The World Needs a Renaissance—Not a Reset II

David Gosselin

“And men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty waves of the sea, the broad tides of rivers, the compass of the ocean, and the circuits of the stars, yet pass over the mystery of themselves without a thought.”

― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

Lamenting the loss of ancient mysteries and traditions has become popular in our modern age, but is man really lacking mystery in the twenty-first century? Or have many today simply failed to appreciate the mystery that is modern Western civilization? After all, what could be more mysterious and magical to an archaic man and ancient civilizations than the miracle that is the modern West? With its previously unimagined abundance, light-speed communication, wealth of scientific marvels and industrialized power, both the most ardent Atlanticists and archaic observers of the ancient world would be compelled to believe our civilization had fallen under the spell of the most powerful wizards the world had ever seen.

But whence did this magic actually spring and what is its true source?

For some people, the question has become obsolete. For instance, according to a World Economic Forum (WEF) guru and modern H.G. Wells devotee like Yuval Hariri, humans are no longer “mysterious souls,” but “hackable animals.” Soon, powerful AIs will emerge as the new oracles of a technetronic age, outpacing humans in almost every field. This “singularity point” will render much of humanity superfluous, leading to the emergence of a new “global useless class.”

So modern transhumanist and AI occultists tell us.

But is any of this true? And is there some principled way to verify claims that the human mind can be replaced by sophisticated pattern recognition or complex quantitative analysis conducted by algorithms? Were the birth of Renaissance marvels like Brunelleschi’s Florentine duomo or Da Vinci’s Last Supper really just the product of clever pattern recognition, or was there something more intangible, yet intelligible, in these celebrated works which married science and art on a fundamentally new level? Said otherwise, however many 1s and 0s are added to AI’s computing power, at what point does a creative human soul capable of experiencing creative epiphanies emerge?

If we can wrestle with this question, the rest becomes detail.

To situate the strategic nature of this matter today, which transhumanists and AI cults believe is a settled one we’ll revisit the magically transformative moment that was the European Golden Renaissance. In doing so, we’ll demonstrate that the nature of our modern crisis has little to do with a lack of mystery but - if anything, forgetting the mystery at the heart of Western civilization.

The Changing Images of Man

To truly re-acquaint ourselves with the mystery that is the modern West, consider the often obscured history of the European Golden Renaissance. Ironically, the strategic nature of this turning point was captured with considerable awareness by none other than those forces dedicated to repatterning the very Western Classical and Judeo-Christian image of man which made the Renaissance possible in the first place.

The strategic assessment in question is found in the pivotal 1982 “Changing Images of Man” document, published by the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). As the name suggests, the authors concern themselves with the evolution of man’s own “self-image,” from the early days of archaic Greek man to Judeo-Christian Renaissance man.

The SRI authors write:

In contrast to the Greek notion of ‘man,’ the Judeo-Christian view holds that “man” is essentially separate from the rightful master over nature. This view inspired a sharp rate of increase in technological advances in Western Europe throughout the Medieval period. On the other hand, the severe limitations of scholastic methodology, and the restrictive views of the Church, prevented the formulation of an adequate scientific paradigm. It was not until the Renaissance brought a new climate of individualism and free inquiry that the necessary conditions for a new paradigm were provided. 

Interestingly, the Renaissance scholars turned to the Greeks to rediscover the empirical method. The Greeks possessed an objective science of things ‘out there,’ which D. Campbell (1959) terms the ‘epistemology of the other.’ This was the basic notion that nature was governed by laws and principles which could be discovered, and it was this that the Renaissance scholars then developed into science as we have come to know it.

We should note that the particular ivy league institution in question, located in Stanford, California, was originally called the Stanford Research Institute, but rebranded itself plainly as “the SRI” due to blowback caused by its notorious “counterinsurgency studies for Southeast Asia” i.e., research into sadistic bombing and psychological terror campaigns conducted during the Vietnam war and other foreign expeditions led by the Anglo-American establishment. As a result of public outcry and anti-war movements, the SRI chose to legally distance itself from Stanford University to continue its cutting-edge “research” away from public scrutiny and prying eyes.

Surprisingly, this newly rebranded research organ was known for its innovative mechanical and technical engineering research, yet its “Changing Images of Man” program had as its aim the creation of a new “spiritual” paradigm, famously dubbed the “New Age,” or “Age of Aquarius.”

The purpose of this program would be to entice Western civilization away from what was traditionally thought of as “progress,” that is, the kind of scientific and economic development which made modern abundance and “free inquiry” possible. In its stead, an inner-directed spiritualized view of man centered on self-improvement and evolutionary “consciousness” would fit the bill.

The SRI authors write:

The new paradigm will likely incorporate some kind of concept of hierarchical level of consciousness, or levels of subjective experience. These will be distinguishable in the sense that concepts and metaphors appropriate to one level do not necessarily fit another. They will be hierarchical, not in the sense that one is higher than another on some value scale, but in the sense of structural hierarchy, and also in the sense that the consciousness of intense moments of creativity are accompanied by, in some testable meaning, more awareness than times of ‘ordinary consciousness,’ and those in turn involve more awareness than deep sleep.

The notion of a spectrum of potential consciousness connotes extending the range of recognized ‘unconscious’ processes (i.e. processes of which we are not usually conscious although the potentiality appears to be present of experiencing them directly) to include a vast range of reported experience in the provinces of creative imagination, ‘cosmic consciousness,’ aesthetic and mystical experience, psychic phenomena, and the occult.