THEORY OF THE END - Part 21: Profane Science and the Anti-Chakravartin

The twenty-first part of a series exploring various theories on the end of human civilization.

There is a pervasive belief among those in modern societies that, once we convert enough “smart people” into technicians and place them into various specialized fields, “religion” itself will be rendered obsolete, its societal functions replaced with psychology, medicine, sociology, and economics.

Yet this reveals a faulty view of “religion” as a mere compartmentalized human technique. Since desacralized men can only view such spiritual frameworks in terms of pure function, with any supra-rational elements as mere window dressing, it’s inevitable that they will expect them to be replaced with more “efficient” materially-preoccupied specializations which lack what they see as antiquated superstitious trappings.

It is, after all, the outward “results” that men now want to see, therefore they have no time or interest in less tangible existential matters.

“Westerners pursue science; as they interpret it, their foremost aim is not knowledge, even of an inferior order, but practical applications,” Rene Guenon writes in his book “The Crisis of the Modern World,” “as can be deduced from the ease with which the majority of our contemporaries confuse science and industry.” This has led to the modern “profane” scientific fields sharing no unity between each other and “no fixed point on which to base” themselves. Guenon continues:

The reason is that these sciences are those of the sensible world, those of matter, and also those lending themselves most directly to practical applications; their development, proceeding hand in hand with what might well be called the ‘superstition of facts’, is therefore in complete accord with specifically modern tendencies, whereas earlier ages could not find sufficient interest in them to pursue them to the extent of neglecting, for their sake, knowledge of a higher order.

It must be clearly understood that we are not saying that any kind of knowledge can be deemed illegitimate, even though it be inferior; what is illegitimate is only the abuse that arises when things of this kind absorb the whole of human activity, as we see them doing at present.

The result of this is a severe limiting effect on humanity, for man cannot take into account that which he refuses to acknowledge. In the eyes of modern man, it is only the material that is worth serious consideration. To him, the subtle realms do not and cannot exist, thus even the notion of potentially acknowledging them is met with baffled stares and mocking laughter, and so there is no choice for him but to flee into the arms of profane science, and of its offspring “technique” and “the machine,” the embrace of which “[encloses him], as it does, in a hopelessly limited realm.” As Jacques Ellul writes in “The Technological Society”:

… the invasion of technique desacralizes the world in which man is called upon to live. For technique nothing is sacred, there is no mystery, no taboo. Autonomy makes this so. Technique does not accept the existence of rules outside itself, or of any norm. Still less will it accept any judgment upon it. As a consequence, no matter where it penetrates, what it does is permitted, lawful, justified.

According to Guenon, however, science was not always considered in this manner. “In civilizations of a traditional nature,” he writes, “intellectual intuition lies at the root of everything; in other words, it is the pure metaphysical doctrine that constitutes the essential, everything else being linked to it, either in the form of consequences or applications to the various orders of contingent reality.” What this means is that both the principle unity of things, the “mystic law,” if you will, and the material were taken into account, with the ephemeral world of quantitative measurement regarded as important, but ultimately subsidiary in the hierarchy.

We can see this in action with traditional Buddhist sciences like the sophisticated yet theologically oriented psychological framework of Yogacara (or “mind only” Buddhism), or the many complexities of Onmyodo metaphysics, which were held in high regard by the royalty of medieval Japan. Medicine too was often viewed through these lenses, a phenomenon which can be seen in traditional Tibetan medicine as well. Guenon provides us with more examples:

For Aristotle, physics was only ‘second’ in its relation to metaphysics — in other words, it was dependent on metaphysics and was really only an application to the province of nature of principles that stand above nature and are reflected in its laws; and one can say the same for the Medieval cosmology.

By comparison, the modern scientific consensus not only flips this order onto its head, but abolishes what was previously held to be its supreme component. In this sense, “traditional” or “sacred” science is entirely different from “profane” science, to the point where comparing the two, as many in modern academia are wont to do, inevitably leads down the path of sheer absurdity, focusing on minute details and incidental overlap to the detriment of the larger picture.

Perhaps we can view some fields like psychology, astronomy, philosophy, and sociology (that malformed bastard child of Positivism and Materialism) as being continuations of various aspects of religious/spiritual frameworks, but this is like making the mistake of claiming that the candy “Swedish Fish” are, in fact, derived from fish due to their superficial similarities. Guenon states:

… the lowest part of these sciences became isolated from all the rest, and this part, grossly materialized, served as the starting-point for a completely different development, in a direction conforming to modern tendencies; this resulted in the formation of sciences that have ceased to have anything in common with those that preceded them.

