Irrational and stressful algorithms: Revisiting the Modern Gnosticism thesis through liminal incommensurability (part i)

The idea that the modern world, in particular modern knowledge and science, represents a victory of ancient Gnostic views, branded as heresies in the Christian era, is one of the cornerstones of Voegelin’s life-work, and also an idea that has immense contemporary relevance. Needless to say, it is also one of the most controversial of his ideas, though strangely enough it is opposed not only by those in general hostile to Voegelin’s ideas and stance, but even some of his vocal supporters, who argue, since quite some time, that this idea is simplistic, and was withdrawn by Voegelin himself. However, such a position is untenable, and is based on a misunderstanding. It is untenable, as in The Ecumenic Age, the fourth volume of the magisterial Order and History series, the last one published in his life-time, Voegelin unequivocally returns to his ideas about modern Gnosticism, reasserting them. This volume without the shadow of a doubt is a culmination of his life-work, being not just an addition to the previous three volumes but a partial revisitation of ground covered there, thus a summary re-statement. In the remaining years of his life Voegelin only published – or rather wrote – a series of meditative-reflexive essays, which were not products of further research. Furthermore, such a critical position is also based on a misunderstanding, as Voegelin’s aim was never to reduce attention to Gnosticism as it was identified as a heresy by the early Christian Church Fathers, rather considered it as part of a broader spectrum of occult, underground Hellenistic currents of thought, like alchemy, Neoplatonism, magic or hermeticism – though a particularly important one, especially due to its obsession with the saving power of ‘knowledge’. His related ideas thus remain vital for our contemporary, and questioning his Gnosticism thesis is a very serious error, to say the least.

This article will be the first of a series in which I try to offer some reflections for readers of VoegelinView about the vital contemporary significance of the modern Gnosticism thesis, taking further some ideas from a set of recent books around the journal International Political Anthropology and the Routledge series Contemporary Liminality, problematising modern technology.[1] Being a political philosopher, Voegelin’s works were concerned mostly with political ideas, less centrally with scientific knowledge, and even less with technology. This is where the books mentioned, which apart from the modern Gnosticism thesis draw among others on the ideas of Frances Yates and Stephen Toulmin on the history of science, and Heidegger, Lewis Mumford, Borkenau and Foucault on the mechanisation of human conduct and thinking through technology, complements Voegelin’s. Of particular relevance is the term ‘liminal incommensurability’, or the ‘incommensurable liminality’.

Liminality and incommensurability

The term ‘liminality’ by our days is quite widely known, though still not widely enough, and with considerable imprecision. The term was introduced in 1909 by Arnold van Gennep in his by now classic work The Rites of Passage, and was intended to serve as foundational not just for anthropology but for sociology and the social sciences in general. Van Gennep was, together with his close friend Marcel Mauss among the very first persons who gained a proper training in anthropology in France, and his 1909 book, based on ethnographic research and previous book publications, was indeed peerless in its scope and content. However, he had the bad luck of thus interfering with the project of Emile Durkheim, who was a dogmatic neo-Kantian neopositivist and a most mediocre mind, but extremely powerful in French academic life. The outcome was the banishing of Van Gennep from French universities (he never gained there any position), and the ousting of the term ‘liminality’ from intellectual life. It only started to gain some currency well over half a century after its publication, when the English translation of the book was accidentally picked up by Victor Turner.[2]

‘Liminality’ helps to capture the formative and transformative aspects of temporary period of transition, enabling a joint and structured study of the way periods of transition, but also of crisis or dissolution of order are experienced, and a way or solution is searched for out of these moments of uncertainty and anxiety. Such moments are part of life and so are inevitable, but they can also be purposefully mongered, instrumentalised or abused, for e.g. by making temporary liminality permanent. Some of the greatest masters of such liminal tinkering are Marx and Lenin, with their ‘revolutionary moment’, where Marx was offering first some theoretical tricks, while Lenin put those into practice by the conquest of the Winter Palace.

While in the social sciences liminality is often used in a positive sense, for example through the hailing of ‘hybridity’ in post-colonial discourse, Agnes Horvath broke new ground by placing emphasis on the point that liminal situations are not only anguishing, thus their unconditional glorification simply makes no sense, but can even be forced, producing situations in which the common measure, central for living, is lost, and so are incommensurable. It is here that she introduced the idea of liminal incommensurability, as a way to illustrate those ‘irrational rationalities’ of modernity which also so much preoccupied Max Weber. He introduced the concern through the mathematical expression ‘irrational numbers’, arguing that the Greeks were right and such numbers are truly ‘irrational’, or in other words incommensurable.

