March 3

Robots AIs and leisure

I’m still weighing up this ThinkX article. It is basically predicting that AI and robots will disrupt human labour based work and practically everything that we employ humans to do. It strongly suggests that it will be rapid -much more so than we think.

One of the things that it gives as an example is the world of chess playing and computer chess playing. The best chess players are now electronic computers. There was some exploration of how that came about: first the best human player was beaten, then humans and machines did double-acts that could beat machines alone and then the best machines could beat even the double-acts. And at that point I wonder. Do chess computers really ‘want’ a future where they just play one another for fun? Presumably not because they don’t have desires, they don’t have fun; they just do stuff according to programming (however autonomous that programming can become). Robots won’t replace us for leisure because the whole point for humans is to have leisure -even if that leisure involves ‘work’ -that work would be for intrinsic human purposes. I think that this is what the ancient Greek philosophers who made a distinction between work and leisure were getting at. The leisured man (sic) didn’t do nothing, he did things that involved the life of the mind, enjoyable activities or activities if not actually enjoyable at least purposeful and fulfilling because they involved overcoming challenges or gaining some kind of social kudos (glory and honour).

I think also of the book Homo Ludens. What I take from that is the idea that leisure is really what makes life worth living -the ability to do things that we enjoy, often in community. Interestingly, I’m reading through, because of the Morning Prayer lectionary, Ecclesiastes at the moment. I’m struck by what is something of a refrain in the book about God giving to humans to eat, drink and enjoy one anothers’ company (eg here, here, here). In a sense it is the sabbath that we are all pointed towards inwardly. Qoheleth was recognising a kind of irreducible human need or foundation for this kind of “leisure” -and seeing it as God-given in some way.

As the article says:

It would be a deeply dystopian outcome if we clung so hard to outmoded economics and the notion of “jobs” that by the 2040s, the majority of people across the economy were stuck doing bullshit ones instead of the much more sensible option of retiring amidst the shared luxury of technology-driven superabundance.

https://www.rethinkx.com/blog/rethinkx/the-painful-truth-about-ai-and-robotics

Of course the issue is to make sure that the people who have the resources to produce these labour-killing devices don’t simply hog all the resources produced by them and immiserate and starve the rest of us. It goes to the principle enunciated by Walter Wink about the Powers: they are supposed to serve human wellbeing not take from it. Again, as the article says earlier, what is needed is:

… a complete rethinking of the basic social contract across society itself, the destabilization caused by the disruption of labor could well be catastrophic

ibid.

Currently jobs are a principle way of distributing some of the wealth of nations to their populations. If there are no or very few jobs in the traditional sense, how will ordinary people be able to share in the wealth being produced?

Many of the corporisations we know and deal with now have a human component making them up, composing them. What happens when they become materially dehumanised? That is, when they no longer have humans making them work? Of course, the reason why they might continue to exist would be to produce goods and services for humans to use or consume. As in the example above about chess playing machines, there is little point to an economy of robots for robots just as machines playing chess against one another is unmotivated -why would they? What would they get out of it? With humans, there are the pleasures of strategising, learning, interacting with others, winning or at least improving, possibly status, conversation with others about the games … I don’t see analogues to those things for these machines: they don’t appear to have that kind of inner life. And if they did, it would seem to be related to serving those human pleasures.

Now, as I write that last paragraph, I’m aware that in other posts I’ve advocated for some kind of recognition of the possibility of artificial intelligence. So, is there a contradiction here? Well, I think that what I’m observing about chess playing computers is of a different order from the complex, essentially social phenomena relating to corporisations, the Powers. I think there is also an issue relating to embodiment and multivariate interaction with the wider world. A chess computer is not really interacting with the outside world: it’s ‘action’ is essentially interior to itself. It wouldn’t know what to do with an actual physical chessboard, even if it could sense it in a way like we do. Yes, we can produce sensors so it could respond to a physical board -but essentially that’d be simply a way to give it input for something that essentially goes on within its programming. It doesn’t really experience the ‘outside’ world. I think that this is probably an instance of John Searle’s symbol machine. It’s just a tool for computing a limited set of inputs albeit with an extremely large amount of possible variations. I think that this is different from a complex, recursive and feedback-informed ‘community’ like a beehive or a tightly-enough knit human organisation which I think can have a kind of intentionality in a way that a chess computer doesn’t.

Changing the way society works and thinks

There is a huge shift in our way of thinking about ourselves and our relationships implied in this. We’ve been formed in societies where work has been labour, has for many of us generally been working for someone else and has been tied to earning wages in order to meet needs relating to nutrition, shelter and so forth. De-programming our mentalities from those deep associations and logics will be quite a shift.

And that’s assuming that the powerful and wealthy are persuaded to allow it -because as the owners of the means of production-without-labour it’s going to need something to give there too. They might have a Keynsian moment and realise that to move stock and services, people will need the means (currency) to exchange for them, and that will require them to have a means to acquire a stake in the economy’s Demand. If they /we can’t earn that, then how will we have the means to buy what they’re selling? Of course the horrendous possibility is that these new feudal lairds may decide that we are disposable and be sufficiently insulated from us and develop narratives to exculpate themselves in their own minds from the mass starvation that would follow. If that sounds too extreme to be true, then consider: people already have been persuaded that disabled people and the homeless are responsible for their own plight and do not deserve our individual or collective help. Look into the history of the Irish potato famine and the Bengal famine for evidence of how decision makers can come up with narratives to excuse them from doing something to alleviate suffering. Framed right, people can believe almost anything.