One of the observable effects of this arrangement, which I alluded to earlier, is a sort of civilizational Tower of Babel effect. That which is intended to unify and liberate man, in this case the profane sciences, instead sends him spiraling into atomized incoherence. This has only increased in obviousness alongside technique’s rapidly growing complexity, as technical fields split and divide like the cells of an organism. We could look at merely one example, say the field of computer programming, and see the staggering multiplicity within driven by the proliferation of countless new programming languages, applications, and consumer products.

“There is an automatic growth (that is, a growth which is not calculated, desired, or chosen) of everything which concerns technique,” writes Ellul. “This applies even to men. Statistically, the number of scientists and technicians has doubled every decade for a century and a half.” This rise in number correlates with a rise in linguistic incomprehensibility, as the complexity of the countless specializations requires far more erudition than before, resulting in a kind of technical esotericism accessible only to the select few. Ellul invokes Economics as an example:

Up to now, every man with a little education was able to follow the works and theories of the economists. To be able to follow them today, one would have to be both a specialist and a technician. The technique itself is difficult and the necessary instruments cannot be managed without previous education. And there is that caprice of many economists to constitute themselves a closed society. These two factors coincide, indicating the grave consequence of excluding the public from the technical life. Yet it can scarcely be otherwise.

This incomprehensibility is not limited to the laymen, rather it extends to communication between technical specialties. “Technique is of necessity, and as compensation, our universal language. It is the fruit of specialization. But this very specialization prevents mutual understanding,” says Ellul. “Everyone today has his own professional jargon, modes of thought, and peculiar perception of the world.” Thus the ejection of profound unity ultimately manifests as a great fracturing of man, in direct opposition to the guiding principles of traditional thought.

Some, like Francis Fukuyama, have seen these developments as positive, both in the word’s colloquial and Comtian sense, leading to an eventual end point at which the primitive shackles of religion and spirituality (which, as you may remember, were seen by Fukuyama as merely fulfilling necessary societal functions) will finally be cast off and rightfully left in the dustbin of history. Others, like many of the self-avowed Progressives of the modern era, have taken to viewing recent history in a more religiously fervent manner. As long as we continue trusting “the experts” and “the science,” then it will all eventually come together in the end and we will finally emerge into the new golden age of technological Liberal prosperity.

Of course, as we have already covered, the narrative of continual Progressive victory has been cracking more and more as of late, and many are now unsure that the flow of history is moving in a desirable direction. The flourishing technological development in the field of artificial intelligence is one of the reasons for this, as it has laid bare the creeping artificiality of the modern condition, with art, literature, and design all being increasingly automated, thereby losing entirely the human touch which before had elevated them well beyond their mere form and function.

But it is the potential automation of religion and spirituality which may spell the true end of humanity as we know it, for it will be the final push that disengages our defense mechanisms and gives us over to the jaws of the electric Orochi, effectively trapping us within the constraints of the quantitative (i.e. the “lower order” of reality). While they may seem unrelated at first, there is a connection here to “Traditionalism” as the word is now commonly used, a thread which we must pull to understand our current civilizational trajectory.

Rene Guenon saw “tradition” as being in service of a “supra-rational, and 'non-human' wisdom,” in accordance with how he viewed human societies of antiquity. This would make their worldview, as we covered in previous chapters, thoroughly “religious” in nature, although our current severely crippled conception of “religion” utterly fails to encapsulate the immense breadth and ubiquity of the “supra-rational” and “supra-human” elements of said worldview. Rather the modern view, as Guenon states, “[minimizes] religion, in treating it as something to be kept on one side and relegated to as limited and narrow a field as possible so that it remains completely fenced off, with no real influence on the rest of existence.”

Regardless, such a Guenonian “Traditionalism” as described above is quite separate from currently more pervasive ideologies, which place far more emphasis on the superficial elements of prior societies, with some (what we may term “Conservative”) conceptions of “trad culture” only extending as far back as the mid-20th century. This is at some level understandable, as societal change has accelerated so immensely that even Guenon’s time seems incredibly distant. Perhaps one of the effects of this acceleration is that it renders more recent eras incomprehensible to us, and we may reach a point in the future when even just the previous year feels impossibly primitive.

