Douglas Rushkoff on the Problem With Modern Spirituality & Ethics
How we came to see ourselves as separate from nature
A Note from Rainn
Hey There Soul Pioneers!
Buckle up, because this week on the Soul Boom podcast, we've got the brilliant and ever-engaging Douglas Rushkoff. A polymath of remarkable output, he's a media theorist, writer, professor, and documentarian who has written enough books to build a small library—20 to be exact (including his newest Survival of the Richest). Rushkoff explores the ethical implications of technology, and in his call for our digital landscape to become more human-centered, he deftly weaves together the themes of interconnectedness and spirituality. Heady stuff, yes, but definitely not boring.
For today’s Soul Boom Dispatch, we're diving into his fiery manifesto Team Human. In this excerpt, Rushkoff challenges us to reconsider our relationship with technology, spirituality, and our environment, through the Cree concept of "wettiko"—a metaphorical disease of disconnectedness and exploitation that he argues has plagued civilizations throughout history.
Shoghi Effendi, one of the principal luminaries of the Bahá’í Faith, shared a similar critique. In 1954, he warned that the social evil of “crass materialism” had pervaded all aspects of our life and had metastasized. Describing its trajectory, he wrote that it was “this same cancerous materialism, born originally in Europe, carried to excess in the North American continent, contaminating the Asiatic peoples and nations, spreading its ominous tentacles to the borders of Africa, and now invading its very heart.”
It is indeed heartbreaking to consider the damage that the spread of materialism has wrought, both socially and ecologically. But let’s not lose heart. The consequences of materialistic values and the other destructive forces we see are only half the story.
If you read Soul Boom the book, you might recall my reference to a key Bahá’í concept. This concept helps me make sense of what exactly is happening in the world right now—how the disparate and conflicting energies of our time are at work in the transformation of human society on a global level. It’s simple but revelatory. The concept explains that at any time, there are two parallel powers working on the world at once: the forces of integration and the forces of disintegration.
Back in 1938, Shoghi Effendi described this phenomenon perfectly: “A twofold process, however, can be distinguished, each tending . . . to bring to a climax the forces that are transforming the face of our planet. The first is essentially an integrating process, while the second is fundamentally disruptive. The former, as it steadily evolves, unfolds a System which may well serve as a pattern for that world polity towards which a strangely-disordered* world is continually advancing; while the latter, as it’s disintegrating influence deepens, tends to tear down, with increasing violence, the antiquated barriers that seek to block humanity’s progress towards its destined goal.” (*Emphasis mine)
In other words, both destruction and evolution are happening at the exact same time! Along with the fragmentation and disintegration of the old order, we also see renewal and integration. The gradual upbuilding of a new world.
Some will argue that these disruptions in our “strangely-disordered world” are no more than the inevitable outcome of late stage capitalism. But our polycrisis goes beyond any one economic or political system. Consider the history of the 20th century: even though capitalism and communism were sharply divergent and antagonistic schools of thought, each was tragically enmeshed in materialistic philosophies. They both neglected the spiritual values and ancient truths foundational to a stable and flourishing world civilization. If history is any guide, the solutions won’t be found in political passions, conflicting class interests, or in technical solutions alone. What is needed is a spiritual revival before political, economic, and technological tools can be successfully applied.
That’s why Rushkoff's insights are a much needed wake-up call. He reminds us that our values shape our interactions with technology, each other, and our planet. It's time to ask ourselves: if our world were reorganized around the principle of our oneness, what would it look like then?
¡Viva la Revolución (Espiritual)!
Rainn
The Problem With Modern Spirituality & Ethics
By Douglas Rushkoff
On encountering the destructiveness of European colonialists, Native Americans concluded that the invaders must have a disease. They called it wettiko: a delusional belief that cannibalizing the life force of others is a logical and morally upright way to live. The Native Americans believed that wettiko derived from people’s inability to see themselves as enmeshed, interdependent parts of the natural environment. Once this disconnect has occurred, nature is no longer seen as something to be emulated but as something to be conquered. Women, natives, the moon, and the woods are all dark and evil, but can be subdued by man, his civilizing institutions, his weapons, and his machines. Might makes right, because might is itself an expression of the divine.