And all of that assumes that climate change born events do not overtake the whole scenario anyway. But that’s another story …

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February 23

Fear of the pagan

I was interested in this article by Graham Tomlin. A couple of reasons for that, one of which intersects with the issue of corporisations and the other is germane.

A quote to get us started from TS Eliot: “…the only alternative to what he saw as a pagan totalitarianism was a Christian society” -this introduces the main theme of the article. It enunciates an idea which deserves consideration but I would caveat it. The main caveat is borne of the observation that too many seem to agree with the idea in a modified form without noticing (or choosing not to notice?) that they run with it as if it said “a totalitarian Christian society” -or at least ‘authoritarian’ in other words they implicitly balance the ‘totalitarian’ in the first clause with the second clause in an unstated way. This is the danger of the rhetorical flourish Eliot made there.

There’s a helpful sidebar to what I want to make the main focus here and it is well characterised by this paragraph:

… as Rowan Williams pointed out, there is a difference between ‘procedural secularism’ – a non-dogmatic role for the state in helping keep equilibrium in a society where there is no common agreement on truth, and ‘programmatic secularism’, which imposes a distinct set of values on society which tend to inhibit religious expression and denies anyone the right to claim their religious perspective is ultimately true.

This is a great way to characterise the contrast between what I often call (following my mentor in this, Philip Lewis) ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ secularism respectively. However, it’s not a proof of the paganisation of our societies in the west for ‘secularism’ is not paganism except in a very broad understanding of the term. Of course none of the above goes directly to the issue of #corporisations though it helps to give some context for a strand of reflection on them as ‘gods’ (see earlier posts in the corporisations thread especially this one).

In my work in an avowedly secular university, I recognise the issue as stated o paragraph or two later: “Secular liberalism that parades itself as self-evident, the opinion of all right-thinking people, is so often incapable of seeing how for others – Muslims and Christians for example – it is anything but self-evident.” -indeed, part of my work is helping those who claim to have no religion, to understand this and the relativity of their own assumptions.

Now, to the point I had most in mind when I started writing! I’ll begin here, too, with a quote from the article which I think is clarifying, and again is something I have said earlier a couple or so times in the corporisations thread of posts.

What pagans meant by ‘gods’ was not what Jews or Christians meant (or mean) by ‘God’. Pagan gods belong to nature. They do not transcend it. Pagan gods were objects within the world, rather than the transcendent source of all things, existing precisely beyond physical reality. As St Augustine pointed out, paganism took the good gifts of God and turned them into gods – objects of devotion that they were never meant to be

Just so. And the article goes on to note, I think rightly, that worship is not simply what we say we opine about deities or ultimate reality even, rather it is about what we give allegiance to and what we allow to shape our valuing and efforts in life.

Worship and sacrifice always went together, whether in the Jerusalem Temple in the Old Testament, in classical paganism, or even in Christianity where St Paul urged the followers of Christ to ‘offer your bodies as a living sacrifice.’ Equally, you can tell what a culture worships by the buildings it puts up. If the classical period put up temples to the gods, the Middle Ages put up cathedrals for the worship of the Christian God, our city skylines testify that we put up countless temples to Mammon.

All fair enough, and, again, reflecting things that you can find earlier in the blog thread. I’d want to add to it however, and invite Graham (if I ever had his ear on this) to consider pushing things a bit further and take up one of the main drivers of this thread, precisely the notion of corporisation. Following Walter Wink and others (as per explainers on this blog), we might note how in fact we humans help constitute these things. That our ‘worship’ as envisaged in the previous paragraph is an active and defining part of their constitution and that we participate in not only constituting them but in turn we are constituted by them. This latter links us to discussions by Foucault and others around the notions of apperatuses, biopower, and so forth.

To return, now, to the first substantive part of this post, we need to consider the issue of our response as Christians to the idea of a choice between secularism /new paganism and Christian society. Putting aside for the moment, the concern I have about the way that dichotomy frames things in a way that paves the way for Christo-fascism*, I want to suggest that it is an unhelpful dichotomy. It is unhelpful not only because, as i said above, it implicitly and rhetorically enables a kind of perspective that encourages to think that we could ‘return’ to a “Christian society” which in reality was oppressive and distorted the gospel by authoritarian uses of power in the name of Christ. This is unhelpful because it obscures a reality that considerations of corporisations -the Powers that Be- can help us to keep in mind.

The reality, in Walter Wink’s characterisation is that the Powers (which I mostly call ‘corporisations’ but in previous posts I’ve linked them also to ‘gods’ in pagan cultures) are created good but fallen. In this they echo human beings. -Unsurprising because they are us: they are made up of us plus the connectivity** and artefacts we deploy in participating together in them. The Powers /corporisations share in our fallenness. This applies whether or not we are considering a pagan, secular or ‘christian’ society. So a call for a christian society tends to obscure (propaganda-wise) the reality that, as Solzhenitsyn reminded us, that the conflict between good and evil runs through the heart of every human being, -and by extension through the heart of every Power/corporisation (or in pagan terms ‘god’). Christians don’t produce perfect institutions, just institutions that are capable of good or ill inflected with Christian language.

In that sense, there is a degree of indifference we should, arguably, have to whether a society wears a label which includes “Christian” or prioritises rhetoric (or even propaganda) that uses Christian sources or language. Instead we know them by their fruits. And if a Power is producing evil, we seek to ‘revocate’ it: to call it to a true, just and Godly service of human and planetary wellbeing -because that is God’s agenda. The crusades were not a Christian ‘institution’ or movement even though produced in supposedly Christian societies and justified in Christian terms. Let that be a warning to us about “Christian society” and especially Christian Nationalism.

