A tale of two futures: Techno-eschatology in the US and India

Abstract

Different religions have strikingly different views of history; but the emergence of modern technology offers promises of salvation that can draw equally on Christian views of time in the US and Hindu views of time in India. For centuries, Christian theologians incorporated technological progress into their linear vision of history, which will end with an eschatological conflict and the rise of the New Jerusalem. In the US today, techno-enthusiasts have adopted the claim that we are fast approaching the end of the world as we know it, though the salvation they expect no longer references Christianity. A ‘Singularity’ will occur, they say, leading to the transformation of biological life into an eternal new world of machine intelligence. In India, however, history is cyclical and the end of the world has long been expected to be a return to the first age. Although presently mired in the misery of the kali yuga, we should anticipate an end to this period and a return to the glorious satya yuga. Based upon popular Indian understandings of science and technology, we should expect that both will be crucial to this process. Interviews and observations made in the US and in India reveal how technological progress is now the critical component in cultural expectations about the end of the world and the emergence of a new world to come.

Introduction

Different religions have strikingly different views of history, but the emergence of modern technology offers promises of salvation that can draw equally on widely disparate traditions, such as Christian views of time in the US and Hindu views of time in India. For centuries, many Protestant Christian theologians incorporated technological progress into their linear vision of history, which will end with an eschatological conflict and the rise of the New Jerusalem. In the US today, transhumanists have adopted the claim that we are fast approaching the end of the world as we know it, though the salvation they expect no longer references Christianity or the return of Jesus. A ‘Singularity’ will occur, many say, leading to the transformation of biological life into an eternal new world of machine intelligence. In India, however, history is cyclical and the end of the world has long been expected to be a return to the first age. Although presently mired in the misery of the kali yuga, we should anticipate an end to this period and a return to the glorious satya yuga, after which the process of decline will begin again. Based upon popular Indian understandings of history, we should expect that science and technology will offer signposts indicating progress in the process of cosmic rejuvenation. The US and India offer two different cultural environments; yet in each, technological progress is now a critical component in cultural and religious expectations about the end of the world and the emergence of a new world to come.

Many commentators claim that technology creates its own markets and that progress unfolds according to some internal logic; but the cultural and personal adoption of technology occurs, in part, based on religious premises. People often believe that technology can bring about a salvation once promised by traditional religions or that technology represents a return to some traditional religious utopia. These are two ways in which technology evokes eschatological expectations; and in either case the religious perspective underlies the use and proliferation of technology. Technologies are, themselves, metaphysically underdetermined: they do not tell us how to interpret them but must, instead, be interpreted by their users. By making technology a part of how a community understands history and, by extension, the end of the world, individuals find various ways in which to understand the role of technology in life.

As Alexander Ornella points out, ‘technology exists in and is part of our symbolic universe, of thick and rich socio-cultural, economic, political, and religious practices. Technology provides meaningful ways to relate to, explore, and frame the world around us. How we shape the world around us, however, can both tell us something about our own self-understanding as human beings and shape our self-understanding as embodied beings’ (2015: 303–304). Examples from the US and India show that advanced technologies can serve widely different eschatologies; despite cultural and religious differences, technology moves across the globe with the promise of historical fulfillment. In the US, many transhumanists draw on linear visions of Christian salvation to argue that technology will bring a radical break in history, whereas in India advancing technology marks progress in an eternal cycle of the yugas. In both cases, technology plays a pivotal role in the end of the world as we know it.

