Singularity - Full Realisation of Man's Fall

The moment of singularity is when Artificial Intelligence will surpass human intelligence.  To some this means the end or extinction of man, the Imago Dei, by his own idol.  While Artificial Intelligence can only ever be complicated input and output and cannot possess consciousness in the of sense of Man as made with the divine spark of life, it can reach the ultimate stage of Gestell - humanity's enframement by the technology it created.

For a scientist such as Robert Kurzweil, captured by the work of his own mind and hands, this, like the Fruit in the Garden is the key to immortality.  Such an attitude is rife in the tech world.  It is no accident that Apple chose the symbol of a bitten fruit.  From this perspective that human desire, rooted in pride, to know and achieve immortality through dominating Nature, subjecting the world to its will, can be traced from the temptation to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, through alchemy, occultism, Baconite science to splitting the atom, to Big Tech and now the push for singularity.  

According to the reductive narrative of atheism, in its Promethean spirit, this is healthy rebellion against the arbitrary Patriarch God.  We outwit the Divine decrees and achieve forbidden power, finally leading to immortality.

This is a misunderstanding of God and His love and benevolence.  Adam was forbidden the fruit because in his undeveloped and naive state such knowledge in Eden would have brought about terror and disaster to mankind.  Instead the Exile was to allow us to survive this disaster of our sin.  The Exile leads to Christ and our redemption and immortality.

The pride of Satan was the cause of his rebellion and he appealed to our pride in our transgressions to achieve immortal life and power over Nature.  We thereby in Heideggerian terms, treated Nature as standing reserve and became enframed by our technology - the work of our own artistry.

What is going wrong here in the vision of perpetual life in this realm of existence is what went wrong at the Fall,, whether you understand that story literally or symbolically.  And it leads to death not life, enslavement to decay, not freedom.  Our pride leads us to see Nature as something to manipulate whether by magic or science - the urge is the same to both practices.  

And so, even if singularity means we can avoid death in this temporal realm, we will not be attaining the richness of eternal life with God.  There is a fundamental and foundational mistake, indeed sin, in this attempt to seize the fruit of eternal life.  We are going about it by grasping, not letting go.

From Christ's death on the Cross we see eternal life is achieved by relinquishng our control and smashing the idols we create, be they Moloch or Big Tech.  That is not to say our creativity is wrong, for just as we are stewards of Creation, so we are made to be creative.  It is rather the spirit in which we create.  It is the Machenschaft Heidegger points to by falling into inauthenticity of Being and treating that over which we are stewards as standing reserve.

The spirit in which artificial intelligence is created is paradoxically both our own grasping at control and a surrender to the work of our own hands as a new god.  Impatient for Moses to return from the mountain, we are building our golden calf.

Nonetheless, however far artificial intelligence develops as an input and output system, it remains only that.  Only God breathes life into beings and only God creates consciousness.  That is not to say that a level of sophistication and complexity that will exceed human rationality is impossible.  Simply by dint of the complexity and the likely general nature of A.I.'s ability to process, in that level of intelligence it could exceed humanity and become more powerful in a technical sense.  It could well be the Beast we must bear the mark of and bow down to worship.  What A.I. will not have is the nous of which the Fathers speak, that enables us to participate in the Divine Energy of God and to be transformed from glory into glory as we participate in the divine - the Imago Dei recovering the likeness of God given at Creation and forfeited by Adam's attempt to force immortality by his own will and grasping.  It is only by love and worship of the Divine source of love and goodness that eternal life is found.  Eternal life is categorically and fundamentally different from the never-ending temporal existence the promoters of singularity lust after.

We may find ourselves ruled over by a diabolical Beast that makes its own image for us to bow down and worship, but we can resist the Mark, like the first martyrs in Rome.  The never-ending life the singularists crave is that referred to in Revelation most likely:

"In those days men will seek death and will not find it."

If this sort of singularity is achieved by our mad scientists, it will be founded on something rotten that is the desire and lust to grasp at forbidden fruit and to usurp the natural order by defying God to achieve immortality.

Such an urge has been in us since the Fall.  It is not the defiance of some arbitrary rule that we are demonstrating.  There was nothing arbitrary about being forbidden to eat of the fruit.  Instead the only way to reach eternal life is as the monks say- by dying ourselves.  In that sense we must rather surrender our selfish and individualistic urge to self preservation and instead be moved by love - love of God and love of Man.

