Even before the advent of Google, America has always been a land of searchers. As a country, we usually think of technology and religion as opposing forces—one connected with our ancient past, the other with our boundless future. Yet in recent years, Silicon Valley has developed a secular theology that can only be described as millennial millenarianism—this generation’s conviction that it uniquely prepares the way for a fundamental transformation, a belief that is itself a recurring theme in human history. Our technological millenarianism has seeped into the national discourse. We are at the dawn of a "New Digital Age," in which even mortality may be slain. The Valley’s “Creators” are exalted as prophets of profit, even from across that great divide. Technology has become an increasingly omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent force in our lives. We reach for our smart phones, like rosaries, to quell anxiety. Like a sage, they provide us with answers. Like a priest, they are privy to our innermost desires. As with any religion, the Internet provides us with “connection” that allows us to experience community, transcendence and loss of self. Our belief is tested when, as with the healthcare rollout, it is proven to be fallible. Our conviction shaken when, as with the NSA, it is proven to be less than benevolent. Of course, technology has made great advances that save and improve lives—and thankfully it will continue to do so. But when it comes to our fundamental national condition, there is nothing new, even under the California sun. Silicon Valley has always been a Promised Land with Biblical aspirations, concerned as much about the search for meaning as for money. The very name “Silicon Valley” betrays its schizophrenic nature. ‘Silicon’ represents the lucrative future, but ‘Valley’ is a geographic marker deeply rooted in our religious past. Yea though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I fear no evil, for you, eternal network, are with me. Your strong signal comforts me… This duality was born in part out of the history of the Bay Area, where the continued legacy of the Gold Rush—even today you can strike it rich with your next "discovery"—intermingles with the region’s initial Western settlement by missionaries. A hidden spirituality still underpins the Valley's temporal topography. Like the original Garden of Eden, the Valley has its own Apple—testament to the Internet’s unmatched ability to tempt with knowledge—and sin. The Twitter bird looks strangely like a dove, all the more apt considering that tweeting may now be how peace is achieved. Google’s motto of “Don’t be evil” has merely dropped the “thou shalt not” in the same way websites no longer require the "http://." The Valley’s main strip, Sand Hill Road, has a symbology so sublime it ought to have been in the Bible, evoking as it does a Damascus Road from impermanence to sacred rock. And behind it all are the searchers: those toiling, Kabala-like in their 0s and 1s, to find the hidden numbers that unlock the universal code; those striving to repair the world. In all this, the Valley is heir to a defining tradition in American life: understanding the new world through the prism of the old one.
As John Winthrop professed, America was to be a "A City Upon a Hill," a phrase that evokes the Christian belief in a "New Jerusalem" to replace what was thought of as the corrupt, old one. Yet, soon after arriving in the New World, Puritans speculators priced up what was, to their eyes, unsettled land. The Ur-divide in American life—our pursuit of money and meaning—was born, or rather reborn, in a "new" land. This eternal divide has played out through the mapping of the new continent on the spiritual landscape of the old.
America’s atlas—filled with our own Canaans and Jerichos, Shilohs and Nazareths, Bethlehems and Lebanons—testify to our re-enactment of the ancient struggle between the sacred and the profane. Our greatest river, the Mississippi, was imagined as the Nile, complete with in its own palace’d Cairo and Memphis. Its waters were likewise embittered by the tears of Slavery, its banks also abandoned in a great migration north in search of freedom. As our pioneers journeyed west, they reenacted a pilgrimage to a Promised Land first imagined in the east. Like their forefathers and foremothers, they crossed the Great Sinai of our interior west until they reached a final Valley bounded by sea and mountain. There, they claimed their manifest destiny at the cost of uprooting the lands’ inhabitants. California is the ultimate heir of this ancient American Dream—and its discontents. In this modern Promised Land, our ancestors settled and left to us a great covenant: freedom and opportunity, creativity and imagination, Hollywood and Silicon Valley. But just as the Puritans discovered—just as the Ancient Israelites before them came to know—the Promised Land is never quite the paradise we hope it will be. That is why, after crossing into the original Promised Land, the Israelites came to believe in the need for a Messiah in the first place. And that is why Christians, even after his appearance, still need theirs to come back. America is in the midst of a new Messianic age. The rising inequality, crumbling infrastructure, and endless internecine warfare between political sects that epitomize our national malaise have been felt deeply, but divergently, across the land, eroding further our community’s sense that it shares a common belief. Our Capitol, designed to be a Temple of reason modeled on classical Athens, has begun to resemble the Temple Mount, with its moneylenders and feuding fanaticisms.
As in days of old, there is a yearning for a leader, from left and right, whose “Will be done…", this time in Washington, D.C. But no one person can make our political lambs lay down with our political lions.
Across the land, a series of quasi-religious movements has arisen to redeem our glory. A fundamentalist movement, the Tea Party, justifies its uncompromising worldview behind the mythical purities of an imagined past. Occupy Wall Street retreated Essene-like from the impurities of our politics—at first into the desert encampments they erected in the heart of our cities.
And now we are told to put our faith in the most American of Messiahs: technology. But like all Messiahs, technology by itself cannot save us. There is a long tradition in Western thought that we cannot be redeemed until we ourselves prepare the way. There is no Deus Ex Machina—no Messiah or machine—that will magically appear to solve our problems absent our own work. What we need now is what we've needed always: the wisdom to combine the old ways with the new, and the faith that, through patient work and collective self-sacrifice, we shall overcome.
Image: Mashable composite. iStockphoto, LindaMarieB
Ari Ratner is a writer in Washington, DC. He previously served as an appointee in the Obama Administration’s State Department.