Communicating Science and Belief in the World of Chthulucene

June Cholsiri / MFA 2017

 

Technology has become an indivisible part of everyday life. The fast-paced and seemingly uncontrollable advancement of science and technology has left many of us feeling overwhelmed. Many scholars attempt to define and predict the world we live in, be it for solving the world’s constant problems, or offering people a glimmer of hope that the apocalypse is passable. This has led to the emergence of many theories, which, in my view, are human beings’ survival handbooks. One of the most so-called critical theories in this human-centred era, the Anthropocene, is, of course, Posthumanism. Posthumanism comes in different flavours with the shared fundamental ideas, namely, to re-conceive and to dissolve the boundaries between human and non-human, advancing a person or entity to the state beyond being human. This posthuman world’s depiction has been experimented with by many science fiction writers since the beginning of the 20th century, through narratives about the possible future, to explore the limitation of humanity and its demise. However, given the speed and nature of today's technological advancement, this imaginative depiction could realistically be our near future.

 

High-tech innovations make people more likely to believe in science and things that are based on proof rather than faith or beliefs. There is an assumption that posthumanism will be completely separated from the concerns of religion. Although there is a strong connection between modern technoscience and a broadly secular, rationalist thought in which religion and science, belief and doubt, theism and atheism are considered incompatible, there are significant ways in which religion is present within representation and discourses of posthumanism. However, high technology and scientific progress may not seem enough to comprehensively describe the meanings of being human, and, by extension, posthuman. Robert Pepperell states in The Post-Human Condition (1995) that, ‘many beliefs become redundant’; however, we still see the notion that states belief is necessary in many contemporary narratives. Therefore, this essay aims to investigate the ways that religion and belief manifest within the posthuman world, specifically in Donna Haraway's concept of the Chthulucene (2016), by examining two works of contemporary narratives: Yann Martel’s novel, Life of Pi (2001) and the film, The Man from Earth (2007), written by Jerome Bixby and directed by Richard Schenkman.

 

There are many subset explanations of posthumanism with the shared principle idea of undermining the boundaries between humans and non-humans; in other words, human and any otherness. To enumerate the kinds of otherness, we need to step back and look at the bigger picture. Otherness can be either concrete such as between animals or machines, or abstract such as cultures or languages. Accordingly, the idea that there is no complete form of human comes up in many studies in this field; figures of man must be challenged to re-conceive  human's perception and to be a response to raise public awareness of humans, bumptious beings. Even though the term posthumanism is interchangeably used with transhumanism, some people suggest that they offer different perspectives. That is to say, transhumanism is based on reason and enlightenment, focusing on the way that science and technology interact with humans. Posthuman regards transhumanism as the next stage of human development through the advanced methods such as modification, enhancement, and transition, taking us beyond the point of being human. This operates on the assumption that we are not already posthuman. Alternatively, the posthumanist aim to investigate the integration between humans and morality, cultures and nature, etc. has been a common theme in humanity since time immemorial. As Francesca Ferrando states, ‘envisioning desirable posthuman modes of existence is a path of self-discovery, once the self has been recognized as the others within. In a spiritual sense, humans have always been posthuman’ (Ferrando, 2016). Following this, the occurrence of posthumanism may exist from which the human being emerges.

 

In light of belief or religion, the thirst of moving past the state of being human could be referred to as desire or greed in some circles, for example, the Attachment or Rāga, one of three poisons that cloud the mind and are the very roots of unwholesome actions in Buddhism[1], or the desire in Christianity that helps us find our way, helps us know who we become and what we are to do.[2] As can be seen from these examples, there are two different responses to the desire. The Buddha believes that attachments always come in the form of deadening desire, which should be detached from the things of this world because they certainly lead to suffering, while Jesus invites us into truth through the re-adjusting of our attachments, not their rejection or dismissal. In other words, for the Buddha, desire is the root of suffering, while for Jesus, desire is the source of spirituality. However, whether we try to preserve it or eliminate it, it clearly reveals that this kind of thirst has evolved with humanity over time. We want to be in the state that allows us to have a higher ability, to live longer, to be stronger and intelligent, either for the sake of ourselves or humanity.

