Elon Musk has intrigued me of late.
In general, I’ve had a casual interest. As an apparent oligarch, he has that as a strike against him. But then he gave me a great quote for my Unknown Empire book that highlights the threat of depopulation (that’s right, not OVERpopulation). Elon agrees with me and my book’s premise—and the facts:
“The biggest issue in 20 years will be population collapse—not explosion—collapse,” Elon said. “Most people think we have too many people on the planet, but actually this is an outdated view” (Unknown Empire, p. 287, cited in LiveAction.org, Sept. 5, 2019).
But then he said something else more recently that jolted me—and further encourages me in my Orthodox Christian Sustainable Farm Co-op project. In an interview on Artificial Intelligence and Transhumanism (Musk is an enthusiast on these), to combat the allegations of how dangerous this Frankenstein technology might become, Elon makes the salient point that we are already there. Everyone has a cell phone. Everyone can be tracked. Everyone has those waves pulsing through them. Everyone is some kind of hybrid of humanity and technology.
Touche.
Join the Orthodox Christian Sustainable Farm Club of Tennessee
I don’t want to keep going down that path. I at least want to slow the rushing river. What to do? I am considering a move to the flip phone (more on that later.) Most importantly, I am taking steps to be able to live a more traditional lifestyle. By traditional, I mean what my forefathers did for millennia: farming, self-sustainability, a reconnect to nature, real food, fresh water, smaller distances, a lowering of the scale of life. Wendell Berry, who prefers to plow with horses rather than a tractor, has written a lot about this need for finding our better nature. I just finished his classic, Jayber Crow, and recommend his collection of essays The World Ending Fire.
As Ghandi once said: “There is more to life than increasing its speed.”
What does it mean to be a person? What does it mean to be human, to be made in the image of God? After all the efficiency, the speed, the conveniences we have carved out for our Germanic selves, Elon’s fast cars and rockets to Mars, what do we then do? What did we speed up for? What now?
My answer is that our purpose is to eat—to eat, slowly and with gratitude, the real food we have created. Traditionally, we have acknowledged this truth by the feasts where we gather at important times and holidays. We see it in the most important family gathering of the day, dinner, where rituals, respect, and traditions are enforced. We see it in the traditional prayer before a meal.
Our purpose is to eat with gratitude and thanksgiving. More importantly, our purpose is to eat the food of the eucharist in formal, eternal, liturgical worship with Jesus Christ as both the officiating High Priest and as the Food itself. Our Farm Club is centered around worship, a village that daily reminds itself of its calling and purpose.
I am with Elon on the First Commandment. We still are called to be fruitful and multiply, and our world is in danger because we are failing to do so. We have plenty of resources. (See my article here.) But I am not with Elon on the commandment God gave in the Garden to grow and eat the world. That would include, ultimately, eating and drinking Jesus Christ in mystical worship. Elon instead wants a complex, hybrid mix of humanity, technology, and weird, futuristic prognostications and (non) wisdom.
I want our lives to look more like the Garden. I’m open to the City of God, at the right time, but I don’t like the current prospects for the City of Man. It looks a lot like Cain’s city to me. (This is a theological topic of great interest to me.)
Back to some Elon positives. He recently was interviewed by the BabylonBee. Yeah, those young Christian evangelicals that are tearing it up in the news space with satire. Elon retweeted several of their memes, and so they asked if they could interview him. To their shock, he said, “Sure, some to Austin, Texas.” So they did. Here’s the interview.
Among other things, Elon said that perhaps he was talking to the Bee and not CNN because he wasn’t perverted enough for CNN. (That was the headline in mainstream media.) He also said if irony could kill you, than Elizabeth Warren would be dead. She criticized him for not paying any taxes. Actually, Elon just made the biggest tax payment in U.S. history, $11 billion, and said Pocahontas pays no taxes and lives off taxpayers.
Elon also confirmed his strong belief that underpopulation is the world’s biggest crisis. And he said liberals have no sense of humor and therefore cannot do comedy or satire. That’s why he’s hanging with the BabylonBee cats. Elon also seems to be a bit based. He tweeted this last week:
No one knows for sure where the world is headed. And, as many of you know, I tend to be more conspiratorial and believe there is cabal of oligarchs planning sinister things. But this interview Elon gave the BabylonBee messes with all that. Here is perhaps the richest guy on the planet denouncing the New World Order agenda of depopulation, giving high marks to Christian conservatives, and appearing rather darn accessible. Apparently, the oligarchs don’t march in lockstep.
In conclusion: have babies. Just say no to becoming a digital zombie. And consider joining our Farm Co-op.
Elon also smokes. Points for him. (Wait, is that a cigar?)