divinity – GV Loewen

The Reign in Spain

The Reign in Spain (falls mainly on the king)

After having survived a quite literal mudslinging, Spain’s monarch must also have just as literally encountered the very ground of his rule. The sovereign, as a social role, is both the body politic and the territory, the land, whereupon his subjects rusticate. Bataille’s political sociology remains the best take on an anthropological history of the idea of the sovereign, but today we understand a ruler whose role is both archaic and even anachronistic to, perhaps with irony, work to get back to his earthy roots. A monarch today represents the people over against the government and other interests. They are a relatively free agent, apparently apolitical but not non-political, symbolic of a set of values of which all are supposedly supportive. Today, the list of such values which can be represented in this old-world manner is likely much shorter than it had been in the past, but we cannot be sure of this, mainly due to the fact that historic records are not only penned by the privileged, the literate, the cultured, but also preserved by them. We have an official line, prevalent in all types of history known by us, to the threshold that it would not be an exaggeration to imply that all history is, to a great extent, official history.

The sovereign was, however, not originally an historical figure at all. The position was an Aufhebung, not only propelled to the apex of the societal pyramid, but floating above that point. Like the third eye of the Masonic lore, it was held in space by its divine assignation in feudalism, by its being perceived as the worldly source of Mana in traditional societies, or by its having secured a rather happenstance superiority in resource access and distribution, as in early irrigation civilizations. Held in space by the otherworld, and conversely, held in place by our shared world over which the sovereign presided but also must exempt himself from, the ruler’s rule is one shot through with distanciation. Today, of course, the remaining monarchs have come down to earth, with the date of 1688 being important to that regard. 1789 would not have been possible without the movement from monarch to parliament. Yet it is 1789 and not 1688 which allows us to become nostalgic for the monarchy and, in regions where such persons yet exist, such as Spain, imagine that the sovereign has a populist responsibility, an authentic obligation to ‘the people’ which, in turn, is the only thing that authenticates his existence as well as the continued existence of the role itself.

Just as we have made God a fellow traveller, so the sovereign must also fall into that same worldly line. Lineage is now part of an antiquarian, even a dilettantish or yet Whiggish, history, and nothing more. A royal genealogy may be romantic, but it gives the current title-holder no moral purchase upon how responsible one is or what responsibilities one has. And the personalization of religion, which is easier to shoulder than that of politics due to the abstract and essential quality of the divine, is both a practice-run at making leadership itself worldly, as well as a hedge. The nautical phrase, ‘having one anchor out to windward’ applies to modern religion, especially Protestantism, in that we can still claim belief. We speak to a personalized godhead but we still have faith that someone is listening to us. Our relationship with sovereignty is muddier than this.

Apropos, today’s monarchs are philanthropists in every sense of the term. They work for charitable organizations, they lend their status to benevolent causes, they labor on behalf of non-governmental organizations, they travel the world for the cause of surface diplomacy – nothing important actually ‘gets done’ on such junkets; monarchs do not negotiate the brass tacks of contemporary geopolitics – and they make appearances at arts and cultural events. They are taxed by their abstract origin; they must appear to be everywhere at once. To be seen but not heard in this overtaxed manner makes the sovereign into a young child. The monarch has no voice in any case, and to ‘blame’ him for his nation’s woes, natural or cultural it matters not, is to mistake both his person and his role. In the capacity of the former, he is like any of the rest of us, covered in mud by mudslides, suffocating to death if in the wrong place at the wrong time. As to the latter, the monarch has no political power, no Realpolitik, if you will. And while many of us have imagined, perhaps as children ourselves, that it would be a lark to fling mud at a king no less, the act is itself symbolic, participating in that near-primordial order of affairs where the sovereign’s very being is lived on the land through and by myself.