Cultural difference and religious eschatology

Eschatology – theorization about the end of the world – is an interesting domain for comparative sociology and religious studies because it offers insight into a community’s highest values and expectations. The comparative study of religions emerged out of colonial oppression and Christian missionary work (Chidester, 1996; Klostermaier, 1989: 314); but as scholars struggled to provide the field with more objective and culturally sensitive methods, they documented patterns of similarity and dissimilarity. Many scholars, such as Mircea Eliade, sought to appreciate how different cultures understand history and time. Although he was overly committed to his ‘morphology of the sacred’ and the essential identity of all religious practice (Pals, 1996: 190; Rudolph, 1989), Eliade made vital contributions to the scientific study of religion and to the classification of different traditions. It was he who explored religious approaches to historical time and noted that religious traditions could be separated into those that see time as a cyclical process and those that had (incompletely) transitioned away from this and see history as a linear process. One need not see such transitions as social or religious ‘progress’; they are merely the result of shifting cultural priorities and the search for solutions to life’s complexities. Differing commitment to either linear or cyclical time will force a community to develop its own unique eschatology, its understanding of the end of the world. Generally speaking, either the world must come to a radical end, or it must undergo rebirth that continues the cosmic story.

According to Eliade, all religions were originally committed to cyclical time; linear time was disseminated across multiple religious traditions after it developed in the Hebrew tradition—though it was from Persian traditions that the ancient Hebrews and Christians developed the idea of a paradisiacal afterlife and their own linear eschatology ¹ . In a cyclical history, the world is constantly remade anew, such as by new year’s festivals in which participants perform a dramatic rendering of the gods’ creative work. This is, for example, Eliade’s reading of the Babylonian Enuma Elish and the Akitu festival celebrating it ([1969] 1984: 73–4). J. Z. Smith has shown there is more to the Akitu festival than Eliade recognized (1982: 90–96); but we should still acknowledge the structures of cosmic renewal that lie central to religious and cultural practice. Within this context, one should recognize that a cyclical history need not refer to a grand cosmic rebirth, but can also refer more simply to the annual or seasonal renewals that affect agrarian, herding, harvesting, or nomadic lifestyles.

In the Indian tradition, the universe undergoes death and rebirth across enormous cosmic timespans. These cosmic processes include smaller scale ‘rebirths’ as human life and culture decline until they are renewed in a return to a more glorious state. Indian traditions basically agree that the yuga cycle (described in detail below), is a process of decline from the first yuga (world age) to the fourth, which many consider to be the current age. At the end of the fourth age, the world will move back to the first. Many repetitions of this process compose the history of the universe, which is, itself, subject to a cyclical process of new beginnings. As summarized by Gerald Larson (2012), a complete cycle (mahayuga) of the yugas is 4,320,000 years – fortunately, the bulk of these are occupied by happier times than the evils of the kali yuga. A day in the life of god (Brahma), takes up 1,000 of these mahayugas. According to Larson, this process is grounded in the precession of the zodiac in Indian astrology and consequently means that, contrary to western expectations of moving into the future, one is always ‘falling backwards into the past’ (Larson, 2012: 122). In both the larger, cosmic perspective and the shorter process of yugas, India’s traditional view of history provides a clear example of a cyclical process and of how meaning can be invested in past events as opposed to future events.

Some communities, Eliade argues, end up joyously anticipating the end of the world, a time at which the divine plan will be fulfilled and they will be redeemed (Eliade, [1954] 1991: 103–107). In linear religious histories, redemption is final and eternal, rather than tentative and in constant need of repetition. With a definite beginning and end, events become meaningful insofar as they ensure progress toward the end; anything claimed to inhibit such progress must be the work of an adversary or, at best, be irrelevant to the cosmos. The faithful can actively work toward the end, ensuring the final victory of good over evil.

While cyclical and linear time appear to be mutually exclusive, they are not necessarily so. While Judaism and Christianity, for example, have adopted linear visions of time, they retain a partial commitment to the cyclical construction of meaning and history. The Christian Eucharist and the Jewish Passover are two such practices, in which the communities share a meal and reenact events of the mythic past (the Last Supper and the Exodus, respectively).

