The website The Marginalian presents Glen Slater's book Jung vs Borg: Finding the Deeply Human in a Posthuman Age, which connects ecology, depth psychology, systems theory and various post-Cartesian philosophies. The author argues that the cultural cycle of worship surrounding posthumanism has created a widening gap between artifice and authenticity, a loss of more self-aware and soulful ways of living, and a rise in anxiety and depression.
Slater draws an analogy with Rachel Carson: just as Silent Spring awakened modern ecological awareness, we now need a conscious awakening from the dangerous dream of posthumanism that Silicon Valley has lulled us into. Just as the industrial capitalism of Carson's era commodified ecosystems and natural resources, digital capitalism has turned our mental habits into the most valuable commodity on Earth. Carson pioneered holistic ecology; her contemporary Jung pioneered a holistic psychology that may save the human soul from death by commodification.
While we have greater awareness of the outside world and the actions needed to avert climate catastrophe, the inner world is another matter. Abundant information has advanced scientific knowledge but not human understanding; it has left us dazed, confused and disoriented.
Attention, motivation, identity, self-image and our capacity for clear reasoning and deep imagination are all affected. The rapid spread of digital technologies into every aspect of life is visibly disrupting the "ecology of mind". The technosphere now overlays the ecosphere, and virtuality has begun to displace reality. The resulting pain is addressed through technological solutions, creating a vicious circle.
The preference for digital ways of relating, the growing faith in artificial intelligence and one-sided education combine to produce reductive views of psychological life. The deeply human is devalued; a horizontal axis of data collection dominates almost exclusively, threatening vertical inner understanding. The result is a world drowning in information and thirsting for understanding.
At the heart of this cultural crisis lie the systemic fragmentation of experience and disconnection from the life of the body. The body connects us to the life of the Earth and the universe; every beautiful thing we touch, see and hear is a bittersweet reminder that we are mortal. This disconnection feeds on the denial of death, from our ancestors' myths of immortality to Silicon Valley's dreams of redesigning human nature, uploading the mind into bodiless machines and reducing the soul to data.
Jung offers an antidote to this damaging delusion. Understanding the depths of human nature provides a pointed rebuttal to the assumptions of posthumanism and the bubble of psychological disconnection that feeds them.
The psyche regulates itself, and the archetypal forms behind it relate to brain structure, anatomy and evolutionary patterns of perception and behaviour, while also reflecting the broader rhythms of the universe. Even after we embraced reason and science, the archetypal world of irrational impulses and religious ideas continues to influence our thoughts and actions unconsciously. Jung's greatest contribution was the invitation to understand the psyche as the foundation of all perception, experience, thought, emotion and action. Archetypes, complexes, projections and introjections illuminate how dreams and fantasies unconsciously shape our lives, while the arts and sciences make up a collective unconscious that shapes culture. The psyche contains the search for the angelic, the demands of the animal body and the structures that unite them; culture's symbolic expressions draw on elemental things such as mountains, rivers, suns, moons, fire and rain, reminding us of the inseparable bond between mind and world.
Godlike power demands godlike responsibility, and this begins with self-knowledge rooted in a sober view of the psyche, illuminating the shadow side of our deliberate pursuits. Will and reason are not enough to provide a basis for wise action; a much broader consciousness is needed.
We need dialogue with marginalised sources of knowledge and with the cultural imagination that shapes that dialogue. The result will be "co-creation": a partnership of innovation, self-knowledge and a cosmology suited to the times, able to temper and shape our technologies while also creating opportunities for spiritual renewal.
A view of existence with its soul restored resists the commodification of everything and recognises spirit and matter not merely as equally worthy of respect but as mutually dependent. The great task of late modernity is to unite what the spiritual pursuits of the old world and the materialistic focus of the new have divided. The neglected side begins to govern the unconscious, while the earthly process itself suggests that we rediscover nature as both spirit and matter.
We also need trust in emotions: as Martha Nussbaum observes, emotions are not just fuel for the psychological mechanism but parts of reasoning itself. Emotional intelligence opens the door to the deeply human; grief and anger call for negotiation, soothing or simply more attention. Our emotions are a foundation of human nature, which is a fractal of Nature, and are therefore raw material for the co-creative process. The desire for more satisfying ways of living, anger at what we exploit and destroy, fear of what stresses us and shame about our part in all of this may be the world's way of speaking to us.
The psyche bridges the realms of intelligence, the inner and the outer, the human and the cosmic, death and life. We need neither a spirit that literally leaves the body nor fantasies of uploading the mind; the essence of psychological experience accumulated through life leaves its mark on everything we do and everyone around us.
Dimming the ego's light allows us to perceive another light that has always been in the background. Posthumanism lets the ego's light of intellect and will shine too brightly, fails to reconcile spiritual aspiration with our instinctual foundation, and shortens rather than extends the human experiment.
Slater explores and celebrates the countercultural movement on the margins of this techno-ecstasy: ways of seeing and being that refuse to exclude beauty, love and transcendence from the human story, a story told in the language of the soul that cannot be reduced to data.
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