 

In the past, to find the way to escape from the prosaic figure of a man, we asked God to give us that power through composing religious activities such as praying, meditating or even sacrificing. Nevertheless, soon after the Scientific Revolution in the 15th century and the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century, people tended to replace their spiritual beliefs with the expectation on answers they sought from science and technology where they can see the more explicit possibility of being beyond a man. Once we understood the basis of genetics from Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution (1859), we could see that the variation can be passed intact to new generations. Evolution allows the existence of heritable variability within a species to generate the differences between ancestral and descendant populations; that is to say, the next stage of human development is possible. Another mechanism that triggers the desire for mankind's advancement is information technology, including communication, computation, uploading and, of course, the internet. Information technologies provide access to resources and knowledge on a wide range of topics, which allows us to find rationality to support what we desire. Namely, if we discuss the offerings of science and technology within the framework of posthumanism and look at a human body as a realm of the human being, science allows us to inspect back into the deepest core of a human, while technology seeks to create the advanced products that solve problems and improve human life.

 

In Haraway’s book, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016), she devises Chthulucene as a new idea to describe the post-Anthropocene by challenging the figure of a man. Haraway proposes an era in which humans are harmonising with other species and ecosystems. Although she distances herself from posthumanism, as she states, ‘I am a compost-ist, not a posthuman-ist: we are all compost, not posthuman’ (Haraway, 2016, p.101). Her work is still primarily considered a useful starting point for examining these emphases. In her classic Cyborg Manifesto, she suggests that, ‘we are all chimeras, theorised and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are all cyborgs’ (Haraway, 1991, p.292). The figure of the cyborg threatens the fundamental boundaries that have long structured ways of understanding the world, through the opposition of human and animal, machine and organism, and physical and non-physical. However, the picture of the cyborg inevitably draws us to think about the transhuman, which does not challenge the figure of a man; instead, it is transforming a human into a superhuman. Therefore, in Haraway’s Chthulucene, she remains focused on a relationship between humans and animals to separate this from the frame of human-robot.

 

Chthulucene, the epoch in which refugees from an environmental disaster will come and assemble represents what comes from under as chthonic, especially the animals with tentacles; from spiders, octopuses, squids, corals to bacteria, coupled with underworld inhabited mythological deities such as Pachamama, Gaia, and Gorgons. Haraway refers to Van Dooren’s book, Flight Ways (2014), when she mentions the spider, Pimoa Cthulhu, who lives under stumps in the forest: ‘Nobody lives everywhere; everybody lives somewhere. Nothing is connected to everything; everything is connected to something’ (Haraway, 2016, p.31). The tentacular chthonic stands for the connection as the remaining humans realise that living with nature and being part of the ecosystem is important for our survival. Haraway emphasises, ‘The chthonic ones are not confined to a vanished past. They are a buzzing, stinging, sucking swarm now, and human beings are not in a separate compost pile. We are humus, not Humo, not anthropos; we are compost, not posthuman’ (Haraway, 2016, p.55).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 1: Multispecies Cat's Cradle. Drawing by Nasser Mufti (2011) in the poster for Haraway’s Wellek Lectures in 2011

Taken from http://adanewmedia.org/2013/11/issue3-haraway/

 

The referral to James Lovelock’s hypothesis of Gaia in Haraway’s work supposes that the world that humans see is the world of human autonomy. We consider ourselves to be outside of nature, authorising ourselves to be centred-beings and classify every non-human by giving their names, as evidenced in the well-known quote of Protagoras, ‘man is the measure of all things’. Humanism holds that man is a part of nature and that he has emerged as the result of a continuous process. We firmly believe in the power of our race and self-production makes us neglect the essential roles of others. We are in a long-term symbiotic relationship that makes us no different from lichens. Since we are all lichens, we can be eradicated from the landscape of the earth; otherwise, we can learn to stay among the rocks and critters for living and dying well (Haraway, 2016). Therefore, her purpose in proposing the Chthulucene is to make kin between all living beings to establish new lines of respond-ability on Earth and all its habitants. By kin, she means something other/more than entities tied by ancestry or genealogy (Haraway, 2016). However, if we would go along with Darwin’s theory of evolution, it could be possible that all beings are already kin by genealogy as he suggests that all different species have evolved from simple life forms, developed from the first bacteria to the early modern humans.

