These distinctive times of explosive technological expansion are ushering in a "new epoch" in human history in which humans have access to unprecedented levels of material power, and must grapple with the bewildering scope of possibilities and dangers entailed by that power. Among other things, the epoch of power poses dramatic challenges for politics — it gives humanity the "tools" to construct human (or inhuman) societies which immerse and involve their members on a larger scale than anything we have seen or imagined before.Historically, we have seen the destructive nature of particular important-but-limited communities that take on an "absolute" definitive status for their members. The result resembles a kind of idolatry — a kind of "divinization" of an ideology or a system, or of a nation, race, ethnic group, or tribe. And we see now the rise of "new tribes" not connected by kinship, but defined by what (or whom) they exclude, and by the pseudo-identities they generate through the images of electronic media, simplistic slogans, superficial "rituals," and other propaganda techniques that are accessible to everyone in this new epoch.
A new kind of idolatry is casting a shadow over our times. It exists in full realization in some places in the world, while in others it lurks as a tendency, as the possible future of present unhealthy aspirations, as an inchoate or partial reality, as a danger, and — undoubtedly — as a temptation. This is not the old "hard" religiously-specified pagan idolatry of worshiping statues or personified forces of nature. It is the much more subtle new "soft idolatry" that marginalizes and effectively replaces God — the One who alone fulfills the transcendent destiny of the human person — with a merely human social or political project.
In recent years (and in recent weeks), government policies in the United States - and the unceasing barrage of words accompanying them on all the media platforms - illustrate the dangers that are spreading all over the world. The problem is not expanding or reducing the size of political institutions, but the role of political power in shaping the human person's understanding of his or herself. Sometimes power pushes against human dignity by promoting a vast social ideal that falsifies the genuine aspirations of human beings as persons (for example, the ideal of "Socialism-with-Chinese-Characteristics-in-a-'moderately-prosperous'-Society" as imposed on one-fifth of the world's population by Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party). Other times, different impositions of power aim to reduce human persons into partisans of a particular "tribe," a self-sufficient, self-exalting, selfish national or ethnolinguistic group with a "manifest destiny" to "greatness," which generally reduces itself to pretentions to become the greatest commercial empire obsessed with materialist consumerism and isolated by the fear of real or imagined "enemies" in the rest of the world.
Both of these extremes, and the various tendencies that borrow from them, are "idolatrous." They tether the human spirit to their paltry materialistic horizons (and they are not afraid to co-opt "God" in a reductionist sense, in service of their projects). Simply, one might categorize this whole phenomenon as "the idolatry of money." More broadly, it is the idolatry that emerges from covetousness and envy, with all the belligerency and chaos that these idols can unleash especially when they disguise themselves as political programs or social movements.
This new idolatry is subtle because its gradual but ultimately totalizing absorption of the human person spreads covertly within society like an incubating disease. It builds itself up through diverse inflammatory manifestations of social problems that often seem to contradict each other. It grows within societies when there is widespread insecurity about personal identity, weak interpersonal and communal bonds, rival ideologies, various artificially aggravated fears, rumors and confusion, negligent ignorance, cultivated superficiality, lack of civil discourse, lack of principles, reliance on pseudo-"authorities" and magnetic or manipulative personalities, pressure for cultural conformity, revenge, group-think, nostalgia, utopian dreams, excessive hopes for prosperity, for progress, for total safety from danger, for many other things (the list could go on and on) ... and — of course — the increasing (and always justified as "necessary") application of good old fashioned brute force.
It all conspires to eclipse the transcendence of human destiny, suffocate the heart of the human person, and preoccupy people with a multitude of distractions. It infects the politics of our time, which in various ways pretends in a practical sense (or sometimes pretends — which is already too much) to rule over all our thinking about the meaning of things, to fill our minds with its claim to be the highest measure of life.
The political ideal of the new epoch is idolatrous insofar as it aspires (even without the awareness of all who participate in it) to "deflect" the human search for transcendence and invade its space, or to use power to suppress it and take its place. It is accompanied (and "enabled") by the reduction of the scope of human desire to the empirical categories of objects-to-be-possessed, and the prevalence of practical materialism as the social norm.
In terms of depth and danger, these emerging forms of political idolatry are venturing into "uncharted territory." Politics now has at its disposal the continuing explosive growth of material power for everything from making things to processing and distributing information to bridging distances and gaining unprecedented dominance over space and time to enhanced forms of multi-sensory engagement through media technology and the (gigantically expansive) realm of so-called "artificial intelligence."
What are the monstrous political possibilities that might emerge in the future, perhaps even the near future? Will we have the awareness and attention necessary to recognize them and the courage to resist capitulating to them?