Wettiko can’t be blamed entirely on Europeans. Clearly, the tendency goes at least as far back as sedentary living, the hoarding of grain, and the enslavement of workers. Wanton destruction has long been recognized as a kind of psychic malady. It’s the disease from which Pharaoh of biblical legend was suffering—so much so that God was said to have “hardened his heart,” disconnecting him from all empathy and connection with nature. Pharaoh saw other humans as pests to be exterminated, and used his superior technologies—from agriculture to chariots—to bend nature to his divine will.
Both Judaism and Christianity sought to inoculate themselves from the threat of wettiko. Their founding priests understood that disconnecting from nature and worshiping an abstract God was bound to make people feel less empathetic and connected. Judaism attempted to compensate for this by keeping God out of the picture—literally undepicted. The Israelites had just escaped the death cults of Egypt, and developed an open-source approach to religion that involved constant revision by its participants. Even the letters of sacred texts were written in a script meant to look as transparent as flame. Unlike the arks at which they had worshiped in Egypt, the Israelites’ ark was to have no idol on the top. Rather, they venerated an explicitly empty space, protected by two cherubim. The removal of idols allows people to see the divine in one another instead. Law even dictates that people can read Torah only with a minyan, a group of ten peers, as if to guarantee that worship is social.
Christianity, likewise, sought to retrieve the insight that a religion is less important as a thing in itself than as a way of experiencing and expressing love to others. The new version of Judaism turned attention away from the written law, which had become an idol of its own, and again toward the heart. Christ of the Bible was attempting to prevent religion from becoming the figure instead of the ground.
But the crucifix became an emblem of divine conquest, first in the Crusades, and later—with the advent of capitalism and industrialism—for colonial empires to enact and spread wettiko as never before. And the law, originally developed as a way of articulating a spiritual code of ethics, became a tool for chartered monopolies to dominate the world, backed by royal gunships. While Europeans took their colonial victories as providential, Native Americans saw white men as suffering from a form of mental illness that leads its victims to consume far more than they need to survive, and results in an “icy heart” incapable of compassion.
Clearly, the wettiko virus prevailed, and the society that emerged from this aggressive extraction still uses the promise of a utopian future to justify its wanton exploitation of people and nature in the present.
Many Westerners have come to understand the problems inherent in a society obsessed with growth, and have struggled to assert a more timeless set of spiritual sensibilities. But, almost invariably, such efforts get mired in our ingrained notions of personal growth, progress and optimism.
Frank Baum, the author of The Wizard of Oz, embodied this dynamic. He was not only a devoted follower of the Russian spiritualist Madame Blavatsky but also the founder of the first magazine on window dressing and retail strategies for department stores. Dorothy’s journey down the Yellow Brick Road combined the esoteric wisdom of his teacher with the can-do optimism of early twentieth-century American consumerism. The gifts Dorothy and her companions finally receive from the Wizard merely activate the potentials they had with them all along. All they really needed was a shift in consciousness, but good products and salesmanship didn’t hurt. Similarly, Reverend Norman Vincent Peale’s “positive thinking” derived from occult and transcendentalist roots, but caught on only when he framed it as a prosperity gospel. He taught the poor to use the power of prayer and optimism to attain the good life, and helped the wealthy justify their good fortune as an outward reward for their inner faith.
Vulnerable to the same ethos of personal prosperity, the counterculture movements of the 1960s and 1970s originally sought to undermine the religion of growth on which American society was based. Hippies were rejecting the consumerist, middle-class values of their parents, while scientists were taking LSD and seeing the Tao in physics. A new spirit of holism was emerging in the West, reflected in the lyrics of rock music, the spread of meditation and yoga centers, and the popularity of Buddhism and other Eastern religions. It appeared to herald a new age.
But all of these spiritual systems were being interpreted in the American context of consumerism. Herbs, seminars, and therapies were distributed through multilevel marketing schemes and advertised as turnkey solutions to all of life’s woes. The resulting New Age movement stressed individual enlightenment over communal health. It was the same old personal salvation wine, only in California chardonnay bottles. The social justice agenda of the antiwar and civil rights movements was repackaged as the stridently individualistic self-help movement. They adopted psychologist Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” as their rubric, with “self-actualization” as the ultimate goal at the top of the pyramid. Never mind that Buddhists would have challenged the very premise of a self. The LSD trip, with its pronounced sense of journey, peak, and return, became the new allegory for individual salvation.
