From Celestial Cloister to Cellar: Selling Klosterphobia and E-Claustrophobia

Thinking we are being liberated by tech-expansion, we are imprisoned instead.

Claustral Enclosure Coordination

“In its self-proclaimed exclusivity, the positivist reason which recognizes nothing beyond mere functionality resembles a concrete bunker with no windows, in which we ourselves provide lighting and atmospheric conditions, being no longer willing to obtain either from God’s wide world.”

Pope Benedict

What uses is use itself? How useful is usefulness? Is utility not a trap for the human? Are we positive that positivism is not over-rated?

When peasants in Germany, inspired by the revolutionary sentiment of the Reformers, drank the monastic wine cellars dry, they must have been disappointed that Luther didn’t approve. But he opened the door to a secular Enlightened society subsequently deprived of certain spiritual light. Cellar comes from the Latin root, cella for a room. The word ‘cell’ was chosen because what Robert Hooke saw of a slice of cork with his microscope reminded him of monastic cells. We are familiar with cells in prison contexts. The monk chooses. Similarly enclosed Carmelite nuns, choose their barrier. Another related word is claustrum.

‘Claustrum’ refers to the Latin idea of barrier, gate, shut-in, closure, or enclosure from the verb claudere to close or shut at the root of cloister and claustrophobia. Claustral was used to describe cloisters. There is a claustrum which is quite hidden in the brain that seems to have a role in coordinating signals. Maybe that implies some coordinating headquarter element as we see in all systems. It seems to be involved in normal pain-processing as well as being associated with connection or even spirit. The claustrum is associated with subjective consciousness and initiation of states for cognitive networks for external and internal control demands. It seems to coordinate switching states. The word claustrum has been used in a number of artistic ventures, such as film, to indicate the paradoxical nature of enclosure. Enclosure can be for protection and voluntary or punishment, confinement and control in an involuntary way. These tensions are in the architecture of the brain itself and it is no surprise we see it projected into the emerging global brain. Perhaps it is a neural cloister as it seems to be involved in neural homeostasis. Some believe its disturbance is what happens during the psilocybin experience, as signals are rearranged like coding in a computer. Christof Koch and Crick had identified it as significant in consciousness two decades ago.

The claustral in the Catholic world would have helped social order as cultural and spiritual orchestration. Carmelite Nuns went behind the grille primarily in a voluntary withdrawal which protected them and signified their radical rejection of normality to orient to the divine. This was not escapism but the integrity of a communal heart. People forget the many contributions to culture from the claustral in domains of beer, wine, astronomy, notation, writing, clocks, navigation, universities and so on. The West was Gregorian from chant through the Gregorian reforms. The atomistic logic underpinning the neurobiology of consciousness is not about spiritual consciousness itself but its control in my view whatever benefits we may get medically. The biological claustral may be ransacked by Big Pharma and government yet.

The Fear of Inner Space

Our governors hate our collective inner space because they hate individual inner space as it may allow the soft whistling wind of God speak to us. I suggest our governors’ klosterphobia leads to our digital or e-claustrophobia. You cannot have space for God but must live in techno-human zoo space as you become the animal they think you are before you simply merge with the network. Have you not noticed they gave you a cell (phone) in their net (internet) allowing you to meet the public through a screen by Zoom (like in a zoo) especially after you were in lockdown (like a cage)? Your tags are on the way. Our rulers like to control enclosure as the historical taking of public land showed.

We are being driven to mental cellars which constitute the bunker mentality of positivism that Pope Benedict warned about in his speech in the Reichstag building. Ironically we are being pushed by this bunker mentality which comes from those chaps who supposedly emerge from garages or basements into boardrooms in Silicon Valley. There is a reflexive connection. They seek projections of their gathering around the umbilical interface of the IT mechanical mother matrix. You or your descendants will be born again, have no fear. We contract from the celestial to the machine.

The Klostersturm (or storming of the monasteries) is an incredible phase of Austrian history initiated by Emperor Joseph II (an apparently or supposedly devout Catholic). In reality he was dedicated to the Enlightenment. During his reign 700 monasteries were closed down. This was based on a utilitarian reaction against the contemplative life. The Pope opposed it unsuccessfully. This movement cannot be seen as Catholic whatever its intent or justification. The socio-cultural impact must have been huge. Is it any surprise Austria became the home of positivism and psychoanalysis? The Nazis used the same title informally when they attacked hundreds of monasteries in the Kirchenkampf or struggle against the churches. Like many before, they simply made up stories and took their stuff. It is amazing how many economic miracles involved simple robbery. In Germany, if we add huge dispossession in the Kulturkampf and Reformation, we see a huge attack on the contemplative life and culture. Hundreds of monasteries were destroyed during the Peasant’s War of 1524-26. Hundreds more were destroyed during the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648). There was also limited destruction before then in the 11^th century and 13^th century. The impact and specific object later on was destruction of valuable interiority as legitimate. We might see here a certain klosterphobia, a hatred of sacred contemplative space. Klosterphobia represents an attack on inner space for inner space lest God commune with people outside the eye of the prince.

