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Erwan Barillot: “New technologies seek to materialize God”

2023-02-03T15:42:25.288Z


FIGAROVOX / INTERVIEW – In his first novel, Me, Omega, the writer tells the story of a man who tries to rise to the rank of God through technology. This anticipatory and original book, mixing science, philosophy, and mysticism, questions our relationship to religion in a modern...


Erwan Barillot is a writer and public relations consultant.

He is the author of the essay

The Liquid President.

A genesis of macronism

(Free Perspectives, 2022).

His latest book,

Moi, Omega

, was published in September 2022 by Bouquins Editions.

FIGAROVOX.

- In your novel, the protagonist, Ian Ginsberg, discovers the prophetic message of Teilhard de Chardin.

How does his philosophy speak to our times, in your opinion?

Erwan BARILLOT.

-

Everyone can see it every day: our postmodern era is in crisis.

And the formula imputed to Malraux,

“the 21st century will be religious or will not be”

, can be understood in the first degree.

It poses only two possible outcomes to our great contemporary disturbances: chaos or the return of God.

Not just the “return of the religious”, studied by our sociologists for several decades, but indeed the second coming of Christ, the only one able to cut through increasingly inextricable Gordian knots.

This great return, announced in the Apocalypse of John, is called

Omega

in the prophecy of Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955).

Only, unlike the Christ-Pantocrator of Byzantine art, Omega will come at the end of Evolution – living, human then technological, each one being conceived as the extension of the previous one – until transhumanism, of which Teilhard de Chardin is a precursor.

Read also Mathieu Bock-Côté: “Artificial intelligence and falsification of the world”

This is how this thinker, both paleontologist and Jesuit, scientist and religious, is resolutely current: he makes the crazy contemporary technological possibilities the vehicle for the concrete return of God to Earth.

His prophecy may seem wild and yet many Silicon Valley engineers buy into this techno-messianic view.

In my novel, one of them, Ian Ginsberg, decides to see it through.

He understands that, contrary to the conviction of the rationalists of the 17th century and the encyclopaedists of the 18th century, science is not opposed to the idea of ​​God, that it even participates in justifying it, in providing the proofs.

And he goes a step further: he uses new technologies to materialize God, or what he conceives as such: at Easter 2064,

Does modernity, here achieved in technological evolution, necessarily lead to a break with transcendence?

For Teilhard de Chardin, transcendence (which he calls the

"God from above"

) is not opposed to immanence (the

"God from ahead"

): it is the first, the Father who, thanks to the faith he places in man, “calls” his Son to join him and “ascend to him”.

In

I, Omega

, Ian Ginsberg discovers this prophecy and feels personally called.

When he founded his social network, he wanted to see in it the emanation of the “Noosphere”, the sphere of the mind predicted by Teilhard de Chardin;

if he extends his network of connected objects to the entire planet, it is to prepare for the “great communion” to which he aspires;

when, finally, it “rises to the cloud” thanks to its

body uploading technology

, he realizes the dream of the first Christians, the Gnostics, who wanted to imitate the example of Christ.

Ian Ginsberg is the romantic version of all these techno-messianic figures of which Elon Musk is indeed one of the archetypes.

Erwan Barillot

Indeed,

"God became Man so that Man might become God"

, professed the second bishop of Lyon, Saint Irenaeus.

When Ian Ginsberg fulfills this two-thousand-year-old wish, he establishes that, henceforth, God is no longer a matter of faith but of fact.

His enemies are no longer the atheists, who only ask to see in order to believe, but the supporters of a strictly transcendent God: these consider the alleged Ian-Omega as a sacrilegious impostor.

Like Ian-Omega, is Elon Musk the new messiah of the contemporary world?

Ian Ginsberg is the romantic version of all these techno-messianic figures of which Elon Musk is indeed one of the archetypes.

Their innovations always operate in the name of good, with one supreme objective: to make people happy.

But what do we really want?

Happiness, assuming that it is attainable by the techno-messianic system, or freedom, synonymous with risk for this same system?

This is the dilemma posed by the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoyevsky's

The

Brothers Karamazov

.

Like him, Ian Ginsberg answers it for us.

With his “

Pax Omega

”, he put an end to the dangerous anarchy of individuals to erect a “

safe world

”, as we speak today of a “

safe city ”.

» : a world entirely under control.

Can your novel be read as a critique of contemporary idols?

As you remember,

Moi, Omega

is a novel, the mystical epic of a hero – or an antihero.

He does not defend any particular thesis but immerses the reader in a world which leaves him free of his interpretation: it is up to him to consider Ian Ginsberg as the pure product of matter, the culmination of evolution, or simply to accompany him in its mad ascent.

I don't believe that the theme of

Homo Deus

is strictly contemporary.

Faced with the dangers posed by the ecological crisis, the scarcity of resources, the return of wars and endemic insecurity, everyone foresees the inevitable emergence of a future totalitarianism.

Erwan Barillot

If you think about it,

Le Comte de Monte-Cristo

by Alexandre Dumas, published in 1846, already recounts in the most brilliant way the adventure of a man who, after having taken the pseudonym of

Monte-Cristo

(“ Ascending to Christ”) sets out to “correct” an unjust world that God has deserted.

Like Monte-Cristo, Ian-Omega does not oppose the idea of ​​God: he seeks to make it a reality.

In a column in

Le Figaro

, the historian of religions Guillaume Cuchet links the decline of the Christian world to the increase in life expectancy.

Would the death of the death desired by transhumanists signify the death of God?

As a general rule, religion is all the more necessary when the trials are difficult: during great crises, humanity needs the alliance with God.

Also, it is natural that the improvement in the standard of living (of which the increase in life expectancy is one of the indicators) coincided with a relative decline of Christianity.

But we are on the way to a complete paradigm shift: faced with the perils of the ecological crisis, the scarcity of resources, epidemics, the return of wars and endemic insecurity, everyone foresees the inevitable emergence of a totalitarianism to come. .

What will be the outlines?

Ecological (rationing), technological (generalized tracing) or religious (an incarnate God)?

In

Me, Omega,

he is all three at the same time.

This grip denounced in 1963 by the Ellulian philosopher Bernard Charbonneau in his

Teilhard de Chardin: prophet of a totalitarian age

, was assumed a century later by Ian-Omega who claimed to reconnect with, as he himself put it,

"Totality of which we were so nostalgic, this great union of origins

.

No doubt this state will make us happier.

“Because now for the first time

,” the Grand Inquisitor tells us,

“it has become possible to think a little about the happiness of men.”

Erwan Barillot, Me, Omega, ed.

Books Editions, 2022, 480 pages, €21.

Books Editions

Source: lefigaro

All news articles on 2023-02-03

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