A Counter Spell for Moloch

How to hear the Song of the World from the Belly of Moloch?

Moloch is a biblical demon who eats children, and was used by the poet Allen Ginsberg as a means of giving image to late-stage capitalism and the forces underlying it. Why not read this aloud in the office?

'What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!'

From Howl by Allen Ginsberg

Image by Borja Pindado

For just one example of the presence of Moloch, here is a graph showing suicide statistics for teens over the years that social media became more prevalent due to the availability of smartphones around 2007.

Source: WISQARS/CDC

It’s useful to name Moloch because it gives us a vivid image for complex processes that may otherwise be invisible.

The question I’d like to ask here is how do we hear the song of the world from within the belly of Moloch?

The song of the world the irreducible sense of the sacred that great art and religion try to express without squashing it. It’s what links mathematics to music, egrets to elections, and myth to daily life. It’s your most treasured memory. The bittersweet sense of a life well lived. It’s the wild geese, high in the clean blue air:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things. 

Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

As an antidote to too much Moloch, some suggest listening to nature, learning the local rhythms of the landscape, paying attention like an indigenous person, to the more-than-human presences around us.

This seems like a good idea. Not just good, vital.

But twenty minutes of meditation isn’t going to do it. Sending your kid to forest school isn’t going to do it. Moloch is far older and stronger than that, late-stage capitalism being his most evolved form, like Charizard is to Charmander. The seed of the demon was already present in Neolithic times, where Promethean fire allowed us to manipulate and control nature through agriculture. That same capacity for abstraction has intensified beyond all measure.

We’ve been in Moloch’s digestive system for a long time, and unlike when Ginsberg wrote that poem, Moloch’s digestive system now has AI-back social media, hyper sonic missiles, CRISPR, advanced information wars, intensified climate crisis. There are sixteen billion smartphone in existence; Moloch’s eyes and ears we carry around in our pockets. Moloch’s mouth that whispers ‘Look at me. Speak to me. You will be fulfilled.’

But as old as Moloch is, as powerful as he’s become, the lineage linking us to the more-than-human community is older.

‘Our bodies have formed themselves in delicate reciprocity with the manifold textures, sounds, and shapes of an animate earth — our eyes have evolved in subtle interaction with other eyes, as our ears are attuned by their very structure to the howling of wolves and the honking of geese.’

~ David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous

This is the beauty of co-evolution. The strength and age of those invisible bridges that join us to the soul of the world mean that, with consistent practice, a counter-spell can be woven against Moloch. What that ecology of practice looks like will be different for each person, but it does need to be consistent, involved, dedicated, because the presence of Moloch is so all encompassing.

'Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy!'

We enter Moloch’s digestive system at birth, into a civilisation that his been marinating in his stomach juices for a long time. The mind-body split alluded to by Ginsberg is just one element, stitched so deeply into our thinking that it’s become invisible.

Given all this, what ecology of practice, what collection of habits or rituals, do you feel provides enough resistance to Moloch? Do you feel adrift or alone in this? If not, what part does community play for you?

the cleaners are scrubbing the Institute lavatories
because women are supposed to do that.

the girls are typing in the Institute offices
because women are dedicated and careful

the women are assembling printed circuits
because woman are good at delicate work
and women’s eyes are expendable

the young men are doing their PhDs
because young men are obedient and ambitious
and someone wants warheads
laser rangefinders
hunt and destroy capabilities
multichannel night seeking radar
and science is neutral

back home the wives of the PhD students are having babies
because women are maternal and loving
and who else can have children but women?

at the top of the tower the old men and the middle aged men
and sometimes one woman professor
meet to form plans, cadge funds and run the place
because obedient young men turn into obedient old men
and it’s all for the good of the country
and defence funds are good for science
and science is neutral
and no one notices Moloch.

the woman bring them
clean toilets
cups of coffee
typescripts
micro circuits oh so neatly assembled
and children

and it’s hard to see Moloch because he is both far away
and everywhere
and no one asks to whom they are all obedient

and they say, “Who’s Moloch? Never heard of him”
as out in the dark Moloch belches
and grows redder and redder
and fatter and fatter
as he eats the children

Working for Moloch by Mary MaCann