Marc Barnes’ Retardation Religion
August 29, 2023
By NZB3
My best philosophical revelations are frequently revealed by observing people who went the other way. Some of my oldest and most carefully thought out Core Beliefs don’t even register with me until I trace back someone’s behavior to the fact that their own Core Beliefs are totally opposed to mine. For example, as an Anarchist, I’m frequently reminded by Statists that they don’t think they own their own lives and that, by contrast, I know that I do own mine. The latest case comes from watching a little of this 2022 conversation involving a theologian named Marc Barnes. He puts forth an idea about technology and the improvement of our standard of living that belongs to the Dark Ages!
Times like these it would be handy to have more knowledge of first millennium or Scholastic thinkers because I wonder if Barnes is their heir? Or, did his biological and intellectual family escape pre-Enlightenment quicksand only for Marc to turn around and dive back in head-first?
Key question: Does technology take us forwards or backwards? Be careful how you answer because it makes a big difference for yourself and your entire civilisation. Let’s start with the backwards position as put to us by Marc. I don’t have a transcript but here are some paraphrased quotes…
”This is my first distinction I want to make for Christians who take the Bible seriously to make.”
‘Technology is always a covering. Always a response to that lack’
‘It is what technology does. It covers man’s lack’
‘technology is always a reaction to being Cast Out..’
In the Garden of Eden, he says, infant man had it made. Like a baby or toddler our every need was serviced by a parent. You want food? Security? Transport? A nappy change? Quiet? Sleep? Pain relief? HE will give it to you. The Eden environment has everything you need. It is only when, due to sin, humanity is Cast Out that he must grow up and meet his own needs. His standard of living and his technological state only then becomes his responsibility.
To a Christian of Barnes’ faith these efforts are not taking us forward though but backwards. Get Back to where you once belonged. We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden. Inventions, discoveries, improvements. These are not advances for mankind toward independence and the new. We’re simply getting back a bit of what we had before but lost. We are climbing back into the child nursery of Eden and perhaps even mother’s womb by returning ourselves, bit by bit, to the Original State of dependence. Back to how it was before the talking snake and the being Cast Out scene in Act 2 of the Genesis skit.
Going Backwards
Barnes has made explicit what I realise, with horror, many people believe. Tools, machines, institutions, computers, whiteware appliances, light bulbs, cars, etc. are perceived as a means to be infants once again. Things to surrender to. They will baby us by our surrender to them so that less and less of the human experience is left in the human. They will cook our dinner, pick our music, turn the smart bulbs on, do our laundry, order our transportation, clean our air, warm our homes, answer our phones. They can entertain us, do our homework, deliver our sexual needs, mow the lawns, vacuum the floors, guard the house. And that’s just machines you can buy, never mind the things that The State will happily do to infantalise you such and exercising your civic responsibility for you.
Go down this path and there are 2 main responses. Barnes, I think, wants to resist this temptation to sink into technology before we all turn into the fat and sedentary humans in the WALL-E movie. Others, perhaps a terrifyingly high number of us, unconsciously surrender to and aspire to being quietly snuffed out by technology this way. They, like Citizen Kane, miss childhood and want to go back. Not only will they willingly transfer as much of their consciousness into a new cybernetic organism made of themselves and their property they will gladly yield to The State too. Politicians are only too happy to extract power and wealth by facilitating this desire to trade liberty for security on the part of voters who (as Ben Franklin put it) deserve neither.
From this ancient ‘Going Backwards’ vantage point on technology you can appreciate at once the Armish solution to freeze technology in the mid-1700s. That’s one way to stop yourselves from being smothered to death in the soft arms of an A.I. that replies to “Are you my mother?” with “Yes.”
Going Forwards
Well, not all of us share this vantage point on what technology is. Though, I don’t think we are the majority or that anyone in the Going Backwards camp suspects we exist. That includes Barnes even though he is in a minority who thinks about these issues intellectually. Indeed, until I traced back to what it was I disagreed with Barnes about I didn’t even know this well about myself! That technology is not about going back to Eden or infancy at all but that it is about thrusting forward.
When we value technology it is not about Going Home, going back, going to sleep. We want to go forward, see more, be more. We don’t seek to be a child but to develop as an adult. It’s Star Trek: To boldly go where no one has gone before. New life, new civilisations, new land, new ideas, new frontiers!
We’re writing the maps. We’re opening up new ground. We’re achieving growth and doing what’s never been done. Seeing what’s never been seen. Making what’s never been made.
We are not going home to Mum, we are going out to be with Dad.
When we invent or utilise things like electric light or drones or A.I. or space ships it’s not so we can hide or retreat; It’s so we can go get into more trouble exploring and expanding.
A civilisation that views technology this way- Going Outward- is radically different to one that views it as Going Home. Consider how hard it is for a Going Home/Going Backwards civilisation to advance technologically….
First Base: “Who are you to resist God’s technological state and punishment?”
When this Christian ethic of Original Sin took hold it really dropped anchor on the ship of progress didn’t it? We were taught we were bad and had been exiled from The Garden over that. Men were cursed with the labour of work, women with the labour of childbirth. Worse still, the Lock Down level of technology in these Old Testament times was literally Stone Age.
