becoming carries with it unforeseeable higher-order consequences and that restraint in judgment is itself an ethical response to immanence rather than a denial of it.
1Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pg. 21.
2Nick Land, Fanged Noumena, pg. 321-322.
3The Holy Bible, NIV