The history of religion is inseparable from the history of curation, translation, and the evolution of our media

The history of religion is inseparable from the history of curation, translation, and the evolution of our media. One of the oldest sacred texts is Sumer’s Kesh Temple Hymn, cut into clay some 4600 years ago. Whether scholars call it a “religious text” might be beside the point; Enlil’s preamble claims that The Kesh Temple Hymn was written by the goddess Nisaba, the deity of writing, literature, numbers, and intelligence. There’s no evidence from archaeology that we can isolate what theologian Paul Tillich calls “ultimate concern” — matters of our faith and meaning-making — from our record-keeping, systems of abstraction, and politicized attempts to ground our claims in some profound authority transcending hearsay and opinion. What we decide to set aside for reverence or worship, we commit to record and the methods of recording are instruments through which divinity by any measure warps the manifold of shared attention and behavior, instantiating itself in the human world.

What new ecologies of sacred text production will emerge when we have language models that can synthesize and translate anything we feed them?

I’d like to suggest we take the broadest definition possible of sacred to observe the underlying unity of cultural activity. Everything we do as humans is a braid of value and values, pragmatism and aesthetics, operation of and devotion to a world that reveals both secular and sacred aspects when we learn that these are not objective truths but ways of seeing. In this sense technology is, and has always been, a fundamentally religious pastime. What new ecologies of sacred text production will emerge when we have language models that can synthesize and translate anything we feed them? One road in is through the brain. In his popular but contentious 2009 book The Master and His Emissary, British psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist’s review of neuroscientific and psychological research notes a consistent pattern in the kind of attention native to each hemisphere: left-hemispheric thinking tends to be more goal-directed, instrumental, and efficient, whereas right-hemispheric thinking tends toward pattern recognition, intrinsic value, and spontaneous experience of meaning. Left hemispheres regard the world as groups of things to be manipulated, and right hemispheres regard the world as living mystery, undivided and profound. The archetypes of engineer and artist, financier and mystic, arise as complements in a collaboration between the relatively risk-averse and relatively curious, selected over evolutionary timescales. We have always had conservative and liberal perspectives in us; the latter notices what lies behind our stories (invention) and the former makes the tools to write that knowledge into matter (innovation).

Animals evolved this right away. We see traces of bicameral brain function in Cambrian invertebrates — these modes of navigation help an organism hunt (left brain attention) and avoid predation (right brain attention). As soon as you have eyes, you have to balance aiming at your food and noticing when you might have to cut and run. Half of your mind operates on nature to gain leverage, achieve, and realize. Half doesn’t bother optimizing because it is absorbed in noticing, and doesn’t see itself as separate because it’s taking everything in at once.

City-building has always been a sacred task

Unless you’ve had your brain split by a stroke or surgical intervention these are aspects of one intellect, which is why city-building has always been a sacred task: these pinnacles of human artifice act as attractors for our awe and concentration. Every ancient city had a patron deity (including Kesh, who worshipped Ninhursag). We only know of Kesh because our Neolithic forebears decided to use clay as ledgers for recording their transactions, and banking was the job of temples. We cannot cleave the forces that join human labor in great projects: from how we make sense of where to place attention, guide it with technologies like math and writing, and design our living spaces to reflect our understanding of the cosmos. But when we trend toward left-brain powers — economies of scale, efficiency, abstraction, and analysis — and deprecate the value of the right brain’s slippery, illegible, and hard-to-quantify realities, we do so at our peril. Hyperfocus makes us more-effective hunters in the short term but also makes us brittle to unforeseen threats looming just outside the map. 

Science finds this pattern everywhere, from how an epidemic rips through homogeneous genetic populations to how diversity enhances the performance of a work team. Specialists die out in mass extinctions, when disruptions to the food web make new opportunities for generalists to survive and diversify in ecosystems that their lineages then define. The best investors tend to dedicate some money to crazy long bets and contrarian positions. Put another way: it pays to balance one’s portfolio. And over the four billion years of evolution on this planet, the trend toward more diversity is clear: Life, understood as how Earth harvests energy to minimize uncertainty, makes structures that “make sense” and thus unlock more energy over and over. Self-organizing metabolic processes arc toward a more speciose and pluralistic biosphere, which means more kinds of thinking: every living thing is, in some sense, a grainy image or hypothesis of stable features in a local sample of a landscape bigger than presented from a singular point of view.