Wealthy seekers attended retreats at centers such as Esalen Institute, where they were taught by the likes of Maslow, Fritz Perls, Alan Watts, and other advocates of personal transformation. While there was certainly value in taking a break from workaday reality and confronting one’s demons, the emphasis was on transcendence: if traditional religions taught us to worship God, in this new spirituality we would be as gods. It wasn’t really a retrieval of ancient holism, timelessness, and divine reenactment at all so much as an assertion of good old linear, goal-based, ascension—practiced on the former sacred grounds of the Esselen Indians.
The ultimate goal of personal transcendence was to leave the sinful, temporary body behind and float as a free, perfected consciousness. All that prior consumption was just fuel for the rocket, and the regrettable destruction, something to leave behind with the rest of physical reality. This wasn’t a break from consumer capitalism, but the fulfillment of its ultimate purpose. And, by the 1970s, many other sectors and industries seemed to be coalescing around the same set of potentials. Computer scientists were pondering artificial intelligence; personal transformation gurus were helping people walk over burning coals; specially phased audio tapes helped people journey out of body. Mind over matter became the mantra. People sought to escape biological limits before middle age, not to mention death.
As the beating heart of this spiritual, technological, and cultural innovation, the Bay Area began to attract global attention from those looking to overturn or escape the established order. Wealthy progressives believed that they could apply the insights they had gained in their personal spiritual journeys to the world at large. They initiated projects to end hunger, cure cancer, communicate with animals, and contact aliens. Their most significant undertaking was to address the nuclear standoff between the United States and Soviet Union by holding a series of meetings between the two nations’ most spiritually awakened and politically connected individuals.
The Soviet–American citizen diplomacy program brought together America’s leading spiritual teachers, scientists, and psychologists with those of the Soviet Union. The Russian equivalent of New Age spirituality was represented by the practitioners of cosmism, a form of gnosticism that grew out of the Russian Orthodox tradition’s emphasis on immortality. The cosmists were a big hit. Their pursuit of life extension technologies quickly overtook geopolitics as the primary goal of the conferences. Believing that not only could human beings transcend our mortality but that we could bring physicality with us—at least in some form—the cosmists convinced America’s LSD-taking spiritualists that technology could give them a way of beating death.
The cosmists’ original idea held that one could resurrect the dead by rearranging their atoms to the precise positions they were in while the person was alive. But the cosmists were working on other solutions, such as perfecting humans through intentional evolution, moving human consciousness into the bodies of robots, conquering death, colonizing space, or uploading ourselves to computers.
Such were the origins of today’s transhumanist movement. These conferences were formative experiences for Silicon Valley’s most influential executives, investors, professors, scientists, and technologists—some of whom founded the biggest digital companies in the world. This vision still motivates the development of artificial intelligence, private space exploration, robotics, data surveillance, and life extension.
Transhumanism exalts and preserves one particular expression of humanity, while leaving the rest of messy creation behind—or even exploiting it—in order to escape before the body dies or the world ends.
The transhumanist movement is less a theory about the advancement of humanity than a simple evacuation plan. Techno-utopians like to think of themselves as orchestrating a complete break from civilization—a leap into outer space, cyberspace, machine consciousness, or artificial life. But their ideas just extend our same blind addiction to consumption, destruction, progress, and colonization. Cyber-wettiko.
European colonialists ignored the peoples and places they overran in their conquest of the planet in the belief that they were working toward some greater endpoint, some ordained destiny. If some people were exploited, or their ecosystems annihilated, well, you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. Likewise, you can’t grow consciousness on a computer chip without leaving a few people behind—or enslaving some laborers to procure the rare earth metals required.
The singularitans don’t mind harming humans when necessary, because humanity as we know it will not really be participating in the brave new future. These bodies in which we live may as well be forests, oil fields, or any other natural resource that can be clear-cut, burned for fuel, or otherwise trashed in the name of our own immortality. One Bay Area startup harvests the blood of young people so that wealthy executives can transfuse new life into their aging bodies—at least, until they figure out how to upload their ever-so-valuable minds to the cloud.
Once computers and robots can do the thinking, humans won’t even be necessary. It won’t matter so much that we will have destroyed the natural environment, since neither robots nor uploaded humans will require it for sustenance. We will have evolved or engineered beyond the body—or developed an artificial intelligence that makes us humans irrelevant anyway. At that point, we will really only be required to service the machines—at least, until machines get better at doing that for themselves.
