Gibson and the high-tech occult

Noted Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey reviews William Gibson's Spook Country.

Reading the review takes me back to the enjoyment of reading Gibson's books. I really should check out his latest two. Shippey takes issue with the failure of many of Gibson's specific predictions, but seems to me that Gibson's style, the way he evokes a cyberpunk vision, has always been far more important than specific predictions. Particularly interesting is the way he shows human beings making sense of a confusing high-tech world, creating new mythologies, new societies, new hopes, hidey-holes and homes. (Though sometimes I felt that he was putting too much undigested sociological theory into his books.)

I think the most interesting (and most relevant to this blog) part of the review is this:

"In the background, too, are thoroughly non-modern forms of occultism. This too is something which stems from and seems to fit the "cyberpunk" universe, the inhabitants of which tended to think from the start that the real world, or the significant world, was the one inside the computer, the one which did not function in physical space, which was also the world inside their minds. They had in fact become, in a way, creatures of the spirit, who frequently expressed their contempt for the brutal blundering physical world the rest of us live in—as they called it, "the meat." It's not a long way from that sentiment to belief in more traditional spiritual powers, and sure enough, in this novel (as with earlier Gibson characters) Tito thinks he gains his abilities from the voodoo-deities who protect him, whom he calls the Guerreros. Throughout the novel, too, Milgrim is reading his pilfered book about the 12th-century heresy of the Free Spirit, which he connects with modern government agencies as "a secret religion of mutually empowered sociopaths." What is a modern celebrity-figure, asks Bigend, if not a "tulpa," which he explains as a mystic Tibetan term meaning "a projected thought-form," like "cyberspace" itself a consensual mass-hallucination? That's why people keep seeing Elvis. Not very plausible, one may say. But in a world where other people's wi-fi comes through the walls and cellphone towers keep us all in an electronic net, a world where we are deluged with information, much of it wrong and most of it uncheckable, a world where celebrities are omnipresent but invisible except as pixels—well, there is a case for saying that the occult looks more and more realistic."

This has always been one of the things that fascinated me about Gibson's work. I don't think he believes occult and religious ideas refer to any objective supernatural reality. But he does a great job of illustrating the ways they can and likely will provide useful words and concepts for describing the new world human beings are creating; particularly when 'rational' 'modern' concepts fail.* This is especially true for people from the lower echelons of society, who he tends to write about.

*Here's a very limited example. Much has been made of the recent, dramatic spread of Pentecostalism around the world, which can seem counter-intuitive to modern people who think modernity equals secularization. But scholars of Pentecostalism have argued that its growth is linked to the very modern phenomena of globalization and international immigration. And if you think about it, is it any wonder that the story of Pentecost, in which the fragmented people of all races and languages come together to receive gifts of healing and spiritual power, would make a lot of sense, and be appealing to, a migrant worker? Of course it's much more complicated than that - but that's partly the kind of thing I'm talking about.