Nevertheless, linear visions of time force a community to radically reevaluate their eschatology because they establish quite clearly a final end to history—not an end to existence, but nevertheless an end to historical processes. In the Protestant traditions that have so powerfully influenced US culture, this has meant the return of Jesus of Nazareth and the inauguration of a new and eternal Kingdom of God. For two thousand years, many Christian believers have considered the end of the world imminent, and looked forward to a new world to come. Thanks to the secular turn, Christianity now shares cultural authority with other traditions in the US, including atheist and agnostic traditions that have their own champions and communities of the faithful. Among these, many remain committed to the linear expectation of a radical end to history, whether by ecological catastrophe or technological Singularity. Such visions are not all the same, and their particularities are rich and identifying them one of the key tasks of the social sciences; but in spite of the many differences – and their effects upon cultural life – they are part of larger patterns that precede them.

Transhumanism as techno-eschatology in the US

Christian eschatology has proven so compelling that it persists even in post-Christian social movements. Transhumanism – the religious or philosophical belief that humanity can transcend its mortal limits through the use of technology – retains the eschatological hopes of Christianity, including an expectation that history as we know it will end and an eternal new world will begin. Although transhumanists generally decry any allegation that they believe in a future utopia (e.g. More, 2013), most do believe that advancing technology will result in a qualitative shift in history, and this is most apparent among transhumanists who believe in a forthcoming Singularity. For Singularity theorists, human history has only a few short years remaining before the onset of a new world in which transcendent machine intelligence rules the cosmos.

Transhumanism arose out of (largely Protestant) Christianity, and the legacy of Christian thought pervades transhumanist discourse. Despite occasional fears of technological and scientific progress, faith in the salvific power of technology was profound in both medieval and modern Christianity (Noble, 1999). For example, in the New Atlantis of 1627, Francis Bacon described an island community that – as called to do so by God – had mastered technologies that enhance human and animal stock, lengthen the human lifespan, control weather, and more (Bacon, 1951). Over the following centuries, faith in technological progress, and technological salvation, was cemented in western culture. This is shown, for example, in the way that US settlers incorporated technologies into their religious, and millenarian, visions of divinely ordained expansion across North America (Nye, 2003).

As has been widely noted, religion has persisted even as secularism brought an end to the cultural dominance of theological authority in the modern world. Early theorists of secularism (Berger, [1967] 1990; Freud, [1927] 1961) argued that religion would fade away and be replaced by science; nevertheless, religion has continued in the secular era and new religions have formed ² . Importantly, however, contemporary religious believers must now find powerful ways of inoculating their faiths against scientific and technological progress, and this is a vital part of what secularism means in the twenty-first century (Bainbridge and Stark, 1986). Some Christian thinkers have, as Bainbridge and Stark noted, withdrawn from the broader public, painting themselves as the elect whose faith is stronger than modernity. Among these, some produced a soteriological narrative that rejects science and technology as tools of the anti-Christ, but which nevertheless mirrors that of transhumanism (Cole-Turner, 2012: 784, 793). For most westerners, however, rejecting technology conflicts with their changing perspectives on social questions and the ways technology can produce a rich and magical world of opportunities.

The secular turn, and the technological marvels of the 20th and 21st centuries, enabled the rise of transhumanism, which incorporates scientific and technological progress into its belief system. Julian Huxley, one of the great popularizers of science in the early twentieth century, was the first to coin transhumanism in this modern usage. He actively sought to establish transhumanism (which he also called evolutionary humanism) as a religion for modern life (Huxley, 1957a; 1957b). Key figures in the middle of the century, such as Robert Ettinger (1964; 1972) and Fereidoun Esfandiary ([1970] 1978; [1973] 1977), discarded Huxley’s religious language, and late century transhumanists tended to vigorously reject religion and position themselves in opposition to it (for example, More, 2013). Perhaps influenced by mid-century science fiction in this, they reflected the ongoing expectation that secularism spelled the end of religion as well as the misconception that religious thinking was inherently inflexible and divorced from empirical reality ³ . Some transhumanists retain a philosophical stance that generally avoids religious language and connotations; but for many transhumanists – with the Singularity theorists perhaps chief among them – technology possesses the power to save the world and the posthuman inhabitants to come (Tirosh-Samuelson, 2012).