To add new labour saving devices for men, or for women, was a sort of practical blasphemy. God had made the world this way and who do you think you are trying to change it? Here is where we get the old idea ‘If God wanted us to fly he would have given us wings.’ To do something to improve the standard of living was in defiance of God’s order, God’s economy, God’s world. HE, not you, will decide when coffee machines, epidurals, and cricket will be invented. And, come to that, when invention will be invented too. Yours is to wait about until Jesus and his lawyers come back for the Big Judgement Day.
Further, it’s not just practical blasphemy to invent things when it’s not your turn but immoral too. Remember, you’re supposed to be suffering for what Adam and Eve did! I bet Christian Rome didn’t invent aqueducts to carry water, or, not if the Marc Barnes was there to police it. To create labour-saving devices is the same as creating punishment-mitigation devices. It would be 1000 times worse than a kid sticking a book down his pants so the headmaster’s caning didn’t hurt. Or, 10,000 times worse than converting suspension from school into Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
And so no wonder that we were stuck at First Base for 1500 years or so! Dark Ages. Stuck. Stagnant. Nobody gets to boldly go forth. Everybody doing the Armish freeze-frame. Perhaps a few people tried to extend the boundaries but there was a name for that sort of behavior: Witchcraft. And, some remedial ‘detention’ to square these perpetrators up for crossing that technology/developmental line. The tortures were literally medieval.
It’s a wonder we got past First Base.
Second Base: “Look, Mom, I drew a picture of me landing on the moon.”
OK so somehow we get to the Enlightenment and it’s OK to grow up or at least have an adolescent stage for Western mankind. Progress probably belongs to the Going Forward people but there were still plenty of Going Backward people pulling powerful strings. Galileo had his strings pulled by the Backward Catholics for being a Forward. If the Going Backward psychoclass did contribute it means they got past First Base but they would still be carrying the baggage of perceiving technology as a ‘Going Home’ not going forward and that is still a significant impediment.
There are two big adventure stories we tell in our art. 1) Going Out, and (2) Going Home. A very different ethic is attached to each endevour. Going Home is a retreat, a return, an escape to sanctuary from the dangerous world. Someone on the run is Prey and their inventions are about hiding and defense. Someone who is going out on expeditions is a Hunter and their inventions will involve finding and attacking.
The sorts of things these Christians like Marc Barnes could invent are the sorts of things slaves make. Or, the sorts of convenient innovations prisoners make like the drinks they brew in toilets. Animal adaptations under these circumstances include camouflage and mimicry. So while Galileo figured out astronomy, Tasman found New Zealand, and William Harvey worked out blood circulation what contributions could a Barnes-Christian make? Perhaps they gave us the Baroque style: A lavish and magnificent effort to mimic real world wonders and camouflage a Church that was clearly losing ground to those who had long since got to Third Base.
Being stuck on Second reminds me of young Gru from the Despicable Me movie. He keeps inventing things, “Look, Mom, I drew a picture of me landing on the moon,” and “Look, Mom, I made a real rocket based on the macaroni prototype!” but no matter how he tries his Mom never offers positive feedback.
A Going Forward ethic celebrates and incentivises its heroes. You find the New World or a potato or tea or gold or make a sea clock or invent the rubber band and you’ll be a hero to us. Things get named after you. You’re going down in history, have a prize. A parade! You took mankind forward and we appreciate it.
A Going Home ethic is like Gru’s Mom. It will say “Yeah, so you got us a little bit closer to where we should have already been.” No elation or joy for you in your individual achievement. No incentive to get a self-actualising dopamine hit. The glory is all for God and anything you find isn’t yours; HE was there first. Any medication or convenience you could invent is just a poor replica or what we already had in the Garden of Eden.
Now how can a civilisation based on Going Home technology possibly get past Second Base even if it were to, after a millennium and a half, get past First Base? How could anyone succeed to adulthood with a toxic parent always whispering in their ear that they’re a sinner and their accomplishments are pathetic imitations? How can any practitioner of Retardation Religion move our species forward?
Indeed, nobody who thought like that could do what Darwin achieved. There is no Ascent of Man from low to high in this theology. There is no phylogenetic tree of ever-refined forks and branches. No wonder the religious instinctively reject these models of Going Forward biological models. Their own idea of ‘progress’ is of going backwards into God’s protection; Back to the garden. The ‘tree of life’ must drive them etymologically nuts. The embryology similarity between different species must infuriate because it’s evidence for a Going Forward cosmos quite opposed to theirs.
We owe humanity’s advancement to Going Forward people. We owe pauses, stagnation, witch hunts, torture, Dark Ages, demoralisation, and shame to Marc Barnes and his ilk. Their memeplex was never decisively overthrown and not only have they survived into our modern world but their numbers are in large force. They threaten to freeze time once again or perhaps smash progress like Luddites or even turn our inventions against us in a way that make Terminator and The Matrix look like documentaries. As we increasingly switch all we do, even socialising, into the electric digital world we are being confronted about how we are going to respond. The false promise that technology, or The State, will give us back our stolen childhoods looks like Heaven but really it is the great temptation to surrender our souls. This big decision looks like it will define the coming (Fourth Turning) Crisis of the next 2 decades.
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