Wrangling gods

We’re surrounded by (and permeated by) gods, defined as non-human forces that profoundly affect people. How should we manage them? Perhaps religious traditions dealing with gods can help us regulate technologies, the greater-than-human force I’m currently looking at.

What are gods?

Gods such as these arise from our imaginations, at least in part. They are also rooted in material things like people, things, places, and processes. Many concepts overlap here, including Jungian archetypes, egregores, and social imaginaries. Companies are gods in this sense, as are technologies. 

Egregores are probably less well known than archetypes and social imaginaries. I’ve learned the little I know from Mark Stavish’s Egregores: The Occult Entities That Watch Over Human Destiny (2018). He cites Joscelyn Godwin’s The Golden Thread: The Ageless Wisdom of the Western Mystery Traditions (2014) at some length. This extract from Godwin gives a good sense of what egregores are:

If earthly things and actions have correspondences of a non-material kind, it may be that the former are not just passive with regard to the latter. The "'gods," whatever they may be, may need sacrifices and rituals even more than the worshiper needs the gods. Such human activities may be the main, even the only, source of their reality. There is an occult concept of the “egregore,” a term derived from the Greek word for “watcher.” It is used for an immaterial entity that “watches” or presides over some earthly affair or collectivity. The important point is that an egregore is augmented by human belief, ritual, and especially by sacrifice. If it is sufficiently nourished by such energies, the egregore can take on a life of its own and appear to be an independent, personal divinity, with a limited power on behalf of its devotees and an unlimited appetite for further devotion. It is then believed to be an immortal god or goddess, an angel, or a daimon.

Some gods are vast and majestic, like Zeus or Brahma; others are quite limited, like household gods or spirits of place. Some are harder to control than others; it’s said that not even Zeus could dictate to the Fates and Necessity.

It should be evident that I’m taking a polytheistic view of gods, though even monotheistic traditions have arrays of lesser powers like angels and demons.

What gods want from people

Judging by religious traditions, gods want worship and offerings. Like alpha humans, they crave praise and demand respect. These things – as well as sacrifices, in some cases – are what nourish them. It all boils down to attention, without which they wither. Gods are created and sustained not just by belief, but also by stories. Just like celebrities need press, gods need myths.

What people want from gods

The main thing we seem to want from gods is help: protection, assistance, control over events and people, and knowledge of how to do things and how the future will play out.

We look to them for meaning. This includes explaining why things are the way they are, why a culture does what it does, where we came from, and where we’re going. 

Gods are also extremely useful for prosecuting our claims against other groups of people. 

How people traditionally relate to gods

The obvious and most positive interaction is worship, which could include praise, prostration, atonement, and affirmations of affiliation. Gods could be invoked to sanction or bless upcoming actions (like war) or events (like harvests). When gods are angry, people might placate, petition, or rail against them. The interplay could also involve negotiating, trading or manipulating the gods. Most personally, people might confide in, grumble about, or even actively disregard their gods.

A wide variety of attitudes and emotions accompany these desires, from fear and awe through love and inspiration to resentment and hatred.

The means of doing these things often involve ritual but could be ad hoc. The settings range from sacred precincts to ceremonial spaces to special places in the home to something done anywhere the worshipper might be.

Regulation

One can interpret many interactions between society, represented by government, and the technology industry as religious rituals.

Offerings: Legislators and governments continually dole out money and favors to technology companies in the form of subsidies, tax breaks, contracts, and grants. Tech solicits this as a quid pro quo: give us money, and we’ll give you jobs, innovation, economic growth, geopolitical leadership, etc. Like gods, though, there’s no guarantee that the technologies will honor the deal; quite often there are many quids doled out for very little quo.

Invocation: Politicians and regulators are quick to invoke technology as a means to a glowing future. They call on technology companies to solve social problems, whether creating jobs, controlling speech, or improving government.

Hymns: The elites are quick to get on hype trains like AI and 5G. They sing the praises of innovation, hoping that some of the glow we ascribe to breakthrough technology will rub off on them.

Imprecations: When the technology gods don’t deliver, or thwart the desires of a some group, there’s invective, threats, and blame. It usually amounts to little more than grumbling, though. Politicians need technology more than technology needs them; the grilling of tech executives during committee hearings is mere theater. 

While this looks like pseudo-religious activity, I don’t think we grasp that greater-than-human forces, whether natural catastrophe or big tech, can’t be regulated. We can ask, but there’s no guarantee our prayers will be answered; there’s no guarantee our offerings reciprocated. We can cajole or threaten, and perhaps influence behavior at the margins, but we have little power to control them. 

It’s relatively easy to create and cultivate gods/technologies; it’s much harder, if not impossible, make them do our bidding once they’ve grown strong.

Perhaps what we need is a theology of technology. (And by the "If I can imagine it, it's already been done" Rule, we already have one – I just haven't found it.)