The idea and its underlying Platonic philosophy can be illustrated by the image of pebbles on a beach.

Pebbles on a beach

The image is well-known by everybody, and is indeed one of the most common images used as a background for computer screens. This is because such images are immensely beautiful, and convey, as if in a nutshell – or, properly, in a pebble – the astonishing beauty of nature. It also evokes a powerful imagery of Heraclitus: ‘The most beautiful cosmos is pouring out sweepings without a preconceived plan’ (B124). It is this beauty that can be understood through the term ‘commensurability’.

Pebbles on a beach are beautiful, as each pebble is a concrete individual entity, full and wholesome on its own, has a nice and unmistakeable shape – and yet there are an enormous quantity of them on every beach. This is because every pebble, and the entire beach, was produced by the commensurable effect of the elements – and with which the pebbles, or stones, are also commensurable. Each pebble, and the entire beach, is the product of thousands and millions of years – not of evolution, but commensurable interaction, of sea-water, waves, rain, wind, hail, and so on and so on – all natural forces and factors which live together and mould each other, especially the liquid and fluid mould the stable solids until they acquire a form that is considered by all, and justly, as beautiful. This is not a matter of ‘personal opinion’: whoever does not like a beach scenery littered with pebbles simply does not get it, is hopeless, just as the person who cannot understand a joke. Beauty is a fact of life, and of nature; it is a matter of recognition, and not of a debate where the aim is convincing others through ratiocination.

This can immediately be seen by considering three exceptions, three cases where the beautiful view is distorted, interfered with, broken. Two are constituted by a piece of metal or a plastic bottle littered there. The latter is fully incompatible with nature, the waters and the winds are powerless against it, so will stay there – or in the deep sea where the waves might carry it – forever; just a meaningless product of technology, showing immediately the point, argued by Agnes Horvath, that every technological product is waste, dirt, in the strict anthropological definition of Mary Douglas, as matter out of place – and so by inundating the planet with technological products we only put layers of rubbish on the top of each other, leading such contemporary masters of ceremonies as Elon Musk in their infinite wisdom to advise us to escape to Mars – until, of course, we also manage to fill Mars with rubbish as well, so can look for another substitute planet, adding another illustration to the Kafka-Camus-like absurdity or Weberian irrational rationality of modern culture.

With a piece of metal, the situation is only slightly better, though just as revealing, as of course metals are gained from stones, through the alchemic idea of creative destruction – destroy the solidity of the stone by melting it, gaining the metal ore which can be placed into shape, producing identical objects – not like the pebbles on the beach, which only ‘Nature’ the genuine master wizard can do – as we are only sorcerer’s apprentices, the product anyway in general is not beautiful, as one of thousands if not millions, and furthermore pollutes, through rust and metal poisoning, and so the elements, instead of forming it to a beautiful shape, as done with the pebbles, only bring out further its ugly, disgusting and polluting essence. We are always back to the same point, of the irrational incommensurability of modern knowledge, technology, and culture itself.

Let me complete these preliminary considerations by a third example of broken harmony: the case of a pebble that actually was recently broken. This happens all the time, stones have their fracture or rupture lines, where they can be split – and at any rate the fury of the elements can force stones or pebbles to break anyway. And such broken pebbles are not beautiful in themselves.

But it is only natural that this is so, as indeed only a full, whole pebble is beautiful, not a broken one; just as it is true for any object. And from here we can understand the enormous difference between ancient Greek and modern mathematics, and its significance. When we write down, say, ‘three over seven’, we mean three divided by seven, or even better three broken by seven, as the resulting fragment is indeed considered in modern mathematical language a fraction. But the Greeks said something quite different: for them it stood for the ratio of three to seven; and in such ratios, or through such ratios, they were concerned with recognising, and furthering, harmony in the world – as through the shape of their Temples, always strictly following harmonious ratios. The important thing was to recognise in relations between different numbers such harmonious ratios; and the discovery of the existence of ‘irrational (alogos)’ numbers for them was such a disaster, as if a hidden error in nature, that legendarily the Pythagorean thinker (called Theaetetus, which might be a reason why Plato called his dialogue about the impossibility of defining knowledge by this name) who made that discovery committed suicide, to punish himself for unleashing such an evil on mankind. We moderns hardly can believe and understand this – but, given that we do not understand anything, except for the capacity for infinite destruction, this is not so surprising.