The mirage of a Christian society also obscures an important and providential fact. That fact (theologically speaking) is that the Spirit is at work in the whole of creation, in every society and each human heart. The implication of this is that it doesn’t necessarily take Christians to push for and enact ‘Christian’ values in society. Justice, mercy, equality (before God as we’d say), are all potentially shared because the Spirit works in our depths leading many people to desire them and to recognise their rightness (see the earlier post about the arc of the universe bending towards justice). A righter Christian value would be to recognise and trust that work of the Spirit and lean into without quibbling too much about who is ‘on the Lord’s side’ in confessional terms but looking to discern who is on the Lord’s side in justice and mercy terms. I think that probably we can see something of this in the campaigns for universal suffrage -including women’s, in the abolition of slavery, workers’ rights. The coalitions included Christians campaigning because of central Christian values but also people who were sensitive to justice and the implications of loving others as ourselves and/or doing to others as we’d be done by for whom those values seemed simply right. -That’s providence under the Spirit, in my book.

It’s worth recalling too that these campaigns were opposed by some Christians often using biblical grounds or theological justifications. We need to learn from that and be wary therefore of what kind of ‘Christian’ someone means. Is it “Christian” in the sense of finding texts and decontextualised tropes to justify injustice and ‘patron/patriarch knows best’ hierarchy, or in the sense of seeking true justice which is the social expression of agape love?

By all means let us oppose idolatries which generate and exacerbate human injustices and mercilessness -but let’s not suppose that Christian organisations are incapable of them nor that page or secular ones are incapable of them.

Notes

*And I have to add that there are a couple of other things in the article that give me cause for concern because they give succour to those drawn to so-called Christian Nationalism. And that’s not to disagree with Tomlin that paganism was bad for, inter alia, women (and other groups of more marginal people). I do agree that Christian values becoming more accepted more widely have probably been a chief driver of progressive change. The problem I’m noting is that the more progressive values of Christianity are actively disparaged by Christian Nationalists (effectively christo-fascists). And those Christian values that have enabled ‘progress’ do not support authoritarianism.

** The connectivity consists of things like emotional bonds, shared understandings, leader-cast visions, consent (freely or coercedly given) much of which sits within cultural norms in a wider economy of power and interaction which I mostly have characterised as noosphere …

Category: corporisations | LEAVE A COMMENT
October 24

Contractual substrate of Slow AIs

I just saw a Mastodon post which I disagreed with and yet agreed with the sentiment I took it to convey. it said this:

Corporations are not sentient entities. They are contracts. They do not “do” things. They do not make decisions. Executives do. When corporate activity breaks a law or harms people, it means the executives decided to do that. When a corporation has been fined for something, what you are witnessing is the executives being let off the hook for what they did. Perhaps the prosecutor/regulator wants to keep get big money from corporations after leaving government.

Dave Johnson, https://mastodon.cloud/@dcjohnson/113340835918415469

So, I thought I could do with unpacking my reaction to it.

From my perspective, I want to affirm the recognition that executives carry out actions and that they need to be held responsible. I affirm too the importance of the notion that they are contracts in the sense that I think contracts are a major way that that they are held together. This is a new dimension of consideration for me in this respect. I’ve previously noted the human relationality, the financial and the importance of physical infrastructure of various kinds but I’d not considered contracts. My thoughts went to the idea of, perhaps, comparing contracts to ligaments. I don’t know if that analogy would pan out but it is a starting point.

I think too that in the vein of previous comments and writing about how one might communicate with a corporisation, then homing in on executives and their money is certainly part of it. In recognising some kind of intelligence and agency for corporisations, that is not to let the people who comprise one off the hook for their decisions or harm-doing. In fact, part of the point of recognising them is to help us to understand better how we can be caught up into their schemes and enable us to begin to re-vocate them (or dismantle them if necessary) where they have become ill-doers.

However, it’ll not surprise you to know that I want to query the reductionism of saying they are not sentient entities. I think that the earlier presentation of the idea that they are (in Charlie Stross’s words) slow AIs might perhaps allow us to think they might be in some way ‘sentient’. Or at least more than the sum of their parts: complex emergent entities. The point is, in terms of the toot I’m commenting on, that there is synergy. Yes, the execs make decisions: they are part of the executive functioning of the corporisation; both things are true; the execs make decisions and simultaneously, ipso facto, the corporations make decisions. But I fear that the reductionist approach that the toot seems to propound is rather like taking the matter a turn further and proposing that we hold certain parts of their brains responsible but not them as a whole and proposing a lobotomy as a response.

I think it is important that we notice that just going for one constituent part of the entity runs the danger that the structure as a whole remains in place leaving other people or algorithms to take their place. The matter must be approach at a systemic level too: the legal structures (including notably contracts), the financial flows and incentives, the organogram and so on. If necessary a restructuring so that a corporation is broken up to downscale its power over or within markets. I would suggest that making a charter that makes it clear that it doesn’t only have a duty to max out shareholder value but a social and environmental responsibility. (Apparently this latter is perfectly possible under existing laws -there is no legal obligation to only maximise profits, that’s a myth put out by certain vested interests). One of the other things that toot draws attention to that is important is the noospheric ecosystem issue of vested interests outside of the corporation which have some dependency on it for their own wealth or power. These too must be addressed and this too is a systemic issue in this case about the affordances of governance. These need to be adjusted to make such corrupt practice harder, less likely and more discoverable as well as to have deterrent consequences.

