Mandy Brown (same previous post):

IN THE THIRD BOOK in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hainish sequence, City of Illusions, Earth has been taken over by a people known as the Shing. Across the planet, humans live in small villages or else move nomadically with their herds, prevented from knowing their history or from rebuilding the ancient cities and knowledge that the Shing razed and erased. Meanwhile the Shing, themselves very small in number, live sheltered in an extraordinary skyward city, perched above a canyon in buildings made of semi-transparent material. When Ramarren, a visitor from a distant planet, arrives on earth, he awakens in this terrible place:

Quoting Le Guin:

He woke. It took a while, but he woke, and managed to sit up. He had to bury his acutely aching head in his arms for a while to get over the vertigo the movement caused, and at first was aware only that he was sitting on the floor of some room, a floor which seemed to be warm and yielding, almost soft, like the flank of some great beast. Then he lifted his head, and got his eyes into focus, and looked about him.

He was alone, in the midst of a room so uncanny that it revived his dizziness for a while. There was no furniture. Walls, floor and ceiling were all of the same translucent stuff, which appeared soft and undulant like many thicknesses of pale green veiling, but was tough and slick to the touch. Queer carvings and crimpings and ridges forming ornate patterns all over the floor were, to the exploring hand, nonexistent; they were eye-deceiving paintings, or lay beneath a smooth transparent surface. The angles where walls met were thrown out of true by optical-illusion devices of cross-hatching and pseudo-parallels used as decoration; to pull the corners into right angles took an effort of will, which was perhaps an effort of self-deception, since they might, after all, not be right angles. But none of this teasing subtlety of decoration so disoriented [him] as the fact that the entire room was translucent. Vaguely, with the effect of looking into a depth of very green pond-water, underneath him another room was visible. Overhead was a patch of light that might be the moon, blurred and greened by one or more intervening ceilings. Through one wall of the room strings and patches of brightness were fairly distinct, and he could make out the motion of the lights of helicopters or aircars. Through the other three walls these outdoor lights were much dimmer, blurred by the veilings of further walls, corridors, rooms. Shapes moved in these other rooms. He could see them but there was no identifying them: features, dress, color, size was all blurred away. A blot of shadow somewhere in the green depths suddenly rose and grew less, greener, dimmer, fading into the maze of vagueness. Visibility without discrimination, solitude without privacy. It was extraordinarily beautiful, this masked shimmer of lights and shapes through inchoate planes of green, and extraordinarily disturbing.

I haven’t read much Le Guin, but this is possibly the most haunting image I’ve read of the world we all seem to be staring down the barrel of, and the book was published in 1967.

“There was no furniture. Walls, floor and ceiling were all of the same translucent stuff…”

Brown more recently referenced, via Byung-Chul Han, chapter IV of Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition. Here’s Arendt:

It is this durability which gives the things of the world their relative independence from men who produced and use them, their “objectivity” which makes them withstand, “stand against” and endure, at least for a time, the voracious needs and wants of their living makers and users. From this viewpoint, the things of the world have the function of stabilizing human life, and their objectivity lies in the fact that—in contradiction to the Heraclitean saying that the same man can never enter the same stream—men, their ever-changing nature notwithstanding, can retrieve their sameness, that is, their identity, by being related to the same chair and the same table. In other words, against the subjectivity of men stands the objectivity of the man-made world rather than the sublime indifference of an untouched nature, whose overwhelming elementary force, on the contrary, will compel them to swing relentlessly in the circle of their own biological movement, which fits so closely into the over-all cyclical movement of nature’s household.

As Brown and Han point out, the world of screens, and the larger modern world of The Machine (or what Wendell Berry called The Objective), lacks — and this is wildly understated — that durability, and is therefore starved, and starving us, of stability.

“There was no furniture. Walls, floor and ceiling were all of the same translucent stuff…”

On Le Guin’s City of Illusions, Brown continues (worth quoting at length):

The disturbances grow as Ramarren comes to realize that the Shing lie as easily as they speak. They even lie telepathically, as if their very being is a lie. They claim that they are humans whose forebears dressed themselves in the myth of an alien superpower in order to unite humanity and end, or prevent, a great war. But they have destroyed so much—every city, school, library, museum, network—that there is nothing to compare their lies to: every lie they tell exists on its own, unquestioned and unquestionable, not true but not false either. Isolated in time and space, with no referents to knowledge or history, the lies become a kind of anti-truth that, on contact with the truth, annihilates them both.

