691401 research-article2017
SCP0010.1177/0037768617691401Social CompassServais and Liogier: Epilogue
social compass
Epilogue
Epilogue: Towards a technicalscientific reconfiguration of religious narratives?
Social Compass 2017, Vol. 64(1) 68–75 © The Author(s) 2017 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0037768617691401 https://doi.org/10.1177/0037768617691401 journals.sagepub.com/home/scp
Olivier SERVAIS
Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium
Raphaël LIOGIER
Institut d’Études Politiques d’Aix-en-Provence, France
Abstract In this Afterword, we propose lines of convergence between all the articles of this double special issue and, beyond this, hermeneutic keys to read these techno-scientific mutations and their impact on religious narratives. Keywords techno-sciences, religious narration, post-humans, current mythologies Résumé Dans cet épilogue, sont proposées des lignes de convergence entre tous les articles de ce numéro thématique et, au-delà, des clés herméneutiques pour lire ces mutations technoscientifiques et leurs impacts sur les narrations religieuses. Mots-Clés techno-sciences, narration religieuse, post-humains, mythologies contemporaines
This double opus devoted to technoscientific eschatologies has enabled us to see the complexity and multiplicity of the social and spiritual reconfigurations the new technologies open up. Sometimes sources of distrust vis-à-vis the worst in technological
Corresponding author: Olivier Servais, Université catholique de Louvain, IACS – Place Montesquieu 1 bte L2.08.01 à 1348 Louvainla-Neuve, Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain, Belgium. Email:
[email protected]
Servais and Liogier: Epilogue
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dystopies, sometimes sources of promise for a humanity lacking goals but very worried about its own posterity. A very broad spectrum of possibilities presents themselves in these emerging phenomena. That these eschatologies, induced by the new technologies, are imposing themselves is unquestionable. These eschatologies are first of all global and geographically unlimited, electrifying the world through the ever increasingly tight mesh of the Internet. In this double issue, we have traversed three continents: the multiple uses of the digital in the United States or in Europe which is witnessing the dawn of new spiritual careers, the contemporary hermeneutics of Indian mythologies, brought up to date by immersion in digital worlds, and, further, the spiritual transformations generated by the reconfiguration of robot-human relationships in Japan. But we could have taken the analysis further: by stopping with the smartphone revolution and access to the internet by human groups a priori isolated from furiously paced technological advances, as in rural Africa or on Pacific Islands; by focusing our attention on fears of a ‘world-prison’ ushered in by the first State hyper-controls of our personal data by American or Chinese security agencies; or by focusing our attention on the weight of the social networks in service to the march of hopes, such as in revolutions called ‘Arab’ or in Latin-American social movements. In short, the techno-scientific eschatologies open a new window, now unavoidable, on the oldest hopes of humanity: overcoming death, suffering and disease, and, more generally, reaching beyond the limits of its human condition. Technoscience, for that matter, participates in the redefinition of the symbolic relations between the human and non-human worlds, subjects and objects, matter and spirit, man and animals. Henceforth, artifacts, the ensemble of manufactured objects, come under scrutiny, not as the simple and possible tools of religions, but as partners or competitors in human spiritual projects. It is as if, up to now and with some notable exceptions, technological objects have been reduced to an ensemble of purely secular artifacts, peripheral materials in man’s religious quest. Tools for training, dissemination or organization, technologies were relegated to the status of passive adjuvants. However, in the cybernetic times described by Triclot (2016), besides that secular orientation, the first computers’ developments already had a spiritual dimension. The techno-trance machines are revealing the spiritual dimension present from the beginnings of the digital revolution. Consequently, a few decades later, it is not astonishing to see the transhumanist narrative emerging in Silicon Valley – a place of microprocessing and Internet revolutions. That narrative confers an eschatological dimension on technical advances and relates them to the individualistic developments of humans which it amplifies. Thus we find transversal themes here in every field, such as that of ‘going beyond’ or man’s last end (Fukuyama, 2002), the eternalization of the ego, immortalization, or, contrariwise, a return to a primal age (Geraci, 2016). The theme of hybridization is omnipresent too and describes profound aspirations in relations between humans and machines, leading to a new society with no lack of spiritual questioning. Is this eschatology by machines also a redeployment of counter-cultures? Faced with this wave of new scientisms, the digital also becomes a paradoxical refuge for those disappointed with our dehumanizing societies. These digital hermits, Ikkikomori or No Life, in a certain way appear not as the premises of this humanity hybridized to machines, but as resistants of a new kind (Servais, 2017, this issue). We can in part see
