Ruminations 3: On the Reality of Mechanized Truth

(Pix (C) Larry Catá Backer)

This is another in what I hope to be a month long series of aphoristic (ἀφορισμός) essays, meant to provoke thought rather than explain it. The hope is that, built up on each other, the series will provide a matrix of thoughts that together might lead the reader in new directions.

The Divine is said to be able to see everything be everywhere, understand everything, judge, punish, forgive and direct. The Divine, now incarnated through man, has become an aggregation of recording devices which together produce an image of memory. The spark of the divine is now measured in access to this recorded memory, and its control and use the mark of the strength of the connection to Truth. The interpretation of text--of Truth in the Word--has acquired a rather anachronistic flavor, and the priests of the new God(s) splice and concoct Reality from the Truth of the recorded image--sound, action, backdrop and the like.




Techno-morals now draw Truth from image, and construct image to the specifications of its purveyors. What started as a small thing--reports of the spearing of Belgian infants on German imperial bayonets for consumption by American audiences--has become the whole of a mechanics of presenting a greater Truth for consumption by the masses. And so the divine as recorded Truth, the passive senses frozen in time, has spawned its own Satan--the Truth that is staged. If Truth is an eternal recording then is evil its illusion made real? Yet even eternal Truth as record can serve as illusion when appropriately spliced and torn from the great and complex fabric from which it occurs. If so, then the servants of this Truth, the tenders of techno-morality, also serve illusion.

Both the irony and reality of the new religion and its techno morality is most evident, not in the grand events of our time, but in those still small occurrences, that ripped from their larger context, serves the servants of Truth. Christian Bale Rant Caught on Tape, MTV.co.uk, February 3, 2009; Actor Bale Speaks Out Over Rant, BBC News Online, Feb. 6, 2009 ("Film star Christian Bale has called a US radio station to apologise for a tirade which was leaked onto the internet, calling it "inexcusable"."). From act, to exposure, to confession, contrition and expiation--the construction of the reality of the movie actor Christian Bale serves as a template for the creation of a post-rational humanity.