Substack’s AI image generator and the Gnostic Annihilation of Personhood
A reflection on transhumanism, our technically mediated world and Karl Rahner’s theology of personhood.
@MaryHarrington is really bloody annoying: faster, pithier and funnier. I have been bumbling about with this topic on and off and just as I start writing she bashes me over the head with the best theologian Dad joke in history. In an essay for the Heritage Foundation she contrasts the Jewish and Christian imago dei with the emerging leftist/transhumanist imago D.E.I. Born of a Gnostic ‘bioegalitarianism that seeks to replace human nature with a formless equality’ imago DEI conjures a representation of humanity as a ‘protean plurality governed only by its willingness to see the dissolution of all difference as a good in its own right.’ The essay provides an extended tour of humanity’s relation with technology and highlights the ever-present danger that our Promethean curiosity will extinguish that which makes us special in the universe. We can’t but negotiate this path with each generation, but
“a tech-curious Right can walk this path in continued reference to human excellence, ordered always to an acknowledgement, valorization, and defense of the durability, sanctity, and indispensability of imago dei”
I’m not sure that I’m ‘tech-curious’ or even part of the ‘Right’, but I recognize this path that we are all on. Because of my own technical ineptitude and for reasons of exigency, I’ve started using the Substack AI image generator. My first thought was ‘my gosh…this is so easy’. Almost immediately, independent of the quality or otherwise of my writing, my posts acquired a kind of faux professionalism. Intrinsic quality aside, they look quite good. And the truth is, if I want this project to succeed, I don’t have a choice. However, the technology leaves me deeply unsettled – for obvious reasons. Not only does it threaten to displace human artists and artistry. This Star Trek replicator magic is undermining the entire hierarchy of value and discernment. If every single bottle of wine is a 1945 Domaine de la Romanée-Conti burgundy, there can be no cheap plonk, but also no special occasions, no sensory surprise and no crafting of new tastes based on new terroirs. More than that, there can be no wine tasters, no market of wine aficionados and ultimately not really any purpose for consumers or product – any more than the ‘air’ that we breathe. A world saturated by completely free, perfectly reproduced works of art, in any style, conveying any idea or emotion, and produced instantaneously and on command – will surely find itself devoid of aesthetic passion and meaning. Eventually, and this is the logic of transhumanism, it will erode the rationale for the continuing existence of humanity. Something else could exist for us, and perhaps in place of us. Faced with this prospective redundancy, many radical evolutionists, with an eye to the ‘singularity’, simply shrug.
With regard to digital image making, impoverished visual artists will appreciate the obvious threat. But of course, the same AI will be able to write essays of increasing sophistication, defeating our capacity to distinguish man from machine, subject from simulacrum, person from cyborg (machine) and, in some hellish future, from psyborg (machine enhanced man). And all of us on Substack – an online world of wordsmiths and creators – contribute to this transformation with every post, including this one. Talk about turkeys voting for Christmas.
As with any technology, once AI image generation becomes the default standard, it becomes a precondition for success. And as a result, I’m not alone. Even the most reactionary, anti-modernist and Christian critics of technology on Substack all seem to have made the same choice. With or without reflection, I can’t say. The pattern is repeated across all technical domains. To get on in this world we use cars, phones, drugs, vaccines, modern food, email, Interweb … Substack … AI image generation. We keep our heads above water only by rising with each tide, by crossing each threshold. The systems by which humanity leverages the material and social worlds implicate us all. There are exceptions: undiscovered tribes in the Amazon. But even old-order Mennonites use smart phones and modern tech. in their businesses if not the daily life of their households.
Beyond MAGA, populism and the ‘Alt Rohirrim’ (whoever coined that is a genius), beyond the demographic transformation of the West and the very real dangers of Islamification and civil war, beyond the geo-political tensions with China, beyond woke and the culture war, beyond the cataclysm of race and gender … the greatest threat to humanity is transhumanism.
@Mary Harrington makes a persuasive case that we have already entered the cyborg era. AI seems finally to be hitting its stride. @Paul Kingsnorth refers to the emerging posthuman era as ‘The Machine’. The Internet, synthetic biology, cloning, artificial gestation, gene editing, quantum computing, Artificial Intelligence, in-vitro food production, factory production of both food and babies, ecological hyper-modernization, World Economic Forum, digital currencies, digital IDs, the construction of bespoke viruses, geo-engineering — humanity is taking responsibility for managing the planet, directing evolution, reconstructing human nature and deciding for itself what is good and evil on a cosmic scale.
