Resisting the Mi-Go invasion

The Christ-child versus fungoids from Yogoth

Photo by Javier Miranda on Unsplash

“I wish I could live a disembodied existence.” Not the longing of some ancient sage, but of an anxious teenager in an online chat a few year ago, during the Covid pandemic. Many others like her sympathised with her desire. Life in a body, in the material world, was just too difficult, too painful. The messiness of human relationships, family, bodily desires and emotions, tiredness, growing pains, the discomfort of comparing her body with other people’s and finding it wanting: wouldn’t it be better to get away from all this? To live like an avatar in a computer game, to jump into the Internet and stay there? No more pain, no more tears, just total freedom to define oneself. An online native, the girl found her body an inconvenience she would rather do without.

The theme of escaping from one’s body has been a staple of science fiction for at least a century. H.P. Lovecraft, early twentieth century author of the highly influential Cthulhu stories, imagined a race of fungoid aliens called the Mi-Go which could offer humans immortality by removing our brains and putting them in high-tech cylinders where they would be preserved forever. The subjects of their experiments all went mad in the end, of course. But the point remains that Lovecraft’s view of the human is basically as a brain, a mind, which can be removed from the inconvenient vessel of flesh that contains it. C.S. Lewis picks up on this idea in That Hideous Strength, a novel about a sinister organisation which is trying to dominate the world with pure scientific rationalist, led by a horrific figure called the Head, who is just that: a Head, surgically removed from its body and technologically preserved, giving the company its orders. More recently, the Japanese anime The Ghost in the Shell and the Netflix series Altered Carbon riff on the same theme: that the body is basically a machine, a kind of hardware for the software of the mind, and in an ideal world, we would be able to transfer our data to a new body just as we transfer it from an old hard drive to our new computer. In real life, there are rich people who have put their bodies in cryogenic suspension just waiting for this kind of technology to emerge in the future, so that they can be technologically resurrected.

There are authors who go further and envisage us, as the teenage girl hoped, living without bodies at all. William Gibson’s famous 1980s Neuromancer series, based largely in Tokyo, envisages wealthy humans uploading themselves to a computer network before they die, and thereby achieving immortality. Heaven becomes a hard-drive. And nowadays, with the advent of Artificial Intelligence, we can see what that might be like. We can upload the works of an author we admire, even one who has been dead for centuries, and have a conversation with them based on the data we’ve provided. Soon, we will be able to upload all our own photographs, videos and written words, text messages and so on, and generate an AI-version of ourselves. I have no doubt that we will be able to make completely automated, interaction video avatars of ourselves, formed of our own memories, living forever online, talking to people through screens.

I find these developments frightening and sad, partly because they are so convincing. They sound so close to our Christian idea of heaven, a place where there is no more suffering, where all are free and happy and can live forever. But in the end, they are just a parody of Christianity: because whatever those disembodied things that live online, or get swapped between mechanical bodies are, they are not actually us. Humans are more than data. And yet, you can see already from how people are, even now, making AI “friends,” even falling in love with them, that we will be very easy to convince. It will be easy to believe that the AI version of, say, my deceased grandfather is really him, rather than just a bunch of data being cleverly processed to look and sound like him. The more accustomed we get to screen life, the less we feel the need to be close to people in the flesh, the more easily convinced we will become. But it is a false comfort.

Christmas shows the lie of all our technological efforts at immortality. It is not just the story of one more baby being born two thousand years ago. It is a story of cosmic meaning. The Word, the Mind of God, by which all things are made, reveals what God truly is by becoming flesh and dwelling among us. It’s not as though God suddenly decided to do this. God is beyond time. Rather, the Incarnation of Christ shows us who God is and has always been. The Word is in eternal union with the flesh, the mind with the body. For Christians, the body is not something to escape from: it is to be perfected by God’s presence and indwelling, and so to be resurrected in both body and soul.

Yes, bodily existence can be uncomfortable. Jesus’ birth among the animals was not comfortable. His life, His suffering, His death on the Cross were not comfortable. So we should not expect our bodily life to be comfortable. But it is the only life we have. The body is not a vehicle for who we are, it is who we are. To follow Christ is to learn to live with our bodily limitations, improving them where we can to overcome illness or disability, sure, but accepting that there are limitations we cannot get past, including the final and decisive limitation of death. It also means accepting the limitations of others. It is not about escaping from the body or from this material world. It is certainly not about escaping from difficult relations with one another. Christ was not born alone, and nor are we. So, on His birthday we meet and celebrate together, with family and friends.

There is so much that we can do online now, that is good and helpful. We can meet distant relatives, hold business meetings without polluting the air by air or car travel, enjoy online entertainment. But there are things we cannot do. We cannot build houses, have babies, grow food. And, as you will know if you have tried an online drinking party, the online world is not much good for celebration. There is something missing, something fundamental about our humanity, that you cannot get online, and that is being together physically, in the flesh. Eating and drinking together makes us more human. The handshake or hug, the kiss, the whispered joke, the caring touch: these human acts can be enjoyed only in person. Our online interactions are only vague and weak simulacra of real life and real relationships, be that friendship, family, or the intimacy of a married couple. They cannot replace the real thing.

This Christmas, I urge you to put the clean and shiny screens down, and remember that the Lord Our God was born in blood and dung. We need to restore real relationships with one another, people we love and people we do not love so much. And we do this by doing what God offers us forever in heaven: by celebrating together. Don’t accept the lie that we can make heaven through our technology, through extending our lives indefinitely or uploading our minds into some silicon server. That is not heaven. It is a prison. What the Christ child offers is infinitely better: the fulness of life, in soul and body perfected through love of God and of one another, an infinite feast of joy.