George Martin (1971) first proposed that human beings might take advantage of advances in digital technology to gain immortality; but it was Hans Moravec’s seminal works that gave transhumanism a genuine scientific aura (1978; 1988; 1999). Moravec was an academic insider, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s famed Robotics Institute; and he provided a genuine (if still unlikely) scientific basis for uploading human minds and building immortal machines. As machines grow to superhuman intelligence, humanity will upload consciousness into machine bodies and join the artificial intelligences in what Moravec calls the Mind Fire, a cosmic expansion of intelligence throughout the universe. By graphing technological progress, Moravec articulated an exponential curve that predicted an amazing future – and this vision prompted faith in the technological Singularity.

The Singularity is a hypothetical point in the near future in which technological progress will be so profound and so rapid, that to predict the nature of life beyond it is impossible. The term, reinvigorated by Vernor Vinge ([1993] 2003), describes an historical process defended by Moravec and subsequently made mainstream by the inventor and AI expert Ray Kurzweil (1999; 2005). If, as these theorists contend, technology (especially computer technology) progresses at an exponential rate, then the doubling of innovation will lead to extremely short periods of time in which ever more technological transformation will take place. Eventually, the progress attained in these short time periods will be extraordinary, creating enormous shifts in technology and culture – changes that simply cannot be predicted.

Despite its alleged unknowability (or perhaps because of it), the post-Singularity, posthuman world draws directly on Jewish and Christian eschatology. This particular version of transhumanist faith is a contemporary parallel to the apocalyptic traditions of the ancient world. Apocalyptic Jews and Christians (1) experienced the world through the dualistic lens of a good v. evil, (2) felt alienated by the supremacy of evil in their time, (3) anticipated that God would produce a radically new world in which good triumphs, and (4) expect that they will reside eternally in that world in angelic bodies. Likewise, Singularity theorists (1) experience the world as a dualistic opposition of good and bad that is apparent in corollary dichotomies of machine/biology and mind/body, (2) feel alienated by the current supremacy of bodily processes, from slow learning to death, (3) anticipate that evolution – now applied to technology – will produce a radical new world of godlike machines, and (4) believe they will transfer their minds into transcendent new machine bodies (Geraci 2008; 2010). Thanks to vast computation, even the dead shall rise and walk again in this digital wonderland, resurrected through historical analysis (Moravec, 1999: 167), a goal for which Kurzweil maintains an archive for and about his father (Ptolemy, 2009).

Eschatologically speaking, Singularity theorists have absorbed the apocalyptic structure of the religions through which they emerged; but they have replaced faith in God with faith in transcendent – but natural – sources, such as evolution (Moravec, 1999: 165) or the alleged ‘law of accelerating returns’ (Kurzweil, 2005: 7–21). Kurzweil even mirrors the six-day creation of Genesis by describing six historical epochs, ending with the final period, in which not only will the universe ‘wake up’ (Kurzweil, 2005: 21) but transcendent machines might well even find ways of preventing the end of the universe, ensuring that the machine future persists eternally (Kurzweil, 1999: 260). For Singularity believers, just as for generations of millenarian Christians before them, the end is nigh. The world as we know it is dead. Long live the world to come.

Technical returns in the Indian yuga cycle

The distinct religious traditions of India provide a different eschatology, and also a unique way of absorbing technology into religious life. In the twenty-first century, Indian technological and media culture relies on the same linear calendar of months and years that the rest of the world uses; but traditional calendars remain in use for astrological purposes and the historical sense they engender remains relevant. In particular, traditional concepts of time and their regenerative eschatologies remain influential, and technology remains discursively situated in the mythic yuga cycle.