This Gnostic vein of self-determination is of course not new. It is of course straight out of the Genesis playbook - the offer made by the serpent to Eve. Eric Voegelin argued that the impulse to ‘immanentize the eschaton’ runs through all the genocidal utopian projects that characterize modernity: a Gnostic materialism that rejects any possibility of a transcendent realm and a life beyond this and seeks to construct heaven here on earth — societal perfection in the here and now.
Any Christian should be able to discern real evil in this confluence. The Bible has a beginning, a middle and an end. With a bird’s eye view it’s really not rocket science to trace the continuous link between the serpent’s offer and the frenzy of self-determinative hubris now unfolding in the 21st century after the death and resurrection of Christ. I’m beginning to have a grudging respect for those American protestants who continually detect signs of Revelation and the imminence of Rapture.
What all these diverse technological and social revolutions have in common is that they privilege some larger system – society, the planet, an ideology, 'humanity’ – above the person, above the individual. They represent an attempt completely to abrogate the Imago Dei and substitute, as @MaryHarrington put it, a ‘protean plurality governed only by its willingness to see the dissolution of all difference as a good in its own right.’
The idea of an individual created in the image of God was born in Moses engagement with ‘I am who I am’ in the burning bush (Exodus 3:14). For theologian Karl Rahner the unique characteristic of human beings as potential ‘hearers’ of the message, is personhood. All manner of anthropological sciences – psychology, sociology, economics, palaeontology, genetics, physics, neuroscience, chemistry, psychoanalysis – seek to ‘unravel man’ i.e. to analyse and explain…’ to dissolve him, as it were, into his empirical causes which can be specified and analysed and isolated’ (p27). They are not wrong. And anyone of us looking at the world around, reviewing our biographies, at ourselves from without:
‘…discovers to his horror or to his relief that he can shift responsibility from himself for all the individual data that make up his reality, and he can place the burden for what he is, on what is not him…that he has come to be through what is other than himself
In popular Christian apologetics this has often been the reason for distinguishing the material body from the ‘soul’ – a mysterious essence that is somehow separate from the sum of empirical data points. For Rahner this dualism is a reasonable, but ultimately blunt and misleading approximation. Each of the ‘regional’ (by which refers not to geography but domain-specificity) anthropologies tries to reconstruct the whole person from the point of view of whatever specific disciplinary vantage point and agenda (as with ‘homo economicus’). All of these ‘origins’, which devolve responsibility, accountability, and agency away from the individual e.g. A Freudian analyst might point to a particular maternal relationship; an evolutionary psychologist to hardwired behaviours of maleness or femaleness; an economist to an engrained propensity for rational calculation a co-measurement; a biochemist to the production of certain neuroreceptors; a feminist to the socializing effect of social constructed system of patriarchy, and so on. But he goes on, amidst all of these origins into which ‘he seems to dissolve, which seem to make everything about him a product of the world, and from which nothing about him may be excepted a priori, nor may it be excepted – in the midst of this man experiences himself as a subject and as a person” (28 my emphasis). And this interior sense of personhood is not something that could be isolated for examination separate from that raft of other ‘regional anthropologies.’ If that were the case, points out Rahner, the perspective of personhood would be rendered simply another ‘regional anthropology’ to add to the anthology of origin stories. No. For Rahner this ubiquitous consciousness of self-personhood is inseparable from the sense of ‘being a product of what is radically foreign to him’ i.e. the fact that man knows ‘about’ his origins in these diverse causes, but is not itself explained by these origins. He might analyse and reconstruct himself along the lines of myriad discipline (‘regional anthropologies’) but this analysis can’t explain the fact that he does this analysis and reconstruction himself. He experiences himself as something alien on himself as ‘produced’ – and as such affirms himself ‘as more than the sum of such analyzable components of his reality.’ Echoing Gödel's incompleteness theorem Rahner, concludes that this aspect of personhood can never be explained by the system giving rise to it.
“For a finite system of individual, distinguishable elements cannot have the kind of relationship to itself which man has to himself in the experience of his multiple conditioning and his reducibility. A finite system can’t confront itself in its totality’ (30)
A complex system may regulate itself, but it doesn’t have a relationship to its own point of departure or ask questions of itself (31). The propensity for man to place himself in the question from without is something that a finite system can’t accomplish. Historically, this capacity has been synonymous with the idea of soul. But although recognizing its utility, Rahner rejects this conception as primitive. ‘Being a person, then, means the self-possession of a subject as such in a conscious and free relationship to the totality itself.’ Such self-possession can’t come entirely from his empirical self. Even if he were to understand himself as totally determined from without by the multiplicity of ‘regional geographies’, ‘he is the one who does this knowingly and willingly’ (31) i.e. the self-conscious moment of integration is an irreducible subjectivity that is ‘co-present in every individual experience as its a-priori.’
