Is AI the Anti-Christ?

Paul Kingsnorth, a British poet/novelist now based in County Galway, Ireland, first made a name for himself in this country by packaging poet/novelist Wendell Berry’s essays for a worldwide audience in 2016. Kingsnorth rather aggressively titled the compilation The World-Ending Fire rather than The Essential Wendell Berry, but that editorial choice was fair, given Berry’s use of the phrase in his 2006 essay about our continuing dependence on coal to generate electricity. Now, however, I see that Kingsnorth’s choice was not only prescient, given the arrival of AI data-processing centers now projected to claim previously unimaginable shares of our already challenged power grid, but also in character, given provocative aspects to his 2021 essay titled “The Cross and the Machine.” That essay, which recounts how he came to be a Christian, would have been provocative in any case, owing to the fact that Kingsnorth was received into the Romanian Orthodox Church after first joining a Wiccan coven. But the essay was doubly provocative, owing to the apposition of the Cross and something called the “Machine,” a techno-cultural “matrix” that is “globalized, uniform, interconnected, digitized, hyper-real, monitored,” and “always-on.”

Now along comes Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, an astonishingly ambitious work in which Kingsnorth aspires to (1) pin down and define the “always-on” Machine; (2) chart its development all the way from its early 13th-century inception to its quickly nearing, any-day-now completion; (3) measure its cost; and (4) identify reasonable, if futile, paths of resistance by citing dizzyingly diverse sources, ranging from Alasdair MacIntyre to Simone Weil, Oswald Spengler, and Lewis Mumford, on the one hand, and from Jacques Ellul to Jean Baudrillard, René Guénon, and Ivan Illich, on the other. Moreover, Kingsnorth labels each and every one of his arguments with a storyteller’s flair. Part Four, exploring paths of resistance, is called (in a salute to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World) “The Savage Reservation.” Part One, in which the Machine is defined, features a chapter on Spengler’s Decline of the West called “The Faustian Fire,” and Part Two, in which the Machine’s growth is traced, features a chapter commemorating Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry’s 1853 arrival in Japan called “Come the Black Ships.”

My first reaction on reading the book was that it is a complete and unmitigated disaster. Wendell Berry linked to Jean Baudrillard and, even worse, to Oswald Spengler? Nothing rhymed, there was way too much material delivered way too fast, and critiques in the book, to the extent they even exist, were facile. Sure, Spengler’s insights into the decline of the West might, on some level, have value, given he was as interested in millenarian thought as Christians historically have been. But Spengler was heralding a Third Reich and cannot carry the weight Kingsnorth grants him by positioning him as an anchor for speculations in Part One that, moments earlier, had included lengthy references to MacIntyre and Weil. But then I got to thinking about how Kingsnorth’s penchant for citing works that don’t rhyme could be a function of how big the coming AI issue really is, rather than a function of his limitations as a thinker. That realization, in turn, got me to a place where I began to see how much he got right simply by asking, as a Martian might, what this thing is that we can provisionally call a “Machine,” and then asking — point blank — what consenting to participation in this thing might actually entail.

Consider that Kingsnorth completely “gets it” when he suggests, in his opening chapter called “The Dream of the Rood,” that the West is built on a Christian foundation, and that without that foundation the West will fall and, in fact, has already fallen, even though it might appear to be standing, given that capital built up over the course of the High Middle Ages still yields a return. Also, he understands that upending medieval conceptual frameworks so as to favor Newtonian and Cartesian sciences promising predictive power left us without access to truth and, therefore, prone to accept “totalitarian” substitutes for Christian versions of Alpha-to-Omega wholeness. Further, Kingsnorth convincingly explains that the cost of generative intelligence as on view in ChatGPT, OpenAI, China’s Deepthink, and Elon Musk’s Grok is, in fact, nothing less than, as the subtitle to his book suggests, our “humanity” — that which St. Thomas Aquinas calls intelligere, “the proper act of the human being as such,” or what Kingsnorth’s Romanian Orthodox Church calls nous, “heart-mind.”

Once those achievements were clearly in view, this reader, for one, was inclined to give Kingsnorth the benefit of any doubt — until I got to the end, at which point I threw up my hands in dismay after being invited to join him for a “raindance on Astroturf.” Can he be serious? This is what he leaves us thinking about after posing the ultimate metaphysical question and asking how we can regain glimpses of reality?

But that isn’t the real problem with this book. The real problem is that Kingsnorth nowhere closes the deal. Worse yet, he squanders opportunities to close that same deal. Why? The answer is simple: He hasn’t declared allegiance to the Light, which people less religious and well-read than he have begun to do, now that the civilizational ground-shifting under our feet is inclining us to see, honor, and defend Christ — the same Christ whom Kingsnorth professes to follow but, in practice, doesn’t. Sure, he explains very well to his readers the sense of the Christian story on which the West is built. But Christ the Incarnate Word? Not there, either as a person or as a conceptual key.

