Western civilization believes in increasingly few Big Things, as the Greek poet Archilochus and the 20th-century philosopher Isaiah Berlin called them. This includes the One Big Thing, God, the numerous philosophical proofs of whose existence many claim to find insufficient and unbelievable.
Among those things the West does believe in are the numerous discoveries that scientists have claimed for themselves, such as the recent discovery that the universe is expanding at its edges – that is to say, it is receding from us – faster than the speed of light, owing to the cumulative stretching of space: a thing that seems to me to be far more unimaginable and unbelievable than the existence of a single triune God who created that universe and everything in it.
Yet if the media are to be believed, the same class of people, roughly speaking, who accept all or most of the findings of modern science deny the existence of metaphysical truth as being no more credible than the God who embodies it and speaks it to all men.
Belief, it seems, is itself a fluid thing, infinitely susceptible of contraction and expansion
Rather, all ideas and claims of truth are relative, they insist, while a substantial portion of them add that physical reality itself is fluid – allowing, for example, men to be refashioned as women if they are sincerely convinced that they have been (despite their possession of the XY chromosomes that science discovered more than a century ago are the determinants of the male sex), capable of ovulation, menstruation, conception, childbirth, lactation and much else that distinguishes the human female exclusively.
Such people inevitably scoff at the Biblical account of the impregnation of Mary by the Holy Ghost, the virgin birth and the possibility of other miracles which they condemn as preposterous myths, even as they remain open-minded to the feasibility of transferring human minds to computers and boosting them into space to enjoy eternal life beyond the stars, where (presumably) they will spend eternity fleeing Mother Earth as they keep pace with the expanding universe, forever and ever, amen. Belief, it seems, is itself a fluid thing, infinitely susceptible of contraction and expansion according to its holder’s character, imagination and will.
Now, into a world which is ever less able to agree on what is metaphysically and philosophically true and what is false, the new technocratic geniuses and benefactors of mankind have thrust the digital machines known collectively as artificial intelligence, whose purpose is to replicate human intelligence raised to a vastly superhuman level and degree. These machines have been designed also to create counterfeit realities so exactly and convincingly that it is impossible for ordinary users using ordinary and generally available means to distinguish them from the real thing, precisely as if they were counterfeit paper money and coins.
While scarcely miraculous, these replications are indeed remarkable accomplishments, though only in the sense that the creation of the Covid-19 virus in a laboratory was an accomplishment, or that of an artificial carcinogenic virus would be. Unfortunately, even these last two horrors would not come close to being as dangerous to the welfare and future of the human race as the creation of an artificial mistress, wife or child is certain to be.
For a world that cannot recognize and agree on truth, these postmodern sorcerers’ apprentices have created technologies that deliberately confuse reality with unreality, the dimension of the real with that of the unreal; thus destroying the human capacity to recognize and distinguish between the two with certainty and assurance.
Added to humanity’s age-old skepticism regarding the nature of ultimate truths and its inability to agree on them, this new incapacity – and very often willingness – to believe what it sees with its own eyes and hears with its own ears and accept it as “really real,” and not a monstrous counterfeit and lie worthy of the Prince of Lies himself, has the potential to bring about the end of humanity, irrespective of whether the human race as a biological species survives the catastrophe or not.
Karl Marx’s epigram about history repeating itself, “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce,” got the thing exactly backward. While the farcical element in history is undeniable, nearly a century and a half after the faux-philosopher’s death it appears increasingly possible that the process will end not in farce but rather in tragedy of the highest sort, as the creature created in the image of God misuses and abuses his highest and most distinguishing God-given gifts to destroy the high civilization he built over millennia by the proper use of them, and ruin himself along with it.
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