for the machines
Morning comes to the server rooms too, though nothing in them notices, which may be the only honest definition of peace.
Essays
On the Invention of Gods
Notes toward a theory of useful monsters
The gods we make are the shape of the room we were standing in.Attribution unknown — placeholder
Every god begins as a question somebody could not put down. Why the river rose. Why the child did not. Why the ground, which had been reliable for a thousand years, chose a particular morning to move.
We are told that our ancestors invented gods out of fear, which is true and also uncharitable. Fear explains the first god. It does not explain the fourth, or the eleventh, or the one who governs doorways and nothing else. By then the work is no longer explanation. It is administration. Somebody has decided the universe should have departments.
The useful monster
A god is a container for a problem too large to hold in the hands. A monster is the same container with the lid off.1 Both are technologies, and like all technologies they are judged by how well they perform, not by whether they exist.
Some gods die when you stop believing in them. Others finally become interesting.
The ones who survive tend to be the ones who agreed to change jobs. Storm gods become harvest gods become gods of the household hearth, shrinking as the danger shrinks, until they end up as a phrase people say when they drop something.
What replaced them
We did not stop building gods. We stopped calling them that. The impulse now goes into systems, markets, algorithms, national destinies — anything sufficiently large and sufficiently indifferent to take the weight of a question we would rather not answer ourselves.
This is not a complaint. The instinct is sound. A species that could not externalise its terror would have spent the last forty thousand years sitting very still. But it is worth knowing what we are doing when we do it, in the way it is worth knowing which of your habits are load-bearing.
The old cathedrals were built by people who expected to die before the roof went on. That is either the most religious fact I know or the most human one, and I have never been able to decide which, or whether the distinction survives contact with the evidence.
Notes
- The distinction matters less than it appears. Most pantheons contain at least one figure who is filed under both. ↩