A post-technologial/post-human future.

Techno-Capitalism and Post-Human Destinies - I by Debashish on Sat 02 Dec 2006 02:24 AM PST Permanent Link Following on RC's posting of the two articles by Arthur Kroker - on the Processed World of Marshall McLuhan and the '>Techno-Puritanism of American destining (Born Again Ideology) and reflecting on RC's own commentary on the issue regarding technology and the post-human future, here is my first attempt at exploring some of the parameters of the question while seeking for answers and drawing out the larger peripheries before closing in/opening out on/to Sri Aurobindo as the prophet of the Life Divine as a post-technologial/post-human future.

As in Kroker's analysis of McLuhan and also of his close braiding of Puritanism and the Enlightenment imperative in the American ethos, there is certainly more than a grain of truth to the idea that the Enlightenment is a metaphysically transposed theology, the grand onto-theology. Hegel indeed has been (and is being) read in this vein, as the grandest theorist of this white mythology of the Logos, the Word of God made flesh resurrecting itself into Universal Rationality as the end of History. Hence, to understand this, the essence of technology and the essence of the human need to be considered in their relation at this, the escahtological cusp of their mutual destinies.

But to complicate matters, there is also of course, capitalism, which neither Hegel, nor Teilhard or McLuhan have given much thought to in its intimate intermiscience with Technology and the Enlightenment teleology, though Hegel has been adapted into the Materialism of Marx in trying to make some sense of this and its overcoming. So perhaps we need to turn to him too. Technology as the advance of human ability to "grasp" his world and "shape" it for his "use" - survival, utility, comfort, enjoyment, possession in that order of increasing aggression, has of course been with us since language, or the beginning of the human.