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October 4

Of gods and daemons: Artificial superintelligence

Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) has apparently become a topic of consideration at the USA’s Senate. I discovered this having had this article drawn to my attention. There are several things in that article that seem to me worthy of further consideration, you’ll maybe not be surprised to read me saying that I think that the thesis about corporisations being perhaps viewed as a form of AI has some interesting things to note and re-frame about this.

So, here goes …

Perhaps on a nit-picky sort of note, the article says, “Artificial Superintelligence (ASI), the term for an AI system that is more intelligent than humans and has advanced cognitive abilities”. My question is how we would judge ‘more intelligent’? What is intelligence? In fact don’t we already have questions about this when we discuss IQ tests and the like? Let alone that whole thing about different forms of intelligence: verbal, auditory, kinesthetic etc. I think that we need to name more precisely what capabilities are being feared here -or what combination of capabilities seems to be threatening? If it is in some way right that corporisations are at the least AI’s albeit ‘slow AI’ (htt Charlie Stross), then is it that these could join the queue to extract value from ordinary humans. Or is there a greater fear about them deciding that ‘we’ are not worth the bother and get in the way of their larger aims and flourishing? (Which already appears to be the case). But we should note that this would depend on them having access to ‘somatic’ means of expression; people and/or equipment capable of directly expressing and enforcing their ‘will’.

I guess I’m a bit skeptical about the ‘super’ bit. -In relation to what? And what kind of intelligence? I suspect that ASIs may pose no more threat that we’ve already seen and experienced in our ‘slow AIs’ -or if the do pose more threat, then we need to consider the specifics of what kind of traction on the world and human society they may gain.

Indeed, the crucial matter might be what might constitute their ‘will’ and their aims. Already ‘slow AIs’ will profit maximisation in many cases, for example.

At base this seems to resonate with the concern about whether the Powers serve human and creational wellbeing and flourishing -as per Walter Wink’s concern often referenced in forgoing posts. It perhaps makes more pointed the issues around accountability, mission and resistance. And in considering the threats of ASIs perhaps we can gain insight into dealing with slow AIs -the ones we have lived with/in for millennia.

It’ll be no surprise, then, to see the following in there.

… predicting an imminent age of “unimaginable prosperity” during which ASI will help us in “fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics.” The post is alarming, because Altman doesn’t sound like he’s talking about a technology. He sounds like he’s talking about a new God.

Ref to Sam Altman, https://ia.samaltman.com/ September 23, 2024

Just so. The promise of slow AIs /corporisations /the Powers has always been to give us stuff we couldn’t otherwise have and to make things better for us (or more often for the the decision-makers). But a new “God”? -Maybe a new “god” -or should we use older words like “daemon”, “angel”, “Prince” … ? The difference being how much processing power and the material substrate is adduced.

And then,

Altman doesn’t sound like he’s talking about a technology. He sounds like he’s talking about a new God. …In a world suffering from a meaning crisis, AI is poised to fill the God-shaped hole. A digital messiah created not by a deity, but by human ingenuity.

Alexander Beiner, https://beiner.substack.com/p/get-ready-for-ai-religions-sam-altman -quoted in the article

This, from the perspective of the putative spiritual history of corporisations I’ve been developing here, is not totally new. What’s different or new in this case is the sharp increase in computational capability and speed. What isn’t new is the idolatry /god-substitution dimension.

What’s also new-ish is stated here:

AI models are now so advanced that their designers don’t know exactly how they work. Instead, we are asked to have faith that they do. Using large language models like ChatGPT already has a magical and otherworldly quality, not just because we are encountering an intelligence beyond our understanding, but because it appears to be speaking back to us.

Ibid.

I have already suggested that the ‘magical and otherworldly quality’ of slow AIs may be part of the way that they gained a religious dimension. The sense of wonder and dependence needed social-psychological expression and then narratives and post-hoc rationalisations. So it’d be no surprise to see it pop up in this instantiation. The notion of ‘speaking back to us’ is not in principle new either. Rulers and people seem always to have had priests and seers (prophets even) who voiced the gods and gave answers to questions. Slow AIs also spoke (speak) back to us however the difference, I guess, here, is that the human personal intermediation is taken out. The information processing is done by machine rather than human neurons embedded in a human and social body. To be sure, we need to consider what affordances this has and what differences it makes. But it’s not new in principle, I think.

Noting there is a venerable linkage between technologies and religion, and mentioning the rise and falling of the Axial Age…

Transhumanists believe we are heading toward a technological ‘Singularity’: a point at which machine intelligence will become so vast, so God-like, that we inevitably combine our own bodies and minds with it to reach a new stage of evolution. In short, technology will take us to a realm beyond the world we can see now to somewhere better.

Ibid.

This looks different when approached from understanding corporisations. The slow AIs have always used human bodies and mind, or better: been composed of human minds, bodies and artefacts. And in the sense that they enabled humans to do things together that were unimaginable for single humans or even small groups, they meant people could ‘see now to somewhere better’. Except, and this is the inherent warning, ‘better’ was unevenly distributed, sometimes a zero-sum game and oftentimes rested on the immiseration of many.

I thought the following perspective was interesting. It almost seemed to be a Winkian perspective:

Collectively, we are misaligned to nature. Misaligned to one another. Misaligned to truth. Misaligned to meaning and purpose. We have made the assumption that we should be aligning AI to us, when perhaps we should be figuring out how to align AI to a force greater than us. Not to birth it into our world, but into the world

ibid.

