Gods Walk Alongside Us
An Essay on YOUR Attention and the Benevolent, Wrathful, Jealous Beings Who Thrive Upon It
Dear Reader,
As an avid, lifelong reader myself, I often encounter ideas or characters or even whole books that make me both excited and envious. Excited because the idea is so great. Envious because I can no longer have that particular great idea.
”American Gods” by Neil Gaiman is the ultimate example of this. As a writer who is still young in his craft, though increasingly less young in his time on this earth, this is the sort of book that makes me think, in moments of dry witticism, “what’s the point, Neil already wrote the book I wanted to write.”
No matter the skill I develop, no matter the ideas I get the chance to unpack and add flesh to, I’ll never get to write “American Gods”.
But then I remember that our ideas don’t belong to us in the first place, and neither do our works, and really, neither do our lives. And so every bit of art is and always has been built upon other art, and that’s a GOOD thing. I’ll keep writing, and one day when people look to my works and say, “Oh, I see Neil’s influence here”, they’ll say it with a warm smile, not a condescending frown.
I guess that makes today’s essay part fan letter and part rhetorical continuation. However you look at it, these words wouldn’t exist without “American Gods” and I only hope I can do its legacy justice.
-Charles
“Attention is the number one asset.”
-Gary Vaynerchuk
When I talk about gods with a lowercase-g, I imagine your mind quickly pulls up some images from mythology, stories of larger than life characters from some distant past whose exact details are shrouded by the mists of time. I wouldn’t be surprised if those images have a cartoonish quality. Perhaps you’re imagining white bearded Zeus with his thunderbolts in hand, or red faced Thor swinging his hammer. As far as you’re concerned, gods with a lowercase-g aren’t real anymore, if they ever were.
But this cartoonish perspective on gods masks the truth. People interact with lowercase-g gods every day. And I’m not talking about what Alan Watts meant when he quoted G. K. Chesterton as saying, “But now a great thing in the street, seems any human nod, where move in strange democracies, the million masks of God.”
You may not be conscious of it, but you worship, hourly. You make sacrifices, daily. You champion the spread of your gods, and you even participate in the destruction of gods that oppose yours.
You’re skeptical, I know. How could you, who sees these old gods as backwards and barbaric and anti-scientific (or anti your uppercase-g God), possibly be participating in such a process?
Simple. You are god food. Or more specifically, your attention is god food. Your attention is the currency of the gods, the resource upon which their influence is founded. When you invest your attention in some idea or action, that is worship. When you choose to spend your limited attention on one activity and not another, that is sacrifice. When you can’t stop talking about a favorite new restaurant that “you just have to try!”, that is spreading the word. When you outgrow that thing you used to be so into, you take your god’s lifeblood away, weakening them, possibly unto death.
In his book “American Gods”, Neil Gaiman shows the reader a vision of America where mythological entities aren’t gathering dust in libraries. In his fictional America, ancient gods walk and talk and cheat and steal and struggle to corral the increasingly fickle attention of followers. This America is also populated with new gods, gods we don’t immediately recognize as gods because we haven’t been trained to think of them as such, gods like TikTok and the 24 hour news cycle and the morning commute and the virtual assistant enabled coffee pot.
As with any good novel, Gaiman encourages the reader to fill in the blanks with their own imagination. He doesn’t fully articulate the divine-attention calculus. But his gift of the kernel of the idea allows us to pick up where he left off, to expand and embellish.
So let's start by clarifying this more inclusive definition of lowercase-g gods. A god inhabits idea-space. But it isn’t enough to say that a god is just any idea, any thing that attracts a person’s attention. Gods are necessarily bigger than the individual humans who worship them. For an idea to become a god, it must first get outside the head of its originating human. Second, the idea must be sufficiently coherent and stable that it can be shared with other people.
At a minimum, a lowercase-g god is an externalized, collectivized idea.
We can put aside notions of omnipotence and omnipresence. The old gods were neither. And the new gods have no greater claim upon these qualities than the old did, no matter the pretensions of their youthful vanity. The power of a lowercase-g god is measured by the depth and breadth of the attention that is invested in them. The more people talk about them, the more powerful they are. The more an individual or a group structures their life around attending to a god, the more influential that god becomes.