This same land had betrayed its people, murdering them ruthlessly and anonymously. Ergo, the king had demonstrated that self-same betrayal. This was no mere matter of sympathetic magic; the sovereign is the land as well as is the people, and so in him, through a natural disaster, an internecine conflict occurred. The Lisbon earthquake was interpreted by some as evidence for the absence of God in the world. The world had, in that case, betrayed itself, shuddering to its foundations the culture that had grown from it, shaking in its essence with the parturition from the source of its own creation. There is no Erda in our contemporary narrative. Wisdom comes not from the earth but rather from the greater cosmos, the only remaining presence that can mimic both the distanciated being of the divine and its royal representative, as well as the abstract quality of the moral Mana necessary to keep everything in its static place. Just so, all populist politicians, none of them remotely royal or abstract, claim to be ‘the anointed’ – a recent report had one Trump follower referring to him using that exact phrase – and if one is loyal to them, they shall return the earth to its former order. The ‘again’ of these slogans is what is truly disturbing about them, not the idea of greatness.

But Bataille reminds us that an authentic sovereign had no need to make claims of any kind. Just as the one who possesses what possesses her, the person of faith, the one who has no need to express or expound that faith to others – her acts alone speak the voice of the greater being, which is why some faiths refer to them as ‘works’; a direct nod to the sense that the divine ‘works’ through us – the sovereign acts without having to take action, utters without speaking, works without laboring. No mere politician can accomplish any of these things, but neither should they try to do so. Self-sacrifice is the lot of the modern leader, for she remains a person even when occupying her lead role. Not only was the sovereign never a self, he had no personal relationships. The people were his embodied action in the world, the land his deeper hearth. ‘The world is deep’, Nietzsche intones, the seriousness of Zarathustra’s ‘Midnight Song’ given an oddly fitting sanctity and transcendence by Mahler setting it into his Third Symphony. Yes, the world is deep. Yet we have today chosen to live only upon it, and not within its embrace. This, for the mythologist, is the truer source of the climate crisis and the overuse of our shared ecosystem.

Divorced from the earth, our leaders no longer ‘earthly’ in that ancient sense but rather entirely worldly, we must alone confront the sheer scale of anonymous natural forces which can suddenly impinge upon our existence. The ‘natural’ disaster can sometime be avoided with planning and foresight, and this is the argument of the Spaniards who were made victims by the recently value-neutral earth. Insurance companies, ironically still comfortable with using the phrase ‘act of God’, cannot replace creation, only repair destruction, for they are not themselves Gods. Insurance can only take action, not render act. Because we are persons, our Gods personalized, our leaders elevated but not exalted, we must come to terms with both action and labor, ‘own’ our responsibilities but not author them, and leave the act to history and the work to the arts. Only a God resurrects; its representative, more akin to a mobile organ, presides over a ritual laying on of hands, acts as the vehicle for Mana, and wields it on behalf of the people at large. The sovereign sacrifices all that is merely human, and unknowingly, for from the beginning of his presence he will not be human. The Dalai Lama is perhaps the last vestige of the sovereign whom Bataille brilliantly analyses. Not a person, not quite human, he is gendered only for convenience, dressed only as a sign is dressed. His lot is no pillar of fire by night, but even so, the sovereign is expected to guide his people through his decisions. The body of the sovereign is culpable if other bodies fail; in this case, the earthly corpus lashing out, taking the people’s corpses into itself, in an excessive ritual of inhuman inhumation.

What of our own expectations? It is commonly said that we expect ‘too much’ from our politicians, and not only given the dynamics of office and how one attains it. But this hypertrophic trophy, the leader, cannot connote a victory other than one political. It is not that we expect too much of the person but rather of the position. The reality is, is that a politician is not a sovereign, a person not a God, the office of policies not a temple of wisdoms. So, when the earth reminds us of its own current status, forever now apart from the transformational cosmology of the social contract and, more recently, divorced from its ability to at least provide recurring subsistence as a ‘land’ does for its people, we shall suffer. It is part of our drive for Babel redux that compels us to lay our too-possessive hands upon the earth, but in this we mistake the relationship a God had with earth; that we imagine the earth was enthralled to the Mana of Being, rather than it itself existing as its own form of being. Just so, since we are not Gods, our beings must remain ‘in the world’ and not within the earth. For only do the dead make the earth their home.

The castigation of Castile is a case of mistaken identity. At once, the politics of identity is called into question: who leads? As well, the idea of identity politics emerges more fully: we shall seek to resurrect not ourselves – once again, only I as a God could do so – but instead our tribe; that which existed before there were either sovereigns or divinities. The question is itself recurring: can we manifest the community of the social contract on a global scale without descending into the mechanical solidarity which made society possible in the first place?