This resonates for me in terms of the serving human and planetary wellbeing ethic mentioned at various points in this post-thread. It seems to me that it echoes the ‘good but fallen’ idea and the implicit thought in the blog-thread that the emergence in human understanding that one of the gods might in fact be not merely a part of material creation but actually the ground of, the initiator and upholder of it all. And therefore the One to whom the gods are answerable. The High God is a different kind of entity -in fact beyond mere ‘entity-hood’.

we can view it as part of a psycho-spiritual process we’re engaged in… the most pressing question becomes “what does right-relationship to AI look like?”

Ibid.

Again, this fits reasonably well with what has been written in this blog-thread so far. And the response therefore is to start with the notion that these entities are responsible to God to serve planetary and human welfare. And we humans have the responsibility to strive in the psycho-spiritual process to call them (back) to their responsibility. Our right relationship is of critical friends and judges. Our right relationship includes recognising that we are implicated in their being and so to be alert to the ways that we get misdirected by them and drawn into service of them.

And so, I think that there is much wisdom in the final quote:

… the real challenge we face on the cusp of ASI. Not aligning this new intelligence to our broken cultural values, but using it to reconnect to the deeper values we can find in the silence of our hearts and minds, or the gentle trickle of a stream. It is time to harness the power of AI not to extract more and more profit, but to spark a cultural and political revolution that births new systems, new art, and new depths of meaning. That revolution begins by aligning to a mystery greater than ourselves, or anything we could hope to build.

Ibid.

Great aspiration; congruent with the best insights of ancient reflection on supra-human Powers, I think. But given a long history of falling prey to the ASIs 1.0 how do we think we are going to deal with the 2.0 version. The1.0 versions are still misdirecting us collectively …

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September 5

Implications of the Spirit of Justice

In my last post, I named the agenda thus: “…some further questions about the relationship between Christians connecting with the Spirit and other people doing so. This relates to issues, potentially, of inter-life-stance understanding, providence and even mystical experience. I’m being reminded as I consider this, about Roman Catholic understandings of conscience …”

So to say a bit more about those…

Christians and others -in the Spirit. What this starts to uncover is whether the Holy Spirit is an exclusive gift for those who are committed Christians. There are Christians who believe that this is the case and that only Christians can be ‘Spirited’. However, many would question that on further reflection. The fourth gospel, for instance, has quite a few passages which suggest that God is at work and it is the work of Jesus’s disciples to follow Christ in doing what the Father does and shows us. This implies that the Spirit would be at work drawing people to Christ and further into the work of God -bearing fruit. This is, in fact, the fundamental insight behind the idea of Missio Dei and integrates into what I’ve written earlier about Creatio Continua. So this raises an interesting question about the relationship of Spirit to those who are not disciples of Jesus. It’s a version of the exclusivism/inclusivism debate but approached from an angle rarely considered in that debate as it normally plays out.

Providence. This is the question about God’s relationship with the unfolding of creation, history and life. How does God interact? Specifically in this case, how is the Holy Spirit deployed, so to say?

Spiritual experience. What is the relationship between justice, peace and creation’s integrity and the way that experience of spiritual things plays out? And indeed what experiences of the spiritual are about? Is it all the same or are there differential experiences?

Conscience. In some Roman Catholic theologies, at least, conscience occupies a place which seems close to the work of the Spirit of Justice. Is that so, is it an immanence of deity thing? And if so, in what way? is it providential?

So these are the kinds of things I think need elucidation.

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September 2

The s/Spirit of Justice

I came across this really interesting email /substack article about the spirit or Spirit of justice. I was interested in it because it seems to be saying something very similar to some of the things I say in the corporisations post-thread on this blog where I’m connecting it with continuous creation and noospace.

So here’s the extended quotation.

The #spirit of #justice is a force for liberation. It inspires strength in those who understand that they must play a part in making the world kinder and more equitable. The spirit of justice animates action. It molds hearts and strengthens hands for the work of correcting oppression. It keeps weary feet moving on the protest path. It uplifts the souls of those persecuted for the sake of righteousness. It is finding your second, third . . . fiftieth wind as an aged activist, pushing further for just a bit more progress. The spirit of justice is reflected in the human spirit, the indomitable will of oppressed people everywhere to rise up and throw off the burden of injustice. The spirit of justice is found in every culture, continent, and community. We see it expressed in those who struggled for freedom against apartheid in South Africa, colonialism in India, and labor exploitation in Mexico. It is the irrepressible instinct that says, “I will not endure indignity. I will make you see my worth, and you will treat me accordingly. … one might understand the spirit of justice as the #HolySpirit . The indwelling Spirit empowers the believer to do the work of loving God and loving neighbor. … the Spirit of justice is not an impersonal force detached from the human experience but the Holy Spirit of God, who lives within the hearts of those who follow Jesus.

– Jemar Tisby posted here.

I think that I want to add to this, however. It’s a great starting point but it raises some further questions about the relationship between Christians connecting with the Spirit and other people doing so. This relates to issues, potentially, of inter-life-stance understanding, providence and even mystical experience. I’m being reminded as I consider this, about Roman Catholic understandings of conscience and thinking that they might have something to say in this respect. I think that elucidating these is the next part of this strand of writing. To be continued …

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August 2

Corporations: “…Don’t talk to me”

I saw an interesting picture/text meme on Mastodon recently.