According to tradition, the world is in a constant process of birth and decay. In the first age of each cycle, satya yuga (also called kreta yuga), people live longest and maintain dharma ⁴ . In each following stage – treta yuga, dvapara yuga, and kali yuga – people live shorter lives and become more sinful. In addition, they lose the spiritual mastery that comes with dharma, and which provides supernatural powers, such as the capacity to communicate across vast geographic distances. While much of this appears familiar to any reader of Hesiod, the Indian cycle is different because at the end it returns to the golden age of satya yuga. Depending upon one’s textual authority, either the kali yuga ends and a new satya yuga begins or the process undergoes a reversal back to satya yuga. That is, cosmic history either processes from satya yuga through treta yuga, dvapara yuga, and kali yuga before a new satya yuga begins or else it proceeds as follows: satya, treta, dvapara, kali, dvapara, treta, and finally back to satya yuga. Naturally, with many authors across great geographical gulfs over two to three thousand years of history, there is more than one way to understand the yuga cycle.

Though the yuga cycle traditions are very old, they remain part of contemporary Indian culture because traditional calendars remain in use. Religious and lifecycle rituals, for example, are still based upon local, lunar calendars and astrology (Klostermaier, [1989] 2007: 278). As such, the ancient view of time remains relevant. Even many participants in rationalist groups that reject magic and religion remain committed to astrology (Quack, 2012: 213), and the University Grants Commission in India has suggested adding astrology to college curricula (Quack, 2012: 170). The ongoing use of traditional calendars and astrology mean that the yuga cycle worldview operates in the lives of most, if not all, Indians whether or not they explicitly adhere to it. At the same time, native genealogical records (which are connected to astrology, and which matter in matters of marriage arrangement, funerary rites, and other occasions) are automatically linear, and thus in constant tension and coexistence with the cyclic view of history we see in the Puranas (Perera, 2015: 42–3).

Alignment with the Gregorian calendar and use of genealogical histories have not caused Indians to reject the yuga understanding of cosmic history even though these new calendrical models surely change how people think of daily life and the passage of days. Certainly, not all Indians ascribe to the cycle; but there is empirical evidence that many continue to do so in the modern era. For example, Ishita Banerjee-Dube argues that the popularity of the Bhima bhoi malika ba padmakalpa indicates the ‘significance of the persistence of kaliyuga in popular time reckoning … Kaliyuga occasions novel understandings of the past that make the present meaningful and envisage the future’ (Banerjee-Dube, 2007: 150). Accordingly, she avers that during the late colonial period, popular accounts of resistance claimed that the kali yuga (and British control) would soon end and satya yuga would arrive. More recently, Ann Gold (1988) has been told by Rajasthani farmers that drought conditions and declining forestland are punishments for the sins of kali yuga. ‘While most who mentioned Kali Yuga were literate Brahmins, we now and then heard it evoked by uneducated farmers as well’ (Gold, 1988: 167). For many of these Indians, the persistence of the yuga cycle is directly connected to political or economic disenfranchisement. That is, for those who struggled against the British, the yuga cycle helped make sense out of present circumstances and provided hope for the future. Similarly, while explaining droughts as a consequence of kali yuga may have provided little actual hope for suffering farmers, it at least provided an explanation ⁵ .

It is worth noting that while commitment to the yuga cycle might be more prevalent in religious or lay-scientific communities, it has some purchase in science also. For example, the US-based biochemist Bal Ram Singh argues that contemporary astrophysicists might do well to attend to the yuga cycle in considering revisions to contemporary cosmological theories (Singh, 2008: 152–3). Physicist VV Raman suggests the same (Raman, 2011: 84–6). Without clear data, it is impossible to know if many Indian scientists living in India find the yuga cycle scientifically relevant; but it seems likely that some do. David Gosling, for example, quotes a research fellow who referenced the yuga cycle in reference to contemporary cosmology (Gosling, 2007: 125).

Alongside the belief that descending yugas mean a diminished world, many Indians believe that science and technology have declined since the times of the Vedas and epics (approximately 1000 BCE to 300 CE). In the late 19th century, Dayananda Saraswati made one of the first modern claims that the Vedic references to flying vehicles, explosive devices, and more demonstrate that advanced technologies were actually present at the time of the texts’ authorship (Klostermaier [1989] 2007, 475; Raman, 2011: 48) ⁶ . Throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, such claims have been widely propagated as part of nationalist rhetoric (Geraci, forthcoming).