And just as people can learn from one another, one individual adopting the successful strategies of another, the gods can learn from one another too. Once upon a time, most, if not all, gods were rooted in place (the pre-Socratic Greeks for example had proper names for the spirits that inhabited every glade and spring). But along came those innovators, the Israelites, and they had the genius idea of placing their god in a casket and carrying him before them onto the battlefield. Whether or not they actually won battles due to their god’s intercession, they did win battles, and word of their success spread and the idea caught on. People saw the value of transportable gods and so their gods adapted. People began to trust that their gods could, and would, follow them to new lands.
Though there was some hesitancy in the transitional period.
Gaiman perfectly encapsulates this challenging shift in mindset. He tells a short story of the first Norsemen to land upon the northeastern coast of North America. The small group of seasick men begin to regret having made such a dangerous voyage, saying
“We are far, far from our homes and our hearths, far from the seas we know and the lands we love. Here on the edge of the world we will be forgotten by our gods.”
Their leader clambered to the top of a great rock, and he mocked them for their lack of faith. “The all-father made the world,” he shouted. “He built it with his hands from the shattered bones and the flesh of Ymir, his grandfather. He placed Ymir’s brains in the sky as clouds, and his salt blood became the seas we crossed. If he made the world, do you not realize that he created this land as well? And if we die here as men, shall we not be received into his hall?”
And the men cheered and laughed.
This story of their all-father was not new to the men, but the idea needed reinforcing, it needed renewed attention to be maintained. If their leader had not spoken up, the men might have allowed their god to die amidst their despair. Only through external collective reinforcement did their all-father complete the voyage alongside them.
Having gods in the first place might be a uniquely human thing. I won’t sit here and say I know what non-human animals are thinking, but I will point to an interesting mechanism that humans have that other mammals don’t.
Humans are uniquely capable of “joint attention” (with the limited addition of canines).
When I point at something, you look where I am pointing. When I speak about something, you conceptualize that thing for yourself. Even when I don’t explicitly invite you to share my focus, you can infer the object of my attention by following the direction of my gaze (white sclera are rare outside of humans).
Just as humans, in so many creation myths, are brought to life by word or by breath, so too must the gods be brought out of our heads into the world. Joint attention is the mechanism by which an idea is externalized and shared. Joint attention is necessary for an idea to become a god.
Before a god is externalized, when it is still an idea in the head of a visionary human, it is like a seed, a god-kernel. So long as it remains trapped in the human’s head, that god-kernel will never be able to amass enough energy to exert influence on the world. Its maximum available attention will be one human’s worth, and in practice it will be much less than that. Even the most all-consuming of ideas are hard pressed to claim 100% of a person’s attention 100% of the time.
Externalization alone isn’t enough. I can tell you all about my ideals and beliefs, but if they don’t resonate with you in a way that encourages you to take them up and make them your own, then their power remains limited to my singular attention span. Still an idea, not a god.
Only once an idea becomes adopted by a community can it begin to rise to godly status. The community will define enough of the idea’s edges to be able to conveniently talk about it and each in their own time, culture and ritual and common practices will accrete to form the character of this lowercase-g god.
The idea has become a god and it can now persist through time, evolving independently of its human originator.
The new god can now persist beyond a single human generation, often outliving or emigrating from its originating community. Age becomes a source of power since lowercase-g gods exemplify what Nassim Taleb calls the “Lindy Effect'' which can be summarized to say that the longer a non-perishable thing (an idea) has been around, the longer it can be expected to remain around.
In the age of the internet, where “good” ideas have become partial-pennies a dozen, new ideas are born and then discarded before they ever have the chance to take root in culture as new gods. Even the new gods seem to be short lived, think dial-up modems and Giga Pets. For a brief period in the late 90’s and early 00’s, not a day went by without the buzzing call to worship of the modem or the devotional care-routine for a handheld critter. But today, both gods are mostly memories.
But old gods die hard. Just ask Death.
Another accomplished author, George R. R. Martin, famously wrote about old gods and new gods and their influence over culture. But one of his swordmasters saw through the gods and their posturing, saying, “There is only one god and his name is Death. And there is only one thing we say to Death: not today.”
Even in the real world, people are far from overcoming their need to invest attention into Death. Whole industries exist with the aim of defeating death, and yet all the time and the money invested in breaking Death’s hold upon humans seems only to further empower the ancient god, causing people to think about him more.
Each person’s fears of dying, whispered in confidence to a loved one, are prayers that further strengthen this age old god.
Growing up, I heard many stories about the Olympians, the pantheon of Greek gods, and as a child I never understood why they were so quarrelsome, so jealous and vengeful. Why did the gods, who were supposed to represent societal ideals, always behave so badly? Surely it wasn’t just an entire mythology full of clickbait?
