In a provocative post on America’s faith in technology, Charles Mudede took off from my recent Obscenity in Black and Blue and soared with it.

This “great belief in technology” is not secular but closely linked with a great belief in American awesomeness…

The certainty of American awesomeness that led to the war in Iraq or to the current destruction of the Gulf of Mexico, has been rooted in one, politically powerful branch of American Christianity. And what has feed much of this overrepresented group’s tireless (and often comical) resistance to the hard facts of, say, Darwinism, has been the belief that American greatness cannot be separated from divine providence, from supernatural agency.

When Charles soars, I often feel like I’m in a tiny Piper Cub straining to get off the ground, but I love that he gets back to the real meaning of awesome — not just neat or cool, but full of awe.   Awe-inspiring. that is, as well as potentially awful/awe-full.  And he’s right:  that sense of awe is essentially religious.  That is, it’s faith-based.

Our conviction that technology has the answers — in this case, to cap the burst oil well under the Gulf — is now revealed as the article of faith it has always been.  One major impulse behind religious faith is to create a sense of order in the universe, and through order, control.  We are no longer hapless, meaningless, pawns of existence.  Faith might seem to be about humility, but more often, it’s the opposite.  Through faith, in whatever god, we aggrandize ourselves.  We assure ourselves of our meaningfulness, our purpose (as in that terrifyingly mechanistic idea of “the purpose-driven life”).   Faith puts us in control, gives us the illusion that we possess the key to it all.

Of course if we really thought technology invincible, we wouldn’t need faith in it.   So to suppress that awareness, we fetishize technology — we make it into a fetish, worshipped for its magical powers.   We take applied science and turn it into an article of  faith.  We think it all-powerful, invincible.  Until it isn’t.

You read this, obviously, courtesy of technology.  But remember when the screen crashes and you feel utterly vulnerable.  TDS — technology deprivation syndrome — kicks in.  You feel bereft, helpless, cut off from the omniscience and the omnipotence of the Web.   You’ve been dropped into a void.  Your god has failed.   Examine that feeling closer and I suspect it’s close to that of an addict suddenly cut off from his or her drug — and that the flood of relief when “service is restored” is very like the first hit of a restored supply of meth or heroin.  All memory of vulnerability vanishes.  Wheeeee…. we’re flying again.   Until the next crash.

We can hardly say our faith in oil companies has been shattered (though it would be nice, if absurdly naive, to think that their faith in themselves has).  Presumably the BP engineers who insisted on riskier, less expensive blowout-prevention procedures did so in full faith that they would work.  Well, make that partial faith.  They were playing the odds, and they knew it.  Always a dangerous thing to do when gods are concerned, especially when it’s you that’s trying to play God.

Did they never hear of the Golem, or see a Frankenstein movie?   Never hear the line “the monster lives”?    Now here we are, stuck with a real-life monster movie.   Simultaneously sickened and fascinated, terrified and thrilled, we watch it with horror — and a sense of terrible awe.

This live feed of oil belching into the Gulf is currently one of the most “popular” on the Web.

I can see why.  It has the horrible fascination of obscenity — a kind of never-ending money shot.  The relentless, black, viscous gush into the Virgin-Mary blue of the floodlit water makes for an almost perfect visual metaphor of evil:

Yes, I am aware that ‘evil’ is  a religious term.   How can a proud agnostic use such a word?  I trust my guts.  As I look at this, I am sickened.  The feeling starts in my throat, travels down to the pit of my stomach, then makes its way up again into my throat, leaving me with such a deep disgust that I feel dirty, degraded.

I think this visceral reaction is simply a human response to evil.  You don’t need religious, satanic formulations to recognize evil when you stare it in the face.   If you doubt that evil, the NYT today reported on an internal BP document which makes it clear that though there was a better way to secure the mile-deep well, BP chose a riskier and less effective way as “the best economic case.”   In the name of the Father Profit, that is.

But then I may be wrong.  Perhaps the popularity of this feed is simply due to the desperate hope to see it stop.  Or to the fascination with the pornography of oil-drilling language — “junk shots” and “top kills.”   Or to the gruesome obsession with disaster, as with the endless replaying  of the space shuttle Challenger explosion in 1986.  Then the pretty patterns were white on sky blue;  now they’re black on water blue.  Either way, they’re obscene.

Interesting things happen when you stop thinking of oil as a resource and start seeing it as a religion.   How else explain the non-rational, all-encompassing human devotion to the stuff?

Charles Mudede brings a gently sardonic brilliance to bear on this on Slog, the blog of Seattle’s alt-hip weekly The Stranger.  On offshore drilling platforms:

They are magnificent, they are the descendants of Our Lady of Chartres, they are the cathedrals of the oil industry. Indeed, recognition of this connection will add to our understanding of why it is that Christians on the right side of politics so deeply admire offshore drilling—they can’t help but be impressed by the almost Gothic severity of an offshore platform, out there in the sea like a cathedral on a mountain.

Face to face with the industrial sublime —  the energy-producing, distance-defeating, plasticizing miracle of oil, as essential to modern society as the sun was to ancient ones — what can a mere human do but submit and worship?   Simply by living as we do, we are all followers of the cult of oil, all members of a church that far surpasses any other in size and wealth.   Helplessly dependent on it in every aspect of our daily lives — give us this day our daily oil — we abjectly acknowledge its power to sustain us.  And panic as we realize the other side of its power, which is to destroy us.

It all gets very biblical:   like ancient Israelites who had the temerity to worship other gods than Yahweh, we tremble as the divine wrath turns on us, and with such sublime irony:   the current Flood is not just oil instead of water, but oil into water.

See Charles Mudede’s  full post here.  And lest anyone accuse me of losing perspective, check out this earlier Slog post by Dominic Holden, superimposing the current outline of the Gulf oil spill on a map of western Washington state.   Do the same superimposition over a 400-mile-long  swathe of your area, and experience awe.

Posed?  Unposed?  Shades of the end of Kubrick’s ‘2001’?   Is there some special irony in the fact that part of Nevil Shute’s post-nuclear-apocalypse novel ‘On the Beach‘ took place in an abandoned oil refinery near Seattle?

Here:  oil-spill clean-up workers suited up  yesterday at Dauphin Island, Alabama.

Photo:  Michael Appleton, New York Times