Among the Shing are humans known as “toolmen.” As children, the toolmen were identified as having “subnormal minds” and brought to the city to be plugged in to the psychocomputers, raised to become servants to the Lords, as the Shing are known. Mute and compliant, they seem a mere extension of the machines they operate: flesh-and-blood computers completing tasks to fulfill their program, with no thought or belief or desire to get in the way. A toolman is the perfect slave: he has no self to rail against his enslavement.

Ramarren seems at first to be treated as an honored guest by the Shing. He is given the comforts a body needs, and spoken to with a formalized, if stilted, respect. But he soon learns that the Shing have twice assaulted his mind, have hunted through it in search of the secret location of his home planet, as if his mind were nothing more than an encrypted storage device, a resource to be hacked and exploited. The Shing’s appetite for the acquisition and destruction of knowledge extends not only to his people but to his own thoughts. And their lies (their anti-truths) are their greatest weapon.

Ramarren—alone and unarmed—has but one small hope against their methods:

Against them he could never prevail except, perhaps, through the one quality no liar can cope with, integrity. Perhaps it would not occur to them that a man could so will to be himself, to live his life, that he might resist them even when helpless in their hands.

Integrity seems a meek defense against the Shing’s aircars and psychocomputers, the parahypnotic drugs, the gravity-defying city and deadly laser guns. And yet that integrity is what allows Ramarren to come back to himself, to finally see through the Shing’s lies, to briefly and decisively disarm them and make his escape. It is in his unremitting longing for life that Ramarren is finally free.

As Brown mentions in the more recent post above, the lack of stability, especially in the screen-world, requires more — and more, and more, and more, and more — vigilance; “and vigilance is exhausting.”

On the one hand, integrity also requires vigilance (more and more and more…), and is also exhausting. But saying that out loud makes it seem unsurprising and historically true to the nature of human integrity, though without diminishing the genuine and even currently increased exhaustion of it.

On the other hand, there is a kind of integrity that is a relaxing response to exhausting vigilance. I recently (just yesterday, apparently) quoted Steve Robinson, who at one point in his life decided to stop being so vigilant about his vigilance and instead focus on being what he knew he ought to be according to the knowledge he had. The weariness of vigilance led him to a kind of rest in integrity.

Maybe it’s a kind of every-day Sabbath. I’m aiming for that.

Mandy Brown:

What AI is is an ideology—a system of ideas that has swept up not only the tech industry but huge parts of government on both sides of the aisle, a supermajority of everyone with assets in the millions and up, and a seemingly growing sector of the journalism class. The ideology itself is nothing new—it is the age-old system of supremacy, granting care and comfort to some while relegating others to servitude and penury—but the wrappings have been updated for the late capital, late digital age, a gaudy new cloak for today’s would-be emperors. Engaging with AI as a technology is to play the fool—it’s to observe the reflective surface of the thing without taking note of the way it sends roots deep down into the ground, breaking up bedrock, poisoning the soil, reaching far and wide to capture, uproot, strangle, and steal everything within its reach. It’s to stand aboveground and pontificate about the marvels of this bright new magic, to be dazzled by all its flickering, glittering glory, its smooth mirages and six-fingered messiahs, its apparent obsequiousness in response to all your commands, right up until the point when a sinkhole opens up and swallows you whole.

Also:

It’s instructive that one of the mechanisms for perpetuating this ideology are chattering bots that speak both fact and falsehood in the same servile and confident tone, their makers unconcerned with the difference. In fact, their makers seem entirely concerned with obviating that difference, with disappearing distinctions between knowledge and ignorance, without which truth becomes entirely a product of power. Proving the superiority of some humans over others has repeatedly failed; what better way to continue the effort than the deployment of technology that makes proof of anything impossible, such that making something true requires only the right person to declare it so.

Also:

Intelligence has never been an objective quality that can be ascertained the way we measure the (actually increasing) carbon in the atmosphere. It is a political device that preserves power and care for those deemed worthy of it, and which simultaneously withdraws such care from everyone else. Its latest incarnation, with that modifier artificial, asserts its power through programs that wash accountability from the programmers: control, wealth, and power run up to founders and investors while harms run down to the rest of us with no possibility of redress.