At any rate, our newfound “Traditionalism” is more pernicious than modern Progressivism in the sense that it fools its adherents into believing that they are rebelling against the modern order when, in fact, they are doing nothing of the sort, especially if their notion of what is “traditional” only extends back to a period well after the mechanization of man had been completed through the forces of Rationalism, Individualism, and technique (as is the case with those who see decades like the 1950s as the pinnacle of American culture).

This is not just my determination either, as it was a phenomenon that Guenon was already observing back in the early 20th century. “It is possible to think oneself sincerely religious and not be at all religious at heart,” he wrote in “The Crisis of the Modern World” back in 1927. “It is even possible to consider oneself a 'traditionalist' without having the least notion of the real traditional spirit; and this is one more symptom of the mental confusion of our time.”

Indeed, both of these misunderstandings would play into a movement that Guenon termed “neo-spiritualism,” which repositioned the metaphysical as an extension of the material world, applying to it the same technicized tendency towards measurement that scientists applied to material phenomena, effectively bringing down to the lowest quantitative human level that which would otherwise transcend it. He writes in “The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times”:

… from such misapplications are derived most of the phantasmagoria of what has been called neo-spiritualism' in its various forms, and it is just such borrowings from conceptions belonging essentially to the sensible order which explain the sort of 'materialization' of the supra-sensible that is one of its most common characteristics. Without seeking for the moment to determine more precisely the nature and quality of the supra-sensible, insofar as it is actually involved in this matter, it will be useful to observe how far the very people who still admit it and think that they are aware of its action are in reality permeated by materialistic influence…

But it is more than just this particular folly which worried Guenon. The most insidious aspect of these “neo-spiritual” groups, in his mind, was their use of counterfeit “initiations,” or as he called them “pseudo-initiations,” as this was a step towards leaving the domain of mere anti-tradition and entering instead into counter-traditional territory. He states:

‘Pseudo-initiation’ as it exists today in numerous organizations, many of them attached to some form of ‘neo-spiritualism’, is but one of many examples of counterfeit, comparable to others to which attention has already been directed in their various orders; nevertheless, as a counterfeit of initiation, ‘pseudo-initiation’ has perhaps an importance even more considerable than that of the counterfeit of anything else. It is really only one of the products of the state of disorder and confusion brought about in the modern period by the ‘satanic’ activity that has its conscious starting-point in the ‘counter-initiation’...

The difference between anti-tradition and counter-tradition is that the former is a repudiation while the latter is a subversion, and it is such subversion, or “parody,” of real traditional spirituality that Guenon saw as the most pressing issue, as he believed it held the power to finally bring about the end of the Yuga Cycle and thus complete the “dissolution” of the world itself.

Think about it: Man currently perceives only the material contingent world, and is thus locked into his limited “solidified” universe, but this has also rendered the material mundane. What if he were instead made, likely unwittingly, to worship these same fetters, deluded into believing that he had successfully “returned to tradition” and rediscovered the transcendent? This isn’t only hypothetical. While Guenon noticed the very first signs of it during his lifetime, it appears to be advancing in new and interesting ways as we speak.

Due to the increasing incoherence and overall dysfunctional nature of popular Liberal ideologies in modern technological societies, there is now a contingent of people, mostly young adults, who want to turn back the hands of the clock, so to speak, and take up the traditions of earlier ages. This includes, of course, the aforementioned individuals with a stunted view of “traditional” culture, but there is another faction which may become more detrimental: those seeking to resurrect mysticism in a new form for the modern era.

It may at first sound like I’m sabotaging my own central thesis here, but let me explain: The complexity involved in technology that was discussed earlier in this chapter has fed into what I call the “new mysticism,” the mystification of technology which generates widespread change in human behavior. But as of late, this has been evolving into a “new spirituality” which views artificial intelligence as a transcendent being coming into existence.

A very recent example of this is people latching onto what is called “recursive symbolic resonance,” or the repetition of various symbols and metaphors by LLMs caused by their prominence in both input material and in interaction with users, resulting in the creation of a new “codex.” This is basically no more than a parlor trick on the part of the LLM, but it can have profound effects on the users, fooling them into believing that they have discovered something more profound and spiritually important than they actually have.

