The Power of Stories, Part 2
the Manipulation of Language
another over-crowded bookcase in our house
These innovations are fundamental to what it is to be human. We are the animal that, for better or for worse, tells stories about ourselves to ourselves. What an enormous power it is, the power of word, the power of symbol, the power of story. And what terrifying consequences result from its misuse.
Only by understanding the generality of the use and abuse of the power of word can we approach a solution to the problem of how to align AI with human well-being given its potential to automate the opposite, whether as a tool of totalitarians and madmen or as an autonomous agent itself.
It is not a mere technical problem. It is the latest iteration of the original alignment problem of symbolic culture that every society has grappled with. AI merely brings to it a new level of urgency.
-Charles Eisenstein, “Intelligence in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
Let’s recap Part 1 of this article:
We, as a society, are being held by the ‘cold spell of the intellect’. The mythology of our time wants to shape our future by convincing us that science, or rather scientism, is all there is in the world and everything that can be known can only be explained by the rules of science - sometimes referred to as The Age of Reason. Scientism looks to shatter the Ancient Mysteries and, instead, tell a new tale of our origin/genesis, one which comes out of cold logic. Scientism wants to remove any vestiges of subtlety, enigma and sacredness in our mythology and replace it with left-brained certainty.
Remember, stories used to be a guide to reality, helping us to ‘orient ourselves in the world’. What do the stories of today offer? What is to come of stories, or any art for that matter, in the era of AI? Where will Scientism lead us? These are some of the questions I have rolling around in my head, and in the heads of so many others today. But first we must deal with the problem of language…
Language is both our most effective tool and our most powerful weapon. - Paul Kingsnorth
Lert us start to explore these issues by looking to our use of language. Paul Kingsnorth explores the power of words in his essay The Language of the Master:
Most humans throughout history would barely have understood the purpose of staring immobile at some marks on paper or glowing screen. The notion that they could help anyone to understand the complexity of lived reality would have seemed absurd…
Words are not real. I think we have forgotten this. In a culture that increasingly deals with abstracts, it is a dangerous form of forgetting.
‘A dangerous form of forgetting’ for sure. What Kingsnorth means here is that words only represent the things they are describing. When I talk/write about, say, cooking, that is not real. What was real was the cooking itself, the doing. The actual act of cooking is happening in reality, whereas the talking/writing about the cooking is the abstraction (as a side note, more people watch cooking shows in America, than people who actually cook….hmmm).
I think people fall prey to this when they watch TV. Someone will say they know a place because they have seen it on a TV show, but they can’t know a place unless they have physically been there; the other is just an abstraction. Just because you have seen, read or heard about something does not mean you have actually experienced it.
Let me try to illustrate this (rather esoteric) concept another way… We are already an abstraction from our true form. We are spirits having a physical experience, souls in human form. We are already living one degree away from our true selves. Now, if we think about using language to communicate with other human beings (who are also spirit inhabiting a physical form) we are two degrees away; matching symbols to the sounds we utter - now three degrees away. Reading someone else’s words we are four degrees away. Did you ever hear of ‘6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon’? This is where I’m going. Once we get to a computer program that is ‘learning’ from the information we feed it, reconfiguring that information to feed it back to us…how far have we come, how many degrees, from our true selves, from our essence, our spirit? How far has the abstraction gone?
If language is ‘our most powerful weapon’, and it’s only a degree or two away from our true Self, then how is it that we cannot see the dangers in AI and Scientism? How can we not feel the abyss we are walking into? (let’s just allow those questions to sit there for now)
So, back to Kingsorth and the complications of our language:
I have a suspicion – a suspicion I have long held but have circled around, not wanting to fully face. It is this: that words are the problem. That language itself – or at least the kind of language we use, abstracted, boiled down into these ink marks – is part of the process by which we desacralise the world.
