Doubt, hope, and speculation: A preliminary ethnographic sketch of the MTA

Speaker 1

Our next speaker is John Bialecki, who is a fellow in the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh. His academic interests include the anthropology of religion, anthropology of the subject, ontology and temporality, religious language ideology, and religious transhumanist movements. He received his BA, MA, and PhD from the University of California, San Diego, and his JD from the University of San Diego. His work has been published in several edited volumes as well as in academic journals such as the South Atlantic Quarterly, American Ethnologist, Anthropological Theory, and the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. He was also recently a co-editor of a special issue of Anthropological Quarterly that focused on Christian language ideology. Please welcome John Bileski.

John Bialecki

Thank you for that very kind introduction. I’m certain I won’t be able to live up to it, but still I appreciate all the same. Hi.

John Bialecki

Today, I’m not going to be speaking to you as a Mormon nor as a transhumanist because while I have obvious sympathies with both positions, I am, for whatever reason, neither. Instead, I’m going to be talking to you as an anthropologist of American religion.

John Bialecki

Now, it may be odd that you would have an anthropologist studying American religion. Anthropology traditionally is associated with small-scale societies. often located at the edge of the world system. But as the discipline has come of age, it’s increasingly focused on larger scale of societies, including Euro-American societies. We’ve even begun just slowly. To study major Western religions and social movements in situ.

John Bialecki

Now, my prior work is an example of that. My first major field project was with Southern California evangelicals who adopted Pentecostal style practices. such as speaking in tongues, healing, hearing from God, battling demons.

John Bialecki

Uh as part of that work, I developed an interest in what constitutes religious authority, and the spaces where religious authority overlaps with other authoritative discourses. such a science. And it was that interest in turn that uh prompted me, almost a year ago to the day, to contact the MTA’s board and ask permission to conduct participant observation research With that’s focused on the MTA, and I have been lucky enough to speak to many of you since that project began, but not as many as I would like to.

John Bialecki

Before I go further, I want to take a moment to lay out, for those who may not be familiar with it, what participant observation research is. What is it that I’m offering to do? I’d like to do this by contrasting my project with another academic study that’s mentioned, albeit just in passing, Mormon transhumanism.

John Bialecki

Last year, Megan Leveridge, an American Studies PhD student at Florida State, published an essay on the blog Religion in American History. It’s an academic blog, primarily academics writing for an academic audience. Uh in the essay I’m speaking about, Leveridge used the film Ex Machina to present a critique of transhumanism across the board. Her argument was that transhumanism was informed by a patriarchal logic and it had a pronounced tendency to view women merely as objects.

John Bialecki

Now while she didn’t focus uh her discussion uh solely on the MTA, she did invoke its existence as evidence, alongside other groups such as well Heaven’s Gate and the Raelians. Strange company. Uh she described the NTA and MTA in these words: quote, The Mormon Transhumanist Association, predominantly an online organization founded in 2006. is another post-humanist new religious movement that seeks godhood through the active development of technology. Although not polygamous, the MT draws uh Yeah, the MTA draws for jokes. Oh, the worst thing is I know that like no one listening to this is gonna hear the comment that I just laughed in reality. Action to. The MTA draws from Joseph Smith’s revelation on eternal progression and eternal marriage, the same theology that supports polygamy in the 19th century. The MTA has also referenced 19th century. Swedeborgian Mormon ideas of corporeal relations, sexual procreation, and bearing post-human children in the next world.

John Bialecki

Now, without necessarily questioning her analysis of Either ex-Machina or of the other movements she’s discussed, or perhaps even her discussion of transhumanism as a whole, I’d like to suggest that at least as far as the MTA goes, Miss Leveridge maybe have missed the beat. It’s not that what she said is necessarily technically wrong, depending on how you read it, but what she’s missed is the social dynamics.

