Existentialism, Extinctionism, and The Matrix
I hate reading something interesting and then a few hours or days later I see a link about to the story posted to Fark. Damn that Drew Curtis! Anyway, I didn’t rip Fark off on this one… According to the Christian Science Monitor, theologians, sci-fi fans, evangelical Christians, movie critics, and others have been debating the spiritual themes woven throughout “The Matrix”. And the forthcoming sequel will likely intensify the debate. I would agree with those that argue the film’s religious overtones most closely identify with Gnostism. The author writes, “In the Gnostic philosophy, the physical world is not part of God’s creation, but a manifestation of a lower god - a nightmarish reality that imprisons mankind, say religious experts. Gnostics believed they could achieve salvation, not by overcoming evil and sin with God’s grace, but by learning the ‘higher knowledge’ about reality.”
Samples from CS Monitor’s Matrix Glossary
Evil: Agent Smith tells Morpheus that the original Matrix world was “designed to be a perfect human world.” No one accepted the program, he explains, because “human beings define their reality through misery and suffering.” By drawing on parts of Genesis and comparing humans to a virus, Smith establishes evil as a natural, intrinsic state of human nature.
Matrix: Literally, a computer program used to imprison mankind. According to Webster’s, “matrix” means: 1) orig., the womb; uterus 2) that within which, or within and from which, something originates, takes form, or develops. At its heart, The Matrix is a story about birth and creation.
Nebuchadnezzar: Morpheus’s ship. This figure referenced in the Book of Daniel was the powerful king of ancient Babylon who suffered from troubling dreams. The name literally means “Nebo, protect the crown.”
Postmodernism: Neo hides his illicit software within a chapter titled “On Nihilism” within a volume called “Simulacra and Simulation,” by Jean Baudrillard. This seminal work of postmodernism advances the idea of a copy without an original. The Wachowski brothers assigned Keanu Reeves to read this book before filming began.
Logos: The altered studio logo at the opening of the film may be highly significant. The Matrix-coded WB letters could simply be the Wachowski brothers thumbing their nose at the Warner Bros. But by altering the logo - from the Greek term “logos,” for word - the film’s opening does two things. First, it corrupts the Gospel of John, which begins with “In the beginning was the Word…”. Second, it asserts that metaphysical meaning can be gleaned by mining deep into words, or code.
Ready for a real life Matrix? Charles T. Rubin tackles the mother of all esoteric subjects: transhumanism– championed by “extinctionists” like Hans Moravec and Gregory Paul, in his recent piece in The New Atlantis. These guys see a role for technology when it comes to “natural” selection: “human extinction will result from some combination of transforming ourselves voluntarily into machines and losing out in the evolutionary competition with machines.” What may be most scary is that these two authors are not kooks. Apparently Mr. Moravec’s work is supported by government agencies as NASA and the Office of Naval Research.
Rubin writes:
With such faith in evolutionary progress, any constraints on the utopian elements that already exist in Bacon and Descartes disappear. Human beings are envisioned simply as a link in the chain that stretches from our chance beginnings with the Big Bang to a new age of intelligent life. If Moravec is right, eventually the robotic future will almost literally be able to redeem the past. Insofar as intelligence remains human, such a reconciliation cannot take place, because human beings are the result of chance. But as ?mind, all conquering mind? comes into its own?embodied in ways that it creates for itself?the universe will at last become purposeful.
May 10th, 2003