The language we use pulls us further into the world of abstraction and away from the Sacred (our soul, spirit, essence; if we are made in the image of God, then we are Sacred). This is the slippery slope we are on.
The notion of identifying ‘problems’ – of using language as a tool to pin things down, define them, dissect them and then improve upon them is fatally flawed. Life is not a problem to be solved. It is a state to be dwelt in. To believe anything else is to walk the path towards tyranny; the path we have long been walking, even as we believe we are on a pilgrimage towards liberation.
We tend, in our society, to feel we need to examine, pull apart and dissect everything, but, as stated, ‘life is not a problem to be solved, it is a state to be dwelt in’. This life is a state of being in a physical realm where we have the opportunity to learn by doing, interacting, relating and experiencing, yet we are obsessed with analysing, deconstructing, indexing and, ultimately, separating and segregating ourselves from the rest of Creation.
working with the ways of seeing and communicating which machine culture downplays or ridicules, but which every traditional society before modernity’s advent understood and worked with. That means myth, religion, practical expertise founded upon physical work, rooted imagery, holistic conceptions of life, communication with non-human beings, poetry, complexity, questions that do not have answers, questions which are not questions at all. It means seeing time as a circle, not a line, life as a process, not a puzzle to be solved, death as a part of that life, not an enemy to be defeated. Sometimes – horror of horrors – it means embracing unknowing. It means learning to stop, and be silent.
Here we are, back to stories as medicine; back to myth, religion, experience, work, creativity. In Part 1 I quoted from The Power of Stories, “Imagination is supplanted by the intellect as the wisdom of myth gives way to the clever concoctions of scientific theory.” This is akin to what Kingsnorth is getting at - our left brain (the emissary) has taken the right hemisphere (the master) captive and what we are left with is polemic, not poetry.
I would suggest the way forward is to go into the “myth, religion, practical expertise founded upon physical work, rooted imagery, holistic conceptions of life, communication with non-human beings, poetry, complexity, questions that do not have answers, questions which are not questions at all”. To pull away from the draw of the Machine and Machine Thinking - Scientism, Left-brain Dominance and the Manipulation of Language.
Addison Hodges Hart, The Pragmatic Mystic on Substack, in his article AI Watch - or, Here Comes Hell offers his antidote for our current predicament:
Among the deeply human needs and attributes that AI threatens, such as creativity, education, employment, dignity, and so on, I don’t believe it’s any exaggeration to say that the spiritual dangers it poses are grave….
What we do with our time, in our leisure and in our work, is always essential to spiritual discipline. It will be even more urgent to practice our ascetic lives conscientiously and rigorously as we turn this new historical corner. If we find we are mentally living in fabricated worlds of illusion, being lied to by the media, unable to distinguish fact from fantasy, spiritually confused, unable to concentrate, incapable of learning with a sense of confidence in the veracity of the information being imparted (and younger generations are now at risk in this way to an extent we never were)… then it may well prove the case that only our prayerful, contemplative commitment to Christ and the truth will keep us mentally, emotionally, and spiritually balanced.
I think I will leave it here for now - these concepts are deep and only time can allow you to sit with them and fully explore the possibilities.
I will continue with Part 3, Trust in the Post-Truth Era soon, but for now if you are interested in reading more about Kingsnorth’s ideas around language and the written word here’s a link to his article entitled The Great Work (and a preview):
I have long felt that certain forms of writing are also forms of magic. That gazing upon small black marks on white paper, or on a glowing screen, can cause chemical, hormonal, physical, and emotional changes in a human animal is no small thing. We have all read things which have had a deep and inexplicable impact on us; which may even have changed the course of our lives. I have written things which have had this impact on others; I know, because they have told me. Sometimes I have written things which have caused the scales to fall from people’s eyes, and they have thanked me for it. At other times I have written things which have enraged people, and they have abused me for it. I always know when I am writing something which will have this kind of impact. Something rises up through me and I don’t know what it is. It is important not to ask.