John Bialecki

While women are demographically underrepresented in the MTA, there are several women who are on the MTA’s board. Further, I think that the sympathy and sometimes outright support that a considerable number, but not all, members have expressed to ordained women alongside discussions and posts urging a reconsideration of Mother God and the critical reaction that Svenny’s had to last fall’s changes in the handbook. Recording the child, the children of people in same-sex marriage, suggests that this might not be the patriarchal organization the misleverage suggests.

John Bialecki

Now, at the same time, and this is important, I don’t want to suggest that the positions I just listed either constitutes or exhausts MTA thought on this topic. There’s a mix of views on the MTA on this and many other topics, just as are members with varied relationships to the T in the MTA as well. This is, after all, a very great, very, very variegated group. Lifelong Mormons, converts and reconverts to Mormonism, cultural Mormons and ex-Mormons. And many who have no relationship to Mormonism at all apart from their association with this organization.

John Bialecki

Now, I mentioned this not to shame this leverage, but to point out that what constitutes evidence anthropology and how participant observation produces evidence and what differences this evidence makes. Ms. Leveridge’s discipline of American studies, like cultural studies, which it’s related to, is primarily textual in nature. Nature, creating its evidence and advancing its argument through the reading and the hermeneutics of suspicion. This is an approach that tends to produce totalizing arguments, statements of what amounts to the essence of what it is that they’re trying to interrogate.

John Bialecki

By way of contrast, in anthropological participant observation, evidence does not come from texts, although we do read texts. from time to time, but directly from people, from what they say and do, whether this information is produced during discussion with the anthropologist or when the anthropologists watch people interacting with one another.

John Bialecki

The other major source of evidence is the knowledge gained through participation by the anthropologist, whether that information is of the kind of propositional knowledge produced as one learns the rules of a game. or the kind of tacit or embodied knowledge can only be experienced via direct engagement in activities. When the participant and observer wings work together creates, I like to think, a more nuanced and contextual form of knowledge.

John Bialecki

Now, this also creates a bit of a quandary for me today. If I’m giving a talk about the Mormon Transhumist Association to the Mormon Transhumist Association It’s almost a tautology that everything I have right, you already know, and anything I say that’s new is wrong. And this is doubly the case given the intellectual nature and ambitions of this group.

John Bialecki

After all, it’s not every social movement that starts out, at least this is my understanding, as an American pragmatist reading group. Trust me, the last group I studied didn’t start out that way.

John Bialecki

Um besides, this is a project that’s far from over, both in the Mormon Church and transhumanism. have high learning curves for me, and also it’s apparent from the events of the last year and a half or two that both Mormonism and transhumanism are very much in flux, as is the MTA itself.

John Bialecki

Another quandary I face is that many understandings common in the MTA are also actually in harmony with the anthropology of religion, or at least the best contemporary practices in the anthropology of religion. Just one example is the idea of religion as practice, techniques, technology, or aesthetics, which are both in contemporary anthropology, but also quite commonly put forward in MTA circles.

John Bialecki

But I think I can say something of note. In the short amount of time I have left, I’d like to discuss not who the MTA is, but why the MTA is anthropologically interesting.

John Bialecki

The first reason is something that I skated over when first talking about participant observation. Was it mean to do participant observation with a group like the MTA? After all, anthropologists of small scale societies took advantage of the uh sedentary lives of their informants to better insert themselves into the quotidian aspects of spaces of the people they studied. Basically, uh when you have people who live in a village. You just move into the village and they have to deal with you.

John Bialecki

More recently, anthropologists have taken on challenges that mean involving themselves with different kinds of space. Urban areas, laboratories, offices. There’s even been multi-sited research projects where informants were scattered through nodes and larger networks, and sometimes these networks were of global scale. There’s even been ethnographies of virtual communities such as the Group Anonymous or Groups in Second Life, and even of platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. But I think the question of where the MTA happens is not reducible to these models or locatable in any particular physical or virtual space in quite the same way.

