The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace

A summary of:
Wertheim, M. (1999). The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet. Virago Press: London.
Introduction - The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace

From the outset, it appears that Wertheim is very much arguing the opposite of me: that the Internet offers new spiritual potential. Or at least she suggests that people experience a new space for their souls in cyberspace. For example, she quotes Kevin Kelly who says, "I have experienced soul-data through silicon;" and Michael Heim who writes, "Our fascination with computers is... more deeply spiritual than utilitarian;" "In our love affair [with these machines] we are searching for a home for the mind and heart."

On some level, this seems particularly sad to me. We are like the orphaned animal cuddling up to a stuffed animal surrogate. Cute - but heartbreakingly sad.

But then, Wertheim is not arguing this clinging to the Internet as a "disembodied paradise for souls" is healthy. Instead, she writes, "I see this trend as inherently problematic." On the other hand, her task in the writing of the book is to explain why people have been brought to this state where they must seek new space for their souls. She does so by tracing not just the technology, but the culture that gave birth to its science. This includes following the story of the changing Western mindset, the art and history and science that progressed through the ages to eventually give birth to our new world in which the Internet makes a kind of sense as a surrogate home for the soul (or in her words, "creates such a hospitiable climate for quasi-religious dreaming about cyberspace").

A brief way to characterise our new climate is to compare it, as Umbert Eco did, to the last days of the Roman Empire: corrupt, fragmented, "marked by inequity." According to Wertheim,

Ours also seems to be a society past its peak, one no longer sustained by a firm belief in itslef and no longer sure of its purpose. As part of the response to this disintegration, Americans everywhere are looking to religion for new grounding in their lives.... US society today vibrates with 'spiritual' yearnings. Like the late Romans we too are searching for a renewed sense of meaning (21).

The irony of finding a spiritual home in the Internet is that it is decidedly secular: "The religious appeal of cyberspace lies then in a paradox: here we have a repackaging of the old idea of Heaven but in a secular, and technologically sanctioned format. The perfect realm awaits us, we are told, not behind the pearly gates, but beyond the network gateways, behind electronic doors labeled '.com', '.net', and '.edu'" (22).

But as I have mentioned previously in this blog, echoed here by Wertheim, "People will only adopt a technology if it resonates with a latent desire" (27). Are there not other ways of meeting these needs than by retreating into the space behind our computer screens? Wertheim writes,

The failure of modern science to incorporate this immaterial 'I' - this 'self,' this 'mind,' this 'spirit,' this 'soul' - into its world picture is one of the premier pathologies of modern Western culture, and sadly, one reason many people are turning away from science. Sensing that something crucial has been occluded from the physicalist picture, they are looking elsewhere in the hope of locating this missing ingredient (38).

Another way of describing this home-seeking behavior is that it is escapism, pure and simple. People can be whoever they want to be on the Internet, shedding their flaws that they are ashamed of, without having to actually fix them. And Wertheim writes, "Some champions of cyberspace dream of escaping entirely from what one commentator has called 'the ballast of materiality'" (23).

Mostly, Wertheim describes the situation as a problem of overcrowding: "In the modern scientific world picture it is a matter of cosmological fact that the whole of reality is taken up by physical space, and there is literally no place within this scheme for anything like a spirit of soul or psyche to be. In the vision painted by modern science, the physical world is the totality of reality because within this vision physical space extends infinitely in all directions, taking up all available, and even conceivable, territory" (31). As Wertheim goes on to explain in later chapters, our very conception of the space we inhabit has profoundly altered our worldviews, evidenced by and reinforced by art, literature, and science... and eventually manifested in our technological innovations. These changes, as she maps out so convincingly, involve the steady climb of physicality in our thinking about our world, such that it supercedes all other forms of 'reality' and in the process uproots them, making them (things like the soul, emotions, dreams) homeless, ungrounded.

She warns against the lazy characterization of modern scientific thinking as dualistic. "This world picture is entirely monistic, admitting the reality of the physical world alone" (34). "How," she asks, "did we go from seeing ourselves at the center of an angel-filled space suffused with divine presence and purpose to the modern scientific picture of a pointless void" (35)? "How did we go from seeing ourselves embedded in spaces of both body and soul, to seeing ourselves embedded in physical space alone" (36)?

And the most important question of all: "how has this shift in our vision of space affected our understanding of who and what we are as human beings" (36)?