Just as Indians began articulating theories of Vedic technology, there was a flourishing of literature that discussed – obviously as a consequence of the historical and social context of British colonialism – the kali yuga ⁷ . The yuga cycle had been used previously as a way of engaging a change in social order (for example, Nath, 2001); and so the timing of increased interest in the yugas and historical revisionism is not accidental. The historical understanding of progressive decline forms the basis for belief in Vedic technology as ‘in the Hindu conception, the past must have been more developed than the present’, and ‘a significant number of Indian élites defined “progress” as a movement towards achieving the heights of the glorious past’ (Deshpande, 1979:11). Dayananda’s claims were clearly aimed at resisting colonial control, and for that reason they have been taken up and integrated into contemporary Indian perspectives on technology. While the British no longer rule India, western economic and military domination create a continued need for nationalist rhetoric in technological development.

The belief that modern technology existed in ancient times is widespread, including within scientific circles. ‘Much of this knowledge could have been existed, existing before’, one nanotechnology engineer explained to me. Going further, an AI systems researcher told me that

There could be some great technology, which we are not able to really foresee, which really existed. So it’s quite possible. If somebody asks for a proof. The proof is that okay we believe the scripture that exists. That is the proof … Many of us personally believe … the scriptures, whatever they have stated is true. Just because we have no, we cannot do … it does not mean, they are also not done. It is not just a story that somebody has floated. So, we have a long way to go.

In addition to scientists, claims of technological priority circulate in religious, political, and popular circles. Jonathan Parry, for example notes that his interviewees in Benares believed that the ancient rishis possessed advanced scientific knowledge (Parry, 1985: 206). Of course, a brahmin pundit in Benares has a different reason for articulating such claims than an AI researcher in Bangalore. Vedic technologies and the conceptual framework that encompasses them are, therefore, what Star and Griesemer (1989) call ‘boundary objects’. They pass among different constituencies and bind together different communities with different interests. A scientist might want to freely entertain hypotheses or might believe that Hindu scriptures are authentic narratives of the past, with or without regard for whether he sees a postcolonial ‘hangover’ in scientific research or Indian political power ⁸ . Such technologies, then, bind a community together through individuals’ differently oriented yet shared commitment to the mythical flying vehicles, rockets, and scientific practices.

Late in 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressed the popular sentiment that there was plastic surgery and genetic engineering in Vedic times, as evidenced by the epic tale, the Mahabharata. Karan Thapar criticized Modi in The Hindu, and a polarized debate ensued in the online comments (Thapar, 2014). Among the comments posted to Thapar’s article, 86 rejected belief in Vedic technology, 43 supported it, and another 77 left comments too vague to reveal the authors’ positions (though many of these made negative remarks about other religions’ truth claims, and hence might be considered to lean in the direction of belief). Comments supporting Modi’s claim received an average of 128 ‘likes’ and 217 ‘dislikes’; thus, while the majority of The Hindu’s online readership objects to claims of Vedic technology, there is a strong contingent of supporters. For Modi and many (most?) of his supporters, such claims are precisely about nationalist political interests (Geraci, forthcoming).