Selling the story of all the stuff that these useless reprobates have is a shared one among the Nazis and Communists. Both are united in the mono-revolution. Both rob monasteries. So do reformers, empires, states and capitalist economies. Both contribute in a right-left combination to the revolutionary tactic that appealed to Protestants and Bolsheviks alike. After you strip the altars and get the goods you can use it to show how effective your production system is. The Church held its property in trust for the poor. Now socialists and capitalists suggest we should have a sell off. This is The Shoes of the Fisherman (1963) scenario that was made into a film in 1968.

The Fear of Watching Public Space

AI is part of the net entrapping us and coming into our space, body and consciousness. I think we must begin to recognise how the emerging control-grid will affect us and feel. The advent of this new system comes about because we have entered into the atheistic materialist bunker. We are descending by various chutes into the conceptual, cognitive and consciousness cellar. Therein, our capacity to be connected to the celestial and transcendent is confined. We become transactional entities mediated, reduced and dispensable. The floors above will be detonated so they can be built back better. H.G. Wells, the architect of the New World Order wanted to bomb Rome.

Claustrophobia is a fear of confined spaces. Digital claustrophobia or what I call e-claustrophobia is now being recognised by some as a problem. We don’t need more diseases but we do need ways to recognise how the new AI matrix affects us. There are two further elements which indicate the unique problems we face. The first is that much e-claustrophobia can occur in the open in a way more suggestive of e-agoraphobia. Perhaps there is a psychic oscillation. The surveillance society must induce a feeling of being watched all the time by AI. Perhaps this can be informed by relating the e-claustrophobia to the panopticon it represents. Alternatively it involves a type of scopophobia or fear of being stared at. AI-scopophobia may become real. Scopoclaustrophobia is a bit long and pathological but you know what I’m getting at. I’ll settle for mechascophobia. Ironically, we get to a mechanical simulacrum of the God vision which the system wants to replace. But there is no divine mercy in this digital divining system. Maybe we do not have to worry because this network will probably be able to affect you physically and actually make you sick for public security or some other justification, especially as your inserts come on stream or you have become digitally identifiable. The pager exploding in the hand is a sign of what is coming for us.

But there is another strange element. This system does not want you to be alone, in peace, silent, in retreat, in contemplation. This panoptical e-claustrophobia is reflexive. Fear of the closing in of the digital world relates to loss of interiority and anonymity. The force behind intrusion is the same and represents an unwillingness to allow space and freedom for contemplation, especially if that is used for spiritual purposes or to communicate with the divine beyond the state’s control. Thus the e-claustrophobia is driven by a klosterphobia. I don’t want to pathologise but merely to point out or illustrate that interior space and space for interiority and associated practices such as contemplation will be rendered pathological. The logic of the scientific system is that you will be turned inside out. You will have no privacy. You will be told it was for your safety. They will let your world deteriorate into chaos until you cry for more regulation and then you will get it for your safety of course. Freedom is Slavery! The Marxist says all consciousness is social. The geneticist focuses on the selfish gene and extended phenotype. No space for the temple or to contemplate will be left by the time the AI system ousts human consciousness. AI-Govnerveance is the technique to dominate our inner space by interpenetration.

You may say it is ironic and I know that ‘subs’ and ‘stacks’ can refer to slaves and ant debris. I am under no illusions. Call me suspicious. I too must tap on the pipes in the prison. Maybe The Machine Stops (1909) by E.M. Forster intuits why we might need a divine intervention to stop this. I believe it will come. I suspect others in cloisters know this in the silence or are praying for that now. That is why they become dangerous perhaps. That is why they guillotined the 16 Carmelites in the French Revolution. The contemplative orders in Europe provided a breathing space. They had an entirely different economic model which falsified the Marxist economic history analysis. Hilaire Belloc argued for their socio-economic significance in The Servile State. Ironically, the nun’s or monk’s cloister might perform the same function as the mysterious claustrum in the brain. They are involved in spiritual homeostasis. Whilst the use may not seem as clear in the short-term, when you eradicate them you become obsessed with the use of use itself in a recursion which has diminishing value until value itself is undermined. The external instrument triumphs over the internal, intrinsic value. When we get hyper-functional we lose coherence and existential will to taste the wine of incarnation that Ellul, Charbonneau and Bernanos urged us remember whether in nature or life. Choosing to enter into a confined relationship with God with all the spiritual opening that entails that may be reflected into the community is completely different from involuntary submission to a total mechanical system which is construed as an emerging divine force that regards you as a defective and costly accident to be controlled or assimilated.