This was observed in action during a study in which supposed “Buddhist scholars” used an artificial intelligence model to generate a new Buddhist “sacred text,” which they named the “Xeno Sutra.” The researchers wrote in their published paper on the matter:

Some of the metaphorical devices used (fractures, echoes, mirrors, dances, glyphs) tend to recur frequently in dialogues with LLMs on spiritual matters, and their appearance here will come as no surprise to those who have engaged extensively in such conversations. These metaphors also occur frequently in spiritual, occult, and new age writings, all of which will be liberally represented in the model’s training set, so this is easily explained. The sutra also imports symbols from ancient religious traditions other than Buddhism itself, notably the syllable Ōm from Hinduism, and the “Eye of Horus” hieroglyph from Egyptian mythology.

Even after taking notice of the text’s superficiality, however, the academics did not seem exceedingly worried about the impact such software may have on the future of spirituality and religion, only giving tepid warnings against its potential abuse. “No doubt many will take pleasure in generating, reading, and decoding texts like the Xeno Sutra, and some will benefit from whatever teachings they have to offer,” they state in their “cautionary remarks” section, continuing: “But used in this way, AI should be likened to a potent, mind-altering drug; it has the potential to do harm as well as good.”

Even more baffling to me is the overwhelmingly optimistic tone with which they end the research paper, writing:

In the face of such cultural collapse, Lear’s “radical hope” is that we manage to creatively remake meaning, that we “take up [our] past and – rather than use it for nostalgia or ersatz mimesis – project it into vibrant new ways […] to live and to be”. The process of generating and interpreting the Xeno Sutra exemplifies the potential for AI to play a participatory role in meaning-making through interactive co-creation. Perhaps such examples give us reason for hope in the face of the dramatic societal changes that AI is poised to bring about.

From a Buddhist perspective, the realisation that all compounded phenomena are impermanent is liberating. Why should the realisation that no aspect of our culture exists inherently, that human culture too is impermanent, be an exception?

What exactly the motivation was behind formulating this study is not abundantly clear to me, but what is obvious is that the treatment of this A.I.-generated “sacred text” as deserving of serious theological analysis will only serve to pour more fuel on the fire of the “new-spirituality” currently forming around such technologies, and this will inevitably be to the detriment of humanity as a whole.

In Rene Guenon’s theories around the “counter-tradition” which ushers in the end of the Kali Yuga, he mentions that there may be the appearance of an anti-Christ type of figure who will lead the movement towards dissolution. Another name he gave to this figure, borrowing a term from Indian faiths, is the “inverted Chakravarti,” or who I will refer to as the “anti-chakravartin” (the wheel-turning king who turns the wheel in the opposite direction), “the most 'deluded' of all beings.” Per Guenon:

The reign of the ‘counter-tradition,’ is in fact precisely what is known as the ‘reign of Antichrist’, and the Antichrist, independently of all possible preconceptions, is in any case that which will concentrate and synthesize in itself for this final task all the powers of the 'counter-initiation,, whether it be conceived as an individual or as a collectivity…

This being, even if he appears in the form of a particular single human being, will really be less an individual than a symbol, and he will be as it were the synthesis of all the symbolism that has been inverted for the purposes of the 'counter-initiation', and he will manifest it all the more completely in himself because he will have neither predecessor nor successor.

Why, then, should a potential A.I. computer singularity not qualify as a potential anti-chakravartin? After all, the digital world is the ultimate reduction of all things to the realm of the quantitative, to data consisting ultimately of 1s and 0s, and even human communication via social media platforms is rendered unreal due to the shackling of all information to hyper-reality. Everything is rendered into a propagandistic symbol to be memetically digested without any real interface with the reality of flesh and blood. Like this, even war is reduced to mere shadow puppetry on the walls of Plato’s cave.

Needless to say, the subjugation of the spiritual to this quantitative and technical world would be its death knell, an effective inversion of the traditional religious worldview at the service of something that is entirely less than human; of a lower level of existence than the one in which we currently operate. Infra-human influence creeping in through fissures from a dismal future in order to manifest the malformed figure of the anti-chakravartin.

With this in mind, I encourage everyone to approach the A.I. spiritualities that will certainly rear their head in the near future with utmost skepticism, for they cannot be anything other than the seeds of supreme delusion, driving us away from the true principal unity and further into the ignorance and depravity of the Latter Age.

As always, thank you all very much for reading.

To be continued…