Haraway’s interest in science fiction and storytelling can be seen in the uses of mythical character as a medium to explore her Chthulucene, which is based on scientific facts about symbiogenesis. Yann Martel uses a similar method of storytelling to narrate his story, Life of Pi (2001). Life of Pi challenges humanism and the value of rationalism by signifying the human-animal relationships between the sixteen-year-old boy, Pi Patel, and other animal survivors in one lifeboat floating on the Pacific Ocean, especially with the Bengal tiger, Richard Parker. Representing Pi, the protagonist, as a practising Hindu, Christian, and Muslim who later studies zoology and religious studies, attempts to bridge the gap between science and religion in this narrative. Thus, Pi already has three distinct survival principles to deal with: science, religion, and storytelling. Pi’s science and rationalist perspective is influenced by Mr Kumar, his biology teacher who is an atheist. Mr Kumar tells him that, ‘there are no grounds for going beyond a scientific explanation of reality and no sound reason for believing anything other than our sense experience’. In addition, he thinks that ‘religion is darkness’ and ‘God never came’ (Martel, 2001, p.17). Rationality in Mr Kumar’s notion somehow is taken too far; it impedes the full experience of joy in life and faith in the divine in Pi’s life, as he adopts three religions with a simple thought: ‘I just want to love God’ (Martel, 2001, p.66). Each of the religions Pi is adopting relies on a distinct narrative, which Pi defines as irrationality, emotion, and faith.

 

The animals in Life of Pi serve primarily as narrative tools rather than as characters within their own right, as Martel comments that, ‘the animals might embody certain traits. We think of tigers as being ferocious, etc. But to my mind, it was the other way around: the humans embodied certain animal traits’. Richard Parker is the manifestation of the identity Pi creates to survive the devastating loss he has endured and the cruel reality of being the only traveller on the ocean. Pi’s humanising of Richard Parker is more a comment on Pi’s own needs as a lonely human being in an extreme situation than on Richard Parker as a sentient individual. In my interpretation, Richard Parker plays a link between science and religion, rationality, and faith. Along Pi’s adventure, many sceptical appear. Although the narrative shows the relationship between human and animal, there is still a clear boundary between Pi’s space and Richard Parker’s space in the lifeboat. This idea is translated further in the film Life of Pi (2012) by Ang Lee, as we can see this opposition reinforces and manifests through physical boundaries in the lifeboat, which is split in half by the white canvas and bright red hull. Each corner alternately belongs to Pi, and Richard Parker represents the uncertainty in God in Pi’s perspective. The tiger’s function is to serve as a bond between the three distinct inter-related principles in which Pi commands his world within the framework of a coming-of-age story to eventually provide Pi with a sense of hope at the end of the novel. In the film Life of Pi, Pi as an adult says about this scepticism: ‘doubt is useful, it keeps faith a living thing’. Consequently, throughout the narrative, the human-animal boundary is maintained and reinforced. The boundary, in a sense, does not act as a barrier; instead, it acts as a relationship.

 

The novel illustrates the potential range of approaches to human-animal relations and to challenge humanism within the context of religion and science. In an interview with Jennie Renton, Martel says, ‘Science and religion don’t have to collide—I see them as complementary, rather than contradictory. Science can be a gateway to the greater mystery’ (Renton, 2005).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 2: Picture from the Film Life of Pi (2012) by Ang Lee

Taken from https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2013/02/life-of-pi-ang-lee-production-design-oscar-nomination

 

 

Similar to this, Haraway mentions in her book the story of Medusa and Perseus, a hero with the magic bag. She compares this bag with Ursula K. Le Guin’s carrier bag theory of fiction and natural-cultural history; Le Guin's theories and stories are capacious bags for collecting, carrying, and telling the stuff of living (Haraway, 2016). It contains stories, histories, theories, adventures, all kind of otherness, and, of course, Medusa’s head. This bag contains everything that is found on the way, except the holder himself. It provides the meaning to the hero’s ongoing life, but, on the other hand, this bag is always ready to explode and destroy the hero himself with the brutal weapons he has collected. However, this bag is disdained by the hero, and the last thing he wants to know is that his beautiful words and weapons will be worthless without a bag (Haraway, 2016).