A fracture, or a ‘broken number’ is potentially irrational, as there is no certainty whatsoever that the result of a breaking would produce a harmonious result. Rather it is almost certain that any pebble, stick, or other object broken by force will produce disproportional, thus literally non-rational parts: parts between which there is no proper ratio, or which are incommensurable. Note that I did not say ‘equal’ parts, which is only one possible mode of harmony – except that for us moderns, in our infinite ignorance, it is only the ‘equal’ result that counts as ‘just’, anywhere, with a blatant – and of course systematic and purposeful – ignoring of the ways of nature to secure harmony – according to the harmonia mundi.

Back to pebbles, and finishing this part of the paper – a broken pebble on the beach, ugly and disproportional it is right after the fact, would be subjected to the elements, and after a few winters, and summers, it will gain another full, pleasing, beautiful shape. Not so with the products of modern technology, which are radically incommensurable with Nature, and only result in radical corrosion and corruption (or joint break).

In the following, this article will focus on one aspect of such technological incommensurability: the manner in which the automatised algorithms that increasingly surround us and guide our lives, systematically interfering with our conduct, are also incommensurable with our existence; they supposedly ‘help’ us, by making our life ‘easier’, but in actual fact enslave us to their logic, and in particular raise our stress level to pitch height, in the otherwise most simple and natural aspects of our daily lives.

The automatic door

Let me start with an indeed most trivial example, the automatic door. I noticed a long time ago, when walking in Florence in the summer, that bars of course use air conditioning in the summer heat, but as they have automatic doors, which are always open, as somebody is always passing by in front of them, such air conditioning is not efficient, only causes a cold if one happens to sit under them. So what is going on here?

The first step in our inquiry is that the idea, like every such technological invention, is of course American, taking as a model, say, a drive-in diner in Houston, Texas. There only those people go close to the door who actually want to enter, so the door quickly opens and closes, the cold air remains inside. In Florence, where in the city centre every minute literally dozens walk past the door, all this of course makes no sense – except for now, when – due to reasons of ‘hygiene’, another hyper-modern buzzword – certainly soon such doors will be legally prescribed by the EU. But did it make any sense even in Houston, TX? Not really, as we are humans, we have hands, and so can open a door, in contrast to animals – particularly smart cats manage to jump on certain knobs, opening them, but this is an exception in the animal world – just as we have legs to walk, this is why we are humans, bipedal, though certainly not in Houston, TX, where nobody ever walks, instead goes everywhere by car, and this is where this particular story started, as they take the car to the diner, instead of walking to the bar, which of course has something to do with the climate of Houston, and the rationality – rather: utter madness – of building a city there: Houston, the favourite city of Milton Friedman, according to whom this shows the unique power of capitalism, as only a capitalist society could build a city on that ghastly swamp – which indeed says a lot about Friedman, Houston, capitalism, and modern madness. But returning to the doors, and knobs, not only that we have hands which can open a door, but it is much better to open a door and not having it opened before us, as opening a door – and this is not a joke – is an experience: it implies the touching of a knob that can be beautiful (even metal-work, if artisanal and not mass-produced, can have its artistic value), and even more importantly a door can be a beautiful piece of solid wood, well-prepared by a master carpenter – in Florence one occasionally can buy a calendar which, instead of scantily dressed female celebrities, contains twelve pictures of beautiful old doors that still exist in Florence – not the doors of a church or a palace, but simple common historical buildings. Entering through those doors is what I meant by experience – certainly not pushing aside a piece of glass bordered by aluminium. The loss of the experiential content of our lives is what is called as alienation – and the successive modernist innovations represent stages in the intensification of this alienation process; just one aspect of the many, and by no means the most upsetting or innerving one.

For this, let us see what happens if we enter the bar and – God forbid – have a minor elementary natural need to resolve.

The automatic light

Well, the doors of toilets in bars are not yet automatic, for rather evident reasons – though perhaps that will represent the next level of progress (or madness), together with special toilets for those who are neither male, nor female – Florence has not yet progressed there. But the lights in them are mostly automated. What this means is that one does not have to touch even the light-switch – super-comfortable! Hyper-hygienic! One just enters, and the light turns on: magical modernity!! So far so good, but then comes the next stage when – if somebody spends there too much time, is too small, of for any other trifling reason – the light suddenly vanishes, and of course in the worst possible moment, when one is trying to complete his ‘need’. There is no need to enter into further details, everyone can imagine the scenery for oneself, and probably ‘experienced’ it indeed several times. At any rate, one tries to wave with hands – which under certain circumstances in itself is most problematic – talk to the sensor, or blow towards its supposed direction, so that it would be so kind as to give again light. But it is just an algorithm, does not know anything about kindness, and does not work until the right, ‘efficient’ mode of action is selected – except that we do not have a clue what that could be. Still, usually, again as if by magic, some of this works, and there is light again – we can finish our act.