Then, say the chief scientists at the world’s biggest internet companies, humanity may as well pass the torch to our evolutionary successors and get off the stage. Proponents of the singularity discount human objections as hubris, ego, or nostalgia. Humans are the problem; they are part of that same evil, ambiguous natural world as women, forests, and uncivilized natives. Heck, humans are the natives, subject to unpredictable ebbs and flows of emotions and hormones and irrational needs.
Singularitans consider technology more trustworthy than humans. Surveillance is not just a profit center for social media, but a way of safeguarding digital society from human resistance. Code enforces rules without bias (unless, of course, you happen to be the coder). It’s a blockchain reality, where machines execute the letter of the law without any sense of the spirit. So much the better to accelerate development and reach the singularity before the clock runs out on the habitable biosphere.
Computers and artificial intelligences are pure intention, not clouded or tempered by human social priorities or moral misgivings. They are a direct, utilitarian extension of our apocalyptic urge to colonize the natural world.
We have finally found a way of inflicting wettiko on ourselves.
Our addiction to expansion, growth, and transcendence derives from our hubris and need for control. We mistake colonizing a new region of the planet or dominating some aspect of nature for an expression of our creative power. We act as if we were gods, capable of creation and immune from the value systems that might otherwise restrain our will. And because this path is ultimately so unsatisfying, it is also addictive.
Like initiates in a twelve-step program, those of us suffering from wettiko must turn to a higher power if we want to stop our destructive behavior. It’s difficult for many of us to believe in God, much less some divine wisdom or order to the universe. We may never accept the prehistoric sensibility that everything we do merely reenacts some archetypal gesture of a deity. But it’s probably necessary that we at least accept that humans are best guided by some higher, universal ideals. These ideals may be pre-existing laws of reality or principles of life with which we resonate. They could be morals discovered or invented by human beings through some innate sense of good. Whatever their origins, we need these ideals to guide our choices.
If we’re not going to follow the commands of a king, a CEO, or an algorithm, then we need unifying values in order to work together as a team toward mutually beneficial goals. Even that idea—the notion that things should be mutually beneficial—is itself a higher-order value. It’s an assumption about what’s right, baked into not just our evolutionary history but also into the structure of a moral universe.
We do have a more profound sense of right and wrong than is suggested by the Industrial Age logic of productivity or capitalism. Those are functional values, but they don’t really inform an ethic. They don’t animate us in any real way, or give us an alternative to the self-destructive path we’re pursuing. They lead us to dominate nature, which ultimately includes subjugating the natural within ourselves. Our goals for human happiness and well-being become metrics within an industrial or economic system—over-rationalized and disconnected from the natural world.
We need a Reason for what we do: enduring values toward which we strive. These are not the reasons we do things—the practical, utilitarian purposes for our many activities—but the big Reason to be taking action at all. For example, the reasons for education are certainly important. Students gain skills, increase their cognitive abilities, and absorb facts. But the Reason for education? Learning, period. It is an ideal in itself.
What matters is that without Reasons, we are subject to an entirely utilitarian logic, which doesn’t leave much room for humans or nature. It’s a logic that tells us humans to just be reasonable and submit to compromise, rather than Reasoned and principled. It’s the logic of might makes right, where utilitarian power outweighs greater good.
The ideals through which we combat such logic are not distanced or abstract. They’re as close to the core of our being as Peace, Love, Unity, and Respect. They can’t always be justified or rationalized, but that’s not because they don’t exist. We have simply lost our capacity to relate to them.
This innate, natural, effortless connection to ideals was surrendered to the market, to colonialism, to slavery, to extraction, and to technology, then justified with applied science, utilitarianism, and public relations. We reduced ideas to weaponized memes, and humankind to human resources. We got carried away with our utilitarian capabilities, and lost touch with the Reasons to exercise those capabilities in the first place. That’s how we came to see ourselves as separate from nature, and capable of bending reality itself to our will no matter the cost to everyone and everything in our way.
It’s time to rebalance our reasons with Reason, and occupy that strange, uniquely human place: both a humble part of nature, yet also conscious and capable of leaving the world better than we found it.
Excerpted with permission from “Team Human” by Douglas Rushkoff (Norton & Company, 2019). Douglas Rushkoff is a media theorist, author, and professor known for his insightful critiques of digital culture and its impact on society. He explores how technology shapes human interactions and economics, advocating for ethical and spiritual adjustments in our digital age.