You might think that’s because Kingsnorth is a disciple of René Guénon, as is clear from his explicit salute to how Guénon brings “astringent clarity” to the growing importance of simulacra in a chapter called “The Desert of the Real,” and also from his use of Guénon’s phrases “Western Deviation” and “Age of Iron” when titling Part One and a concluding chapter in Part Three, wherein the Machine in its “final” form is described. (Aristotle will forgive us.) After all, Guénon was a convert to Sufi Islam. But that explanation for the absence of Christ the Incarnate Word as a conceptual key in Kingsnorth’s toolkit would be wrong, for Guénon had an excellent understanding of when and how medieval conceptual frameworks gave way to Newtonian and Cartesian ones. Indeed, Kingsnorth’s Guénon discipleship is why he gets so many things right. No, the real reason Christ the Incarnate Word is absent as a person and/or a conceptual key in Kingsnorth’s book is aloofness from “ordinary” life and, to that extent, the “reality” Kingsnorth claims to seek.

Listen, for a minute, to Kingsnorth talking about “bus stops and breakfast cereals and math homework and being forced to wash your dad’s car and wondering how to talk to girls” in the introductory section: “This is not Lothlorien, and nor is it Earthsea. The worlds created by Tolkien and Asimov and Verne are better than this.” What, then, to do after you’ve read all their books? Answer: “Pick up a pen and…create your own.” Huh, I thought. Aren’t Tolkien and Ursula K. Le Guin good because they help us to see why chores and communication difficulties matter? Apparently not, according to Kingsnorth. Rather, Tolkien and company are good because they successfully imagine their way out of a world Kingsnorth thinks is false. “Out in what is fondly called ‘the real world’ by people who often don’t know much about reality,” he explains, “you are living in a metastasizing machine which is closing in all around you.” Ah. Should have known. Without the kind help of professionals like Kingsnorth who habitually distrust appearances, I would never have known that being required to complete homework assignments as a youngster aided and abetted the Machine suddenly risen in our midst.

Am I making too much of this slip? I think not, given Kingsnorth’s avowed interest in stories. And that’s unfortunate because this lapse puts him in a position where he is prone not to pick up on clues that would otherwise yield answers to the questions he most urgently asks.

Take the clue most easily within reach: Ivan Illich’s refusal to accept “post-Christian” as an identifier for our age and to go with “age of the Anti-Christ” instead. That was a risky move on Illich’s part, given that “Anti-Christ” can incite a fire-and-brimstone sort of hunger that can get in the way of judicial analysis. Thus, in one sense, Kingsnorth was wise to disavow use of Illich’s term as a marker for the Machine so as to go with terms less associated with end-of-the-world scenarios. Terms like Moloch, say, or Lucifer. Yet, in another sense, Kingsnorth was wrong not to pluck the low-hanging but dangerous fruit Illich reached for because slicing this fruit open and tasting its essential meaning would have given him the most succinct answer to the puzzle he was trying to solve. To what, after all, does the “Anti-Christ” refer? Is it someone with a silver tongue who promises an end to hunger and disease through one-world government? Maybe so, maybe not. I suppose we’d be closer to the mark if we simply said the Anti-Christ is a false prophet who looks and sounds like Jesus. Even in that case, though, we’d still be vulnerable to a maybe-so-maybe-not rejoinder, for we’d be unnecessarily confining our search field to individuals. The best way to get a clear answer, I submit, is the simplest one, and that is to take the phrase at face value and focus on the event that “Christ” means — namely, the Incarnation, the Word made flesh. Do that and everything falls into place, not least the puzzle Kingsnorth most wants to solve, because “Anti-Christ” can then be seen as the rigidly enforced separation of Word from flesh.

The “Machine” runs on artificial intelligence at its most advanced pitch, yes? Well, we now know exactly what this Machine is. It is disincarnational logic, realized. It is exactly what Christ, as defined by the Council of Nicaea, is not.

When we recite the Nicene Creed, we are confessing something extraordinary, which is that the Second Person of the Trinity is a Word whose signifying power depends on embodiment and is subject to the constraints of time and place, just as a human word is when we name things, be they simple (one object) or complex (an entire life or a line of reasoning), by embedding them in consonants and vowels that convey their “sense.” Words are not, in this instance, simply material vocables used to convey information that, existing somewhere outside of place and time, is infinitely reproducible. Rather, they are flesh invested with sense to the point where the thing named can mean and, to that extent, shine with thereness, if it is an object, and finality, if it is a person, a town, or a civilization governed by a teleological end that has somehow, from the beginning, always been present.

That established, would it not have been better for Kingsnorth to have picked up on that clue providentially left to him by Illich? Given that teleological ends, on the one hand, and mechanisms allowing for feedback and adjustment per cybernetic logic, on the other, are mutually exclusive, I submit that following Illich’s clue would have vastly improved Kingsnorth’s book. Well, we need not make the same mistake and, indeed, shouldn’t, because readers of Against the Machine have a chance now to redeem the hard work of its making by engaging with Kingsnorth’s arguments to the point where the book functions as the wake-up call it was intended to be.

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