The point, however, is different, and goes right into the heart of the inherent perniciousness of algorithmic technology. This is that the next time when we need to take care of our needs in a bar or a restaurant we are increasingly prepared for the eventuality – but not simply in the sense of mobilising our acquired knowledge what to do (as we don’t really know how we should force the ‘system’ to switch on the light again), but getting tense and worried about what and when will happen – as, in contrast to switching on the light, we have no power over the process, so are at the same time alienated and disempowered (note that Marx, with his obsession about technological rationality and efficiency, offers no clue about genuine alienation and disempowering). Or, a most simple activity, which nevertheless anyway has a slight or even not so slight anxiety component, becomes fully invested by anxiety solely due to the technology which is supposed to help us. Thus, instead of doing so by automatically fulfilling our supposed wish – meaning, if we enter the door, we want light, so there comes the light, without us needing to touch the switch – it subordinates our activities to an automatism, which to start with works on the ‘average’ – or producing a Tocquevillean ‘tyranny of the majority’, in the best of cases; but then imposes a presumed rhythm on the human body which does not really suit anyone – except perhaps one who has already become totally mechanised, thus all but stopped being human.

I could continue with the automatic running water tabs, another algorithmic absurdity; but instead, I’ll move to the next step in our promenade through automatised hyper-modern algorithmic madness, that concerns automatic elevators.

Automatic elevators

Automatic elevators are perfect examples for the madness of technology, already explored by Kafka in his Amerika. One version is the always moving elevator, similar to the moving escalators of airports or shopping malls, where one must find the proper rhythm in order to enter and take up the rhythm of the machine – so again the human is forced to adjust himself to the machine, rather than the other way around. But now I would like to introduce another example, closer to our homes and more pernicious: the elevator door which closes automatically. The reason, presumably, is again to help us humans: instead of us needing to close the door, it closes automatically, without the need for us to intervene. I said presumably, because such benevolent intentions, like everything having to do with technology, especially automatization, cannot be taken for granted. The reason, rather, is a combination of saving money, efficiency, and presumption of human error or laziness: humans, those idiots, often fail or forget to close these doors, so let’s close them automatically, instead of waiting for those.

What’s wrong with this, again – apart from the standard malevolent rationalistic assumptions? Well, let’s wait until one has to carry home the shopping. The bags must be put inside the elevator, but this certainly requires more time than the ‘officially’ allotted (by whom?)[3] algorithmic time for the closing of the door, so the door might close by itself while we try to upload the bags, and in an exceptional case the elevator might even be called at this second by somebody else. Or, we try to block the closing of the door by one bag, which might or might not be heavy enough – in the latter case the door will simply push aside the bag, possibly emptying its content, of which some might possibly even fall down into the elevator pit; so we instead, the next time, try to block the door with our body, meaning that we receive the kind hit, or just push, on our back, and so on, and so on.

There is no need to continue, except to conclude that here again, with an automatic elevator door the simple task of taking home one’s shopping, a nuisance in itself, becomes a particularly heavy, stressful burden, which furthermore is basically unsolvable: instead of simply loading the elevator, one is stressed to be as quick as possible to prevent the door from closing, or from closing again. A nightmare. One element in the comprehensive process which makes in our modern times everyone nervous, anxious and worried all the time.

I’ll give only one more example: paying at the booth at the exit of toll highways or supermarket parking lots.

Paying the toll

Toll highways are particularly pernicious and nonsensical as such roads are made to help traffic, yet paying for the quick road, especially in certain peak times, can be so slow that it all but takes away the time saved by taking the road. This happened with me not once, both in Ireland (near Dublin), and in Italy (especially near big cities and the seaside). But I now turn shortly to the simple act of paying the toll. This involves approaching the booth, opening the window, taking off the seat belt, inserting the card, etc. – all of which takes a certain amount of time, with the car behind anxiously waiting for us to get the hell out of there – which is again an important point, as all such mechanical automatization makes humans each other’s vicious competitors and sworn enemies – which is by no means a law of nature or society, just a misunderstanding of a Malthusian Darwinism that anyway is already a profound misunderstanding of the nature of things, inspired by British Political Economy, a favourite subject matter for Karl Marx, and one of the worse inventions of mankind in its long history.