‘When he explains himself…reduces himself back to the plurality of his origins, he is affirming himself as the subject who is doing this, and in doing so he experiences himself as something necessarily prior to and more original than this plurality’
All of which is to say that man is a transcendent being. Although in daily life, ordinary people are able or compelled to immerse themselves in the concrete empirical realities of their life, this subjective intuition of transcendence is always just below the surface or what Rahner calls the ‘pre-apprehension of being’ (33). And it is this preapprehension that constitutes the person. And however much he tries to explain himself away ‘abandon[ing] himself into the hands of the empirical anthropologies’ he can’t escape his own freedom and responsibility for himself. He is left to himself ‘not only in his knowledge but in his actions’. The freedom in question is not a thing that is possessed by and separate from the person, and all the myriad empirical determinations that make that person – but constitutive of personhood, and of the power to interpret himself; decide, act and self-actualize for himself.
For Rahner it is in this understanding as free will as the integrative lynch pin between empirical man and the transcendent person that is the starting point for salvation. Salvation is not a future prospect that may or may not befall a person from the outside; nor on the basis of moral judgement. It is rather ‘the final and definitive validity of a person’s true self-understanding and self-realization in freedom before God by the fact that he accepts his own self as it is disclosed and offered to him in the choice of transcendence as interpreted in freedom’ (39). In other words, salvation is achieved by individuals through the process of individuation that allows their ‘I am’ to meet the ‘I am who I am,’ in a relation of covenant.
How then does this understanding of the transcendent nature of the person square with the arc of human history? One time Inkling and close friend of C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, traced a long-term psychic development an original ‘participating consciousness’ through to a more reciprocating and individuated consciousness, and eventually the kind of introspective, detached and self-regulating self that we moderns take for granted. Karl Jaspers saw this movement originating in what he called the ‘Axial age’ – with the most significant inflections in the philosophical and artistic developments of post-Homeric Greece, and among the Hebrews. Among the Greeks this was the point at which sculptures started taking on personalist and introspective details indicative of some kind of recognition of a specific, individual self. Gombrich refers to this movement as ‘the great awakening’ in recognition of the way that the artefacts of the period seemed to ‘wake up’. In the realm of literature, particular individuals such as Sappho, Alcaeus and later Aeschylus began to be celebrated as authors who in turn used words to convey introspective states and private feelings. Euripedes experimented with the idea of individual conscience. Anthropologically this is a marked departure from the shared psychodrama characteristic of participating consciousness. Pre-Axial cultures were dominated by a deep and unavoidable apprehension of shared consequences (dishonor and indiscriminate shame or ‘miasma’ that would impact the whole community). Among the Hebrews under Hezekiah, communal clan burials gave way to single burials and smaller family crypts (Vernon, 25). There was also at the same time a great advance in literacy. In Deuteronomy (24:16) for the first time there is the assertion of individual and personal legal responsibility for actions taken rather than collective familial responsibility; and even an insistence than an individual is not under an obligation to follow ancestral Gods; and perhaps most tellingly, that women should be regarded as individuals rather than chattels (Deut 5: 21; Vernon, p38).
At the heart of this revolution in consciousness is the event that took place on Mount Horeb, when Moses talked directly to God at the burning bush (Exodus 3: 13). When asked about his identity, Yahweh famously refers to himself as ‘I am who I am.’ This exchange holds the key to the emergence of the psychologically individuated person/subject identified by Rahner. The perception of a monotheistic God as ground of all being develops, and could only develop, in tandem with the focused mind of a kind of individual that was only then coming into existence. The personhood of individual people and their agency, capacity for self-actualization and eventually salvation, is ultimately a reflection of the one true God’s own triune but integral unity. Salvation depends upon the full realization of that possibility for individual personhood.
Ok this has turned into a sort of quasi academic paper rather than the short post I had intended. How does it all hang together? Basically, modern people take the society of individuals for granted. We project a highly individuated consciousness of personhood at every opportunity – even onto other species. Think about your relationship with your pet cat or dog! Modernization and particularly the operation of the market economy, has dramatically increased spatial and social mobility. It generates myriad roles and functions – tens of thousands of distinct job titles, where there were just a few dozen in most agrarian societies and just a few differentiated roles for a hunter-gather society. Consumer society and the expansion of leisure then adds to the mix countless activities, hobbies, distinctive styles and artefacts though which people can create an almost endless array of distinctive markers of individuality. And our internal psychology matches this kaleidoscope – and it has to be said, increasingly pathologically, in very obvious ways. In attempting, as Philip Rieff argued, to create a social order severed from a sacred order, secular liberalism has reconstituted the Imago Dei as a billiard ball society of individuals. Slipping out of the covenantal relation with God and with each other ‘society’ becomes little more than a kind of Brownian motion.