A few online responses to Modi’s claims directly reference the yuga cycle. One respondent to Thapar’s article, for example, asked ‘Which authority can decide what is scientific? … As per the scriptures, everything will be repeated over and over. As the yugas progress, during the Tretha yuga & satya yuga all creatures will be spiritually advanced and be able to communicate each other. A realised master is capable of doing such things during any age’ [sic] (Thapar, 2014). Responding to a follow-up essay by Romila Thapar and Varun Soni, the very first commenter engaged the yuga cycle, asserting that ‘according to the Surya Siddhanta, Kali Yuga began at midnight (00:00) on 18 February 3102 BCE in the proleptic Julian calendar, or 14 January 3102 BC in the proleptic Gregorian calendar…There was a certain position of the planets at the beginning of Kaliyuga as described in the Puranas. Our historians should focus on finding proof of instead of calling them myths’ (Soni and Thapar, 2014). Such comments, uniting the yuga cycle to the alleged ancient technology, were uncommon; but they reveal a strand of cultural thinking that explicitly sees the connection between claims of technological loss and declining world ages ⁹ . Eliade argues that in cyclical histories the meaningfulness of present events is based upon whether they repeat the important events of the primordial past (Eliade, [1954] 1991: 4); the flipside of this is that in order for present events to be meaningful, they must be somehow identifiable with the past. This political move is key to how and why Vedic priority is a vital part of many Indian discussions of technology.

If technology has been lost alongside dharma, then the changing of yugas ought to bring changes in technological development. Put another way, improved technology ought to prefigure or provide evidence for a changing of the age. Indeed, according to the yuga theory, ‘whatever good there is in the world today is the inheritance from the past ages’ (Deshpande, 1979:6). While a search on the web can identify sites that claim our reliance on technology is evidence for the material (fallen) sensibility of the kali yuga, other sources indicate that improving technology is a sign that kali yuga is actually at an end, and that we are in a stage of ascending dvapara yuga.

Those who believe we are in dvapara yuga trace their position to the influential Bengali guru, Swami Sri Yukteswar Giri. In The Holy Science, he calculates the yuga cycle according to his reading of the Manu Smriti, and argues that the world began its process toward ‘union with’ the coming dvapara yuga in the year 1600 CE; onset of dvapara yuga took place in 1700 (Giri, [1894] 1972: xvii). Sri Yukteswar Giri then takes William Gilbert’s discovery of magnetism, Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, the invention of the microscope and other scientific and technological innovations as his first set of evidence for this moment of progress in the kali yuga and the turning of the yugas to dvapara (Giri, 1972, xvii). In keeping with this, Sri Yukteswar argues that in the treta yuga, our intellects will expand and we will, for example, ‘comprehend the attributes of divine magnetism’ (Giri, 1972: xxi).

Following Sri Yukteswar Giri, David Frawley, founder of the American Vedic Institute, indicates that in higher yugas there will be more widespread understanding of science and technology and that new, cleaner technologies will be developed to avoid destroying the earth and humanity (1990: 59–60). On his website, he writes that ‘this is the New Age into which we have just entered, as evidenced by the great advances in science and technology. It is no longer the dark Kali Yuga, as some continue to think, yet it is far from Satya Yuga as well’ (Frawley, 2012). Though Frawley is American, he is held in high esteem in Indian circles and was awarded the Padma Bhushan, India’s third highest civilian honor, in 2015 – the same year that the Modi government also awarded the Padma Bhushan to Bill and Melinda Gates for their humanitarian work.

The continuing popularity of the yuga cycle in popular reckoning and the expectation that the end of kali yuga will produce a greater age can be seen in Samit Basu’s well-received science-fiction novel Turbulence and its sequel, Resistance. In Turbulence (2010), Basu describes a world where passengers acquire superpowers while flying on an airplane. One of these is the child of a woman who was flying while pregnant, and it is born with blue skin, a horse’s head, and four arms. Naturally, the parents believe they have given birth to Kalki, the tenth incarnation of Vishnu, who will come to end kali yuga, and a new political party swiftly forms around the infant (Basu, 2010: 42). By the sequel, eschatological predictions swirl around the now eleven-year-old, but childish and likely insane, god. In the end, Kalki performs a divine feat that results in the creation of a new world in a new universe, a world which the superheroes hope can be better than the first (Basu, 2014: 285–9).