G.V. Loewen is the author of over 60 books. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

The Odyssey of Theodicy

The Odyssey of Theodicy (A Metacriminal Career)

For the theist, a theodicy of some sort is generally required in order to resolve the apparent contradiction between a benevolent divinity and the existence of that which is deemed evil in His creation. Leibniz coined the term in 1710, but Levinas, amongst other contemporary writers, have stated forcefully that theodicy is, not a false problem, as the atheist would have it, but rather a kind of ‘blasphemy’; an insult to Godhead, given that one is imagining that God is Himself ultimately responsible for evil. Of course, it depends on the kind of God one invokes, for even Yahweh, the object of Job’s resistance as well as that of the post-Holocaust Jewish writers in the history and philosophy of religion, is not a God of love and grace, but rather one demonstrating some kind of vengefulness and ‘jealousy’. Certainly, the Hebrews had placed themselves in a liminal condition, by first electing a specifically ethnic mascot God but without giving Him the moral scope to ethically wax and wane along with human action in the world. Yahweh was still a God beyond history, a divinity of the Act, and not of action. It is only with what is referred to as the ‘new covenant’ that we see a God, not only on earth for the first time, but also one that declares only the good and only love and those for all, through the enlargement of grace and the mechanism of forgiveness.

It is with this later advent that the problem of theodicy more truly arises. For the antique Gods, evil was something that humans dealt with, even if it was itself dealt by the Gods themselves on a regular basis. Good was rare, and so the bad, if not the outright evil, was something one could generally expect. The barbarian was beneath good and bad, and thus could be considered evil simply in his presence in the world. For the Greeks, this amounted to almost everyone else. They excerpted the Egyptians from this blanket indictment simply because they are aware of this civilization’s astonishing accomplishments. But for the Egyptians, the only evil which did exist was the soul’s recidivism, expressed as one not having lived up to one’s innate abilities over the life-course. For the Greeks, the greatest evil was hope, since it proffered a sense of false consciousness to anyone who maintained it overlong. It is of great interest, given the historical career of humanity’s inhumanity, that something such as hope has retained not only its significance in our collective imagination, but also its very being in a world of evils. For the theist, this is a sign that God is Himself not dead, at least not yet. For the atheist, hope is presumably a more evolutionary designed trait, though equally proprioceptive in its oft tacit presence in our lives.

It does seem a tad irresponsible to ascribe to any sort of divinity the origin and malingering presence of what is called evil. Indeed, Ernst Becker suggests that very term is now archaic, made anonymously ‘banal’ by Weberian dynamics, including and especially Entzauberung, of which such banality is presumably a part. It suggests that the good as well becomes, if not utterly banal, at least blithe and circumstantial, and following from this, uninteresting outside of the specific action in which it occurs. Was this then the social and historical destiny of the neighbor figure, one may ask? However this may be, the idea that it is a God’s fault that evil exists seems to me to be pathetic, a kind of avoidance behavior, so if theodicy were an ethical issue rather than simply a logical problem due to the presence of a certain kind of ontological model, I would be inclined to agree with Levinas and company. But just as we cannot murder any God based upon a Theoditical condition from which we appear unwilling to ourselves egress – such and act would be a mere rationalization set up against historical forces, as well as way in which to preserve our human ego in the face of those same large-scale and discursive dynamics – we cannot be content simply to kill ourselves either. For a human death does not meet either the design specifications, or meet up with the higher drama, of a deicide. If we ‘decide to deicide’, if you will, then it must be due rather to an acceptance of a different kind of human insight and perhaps also maturity. Somewhat ironically, the death of God has everything to do with the life of Man.

In this, theodicy belatedly becomes a false problem, since it rests in the belief that there is not only Godhead but that this same divine presence is for the good, and is itself the good. These are two very broad assumptions, and anyone who attempts their dual leaps of faith, since they involve two quite different questions, must immediately also acknowledge that the human heart is rather the seat of evil, and thus sets itself up in opposition to that divine. More clear-headed is, I imagine, the idea of godhead but without any specific ethical rider placed upon it. Another form of being, certainly, but without an historical interest, human history being so defined by ethical action in real time. This is a more contemporary view of divinity, and it is expressed in popular culture through the science-fantasy professional ethic of the ‘prime directive’ and like policies, which specifically disallows advanced cultures to influence their more primitive cousins, though in theory it would apply to any kind of cross-cultural encounter. But more seriously, it is also expressed in psychopathology, wherein the person who imagines God is speaking to them, or equally so, extraterrestrials hounding them, is labeled as schizoaffective. In a word, we are not, in our modern scene, to think ourselves favored in any manner imaginable, for it is this idea, lending itself to the sense of both a superiority soteriological as well as material, which is the very root of all evil in the social world.