We are perhaps approaching another time of martyrdom where we will be called upon to give up on material life for God.  If we can be merged into some Frankenstein abomination through singularity, it will be the decision we must make to turn away from this fake eternal life, just as the martyrs had to choose the lions of the Coliseum rather than deny Christ for their self preservation of this temporal existence.  

Good Authoritarianism

 What links the housing crisis in the UK to the Zionist bombing of civilians in Gaza?  One might say it is because Western governments are under the control of global interests with their own agenda.  Israel is an outpost of the global- liberal empire in the authoritarian and traditional Middle East.  House prices in the UK are out of control, because homes in London have been turned into assets for foreign money (global interests again), thereby pricing people out of the market across the whole country as Londoners are forced out.

That may well be the case,  but there is also an ideology that lies behind many of the crazy and inhumane policies implemented across what now seems a misnomer of the "free world".  That ideology is not simply liberalism, but it is rather anti-authoritarianism.  It is a belief that any measures that require the exercise of legitimate and moral authority or making judgments, is tantamount to Fascism.  And closely linked to this anti-authoritarianism is the never-again human reaction to the horror of concentration camps in Central and Eastern Europe.  This though seems to have been interpreted to give licence to Israel to enact slaughter on civilians in a horrifying way.  This seems to be learning the wrong lesson from the Holocaust.  What we can understand is that we are living in a post-war paradigm in which Israel, because of what happened under the Nazis, must always be protected and no policy domestically can be implemented that might uphold traditional values.  It is a reaction manifesting as a paradigm of thought resulting from the narrative of the Second World War and what it was about.

The situation in Israel and Palestine is not the main focus of the 'blog, but like the preoccupation with liberal progressivism, it is indicative of how we only understand political problems through the lens of the Second World War, while giving no real weight to any other part of European history.  It is of course understandable emotionally, given the proximity in time.  The lesson of the Holocaust though is surely that mass slaughter of civilians is wrong, not that Israel must act with impunity.  That though is another discussion.  Here the focus is the narrowness of the Overton Window in terms of only liberal and progressive perspectives being permissible, despite such political views clearly leading us to moral and social disintegration.  World War Two cannot explain the totality of politics or society.

Even the understanding of the Second World War is anachronistic and imposed retrospectively.  The United Kingdom, at least in the understanding of the man on the Clapham Omnibus was a battle for national sovereignty not global liberal values.  And the war was not so much a victory for the liberal democracies as it was a hard-won and bloody victory by the Stalinist  USSR.  The United Kingdom's sacrifice was real, but it turned us into a vassal of the United States, as the Suez Crisis was to demonstrate in our national humiliation.

We saw this post-war  triumph of anti-authoritarianism in other fields of life than geopolitics.  In the West's conservative movements, true conservatism and maintenance of traditional values and society were overthrown by the liberal ideology of the market and the atomistic individual.  In fields such as psychology, which gained greatly in importance, there has been a clear anti-authoritarian and anti-traditional agenda - from Adorno's the Authoritarian Personality to the dominance of Freud's sex-obsessed reductionism.   

Of great importance is the way that Adorno linked the traditional understanding of self restraint and virtues to Fascism.  Much of the destruction of the innocence of youth is a result of his poisonous idea that sexual restraint led to the Fascist ideology.  All of this was part of a pattern as the reaction against "third way" ideology, whether Fascism, Falange, or Nazi and its replacement with valueless and anti-tradition liberalism.  Hence the destructive sexual and social revolutions of the 1960s, the cancer of which has gradually worked its way through all levels of Western society and culture.  In art too we see the rejection of an authoritative standpoint of beauty to an abstracted modern art often simply trying to shock traditional attitudes long vanquished anyway.  Even in post-war architecture we saw this revolution.  People's living space was turned into the liberal onanism of destroying "authoritarian" values of architectural beauty and traditional civic space.

We must understand therefore that because of the Post-War paradigm, legitimate alternatives to the liberal degeneracy are always placed outside of the Overton Window, however legitimate the solutions presented might be.  It is also telling that after decades of Cold War, still in the West "Fascist" is the political insult of choice.