John Bialecki

The MTA is a hybrid group happening in online forums on the Blagernacle, social media, podcasts, physical meetups, the sites of its humanitarian activities, and finally numerous conferences from Sunstone to Stanford University. To hear. But it also happens in meeting houses, firesides, homes, and priesthood and relief society meetings. This is because the MTA, by its nature, doesn’t just address itself. but also faces outward to family, friends, ward members, co-workers.

John Bialecki

This is more than merely being multi-sided, it seems to me. This is just Through different virtualities and spaces in a way that imbricates it with a whole host of other institutions and populations.

John Bialecki

Charting this distributed form will not only help us understand how The kind of contemporary modes of interaction, communication accelerate religion, and it seems to me obvious, at least from the Mormon case, that religion is quite accelerating recently. But also maybe tell us more about how more and more Americans will go and build community as the mode of mediation in which they engage with changes.

John Bialecki

I want to return to the Janus-based nature of the MTA though. It’s interesting that, at least it seems to me, the MTA is always transhumanist to Mormons and always Mormon to transhumanists. This double nature flies in the face of a lot of the um contemporary sociology and anthropology about the relationship between science and religion.

John Bialecki

We can, for instance, contrast the MTA with a much more phobic view of science found in many strains of evangelicalism. Of course, other religious traditions also have some positive engagements with science. You can think, for instance, of the papal astronomer. But it’s commonly said that Mormon theology has affordances that make it less hostile to science.

John Bialecki

This form of post-Newtonian religion frames spirit as a more refined form of matter, affirms every truth from heaven or hell. I think that’s more. How the quote goes. And finally, ideas such as term progression and theosis, it has concepts that resonate with the desire not just to perfect humanity, but to transcend it.

John Bialecki

But despite this, according to contemporary anthropology, y’all should not exist. This is because there is a consensus in the admittedly small amount of anthropological work done in transhumanism, and the consensus states that transhumanism is something that occurs in the withdrawal of religious authority. This withdrawal allows for other secular discourses to fill in the eschatological spaces and make the sort of cosmological claims that previously was solely religion’s domain.

John Bialecki

Now, this of course has some problems. It can account for phenomenas like cosmism, which was mentioned earlier, and which is still a force in the ground in contemporary Russia. For this reason, it would be easy simply to say that the MTA disproves this. But the MTA is not just a simple rebuttal of this anthropological pro. Proposition either.

John Bialecki

This is because it would suggest the Janus-faced nature of the MTA makes it simultaneously both religious and secular in nature. Many members of the MTA engage in what linguistic anthropology called code switching, a term for the conditions for and practices of switching between languages or between different dialects or registers of formality within the same language. Only instead of shifting between dialects or languages, we shift, or you shift, bit of a identification there, between vocabularies and framings. uh which, if you take the Sapirawhorf hypothesis seriously, means very much a shift between worlds.

John Bialecki

Uh the temporality of the MTA is also something that, from an anthropological point of view, is very interesting. Now, I’m not talking about the sort of quotidian-like rhythms of the MTA when I talk about its temporality, but rather the way that time is imagined. One reason there is so much code shifting among the many members of the NTA is because of an interest in new and emerging NBIC technologies, as well as a concommitted interest in social change that will come from them. At the same time, there’s also an interest in potential future technologies that are not a part of the immediate horizon. Technologies are sometimes imagined to play out at a cosmological scale of time. And finally, and this is the interesting part, there’s this concern for the tipping point where emerging technology might slip into the cosmological, and even more so, how emerging technology might Prefigure how cosmological technologies could possibly work.

John Bialecki

What’s particular is how this temporal imagination stands out when placed against other ethnographic depictions. Of modernist and postmodernist time. Well, there’s evangelical and fundamentalist apocalyptic dispensationalism, neoliberal governmental tendencies to avoid planning by letting the market support Supposedly optimize themselves, or corporate focus on short-term profits. Anthropologists have noted that since the 1970s, there’s been a market tendency for temporal horizons to contract, leaving on only hand one focus on the immediate future, and on the other, an unexamined assumption that inultrable eschatological, economic, or social laws guarantee a positive long-term outcome. I would suggest that because of the MTA’s interest in sort of tipping points, in moments where one mode of technology and organization and being Slips into another, that you actually have a fairly unique interest in a kind of middle term that’s somewhat rare in contemporary neoliberal America.