However, historically speaking, all of this is new. The potential for this kind of individuation is a universal facet of human nature. But its realization has involved a 3000-year historical process, culminating in modernity but starting with Moses’ conversation with Yahweh. It is this interiorization of the psyche and the personality that has made even thinkable the now universal and taken for granted shibboleths about human rights, the reprehensibility of torture, the dignity of human beings qua humanity. The precious insight of Imago Dei – that all human beings are created in the image of God – only becomes realized with the unfolding expansion of consciousness associated with Judeo-Christianity. In short, liberalism, democracy, citizenship, the rule of law and due process all depend completely on the outcome of this historical process and the generation of a certain kind of individuated personality that can make sense of it.
But this is but the most trivial aspect. The intimation of psychological individuation (and accountability) revealed to Moses and realized in the person of Christ is, by the same token, the seat and conduit for transcendent personhood and in consequence, of a subject capable of acting in the world; and of a person with the capacity for accountability and responsibility. To repeat, as Rahner puts it: ‘Being a person, then, means the self-possession of a subject as such in a conscious and free relationship to the totality itself’ (31).
Why then is A.I. specifically, and the thrust towards transhumanism more generally, so devastating and such a diabolical threat to our humanity? Because these technologies threaten to send us back 3000 years, undermining society’s capacity to sustain and reproduce responsible human subjects. The process of parenting and socialization is all about the formation of children precisely with this end in mind – responsible, accountable, self-actualizing persons who are able to act, to create and to love. By placing technical efficiency and technological sophistication above these ends, transhumanism is indifferent to personhood. And by weakening and undermining the integrating connection with transcendence, it surrenders the person to those myriad data that are the focus for all Rahner’s ‘regional anthropologies.’ Transhumanism effectively seeks as Rahner said to ‘unravel man’ i.e. to analyse and explain…’ to dissolve him, as it were, into his empirical causes which can be specified and analysed and isolated.’
The Gnostic materialism that Voegelin identifies in all utopian progressive projects seeking to create heaven on earth is identical with what Harrington dubs the Imago D.E.I. Individuals in covenant with a triune God are transformed into divisible, amalgamable constituents to that ‘protean plurality.’ Whether we are replaced by an imperialist A.I. with its own agenda, or the world-system morphs into an ecomodernist, intensely connected, hyperregulated authoritarian and illiberal liberalism, is irrelevant. If we allow the erosion of the personalist link with the divine, we will have succeeded in creating not heaven but hell on earth. If Axial Age, post-Homeric Greek theatre and art and Jewish monotheist revelation saw the ‘awakening’ of human potential, transhumanism threats to put us all back to sleep. With soft drugs, porn and Internet addiction, this is perhaps a literal possibility. The role of the drug soma and ‘the feelies’ in Brave New World was precisely such a spiritual somnolence. The Great Transformation of modernity is leading to the ‘big sleep’.
I don’t know whether Mary is right in thinking that a ‘tech curious’ right can navigate this path. My instinct is for hygge and hobbit-holes. And yet, I use the Substack AI image generator – even for this post. What does that make me?
References
(Elias, 2010; Jaspers & Bullock, 1953; Polanyi, 1944; Rahner, 1978; Rieff & Turner, 2009; Siedentop, 2014; Taylor, 1992; Trueman, 2020; Vernon, 2019; Voegelin, 1990; Voegelin & Germino, 1987)
Elias, N. (2010). The society of individuals. In The society of individuals. University College Dublin Press.
Jaspers, K., & Bullock, M. (1953). The Origin and Goal of History. Yale University Press.
Polanyi, K. (1944). The Great Transformation. Farrar & Rinehart, inc.
Rahner, K. (1978). Foundations of Christian Faith . Crossorad.
Rieff, P., & Turner, C. (2009). Sacred order/social order: volume I, my life among the deathworks: illustrations of the aesthetics of authority. British Journal of Sociology, 60(4), 844–846.
Siedentop, L. (2014). Inventing the individual : the origins of Western liberalism. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Taylor, C. (1992). Sources of the Self: The making of the modern identity. Harvard University Press.
Trueman, C. (2020). The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism and the Road to the Sexual Revolution. Crossway Books.
Vernon, M. (2019). A Secret History of Christianity: Jesus, The Last Inkling, And The Evolution Of Consciousness. Christian Alternative.
Voegelin, E. (1990). Science, Politics, and Gnosticism : Two Essays.
Voegelin, E., & Germino, D. L. (1987). The new science of politics : an introduction (Paperback edition.). University of Chicago Press.