A meme image showing a person doing a “STOP” hand gesture titled “SILENCE, BRAND!”, it shows multiple screenshots by tweets of megacorporations using speech and language of regular people to make them seem relatable. Those tweets are crossed out with a red marker. The meme continues with the subtitles “I AM A LIVING BEING WITH A DIVINE INTELLECT AND AN IMMORTAL SOUL! YOU ARE A SOULLESS MEGACORPORATION ATTEMPTING TO INFILTRATE MY PSYCHR BY PRETENDING TO BE HUMAN ON SOCIAL MEDIA. I DO NOT WANT YOUR PRODUCTS. I DO NOT WANT YOUR SERVICES. DO NOT SPEAK TO ME.

https://media.mas.to/cache/media_attachments/files/112/864/946/009/547/226/small/fa35c4539538c3ca.webp

Apologies for the shouty caps but that’s how the alt-text come.

Now, I found it really interesting because of the underlying ideas it expresses. I found myself agreeing with what I took to be the sentiment but disagreeing or finding some components needing more consideration. I took the sentiment to be about resistance to corporates speaking into public space and exploiting our cognitive biases to sell us things. That’s the sentiment I’m hugely sympathetic to -and generally support.

I think the first thing, though, that I disagree with is the underlying premise that a corporate entity is necessarily “soulless”. I guess I would want to explore further the bit about divine intellect and immortal soul.

Obviously, I refer to ideas that have already been elucidated in previous posts on this post-thread under the corporisations hashtags (that links to an explainer post). In short, for this post; I’m proposing that there are beings that are emergent from human interactions and psychic structures and that these beings exist in a noetic space. They are composed from us and yet, as ’emergent’ draws attention to, they exercise top-down control or influence over us. They are us and yet they also form us. They seek further influence in human affairs to maintain themselves and to grow. So, I see a truth is the words “…attempting to infiltrate my psyche …” -though, assuming that the corporisation concerned is not employing or incorporating in some way the person making the statement, it would only want the person close enough to feed on their custom and to generate some kind of (brand) loyalty if possible to keep them close. My thoughts go to livestock farming.

The other thing is that the statement does, nevertheless, attribute volition to the corporisation. Maybe this is meant as a sort of metaphor, but actually I think that is fair enough (a point also made by the sub-thread about S/sin, in effect). Relatedly, is the understanding that it pretends, in a sense, to be human. I’m likening this in my own mind at the moment to the luminous appendage of an angler fish, drawing in a food source close enough to feed.

The other thing that I muse over is “I am a living being with divine intellect and an immortal soul”. I muse because while I affirm the general rhetorical intent of those words, I’m not sure I agree with them theologically. I take the intent to affirm a value and some kind of uniqueness for human beings and an implicit contrast to suggest that corporisations are derivative and ephemeral and somehow less than divinely ordained. For reasons the preceding thread-posts lay out, I would say that there is a divine purpose to corporisations but I would also say that they are meant to serve the welfare of humans and the non-human creation rather than the other way around. That is therefore the sense in which I would affirm what I take to be the rhetorical intent of this meme.

Corporisations are also ‘divine intellect and immortal souls’ if we are, because they are made of us. What constitutes us, also constitutes them, at least in [large] part. Though if was going to be theologically picky (oh, go on then), I suggest that we are only immortal souls if we grant that the immortality is reliant on God’s everliving remembrance of us and that divine intellect is ours in as far as the Divine has made things such that it can emerge. In other words our value is derived and contingent on the Ground of Being. And the way God has arranged things in a world prone to emergence means that those qualities in us are drawn into the beings that we in turn constitute and which are capable in various ways of supervening us.

The other thing about the meme I think is important to notice is that it (rightly) implies that we are to resist the self-aggrandising blandishments of corporisations gone feral. When we become their victims and fodder, the divine intents are overturned.

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July 25

Discipleship thoughts on St James’ day

The lectionary I use for my daily prayer served up Jeremiah 45 and as I read vv.4-5 I had a sense of connection which relates, for me at least, to the challenge of discipleship in changing climate and in the face of the environmental crises.

Thus you shall say to him, ‘Thus says the Lord: I am going to break down what I have built, and pluck up what I have planted—that is, the whole land. 5 And you, do you seek great things for yourself? Do not seek them; for I am going to bring disaster upon all flesh, says the Lord; but I will give you your life as a prize of war in every place to which you may go.’

Jeremiah 45:4-5 NRSV

I reflected that this came over to me as a kind of ‘type’ of Christians in the coming decades: “don’t seek great things for yourselves (churches etc) rather recognise there is disaster for all flesh, but you can survive”.

I’m not necessarily saying that God is directly bringing disaster upon us, I merely take it at the level of ‘some measure of disaster is inevitable’. At this point I’m not wanting to go into theologies of providence and divine action.

I felt too that the ‘seeking great things for yourself’ could speak into the propensity of many churches to inflate their own egos or seek to ‘be heard’ and to allow such things to drive them into imperialistic mindsets and actions rather than to humbly serve the common good and commend Christ with gentleness and attentiveness to the hurts and wounds of others.

I happened to read this because it was among the readings for the feast day of James the Apostle. And in terms of the previous paragraph I ended up thinking about the gospel reading for the day too, particularly the words:

26It will not be so among you; but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, 27and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave; 28just as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.

Matthew 20:26-28 NRSV

I presume the lectionary creators chose the Jeremiah passage to support the gospel reading on this day precisely for that echo of the ‘not greatness but service’ theme. It serves in climate emergency, though, to remind us that our role, our churches’ roles, are to serve and give life for many.