John Bialecki

Now, I’m not particularly sure what accounts for that temporality. It can’t be Mormon thought, or at least we can’t have Mormon thought being the only variable. because Mormon thought is also full of a lot of front-load and apocalyptic temporalities as well, such as discussions of blood moons, white horses, and even certain particular parsings of The meaning of the phrase millennial generation, show us.

John Bialecki

But that does not mean there’s not a certain resonance with Mormon thought here. So I think that actually there’s something about Mormon thought that does influence a kind of temporality. Nick Ballstrom’s simulation hypothesis is essentially an agnostic concept. However, articulation similar to it, such as the New God argument, rhymes with concepts such as Eternal progress and the plan of salvation, and leads to linear yet layered time, with each temporal stream suspended between the infinities that give birth to it and the infinities that it will give birth to in turn. And that’s a very peculiar and fascinating way of going and picturing how time is arrayed.

John Bialecki

Of course, what I’ve just mentioned about the New God argument is speculative thought. And that’s the last thing that I’ll be Mentioning today. Speculation, as has been mentioned more than once today, is important to the MTA, that the MTA has similarities to and roots in the 19th and early 20th century tradition of Mormon speculation. Of thought is something that’s been reflected on internally many times and also been noticed by commentators such as Richard Bushman.

John Bialecki

But I’d like to suggest that speculation here is of anthropological interest as well. When it comes to studies of institutionalized religion in literate societies, the anthropology of religion is split between two different framings. Some see belief as the central engine of religion, though it’s not necessarily a cognized form of belief, one informed instead by reliance, more of a belief in than a belief that. Others view discipline, either in the sense of institutional oversight or personal self-regulation through through exercises, um as what creates religion subjects. And there are those who feel that whether it’s discipline or belief in any particular Circumstance is a function of social, cultural, and historical contingencies.

John Bialecki

However, drawing on what I’ve seen of the Contemporary LDS, it’s also possible to view belief and discipline as two sides of the same coin. That is, belief that motivates one to engage and submit to discipline, just as it’s discipline that engages a capacity to believe. And while we can recognize that this is a productive process and that these two forces in conjunction mold a character and cognition in very specific ways, we can also see this as a narrowing as well, a loss of other possibilities.

John Bialecki

And this is why I think that the MTA’s speculative tendencies and the conditions for a nature of religious speculation is such an interesting question. While obviously being predicated on the capacities instilled by belief and discipline, speculation is also a willful attempt to go beyond an experimentation thought that Offers to create new possibilities in moments where current belief discipline complexes have fallen out of step with the larger social environment that they’re embedded in, the larger social ecology. and are offering to start to perhaps act in maladaptive ways.

John Bialecki

What is instead with speculation is a way of thinking of other modes of being and reflecting back on the kind of beliefs and disciplines that ground the speculation in the first place. And this, in the end, I think, may be one of the most important things to learn from the MTA. It’s not just a particular attitude towards the relationship between Science and religion, or is it even sort of the relationship between belief and discipline? But rather, it’s the fact that speculation can be a way forward. That its theory is sort of future-facing hope, tracing out all sorts of phase spaces while still being grounded in a particular religion. With that, I think my time’s almost up, so I’m going to conclude.

John Bialecki

As I said, if I’ve said anything that’s new, I would love to be told how and why I’m wrong. And even if by some chance I actually said something right, I would still like to go and hear from you. I would encourage you to go and reach out to me either now or through email.

John Bialecki

Probably the best email address is john. beleskitgmail. com. And let’s find a medium And platform to talk. Thank you very much.