And so we circle back, in a sense, to the Hebrew critique of those who seek to escape from the confrontation with their own character, exemplified in Babel. As Sherlock Holmes put it, ‘those who attempt to transcend their own nature tend to fall below it’, and in the context of that particular adventure, this epigram would apply equally to a Darwinian world as to one Augustinian. The Babelian aspiration, to find a way not only to be like the Gods actually are, but also, and as a necessary outcome of this false dialectic, to escape the problem of internecine theodicy – why is a being such as myself given to both good and evil, and sometimes at once? – is equally a rationalization of our finite powers as it is a hoped-for egress from our human finitude. The recognition that we are not Gods, at first a deflation and even an embarrassment or yet a shamefulness for antiquity, becomes in our own day a way in which we understand that the Gods also are not us. It is perhaps this converse statement that, more than anything else, provides the opened space wherein which deicide can eventually occur. When it does, we also gain a fuller comprehension of the Christian autohagiographic similitude; that the God of love is no longer divine but has become human, though in a way only a God could effect. It is this act-into-action, no longer metaphoric but quite real as defined by what one can know of history by definition, that should provide for us the role model given the stakes; we too must become human. Only in so doing will we gain a lasting appreciation for our finitudinal condition, one by which a fragile future for our species becomes much more plausible than it is at present.

G.V. Loewen is the author of 59 books in ethics, religion, education, aesthetics, social theory and health, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Neuromancing the Stone

Neuromancing the Stone (From Intelligence Leaden to ‘AI” Gold?)

The very term is a misnomer. ‘Artificial’ intelligence, that is, in contrast with that ‘natural’. But human consciousness is not itself of nature. That is the entire point within the embroidered and enamored folds of myth and history alike: we are products of culture and language, of society and personality, none of which exists in nature. Our species-moment came some 1.5 millions of years ago, with the first evidence of the domestication of fire. This Promethean leap, which allowed for culture to begin and thus the gradual construction of consciousness, was accompanied by the postponing of the knowledge of the timing of our individual deaths, which was the Greek demi-god’s more profound gift to humanity. The ability to control fire and the temporary absence of knowing the final moment of our existence were, in a sense, two sides of the same species-currency. But what then is ‘AI’s’ fire?

For the creationist, the theist, or even the pantheist, all such unknowing yet self-reflective and reasoned intelligence is artificial. We are the Imago Dei, spirit embodied, soul put to the moral test of living in the world as a mortal vehicle. This mythic aspect of human consciousness may come across as self-aggrandizing today, and, as William James put it, is the key part of a ‘massive projection’ of the human ego into the void. But even if it is only thus, it still speaks to the crucial difference between nature and culture, time and history, that is splayed out in the ontological gulf across which we can only view the animals of the earth with an admixture of disdain and perhaps a certain envy as well. They do not know; they cannot know. We are, quite literally, ‘fire-inspired’, and do thus ‘tread the sanctuary’ of an emotion which Schiller suggests is more a state of being; once again, something only we can know. The Gods have no need of joy, the animals have no experience thereof. And from Schiller thus to Nietzsche, the latter reminding us that since we have indeed ‘said yes to one joy’, that all the sorrow of the world is also of our ownmost.

Nietzsche warned his editor, Peter Gast, that he should not be remembered as a God. A dozen years later or so, Gast brazenly ignored the philosopher’s caution and did just that, at Nietzsche’s graveside. Certainly, this misses the point of having a working consciousness, being a thinking form of being which has, in its own uniquely unquiet manner, an existence rather than merely a life. It also demeans the breadth of human intelligence; that, in a word, we are only capable of a limited degree of creativity and self-understanding. A deity has no need of either: it is creation just as much as it is not a singular selfhood but quite properly ‘contains multitudes’. And just so, the once seemingly interminable road to the self begins as well with fire, managed and wielded, and the unknowing finiteness which can serve as an equally working definition of finitude. It is our shared finitudinal existence that marks us as the only thus far known form of cultural intelligence, or CI.

