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COFFEEHOUSE CULTURE -- Issue 2

Streaming - bewitched, blinkered and bewildered - along the hi-tech super-highway heading into the siliconised future, we are bombarded by enticing but ill-defined possibilities. As the pace of technological change has doubled and redoubled, it has left us open-mouthed at the relentless speed of its progress towards some unknown and unknowable point. We have seen the future and it isn’t orange. But it is there — a jumble of techno-speak sci-fi concepts that have been generated, to some extent, by our overwhelming inability to deal with the ever-changing present.
...Despite all that, hyped at and hypnotised by history and the scientific establishment’s pretensions, we subscribe wholeheartedly to the myth that scientists are the saviours of society who shower us with their beneficent favours.
...And, indeed, science is a wonderful thing that has given us so much.Without it where would we be? We are, after all, children of the technological age, defined and redefined by the techology that conceived, created and sustains the external accoutrements of the society in which we all live. Everywhere in our daily lives we can see and apply technologies that clearly defy the street-level Laws of Nature. At every turn we are able to witness the subversion of hitherto immutable natural laws into fields and forces that are only there for the benefit of man. It is, to say the least, awe-inspiring.
...Under these circumstances, who can blame us if we are all in thrall to the mythic Techno-God as it manipulates the forces of nature, bending and burnishing them for the benefit of all. Magic has become mundane, and mysticism — demystified by science’s preoccupation with broadening its ever-growing power base — has disappeared. Things that were once entirely within the provenance of God in his Heaven are now fully in the grip of his lowly subjects. It is no wonder that science has replaced religion as the basis of our belief systems.
...The flaming sword of truth (or whatever it is that we believe in) is no longer held by those who guide our spiritual life — if it ever was. It is the scientists who now wield the shining blade as it slices through our misconceptions regarding the nature of the Cosmos. It is, however, a double-edged sword. For, as it surgically removes our ignorance of and respect for the true nature of the Cosmos, it severs the very fibres that link us to Cosmic Life.
...Although the gifts of science are undeniable, we have lost so much by externalising our vision of the Cosmos, by subscribing so wholeheartedly to the myth of the scientific. So far have we moved from an appreciation of life as a beautifully intuitive and deeply spiritual experience that we no longer seem to have the capacity to reunite ourselves with the very forces that create and sustain us. Indeed, it goes further than that. For many of us no longer even believe that these forces exist.
...Before it is too late (but, if the Cosmos is on our side, it should never be too late) we would do well to consider how we arrived at this pivotal point in techno-time and what we lost on the way. It goes back a long way, this myth to which we all subscribe. Back into the sulphur and brimstone alchemical laboratories of more than half a millennium past, back to a less pretentious age when man was seeking to understand the processes of nature rather than to dominate them.