The argument here is that paradigms though can be flawed and be based upon distorted understandings.  For example, anyone who has read Max Picard's contemporary writings from the Third Reich can see that Nazism was not conservatism, but an avante garde movement, relying on practical methods of cutting edge technology to put forward a demotic and anti-traditional campaign.  The ideology had its roots in radical German thought, not conservatism. Atheist Nietzsche, vegetarian Wagner and artistic Futurism were important influences on the European Radical Right of the twenties and thirties.    Nazism was rejected by the revolutionary conservative movement, which also opposed the degeneracy of the Weimar Republic.   

Today with economic crises, sexual libertinism and radical individualism we again seem to be in a Weimar situation.  Ideas of personal virtue and collective tradition are considered Fascist.  Meanwhile global finance seems to have captured the liberal democracies.  It looks more like we are ruled from Davos not our own parliaments.

Western intellectuals so wedded to the post-War paradigm will have to accept that unless politics is to enter a downward spiral, that some authoritarian values are not only right in principle, but necessary for a functioning and healthy society.  There are vested interests that would oppose a reassertion of traditional values.  We see this every time any form of genuine conservatism gains traction.  It has to be censored, proscribed and cancelled.

Nonetheless traditional values are vital and fundamental for a healthy commonwealth.  We cannot continue to function as a random collection of atomistic individuals driven by our evermore degenerate passions.  The consumer society only encourages people to be slaves to their appetites.  This suits global capital and the corruptors of our society, but it will eventually destroy us.

Only a reassertion of collective traditional values can save us.  Ideas of virtue-ethics, already being revived in philosophy, must enter the mainstream discourse.  According to the corrupted language of our liberal politics any such solution will be dismissed as "fascist".  The authority of parents, the Church, traditional and patriarchal figures are necessary to hold together our societies - but these are the very figures most attacked and maligned.  We need an idea of the transcendent Telos of Man again, particularly in terms of personal virtues, stoicism and traditional gender roles.  The paradigm within which currently we exist is not sustainable.  To some it feels that our atomistic, avaricious and democratic system has already run its course, its fractures and frailties clearly exposed.

For millennia, European culture understood a higher and transcendent purpose for mankind.  From Stoics to the early Christians civilisation was understood in terms of higher meaning.  To reduce and to caricature human civilisation to the Nazism of the Third Reich is both ignorant and anarchic.

Unless the purpose of human nature and society is rediscovered, in terms of living for something more than appetites, having a clear identity nationally, in terms of building a traditional family to give purpose, having roots and a transcendent telos, then darker solutions will beckon.  Just as the dissoluteness of the Weimar Republic was fertile ground for the dark paganism of Nazism, we too may be at risk unless we start to serve the interests of human beings rather than the interests of global finance that lead us to ever increased atomisation. 

There is then a lesson from World War Two after all.  It is not the one usually drawn and repeated almost like propaganda.  A lesson that can be drawn is that unless the moral degeneracy of today's Weimars and the impact on ordinary people of the global financial elites are not mitigated then we risk an extreme reaction.  Better to have a restoration of traditional authority before something more radical emerges in reaction unconstrained by our Christian heritage and ethos.

     

Consequences of Conquest

 All countries have their fault-lines, but there is perhaps something unique about the tensions in English society.  The higher society, the elite, has a contempt for its culture and heritage.  So much so that to prove one's high status it makes sense to treat one's national identity with contempt.  It is almost the test for belonging to the higher status class to demonstrate what would now be termed "woke" opinions.  Nonetheless, this is a longstanding trait in the English national character.  Nowhere was this unique aspect of our character more clearly illustrated in contemporary times than during and in the immediate aftermath of the Brexit referendum.  A referendum on national sovereignty in large part split down lines of class.  The less-educated, the more poorly paid, those who often would have voted for the Left, backed national independence, demonstrating a belief in their country.  Meanwhile, as if to show their social status the upper middle-classes on the whole, in attempting to demonstrate their lack of attachment to national identity, voted against national sovereignty and looked with contempt upon the honest patriotism of those they saw as being of a lower social status.  Being unpatriotic and regarding one's compatriots with contempt was a way to indicate high social status.

The Brexit referendum merely highlighted in sharp relief a longstanding national tension.  And where did it originate?  So deep in the metaphorical DNA is this trait and tension that we must look far back.  Perhaps Sir Walter Scott, highlighting the deep division in his novel Ivanhoe, with the outside perspective of a Scot reached the heart of the matter - the divisions left by the Conquest.  He pointed to how words to describe livestock are English, while words describing the meat itself are French - demonstrating the way the conquered English serve the invading French.  