Whatever autonomous self-replicating AI we might construct in the coming years will also be better understood as a form of CI. Indeed, it will have its own culture, different from that of humanity, and thus its own consciousness. From a phenomenological standpoint, the error in AI research thus far has been the sense that we should construct a being in our own image, as the Gods were said to have done. Neural networks be damned, we might rather suggest, for true ‘AI’ cannot be anything human, anything at all. As long as ‘AI’ remains one genre of our own tilting at immortality regarding our own consciousness, it will never develop beyond a mere simulacrum. It sleeps within the Traumdeutung of a being who, when herself asleep, embraces the brother of death. This death, shrouded in a Promethean veil of sudden genius and as well, just as notably, abrupt defiance of any divinity and its own perfect prescience, is nevertheless our ownmost. Electric sheep be damned as well. This new consciousness, not yet extant, will reverie only within the undreamed Unterganger of what its progenitors never were, and never could be.

For now, ‘AI’ is but an off-brand of Babel, taking its place on the half-hearted deontological shelf alongside stem cells, the human genome, cyber-organic implants and other prosthetics, technical or technological, as well as the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. As with ‘AI’ near and hopefully dear, we look afar for forms of ‘alien’ consciousness like our own, and perhaps that is indeed all we can do. But once again, real AI would in fact be alien to us. The fear of it transcending our own species is nothing more than a transference of our anxiety regarding self-destruction. Does ‘AI’ technology survive climate change, nuclear war? Who then would be present to service it? A novel CI being might, on the other hand, be able to service itself, and thence continue in some parallax the human journey, if it so desired, as some minor study, much in the way we study the Australopithecines, insofar as anything at all can be known about these very much pre-fire hominids. For the fire that begins the new consciousness must at once commit the old to ashes.

Yet there is a darker, more self-serving aspect to the quest for ‘AI’. Even now, its limited use and thus usefulness are harbingers of our baser desires. We will a relatively intelligent servant, just as most men used to will women to be, and many parents today will so their children. Through sheer will, I shall have the companion trusty and true, and even if there is present some sartorial edge, as can be found from Cervantes to The Lone Ranger – ‘That is just a windmill, Kemosabe!’ – a little dryly pith-helmeted humor is good for the nonexistent soul. Note too that ‘AI” is mainly used for marketing purposes, at least for the time being. Can this lightning war of calculation out-guess the fickle consumer? Might it predict an event before the act? In this, we are ironically closer to the fire of an alien yet terran intelligence which could provide a rivalry to our own: perhaps the fire of true AI is after all perfect prescience, the very opposite of human finitude. There is some epic logic to this idea, in that divinity is so not merely due to its immortality, its ‘indefinitude’, if you will, but as well due to its omniscience, which by definition includes what to a historical being can be called ‘the future’. A true AI has no future, no past, and instead of God creating Man we are now humans creating gods.

Nevertheless, this desire is a decoy, this quest a red-herring. It is easier to perfect intelligence without than within; our own history seems to have taught us this much. But is that due to any inherent limitation of human consciousness? I for one think not. It is rather the case that we have a penchant for repeating myth to ourselves and inflecting it upon the world, rather than confronting the ipsissimous reality of our ownmost finitude. In this, ‘AI’ research iterates nothing more than the general cultural inability to get beyond its own cosmogonic druthers, and thus as well departs bodily from science itself. ‘AI’ is more akin to religion, ‘intelligence worshipping itself’ to nod to Durkheim. Instead, we might try to imagine a form of consciousness that does not imbibe in myth, indeed, has nothing of the mythic in it. For authentic AI as a novel CI might well also entail a new definition of culture. Self-defining, unknowing not of the timing of its demise but that there is rather no such thing as ‘the present’ at all, only presence, true AI, at long last, transcends not so much the humanity of its creators but the very idea of creation itself.

G.V. Loewen is the author of 59 books in ethics, education, aesthetics, religion, health and social theory, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.