The Sacred Spaces of Margaret Wertheim
by Paul Mitchell
Zadok Perspectives Issue No. 63
Autumn 1999

Part 2

In the erudite yet lucid style for which she became renowned world-wide after the success of Pythagoras's Trousers-her book tracking the exclusion of women from physics and religion-Wertheim takes readers on a tour from medieval dualistic conceptions of space to what she sees as the new dualism of cyberspace.

Wertheim reminds us that before the world-at-large inherited its current view of a purely physical universe, a place where space is everything (even matter is now considered to be no more than space folded in on itself), space had almost no place at all. In the medieval world the idea of space was dominated by Aristotelian logic which claimed that the universe could not contain within it a void, or empty space. This dovetailed well with the Christian view of a universe divided into 'full' physical space and the 'full' spiritual space of heaven, which lay beyond the earth's atmosphere.
Through history, however, science gradually nudged the idea of spiritual space off the map of the universe. Despite the fact that theology had worked hand-in-hand with science over the centuries to develop our understanding of the universe, in our late 20th century thinking, through relativity and hyperspace theory, there is no place, according to the new physics, left for God to be.
For Wertheim, that is why cyberspace is so important in any history of space; it has become the modern equivalent of medieval heavenly space. It is somewhere for the human understanding of 'spirit' or 'soul' to be. She writes that cyberspace is "a kind of electronic res cognitans (Descartes' idea of a realm within reality of thoughts, feelings and spiritual experience), a new space for the playing out of some of those immaterial aspects of humanity that have been denied a home in the purely physicalist world picture".

So the mechanistic, technological view of the world has created its own electronic possibility of heaven. Forget the body, forget physical community-log on, download and take off for cyber-utopia. That has been the view of authors such as Nicholas Negroponti, Kevin Kelly, Hans Moravec and Michael Heim, since the inception of the internet. But it is not a view Margaret Wertheim is pointing her cursor toward.

"They have promoted this idea that cyberspace is going to be a great utopian realm, this great heavenly realm where all sorts of things will be equal and democratic and possible", Wertheim says. "Everyone will have access to information and everyone will be able to commune equally and freely, and therefore more deeply."

Nevertheless, Wertheim does agree that cyberspace has significant benefits for humanity. Significantly, she says, it is forcing us to take seriously again the notion of the "immaterial". She is also acutely aware in her profession of cyberspace's benefits in the transfer of knowledge and information. And she lauds its community-building potential, its outlet for creativity and its largely egalitarian nature (at least while e-mail and chat groups remain purely textual!). But she is amazed by the failure of many cyber visionaries to recognise this (inherently human) technology's potential for hell as well as heaven.

"They make the claim that cyberspace is going to be a moral space of equality," Wertheim says. "You see this at the end of Nicholas Negroponti's book, Digital Domain, where he makes the claim that because of the very nature of cyberspace it will create more equal communities. I don't think that is true at all".

To: Part 3

Paul Mitchell Paul Mitchell is Associate Editor at Zadok and edits the e-zine www.shootthe messenger.com.au. (See Alan Gijspers' review of The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace)