Lewis, UFOs, AI, and Re-enchantment

 This is a continuation of the theme of the recent post: another conversation with Rod Dreher on "re-enchantment" and his new book Living in Wonder.

This time Dreher is speaking with Jonathan Pageau, one of the most interesting "YouTube Intellectuals" for my money.  Both men are Eastern Orthodox Christians, and in this video discuss the "darker side" of "re-enchantment" - the potential realities behind UFOs, a kind of AI spiritualism, and more.

In the conversation Dreher makes an offhand comparison to CS Lewis' masterpiece That Hideous Strength.  In Lewis' novel he is (slight spoiler alert!) trying to describe narratively what he describes also in The Screwtape Letters: what the Devil would love to be able to cultivate is a person who is a "materialist magician."  Because he is a materialist, he rejects traditional spiritual categories (and therefore rejects God and the Gospel), but nevertheless embraces a kind of neo-paganism but with a "scientific" or "modernist" framing or lens.  Such a materialist-magician cannot believe in angels or demons, but he does believe in UFOs or telepathy.  

IN That Hideous Strength the pseudo-scientific villains are in contact with, even doing the bidding of, demons.  But they think of them as "higher life forms" or "extra-terrestrial intelligence."  They call them "macrobes" rather than "spirits."  But evil spirits they are.  

We are living through what many scholars have described as a paradigm shift from Modernity into Postmodernity.  Modernity was characterized by the linear, the literate, the rational, the scientific, the skeptical.  Post-modernity is skeptical of Modernity itself, and is characterized by the eclectic, the emotional, the image (or the icon), the intuitive.  

Modernity brought us modern medicine and vast corporate bureaucracies; postmodernity has brought us the organic homesteading movement.  

Pageau and Dreher suggest - and I think there is definitely something to this - that UFOs are actually phenomena that have been experienced for many centuries, but whereas pre-Modern people would have interpreted them as "spirits", Modernity has given us a different set of lenses to "re-interpret" them as (essentially) astronauts from another planet.  That is something we can understand and wrap our minds around rationally. 
But what if they are of a different order entirely? 

The United Methodist theologian and advocate of "Paleo-orthodoxy" Thomas C. Oden argued that the crumbling of many aspects of Modernity as a world-view has opened a space for the church to rediscover the pre-modern teachers of the faith and a greater openness to the miraculous, the heavenly, the spiritual realities.  This same dynamic may have also created a greater pastoral need for the church's deliverance ministries, as more post-modern people "mess around with" spiritual powers they do not understand.  That's what Pageau and Dreher discuss in this really thought (and prayer) provoking video.

Let the villains in That Hideous Strength be a cautionary tale for us all.