 

I see similar collective stories in the carrier bag in the film written by Jerome Bixby, The Man from Earth (2005), directed by Richard Schenkman. The film is set in just one location and is still considered a sci-fi film. Additionally, the plot is composed almost entirely of dialogue. In one room with one big conversation, John Oldman, a departing university professor who claims to be a Cro-Magnon and has secretly survived for more than 14,000 years since the palaeolithic age, simply tells the stories of his life to his fellow faculty members. The film answers the basic questions of what it is to be a human in a world divided by boundaries, religion, class, colour, and so on, analysing the concepts of biology, religion, history, and anthropology through intellectual arguments between Oldman and his fellows. Oldman talks about his experiences, travels, discoveries, and when he studied with Buddha. He then claims that he is Jesus, which immediately challenges a many preconceptions that we are comfortable with, to the point that we take them for granted. The religious person grows nervous as his experiences begin to tread on dangerous territories, which shows that people often need an ideology to reinstate their faith in the goodness of being and we feel destroyed beyond the realm of our senses. Finally, Oldman confesses that he made the entire story up, which makes his fellows feel relief that they can stick to their old beliefs. In this film, we can see how we, living in a civilised society, react to change under the ambiguity between science and beliefs. We all live in the sublime confidence that we can somehow elude it and live in our comfort zone; however, the best way to deal with it is to internalise its existence. Science works precisely in this way. Religious and dogmatic fervour aside, the principle reason behind this was a significant, paradigm-shifting change that would have had people revise their existential beliefs, abandon whole new developments in science that were starting to take root and would have otherwise flourished, and find a new set of beliefs that adjust well with the new discoveries. Following Haraway’s statement about the Gorgons that turned men who looked into their eyes into stone, ‘I wonder what might have happened if those men had known how to politely greet the dreadful chthonic ones’ (Haraway, 2016, p.54). We must find the way to open and explore our carrier bag, look into the eyes of Medusa, and not become stone.

 

As A.W. Tozer states, ‘Nothing is complete in itself but requires something outside itself in order to exist’. The human being is somehow incomplete without a technological perspective supplementing their phenomenal biological self. Posthuman distress is predicated on the awareness of an inadequacy and the demand for technological systems themselves. Additionally, posthuman distress is also characterised by faith in the ‘inexhaustibility of the perceivable’ (Lyotard, 1991, p.17), or a general belief that there will always be more information to be translated, learned, or discovered. This information can only be made accessible through the advancement of technology.

 

There is a clear purpose in Haraway’s story, namely, that we should bring back mythology and re-conceive the meaning behind narratives to examine the integration in human and otherness that has been underlying for a very long time to strengthen the meaning of ourselves and the world in which we live. As Jack Hodgins says, ‘myth is closer to reality than history. While history is a collection of the facts, myth is the soul that surrounds those facts’ (Hancock, 1987, p.77).

 

It is easy to notice how religion requires faith. To say that storytelling requires faith is also make sense, as you have to believe that the story-teller is leading you to the right place. Furthermore, it takes as much of a spiritual leap to believe in science as it does to have faith in religion. Haraway’s writing uses a mixture of terms from a variety of cultures and mythologies. It brings up a quasi-spiritual and mythological mantle as she invokes Gaia and Medusa. Likewise, in Martel and Bixby’s stories, they use storytelling to imply the questions: what does it mean to be a human? What makes us human, and what should we do to stay human?

 

Even in a seemingly secular age, expressions of religion still fuel our technological aspirations and our perceptions of the ends to which advanced technologies and science might transport us. Although posthumanism is deeply bound to the spiritual realm, it offers many survival strategies in life. In light of ancient enlightenment, contemporary science, technology, and ecology, posthumanism is developed from an academic theory turned into a philosophy of life, which is a fundamental principle for people living in a shared ecosystem. In our current era, the Anthropocene, posthumanism is required to promote daily post-anthropocentric ethics of living in which spirituality appears as an indispensable resource for this awareness. ‘Envisioning desirable posthuman modes of existence is a path of self-discovery, once the self has been recognized as the others within. In a spiritual sense, humans have always been posthuman’ (Ferrando, 2016).

 

 

[1] En.wikipedia.org (2017). Kleshas (Buddhism). [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleshas_(Buddhism)#Three_poisons

[Accessed 17 Dec. 2017].

[2] Desire and the Spiritual Life: An Advent Reflection (2011). [Blog] Rev. James Martin, S.J. Author of Jesus: A Pilgrimage. Available at:

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/rev-james-martin-sj/desire-and-the-spiritual-_b_790488.html [Accessed 14 Dec. 2017].

 

 

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