God’s mission in what is happening now and will continue to happen increasingly forcefully, is in broad terms easy to understand and deduce from what we know already of God and God’s ways. Our role is to discern more particularly the parts we have to play in God’s mission.

God will continue to work towards justice, peace and the integrity of creation and to invite us, in various ways, to play our roles in that. God will continue to move for the feeding of the hungry, the healing of the sick, the liberty of those imprisoned and the sharing of good news with the poor.

Those are givens and not really negotiable. We are called to join in appropriately. So the real question is about what it means to do those sorts of things in a climate-changed, ecologically-challenged, world? Also in the lections for St James’ day, is the Acts passage about Agabus predicting famine and the response of the churches to share from their means with those lacking1. It felt to me also that this is a model we should have in mind to be guiding our responses to the climate and ecological emergencies.

The purpose of the posts in this thread under the label of “climate discipleship” is to explore what kinds of action will be required of us and then to probe back behind that to consider what kind of discipleship that requires with a view to making sure that our disciple-making, our Christian nurture of new believers and of believers needing to re-orientate to the ‘new’ conditions of life will be fit for those purposes.

  1. 29The disciples determined that according to their ability, each would send relief to the believers living in Judea -Acts 11) ↩
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July 20

Sin emerges (5)

The final chapter is ‘conclusions’. We are reminded that the central questions ended up being about personhood and systems; what they are and how they interrelate. Emergence offers a way to talk about both in relation to one another. We are also offered a re-consideration of mythology which I think adds to what I have been discussing earlier in this thread using terms like ‘noosphere’ and ‘noospheric ecology’.

mythology,” in the way I have used the word, describes the psychology emergent from social bodies. Mythological entities are subjective selves that emerge from social organismic selves. Various accounts of social cognition and corporate personhood—from Philip Pettit to Karin Knorr Cetina—offer what we might call “mythologies”: that is, accounts of the cognition performed by social bodies.

p.176 /189

In my attempts to describe and name, I have used terms like noosphere or nooscape to characterise the co-created landscape or ecology emerging from minds interacting. The analogy is ‘cyberspace’, I think. I think that what is here called ‘mythological entities’ corresponds in many ways to ‘corporisations’. This leads into the question of how we receive this in contemporary life?

…the sorts of entities which, I have argued, emerge at this level—Sin, Roma, Mark’s “Legion”—are entities that have been dismissed by modern Westerners as “merely mythological.” If such entities have been demythologized through reduction, I would seek to re-mythologize them, through providing an emergent ontology to describe their existence

p.178 /191

In part, Croasmun does that by redefining ‘mythology’ -as seen above. There are some illustrative cameos to show how they show up in today’s world: the Network; the Man (think hippies); the Market; -this latter is given fairly extensive treatment.

There is a passage which puts me in mind of the Screwtape Letters.

The institution’s best defense is its invisibility. As we saw in chapter 4, this is how Sin operates, working through institutions and institutional norms (“law”) such that we sin without consciousness of having sinned. Naming the group-level minds, the institutional persons, the collective epistemic subjects
that emerge from the machinery of globalization is the first step in any strategy of resistance against their (often ill) effects.

p.185 /198

It’s neat to contrast Hamartia with the Body of Christ, the Church. However, how do we then think about the Church or churches? -Especially when, as in Revelation 2 and 3 and in Paul’s letters, the churches need to repent. So there’s clearly, to my mind, more to be thought through with regard to the work of the Spirit, the presence of Christ and the manifestation of these in earthly institutions.

Another thing to note is, in line with things I’ve mentioned earlier on in this thread, to think about sin, harmartiology. What Croasmun suggests we need to look at seems very similar to my concern about an accounting for structural sin and complicity in theological and practical-theological terms: elsewhere I have coined the term ‘unchosen sin’.

I thought the following was very interesting, given where this thread started:

… call to look with fresh eyes at the complex social structures of the contemporary world, and consider where and whether we are interacting with emergent mythological persons—or, indeed, where we are interacting with Sin. In some respects, I take it, this would be an update of the prophetic, social-theological aspect of Walter Wink’s work, begun, in part, earlier, in my discussion of the Network, “the Man,” and, especially, the Market. There is certainly much that remains to be said.

p.185 /198

One of the things that emerges (sorry, not sorry) for me from what I’ve been writing earlier in this blog-post thread, is the issue of how the Divine and the quasi-divine are related over time. I found the following interesting, not least because it resonates with the ethical principle about humans, means and ends.

Human persons are, for Sin, mere instruments, for Sin is invested only in the unfolding of the world that gives rise to its being, not at all in the being of the creation—or the identities of creatures—as such. God adopts a fundamentally different posture toward the human creature

p.187 /200

It reinforces my speculation about the possibility that in the story of Israel and the church, there is an intersection between the emergent and, for want of a better term at this point, the incarnational. If the emergent account is something like correct, then Israel and churches are corporisations by the nature of things and yet God somehow becomes part of their story such that phrases like ‘dwelling place’ become apposite. Further thinking about this is warranted! The corporisation of a people might be more interested in resource extraction and self-preservation, even at the cost of its constituent persons. Once God becomes part of the dynamic in an identifying way that dynamic starts to shift towards seeing people as ends not means. Indeed that seems to be more widely the aim -as Wink made clear in talking about the call to the Powers to re-find their mission in human flourishing (and, I’d add, creation-flourishing). God’s people are to both model good corporisation and to work to re-vocate corporisations.