Also(!):

L. M. Terman, whose aim in creating the Stanford-Binet IQ test was to weed out undesirables, remarked that:

The evolution of modern industrial organization together with the mechanization of processes by machinery is making possible the larger and larger utilization of inferior mentality. One man with ability to think and plan guides the labor of ten or twenty laborers, who do what they are told to do and have little need for resourcefulness or initiative. (Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, page 212)

This has always been the intention of AI, and where its connection to the intelligence-rankers of years past is cruelly apparent: if those in power cannot prove that a great many people are already inferior then they will bring that inferiority about by forcing them to use a tool that diminishes their intellectual and creative capacity. I think of the engineers and designers who have spent decades honing their skills, deepening personal and public creative practices in service both to the users of the systems they built and to their own brilliant spirits, now being told to park themselves in front of a sycophantic oracle that can be appeased only through rote dictates, and which never tires of lying even as their own minds and muscles atrophy from disuse. What is being automated here: the work or the people?

Steve Robinson:

I realized that I had read about the Christian life for decades and I knew more about it than I was being. I made a conscious decision to stop reading about how to be a better Christian and start just BEING one according to the knowledge I had.

I guess I could say I grew weary. Weary of the agitation. Weary of the contentiousness. Weary of the insults. Weary of the hostility. Weary of the joylessness. Weary of the crusades. Weary of the havoc. All in the name of and service to “truth”.

Steve Robinson:

Like everyone else who comes to the church “already catechized” I did not know that internet Orthodoxy is like reading an online dating profile and looking at carefully chosen, Photo-shopped pictures. The personality, habits, disposition, attractiveness, and compatibility of my new theological lover were just fantasies that I’d constructed. Of course they were… I had never talked to her, gone out on a date, and encountered her in person. I had never shared a meal with her, known her relatives (often from a foreign country), dealt with cultural shock, accommodated her idiosyncrasies, hung out with her raucous family at holidays, met her drunk uncle, learned her language, or sat in prolonged silence with her. Everything I knew about her was second hand hearsay by other people who had never been out on a date with her either, but had opinions about her personality filtered through their own “personal research” online. 

When I showed up at vespers unannounced, I caught the reality of Orthodoxy in its tattered bathrobe and house slippers, no make-up, smoking an unfiltered Camel with a mason jar of cheap chardonnay in her hand. (Actually, one of my catechetical experiences was helping with a Mission parish where the priest would go outside during the long chanter’s parts of Orthros/Matins and smoke in the parking lot.) I repressed my disappointment with what I found, because there IS an ineffable, irresistible, unexpected beauty when you meet her face to face that no description, dogma, testimonial or digital experience can give you.

So, like many who come to the Church via the internet, I had found the Church and became Orthodox for the beauty it promised. And, yes the beauty existed as advertised. As did the mind-boggling theological nuances, the profound spiritual direction, and rich liturgical depth. But, unlike the internet, real people with real spiritual lives and real issues also existed in it, and I could not delete, unfriend, or fire a condescending, insulting comment over their digital heads and go to bed checking how many “likes” it got, and smirk at my correctness and cleverness. When you sit across from someone at coffee hour the rules of the game are incarnational, not digital and far more complicated.

… I hoped for saints but over the years I found the church of Corinthian libertines and Cretan gluttons. I hoped for one uniform understanding of the Gospel of mercy, but found legalistic fundamentalist Galatians who viewed the Gospel as “law”. I hoped for the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace but found Timothean contentious schismatics who wrangled over words and created factions in the church. I hoped for humble pious clergy but found 3rd John clerics who loved their pre-eminence and respectful greetings in the marketplace (and the internet). I hoped for the un-spotted bride of Christ but found the seven churches of Revelation: Ephesians who had left their first love, pagan Pergamites, lukewarm Laodiceans. I hoped for a church with one mind but found nit-picking Pharisees and savvy Sadducees. I hoped for speaking the truth in love but found arrogant, angry, condescending apologists. I hoped for a purer Christianity and found synchretistic and superstitious Colossians. […]

… I was a spiritual adolescent raised by the wolves of the internet (and in many things was still an infant). I thought I was more mature than I was, and thought I knew more than I did. I knew SOME stuff, but not enough stuff, nor the right stuff. I knew how to live in the small world I made up in my head but not how to live in a big, real world I’d never had to actually navigate and not just pontificate about. I “knew” almost everything, judged almost everyone, and understood almost nothing. […]

… Contrary to my old Bible church’s teachings, New Testament Christianity didn’t have to be re-discovered, recovered, or restored to its minimalistic First Century purity, it has always existed both in maximalist dysfunction and piety.…

… And just as the presence of Christ Himself in the flesh and His twelve first-hand witnesses and seventy disciples empowered by the Holy Spirit couldn’t give us a prettier picture of the Church in the New Testament, so 2,000 years of tradition can not either.…

In actuality, that is good news and bad news, but not really bad news, just real news.