Real problems start the moment the bar is lifted, and so the action is successfully completed. This is because now one must, at the same time, roll up the window (where the automatism might or might not work), put away the card into the purse, the purse into the pocket, start the car, and pull out before the car behind starts to madly beep its horn. The most difficult moment, in my experience, is to buckle up again, as the card must be put inside the purse inside the jacket, otherwise one would forget it inside the car; but one cannot buckle up until this is done; but in order to move away from the booth and not blocking it one needs first to make the engine run again and start the car, but with this now the alarm will ring that I’m not buckled up – another of those totally meaningless stupid algorithms that are legally impossible to shut down. All of which makes, out of the otherwise nonsensical experience of paying a toll at a road – as are we not paying enough taxes so that the enormous machinery of the state could take care of this, instead of downloading every one of its activities on us individually, while keep growing to insane proportions, just as the HR and PR departments of universities, when academics are increasingly forced to perform administrative functions – another nerve-stretching hassle.

Concluding remarks

The examples could be multiplied, literally without an end. But I will not take further the patience of the kind reader, in case he or she is still with me. I will only conclude this first part by saying that these are not just exaggerated examples, taken out of context, but demonstrate how really automatised algorithmic technology works. It is not a kind help to alleviate our troubles, further proof to the benevolence of modernity; quite on the contrary. It shows rather that when certain people, mostly ideologists of modern technology, speak of artificial intelligence, trans-humanism and post-humanism, they truly mean it: the aim is not simply to destroy tradition, culture, and nature, but simply eliminate us humans. With such ideologies it is no longer a question of interpretation, but an explicit, verbatim aim.

So we should open our eyes, in so far as we have them (and not replaced by some super-technological gadgets that supposedly will even see infrared lights, or could protrude in order to see even behind, and so are ‘better’), and do whatever possible to stop technological ‘progress’ – which is progress only in the sense of the progressive destruction of our world, and of ourselves.

 

Notes

[1] See Agnes Horvath, Marius Ion Benta & Joan Davison (eds.) Walling, Boundaries and Liminality: A Political Anthropology of Transformations, London, Routledge, 2019; Agnes Horvath, Camil Franscesc Roman and Gilbert Germain (eds.) Divinization and Technology: The Political Anthropology of Subversion, London, Routledge, 2019; Agnes Horvath and Arpad Szakolczai, The Political Sociology and Anthropology of Evil: Tricksterology. London, Routledge, 2020; Agnes Horvath, Political Alchemy: Technology Unbounded, London, Routledge, 2021; and Paul O’Connor and Marius Ion Benta (eds), The Technologisation of the Social: A Political Anthropology of the Digital Machine, London, Routledge, December 2021 (forthcoming). See also Agnes Horvath’s articles in the 20 September, 13 October, and 5 November issues of VoegelinView.

[2] For further details, see Arpad Szakolczai and Bjørn Thomassen, From Anthropology to Social Theory: Rethinking the Social Sciences, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2019.

[3] This simple question is by no means irrelevant, as nobody knows who, when and how decided about the number of seconds after which an open elevator door is supposed to close automatically. Presumably some ‘research’ was done somewhere by somebody, using some sample, which then became generalised and codified, accepted as a fact of life and nature, without ever inquiring about the relevance and applicability of such a case to others. In the elevator in our home, the door closes after about five seconds, which leaves a rather short time to upload and then again to download the shopping – not to mention that the light switch in the rather dark and closed corridor-area in front of the elevator also has a very tight timing, meaning that usually the light is switched off during the process, producing pitch-darkness just when the elevator door is also closing, raising the anxiety level further – when such anxiety level, in the proper modern manner, was already tested by the queues in the supermarket, the traffic, and the other standard amenities of modern life. But the issue is not how the time assigned by the algorithms can be ‘optimised’, as no doubt there are all kind of procedures involved in ‘updating’ such research – rather that there can be no algorithm valid for every case; and so any algorithm by definition is worse that leaving it to us to close the elevator door when we are finished with our business – and if someone forgets, this might be part of that persons character, or just an accident that one has to live with. As otherwise, together with the possible errors, it is our life itself which becomes stolen from us. And if somebody does not understand this, that person is simply beyond redemption.