Posthuman Blues

One of my worst fears is coming true: The United States has begun an inexorable descent into full-blown theocracy. The antagonism between Christian Fundamentalists and secular America has reached a point of near-terminal absurdity, with the boundaries between church and state continuing to blur as the "moral majority" gains new political footholds.

This despicable milieu couldn't have come at a worse time. We currently face a mass extinction crisis that could violently displace the human species within 50 years. For many Americans, the Armageddon of myth actually seems like an appealing alternative. Infected by the same mentality, the Bush administration recklessly destroys natural resources; if the end is nigh, if Jesus is on his way (albeit late by 2000 years), why bother conserving? If we're fated to go out in a blast of holy special effects, why care?

Author John Shirley, who more or less predicted all of this in his "Eclipse" trilogy, penned in the 1980s, quite seriously proposes that the United States might fracture along ideological fault-lines. Imagine an America in which some states uphold, as best they can, separation of church and state, while in others the teaching of evolution is punishable by law. We are edging closer and closer to just such a schizophrenic state of the union: two Americas occupying the same continent and forced to co-exist in uneasy liaison.

But would the Fundamentalist America content itself with only half of a divided nation? Isn't the goal lurking behind the Religious Right's slippery political rhetoric the complete absorption of all rivals in the name of God? To me, the continued existence of a parallel secular US seems alarmingly fragile; how long until civil war, or its equivalent?

And keep in mind that all of this is framed by a much larger geopolitical nightmare. The Christian regime made possible by the Bush administration is due, in enormous part, to the xenophobia craftily stoked in the wake of 9-11-01. Although the relationship is seldom identified as such, Bush and his counterpart Muslim extremists survive -- and flourish -- through nothing less than symbiosis. The occupation of Iraq serves to justify the image of America as the "Great Satan" perceived by much of the Muslim world just as the perceived terrorist threat, assisted by an elaborate system of Pavlovian "terror alert levels," holds Americans in thrall to the potentially imminent outbreak of "evil-doing."

We are infected with a virus popularly called "belief." Unquestioned, it ruins minds by promoting willful ignorance and escalates suffering by invoking supernatural quick-fixes for problems demanding genuine solutions.

In the end, the biosphere itself will be the victim.