Wendell Berry:

This limitless process of industrialization, what it has done, as far as I see it, is liberate our vices and suppress the efficacy of our virtues.

GK Chesterton:

The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.

Dominick Baruffi:

The fact that we need to pose the question “why is it wrong to marry a chatbot?” tells us our culture does not possess the kind of robust anthropology needed to withstand the coming AI deluge into our lives. If we don’t know what a human is, or what a human is for, we won’t see any problem with giving in to the Machine. In order to ensure that we do not become something less (or greater, apparently) than human, we must first understand what it is we are fighting for. That territory has always been the church’s domain to cover: celebrating the imago dei present in every human life, endowed with purpose by their Creator and created to worship Him with all they have.

If the church has any hope to remain faithful and relevant in the modern world, she will have to reckon with the crisis of meaning many are experiencing as a side effect of allowing the Machine to exercise total control over their lives. In a world that increasingly believes in hyper-efficiency at all costs, a world that will continue to develop at breakneck speed in the coming years, we cannot resort to being a Jesus-flavored version of the Machine and expect our friends to find that notion intriguing. You cannot win the world by mimicking the world. We need something more radical to counter what the Machine offers: a vision of life that is grounded in reality, saturated with hope, and fiercely tethered to the world God made.

Peco Gaskovski:

During World War II, philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre observed that German-occupied France was never more free, because “every accurate thought” was a conquest over German propaganda. Here’s what Sartre said in 1944:

We were never more free than during the German occupation. We had lost all our rights, beginning with the right to talk. Every day we were insulted to our faces and had to take it in silence. Under one pretext or another, as workers, Jews, or political prisoners, we were deported en masse. Everywhere, on billboards, in the newspapers, on the screen, we encountered the revolting and insipid picture of ourselves that our oppressors wanted us to accept. And, because of all this, we were free. Because the Nazi venom seeped even into our thoughts, every accurate thought was a conquest.

That last phrase will always be true. Every accurate thought is a conquest.

And yet today, in the Machine age, what threatens our ability to think accurately is often different from the threat in Sartre’s time. Our devices are certainly capable of spewing venom; but they also spew a type of vanity. […]

The limitation of the digital world is that it isn’t directly connected to the real one. There’s no earth and soil behind our screens, no raindrops falling, no tree roots sucking up moisture, no muddy footsteps made by human feet. It is a digital representation, a shadow mimicking reality.

This separation from the real gives the online world a certain latitude, a certain stretchiness. […]

[O]nline experiences can coddle our view of the world, even if it is fantasy. This happens not just because people are trying to spread “fake news”. It happens because we have an urge to make sense of the world we live in. But digital content, being so easy to manipulate, can turn the search for real understanding into a search for whatever satisfies us.

So we can end up with blancmange understanding, like a blancmange pastry: a high-sugar trans-fat blob of tasty ideas, without much basis in fact, and with no great nutritional value.

Such distorted ideas become possible because they remain separated from the corrective friction of reality. It will always be easier to stay in the virtual world and keep our distortions…

Naturally, this comes at the cost of the world and of truth.

And what is truth?

What is truth? is also the question that Pontius Pilate asks shortly before sending Jesus to be crucified. It’s a very modern question, but it’s fitting that it was asked by a Roman, because it shows it’s also an eternal question. What is truth? How do we know that we aren’t all living in a dream right now?

Before the crucifixion, Jesus is scourged, leaving him wounded and bloody before the final execution. Jesus is supposed to be God, this infinite power “out there”, but at that moment in the story, he is embodied in physical reality. Even if you are not a religious person, there’s something here that speaks to a question we face in our age.

You see it in the Book of Genesis too. Let there be light. Let there be land. Let there be creatures. God speaks, and words become physical reality. According to this worldview, reality is not a dream, not a virtual simulation. Our consciousness is connected to a body and a physical world where there are aches, sufferings, and even death, but also the beauty of summer skies, raindrops, and the feeling of mud under our feet.

If, as Sartre suggests, every accurate thought is a conquest, then every embodied experience can support that conquest through the corrective friction of life itself.

“We’ll never be able to build an accurate and lifegiving worldview out of stretchy digital goop,” says Peco. “But we don’t have to play the puzzling game, not if we’re determined to seek out the corrective friction of the real world—through our embodiment, agency, connection, and the other spheres shown in the Visual Human Creed.”