The answer may lie in the notion of sacrifice.
If attention is the primary resource of the gods, and attention is a limited resource, then when a human chooses to invest their attention in one god, it precludes them from investing that attention in another. When an ancient Greek herdsman sacrificed his prize goat to one god, he necessarily couldn’t sacrifice that goat to another god. The same was true of his attention, his prayers. Hence the heavenly war for human attention and the jealous nature of the gods.
Humans have a choice in where they place their attention (though more and more, the modern world is being populated with vampiric gods who forcibly capture attentions and don’t let them go). The smart human treats sacrifice as an investment, placing his attention in the present upon a god who will give good returns in the future. Over time, the more a god has smart humans investing in it, the more successful it becomes. It is a positive feedback system. Successful gods attract success-oriented humans who improve their station through their involvement with this god which further elevates the station of the god within the pantheon of available gods, which attracts more success-oriented humans, ad infinitum.
This attention resource is limited by the number of people in the world, as well as by the discipline and focus of those people. True, some modifications to that discipline and focus can be made via social engineering, I’m thinking about the attempts at religious utopia in colonial New England or the theocratic autocracies of some modern Muslim states. In both examples, society is structured to encourage (i.e. mandate) a devotional quality in everyday actions which is further reinforced by weekly, or even daily, community religious services. But these large engineering projects seem to be the exception throughout a human history where attention typically flows and accumulates in a more organic fashion.
So of course the gods are jealous. The attention marketplace is saturated and there aren’t enough resources to go around.
How do they solve the problem? The gods go to war.
Today, the fight for attentions seems to be raging hotter than ever, at least in America. Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube each want you to watch their short videos and only their short videos (it is increasingly a sin to navigate off-platform). X is circling overhead, its twittery blue bird having transformed into a scavenging eagle filled with hopes of feasting on all three in due time. Amazon wants you to never leave the shelter of your Alexa-connected home where you can easily have all of your needs and most of your wants delivered on your preferred day with just “one click”. But Walmart, the great disruptor of my childhood ruraldom, is remodeling stores all over the country to show that it won’t roll over and let Amazon force it out of your budget balancing exercises. The list of lowercase-g gods goes on longer than I care to write it: Generative AI, luxury goods, pictures of the food you eat (or wish you could eat), video games, fad diets, your career, pickleball.
They’re all fighting for your attention and they’re all playing for keeps and when the fighting gets hot, sometimes gods die, just Ask Jeeves.
But the fact that I can talk about Jeeves means maybe he isn’t really dead. As we’ve established, ideas die hard, and gods die harder. The more you try to kill them, the more you energize them. In Gaiman’s words, Jeeves may well be one of, “the gods who have been forgotten, and now might as well be dead. [He] can be found only in dry histories. [He is] gone, all gone, but [his name and his image] remain with us.”
But simply talking about a god keeps it from dying out completely. Every time their name is spoken it is a prayer keeping their spark of life smoldering. So long as their name remains, a god can potentially be given new life, perhaps in a different guise and by wholly different people than originated the idea. But all gods have something of the Phoenix embedded within them.
They are rare gods indeed who die out completely, who Gaiman would say, “have passed out of memory. Even their names are lost. The people who worshiped them are as forgotten as their gods. Their totems are long since broken and cast down. Their last priests died without passing on their secrets. Gods die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered.”
Consider the memes you see floating around on Facebook, typically perpetuated by people staring down the barrel of retirement, memes that bemoan the loss of cursive script being taught in school, or photos of rotary dial phones saying “share if you still know what this old tech does”. As pervasive as these things may once have been, it is possible that in another three-or-so generations they’ll exist only in memes (assuming memes still exist, they’re new gods too after all).
Powerful, world changing ideas, good or bad, are not new. Today’s new gods sometimes seem too big to handle. Perhaps because they have access to our high-speed transportation and communication tools, their power seems greater than ever, borderline overwhelming.
But humans have a long history of contending with the gods, managing the benefits and the risks they represent.
Rather than scoff at the ancients for their silly superstitions, what might we learn from their experiences?
How did they worship in a way that was healthy and productive?
How did they constrain the destructive influence of the vampiric gods?
Perhaps studying the patterns of worship out of the past can empower skeptical, modern people to have a healthier, more conscious relationship with the gods that feed on their attention.
Attentively Yours,
Charles Batey