As we continue to devise new tools to peer into the cosmos and inscribe what we behold in ever-subtler and extensive information systems, what counts as sacred text is going to proliferate

This is why, as we continue to devise new tools to peer into the cosmos and inscribe what we behold in ever-subtler and extensive information systems, what counts as sacred text is going to proliferate. Each measurement and story adds to the complexity and begs for new accounts. For media theorists, any medium — from the clay of Sumer to the DNA of Palo Alto — qualifies as “text”, and by this definition we can argue sacred text includes the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (b. 1665). The valid data set may have expanded from faith-based authority to replicable data, but there remains a social process by which claims are canonized. 

In the Information Age, we’re back to asking how to make these choices. As science finds new means of recognizing patterns past the threshold of the five authoritative human senses, “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention” (Herbert Simon) and even experts struggle to maintain their footing on the exponential curve of fact production. Over 30,000 journals published 3.3 million peer-reviewed research articles in 2022 alone. This superfluity of knowledge undermines consensus, just as Catholicism sprouted warring sects when alternate translations and interpretations of the Bible erupted forth from early printing presses. Modern science, journalism, and democracy arose as adaptations for the management of social “buffer overflow” and decentralized the socioeconomic forms by which truth and value were established. Newborn local “deities” found homes in novel architectures: alongside banks and churches, newspaper buildings, universities, and parliaments matured as temples in their own right. New trade relationships and “food webs” grew between them. What new institutions will we build to house the gods born after scientific publications, federal reserves, and congress.

The spirit modern engineers bring to nano-scale manufacturing is as reverent as that which cloaked the tablets of antiquity with hieroglyphs

Further: we are sacred texts. The most important features of our evolutionary histories are written into our anatomy by forces transcendental to our understanding. One thing many ancient cultures seems to hold in common is that people are impressions of divine intelligence, shaped out of clay in myths as far afield as Genesis, Skaldskaparmal, and Popol Vuh, and in Malagasy, Ainu, Māori, Dogon, and Iñupiat accounts that predate the written word. Clays even show up in contemporary theories of the origin of life, in which the chemistry of smectites may hold clues to how self-replicating molecules bootstrapped into being in the first place. 

Is this convergent clay myth a machinic metaphor, like calling brains computers? If so, it is perhaps the most persistent and empirical projection of all time. Even at the secular extreme of thought, we must allow that power and significance were born together in the human mind at least as early as we first learned we could shape stone with intention. Now we carry that same logic into the transistor, animating solid state devices with electric current to recruit them into our cognition. And the spirit modern engineers bring to nano-scale manufacturing is as reverent as that which cloaked the tablets of antiquity with hieroglyphs.

Curation as a ritual, the gardening of wild data, may become as central a preoccupation as the exegetical debates of Rabbis or the obsessive work to replicate strange physics findings. Training software agents as companions in the acts of introspection and communication with the more-than-human, as the vessels through which our devotion flows, seems poised to join familiar acts of careful tending like the alphabet and library, the mixtape and illuminated manuscript. The word that Norbert Weiner first considered to describe the field of cybernetics — angelics, from the Ancient Greek for messenger — comes back with a force if we embrace translation as a sacred duty. Each media innovation opens new possibilities for us to understand the depth of cosmic mystery that calls out everywhere we look.

Curation as a ritual, the gardening of wild data, may become as central a preoccupation as the exegetical debates of Rabbis or the obsessive work to replicate strange physics findings

What, then, is sacred data? “Reality” is just a thin slice of The Real, and we cannot exhaust ineffability with all our efforts to describe it. Yet we still try. Whatever temples we might build, whatever AI agents we might breed to populate the miniature cities of our microprocessors, however else we might technologize attention (by, for instance, turning “inward” to curate a silence in which as-yet-illegible profundity might flourish unbeholden to the pressures of surveillance capital), the Great Work we embody grows more nuanced, fractal, and refined. 

Remember, like a physicist, there is no information without work. Where there is meaning, there is a metabolism. And this cuts both ways: our gods and temples dissolve like dreams when we attend to how curation and translation are inseparable from everything. If we make use of AI to enhance our introspection and unify the sacred and the secular, our temple-building transforms into the contemplation of the next great project as it self-assembles — evolving new worlds and involving divinity into new architectures of participation in the question “Am I relinquishing control?” no longer troubles us.