Peco refers to these eight spheres as “battlegrounds,” but “not because we are urging you to some kind of militancy. Rather, it’s to point out that there is no neutral ground.” And he adds that you don’t need to take on all eight of them; it can be enough to focus, really focus, on one. “Defend even one sphere thoroughly, and you will save many of the others.”

In the link above, Ruth Gaskovski follows this up with “the 3Rs of Unmachining”: “Recognize the damaging impact of technology wherever it happens, Remove it, and Return to the real world.”

And adds, sharply: “We can read as much Mumford, Kingsnorth, Crawford, Berry, Newport, Carr, Haidt, or any number other tech-critical writers as we will, but if all these insights do not actually translate into our lives, we are only moving mind furniture.”

And, hope-filled-ly: “What we need to focus on is how to live a fully human life. The individuals and families who commit themselves fully to remaining grounded in reality, and on being fully human, have already won the war.”

Jake Meador:

What we are seeing now on the political right in America is a bizarre but not unsurprising spasm. On the one hand, there is a portion of the right—more libertarian in its economic sensibilities and hawkish in its foreign policy—that regards its positions as the best way to resist totalitarianism and antisemitism. Many holding to this package of beliefs are old enough to remember the Soviet Union and to have known people who served in World War II, so it is no surprise that they would be particularly alert to those evils. Elsewhere I have referred to this school as “right-wing conservatives.”

On the other hand, there is a rising generation of right-wingers, often called the new right or perhaps the dissident right, who are not particularly concerned with either of those things. Rather, they feel a deep sense of hopelessness about their lives—they doubt they will ever be able to own a home, escape economic precarity, or start a family. …

Since their adolescent years, many have felt attacked over things largely outside their control—to take one example, often relatively banal expressions of maleness were attacked as “toxic masculinity.” Meanwhile, following the social script handed to them by their elders—whatever you do, go to college!—has mostly just saddled them with enormous amounts of debt as they enter adulthood and find a precarious and uncertain job market. These factors generate a great deal of anger, anger which is often quite understandable. In some cases, this can take a still darker turn, leading to a search for someone to blame.

As a result of all this, they understand their political project as an attempt to use the power of the state to fix the problems that animate them and, often, to punish the people they blame for those problems. … I have referred to this bloc as “right-wing progressives” …

There may be some age and experience that separates these two groups — in fact, I’m certain there is. But what Meador misses, and what I have been soapboxing for nearly a decade, is the fact that these two groups have wide, immense overlap. Maybe even more overlap than non-overlap.

Meador says of the latter group, “This is also the same basic media ecosystem that includes figures like the Tocquevillian Catholic Patrick Deneen, the white nationalist Stephen Wolfe, and right-wing tech leaders like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. All of these distinct figures and the movements they are trying to lead, some far more alarming than others, are trying to either direct these alienated individuals or capitalize on their rage.” The former group may not necessarily “follow” the media ecosystem the way the latter, younger group does, but their anger and alienation has most certainly been capitalized on, in the same way, by the same ecosystem.

I’m not sure it’s possible to make sense of the rest of Meador’s piece with this in mind. In fact, it all sounds very 2015 to me.

I don’t know what exactly is going on on the right. Not so long ago, David Frum, speaking of Trump and the American right, said, “When this is all over, no one will admit to having supported it.” I think the best we can hope for is that some are finding the will to step out and say, “I was never a part of that.”

I don’t think I can get my hopes even that high. But I will say that Meador’s call to reflect on the relationship between Pope John Paul and Ronald Reagan is at least partially encouraging. In that spirit or a similar one — preferably one of common love rather than common hate — I will say that if you know or meet anyone coming out of the “postliberal” fog, embrace them.

Blake Smith:

With the rise of modern science in the seventeenth century, [Hannah Arendt’s student Michael Denneny] observed, reality was coming to be divided between, on the one hand, a domain of objective facts explicable in terms of universally valid laws expressible in mathematical terms, and, on the other hand, domains of contingency or unknowability about which nothing rational can be said. 

The faculty of taste, and the range of phenomena in which it can be found to operate, Denneny argued, revealed to early-modern thinkers a “fundamentally different kind of reality” from the reality sundered into rational science and subjective nonsense. This different reality is the one in which we still spend much of our lives, whenever we have to invoke what we sometimes call common sense to make decisions that we feel we can get right or wrong, without having rules in reference to which rightness and wrongness are defined. 

What might be particular about modernity is not so much that these sorts of decisions are more salient to us than they were to our premodern ancestors but that we have a diminished capacity and altered vocabulary for describing the specific areas of reality in which such choices are made.