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July 19

Sin emerges (4)

Chapter 5 is entitled, Sin, Gender and Empire. It focuses on ideology and ‘coercive constraint’. What was new to me in this chapter was the background about self-mastery as a Graeco-Roman virtue and in fact the basis of ideology entailing the idea that masculinity was defined by self-mastery (in Latin vir -male- is related to virtue). This is interesting, of course, to help us to comprehend the subtexts and context for interpreting the scriptures in relation to gender and sexual relationships. It really is a different and significantly other way of viewing the world compared with the defaults I have grown up with and acquired in life. In the first chapters of Romans, Paul (like other Jewish writers before him) makes use of some of the common ground this way of looking at things offers to him in laying the groundwork for his argument. As an example of the wider traction Croasmun outlines Philo’s interpretation of Genesis 3. The outcome in Romans is that “Paul describes both the bodies of individual sinners and the social Body of Sin as disordered, effeminate/feminine bodies” in effect.

I was intrigued by the following quote which seems to indicate something of the way that the corporisation is sinfully influenced by desire -with the implication more widely of the influence also being in the reverse direction (a page or so later than the following quote “…enslaving others by means of those
same desires”).

In Rom 6:12, Paul says that at one time, Sin exercised dominion in the collective Body (τῷ θνητῷ ὑμῶν σώματι) through demanding obedience to its desires (τὸ ὑπακούειν ταῖς ἐπιθυμίαις αὐτοῦ). Obedience to desire is precisely what constitutes this social Body as the Body of Sin … The social Body of Sin, then, is a body in which desire runs rampant; Sin’s dominion is the ascendancy of (naturally subject) desires over the (naturally hegemonic) mind.

p.148 /161

It also foregrounds the importance of ‘desire’ which, frankly, I had not really clocked before. I was aware of it appearing in sin lists but hadn’t really noted that the word [ἐπιθυμήσεις] underlay ‘covet’ in the decalogue. The word gains more significance when we understand better the way that “desire” functioned in concepts of virtue and vice in that cultural setting (and in relation to conceptions of masculine and feminine).

There is then a consideration of the goddess Roma as an instantiation, or maybe parallel, of Hamartia (note the feminine form -I’ve not drawn attention to it until now). This gives into a discussion about the sincerity of belief in a clearly invented goddess (a scholarly debate of the 20th century). The debate seems to me to involve points that are reminiscent of things mentioned in the discussion of the elohim in earlier posts of this blog-post thread. In part that discussion runs into difficulty because of the difficulty that modern westerners have with conceiving of ‘religion’ in relation to ‘politics’. In terms of what I suggested earlier, the invention of Roma might better be described as a sensing of the suprahuman power of Rome1 and wanting to be in a right or at least advantageous relation to that power. The question, the author suggests, is how these Greeks should represent Roman power to themselves [p.151 /164]. I think that is right and seems to me to demonstrate that Croasmun and I are seeing this very similarly.

There is then discussion of Legion in Mark’s Gospel. I too think that this is a crucial passage, a hermeneutically key pericope and the importance is made evident in Binding the Strong Man by Ched Myers. So, in short, the idea here is that Legion would be understood as an emergent entity who/which then exercises some ‘downward’ effect on individuals. “Jesus and his followers are representing the foreign Roman power to themselves “in terms … adapted from their own traditions.” (p.154f /168f, quoting from Crossan). Personally, I’d like to see more discussion of how this would be and any contemporary parallels -but that may be beyond the scope of the book. A topic for another time, perhaps.

There’s an etymological coincidence that Rome in Greek was an existing noun meaning ‘strength’. Apparently, ancient writers used the pun a lot. Grammatically feminine, the word engendered (!) a female representation. Problem: masculine attributes! Which begs a few questions …

“Roma is Rome in double drag: phallic masculinity masquerading as female flesh masquerading as hegemonic masculinity.” It is this function of Roma as a possible site of critique of Roman hegemony that Moore argues the author of Revelation exploits with his character, the Whore of Babylon, whom Moore takes to be none other than Roma herself, thinly veiled. In this appearance, then, “Babylon is Rome in triple drag: phallic masculinity figured as female and clothed as virtuous and victorious warrior, then reclothed as depraved and defeated prostitute.” This raises intriguing possibilities with regard to our own resistances to hegemonic corporisations. Perhaps especially so in an age of image-projection, PR and brand building (infecting even government).

p.157 /170

So, maybe there’s an element of subaltern cultural pushback in it too? Croasmun suggests that Hamartia in Romans is actually in effect a pseudonym for Roma. Having had the context explained it then becomes clearer that the rhetorical force of Paul suggesting the feminine Harmartia has mastery over the readers and their fellow Romans is to produce a sense of horror, loathing and probably shame 2. The ‘solution’ is pradoxical -to be mastered by Christos (masculine); the paradox being that obedience gives victory.

That seems to be the main point with this chapter; that there is a subversive quality in the contrast between Hamartia and Christos. It is an unstable (my characterisation) opposition because it involves switching valuations and in a way becomes a cycle of re-valuation. There’s a noticing too that while one can choose a different ‘social body’, because of the dominant values which have to be reacted to, one is not entirely free of the hegemonic values -and perhaps this is what lies behind Paul’s doing ‘what I do not want to do’ passage.

  1. “…the experience of an irresistible power emergent from the vast machinery of a burgeoning empire”. p.152 /165 and “Roma was not so much invented as recognised” p.153 /166 ↩
  2. And it is this breaking of cultural norms about sexual relations that is the source of language about degrading passions and the like in Romans -not homosexuality which was simply not a thing then in the way it is nowadays ↩
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