In Resistance, Basu pits multiple eschatological visions in conflict, and the winner reflects India’s traditional world cycles rather than the linear vision of utopia offered by other forces ¹⁰ . This does not necessarily mean that Basu literally expects the return of Vishnu or regeneration of satya yuga. Rather, it reveals the ongoing relevance of the yuga cycle in contemporary Indian life. Basu’s narrative arc provides only the hope, not the certainty, for moral and political salvation; but his adoption of the yuga cycle and world regeneration nevertheless trumps the utopian linear eschatology threateningly posed by western corporate interests of a posthuman future.

The focus upon and open acknowledgement of ancient tradition marks an important difference between India and the United States. Western transhumanism divorces itself from past tradition and doesn’t claim any authority from Christianity even as it follows the trajectory of Christian history. In India, however, many advocates embrace the tradition, appropriating science and technology in their affirmation of the past. Meera Nanda (2003) has offered a powerful critique of this position in her discussion of scientific reasoning and postmodernity in science. Among the wider community, Indian rationalist groups also decry any effort to unite traditional religion and modern science (Quack, 2012). Despite this opposition, many accept modern technology as a sign of our progress toward satya yuga, which strengthens prior beliefs. In turn, these overcome the present in their assumption that its triumphs are but imitations of the past and harbingers of a future that is, itself, a return to the past.

Technological progress must mark the end of kali yuga, and thus technology is crucial to the grand sweep of history in India. For some Indians, the ‘material sensibility’ represented by technology is a sign of the evil times; and for these, continuing commitment to technology indicates that people remain mired in kali yuga. For an increasing number, however, technology promises a return to a better world. It cannot be surprising that the online comment above remarks on how residents of better yugas can ‘communicate [with] each other’ when the development and dissemination of mobile phones, including smartphones, has revolutionized pan-Indic communications and created a host of new social, political and entrepreneurial opportunities. For reasons of cost (the ‘last mile’ problem), India lags far behind other nations in landline telephone communication, a problem exacerbated by the importance of telephone and cable lines in Internet communication. But with mobile phone technology, the twenty-first century promises to be an age of wonders. Speaking across great distances, soaring through the air in flying machines, and mastering biology … these technologies offer a ‘return’ to the glorious past, and the end of kali yuga.

Conclusion

Religious eschatologies are not always prominent in the daily lives of people – whether those people live in the US or India – but they are nevertheless an important part of culture and do affect the adoption and interpretation of technology. The adoption of technology happens, in part, based upon religious premises. Either that technology can bring about a salvation once promised by traditional religions or technology can represent a return to a traditional religious utopia. In either case, technology marks the end of the world as we know it; it is crucial to our perspectives on history and our eschatological expectations. Exploring how visions of history provide the metaphysical position for adopting technology requires further investigation; as such visions could form the basis of political action, cultural innovation, and technological progress. The day-to-day reality in which new technologies are built, advertised, disseminated, and adopted requires more thorough study, particularly to deepen our understanding of how eschatological religious perspectives are implicated in this process.

Religious preferences emphasize specific ways of thinking about technology. Depending upon what view of history and what eschatological end we anticipate, our interpretation of and social interest in technologies can change. Western transhumanists want technologies that create a new and eternal era. Though rejecting utopia, the progress of Singularity thinking is ultimately static – it is simply the final consumption of the universe by intellectual computation. Indians, influenced by and often championing the yuga cycle, want technologies to provide magical powers like connectivity and perhaps even adherence to dharma. While these trajectories overlap in important ways, they are different and they encourage different usage patterns and different visions of the world.

Technology does not tell us how to use it or how to think about it, and many options are possible. Material objects and technological practices are the instantiation of a technological imaginary and, in turn, help shape how technology can be imagined in the future; they are, for example, the product of narratives and aesthetics, and the drivers of future designs and future narratives (Ornella, 2015). As a result, advanced technology can serve widely divergent eschatologies and can be integrated into widely disparate cultural contexts. What seems less possible is excluding technology from our religious and cosmic visions. Even in this secular world, we continue to see the world and our history in sacred terms, and then automatically embrace technological progress as our eschatological indicator. Despite cultural and religious differences, technology moves across the globe with a promise of historical and religious fulfillment.