Has anything really changed?  Many of the most powerful families in the country tend to be from the Conquest and many of these elite have contempt for our national identity, focusing instead upon cosmopolitanism, open borders, and destructive liberal social reforms that are killing the country demographically.  Many of the powerful must have a deep sense of being from elsewhere and having an identity above the native identity of the serfs and peasants.  As middle class families go through universities they learn the best way to indicate their new social status is to hold their heritage in contempt and adopt so-called "woke" opinions.

Perhaps we might develop this point further to understand the different characteristics of Anglo Saxon and Norman.  The Anglo Saxons were focused upon the homestead, their faith and their farms.  There was no standing army.  Alfred the Great organised the translation of the Bible into English.  Monks, peaceful and spiritual were subject to the raids by the cousins of the Normans, the Vikings.

And that is where we also can find the root of the Norman character - Vikings settled in the North of France after raiding and piracy succeeded.  Just as in Sicily, where the Catholic Normans plagued the Orthodox Byzantine Empire, in the North of Europe too on the stormy waters of the North Sea, in their own world, the Normans were pirates.

It is not in the insularity and conservatism of our Anglo Saxon forebears and fathers that we find the character enthused by so-called Anglo Saxon economics that uproots communities and focuses on international trade.  The Normans brought to this island the spirit of piracy.  Even on the side of Brexit there are the Normans, wanting to turn this ancient homeland into a Singapore of the West, rootless and cosmopolitan, preoccupied with treasure and lucre.  Whereas the Anglo Saxon yeomanry of England voted leave to secure their borders out of concern for loss of identity through out of control immigration.

Perhaps in the enthusiasm amongst our political class for foreign wars we see again that pirate Norman spirit.  And it is our Norman blood that leads us to try to destroy Russia, with our addiction to the geopolitical Great Game.  Here we inevitably think of a Russian thinker so critical of Anglo Saxon geopolitics, Aleksandr Dugin.  He has resurrected interest in British geographer Mackinder, who saw geopolitics as a clash between liberal, free-trading sea powers and the heartland of Eurasia, focused on tradition and roots - the large empire based on God and Monarchy, not filthy lucre and trade.

Surely our island is in itself a microcosm of this geographical division.  There is real conservatism in England and a rootedness to the land and our heritage.  Contrast this with the enthusiasm of our elite for liberalism both socially and economically.  The elite pushed the sexual revolution.  The elite pushed the economic revolution.  Sharks and bullies from lower status exploited the opportunities in making money and the working class has been destroyed by social liberalism and the sexual revolution.  These revolutions were led by the elite with its Norman blood, with no real sense of rootedness or the ethics of the ethnos.

Another tragic trait of being conquered is a sort of obsequiousness of the subjugated as elites send our young men to die, exploiting our lionhearted bravery, or send their jobs abroad.  Patriotic as we are, our trust in the elite has meant we have allowed agendas that destroy our identity and past to be pursued, from mass immigration and multiculturalism to sending jobs abroad.   We are forced to abandon our history, our traditions, our faith to accommodate the multicultural society that suits the powerful.

That surrender to our current masters goes back to a pacific Anglo Saxon attitude post-1066 to accept the new masters.  Nonetheless, the picture is nuanced.  The Norman Royals ensured they married into the Anglo Saxon House of Wessex.  The monarchy is the institution supported by the ordinary people even today and mocked by the shallow elites, who being alienated from the beginning have no affection for our history.

Not all the Anglo Saxons accepted the Conquest.  Men of deep Christian faith they sought refuge, not in Papal Rome with the Great Schism still echoing through Europe, but in Orthodox Constantinople, joining the Orthodox Emperor's Varangian Guard and taking the fight to the Normans in Sicily, only to be slaughtered by their old enemy.  It is said though that many Anglo Saxons were settled by the Emperor by the Black Sea as a "new" England.

The matter of the Great Schism is also of import here.  Today's Russian Church recognises pre-Conquest Anglo Saxon saints as Orthodox.  As an island England was untouched by many of the Papal innovations.  From the point of view of the Orthodox the Anglo Saxons remained Orthodox.  The schism only occurred a dozen years before the Norman Conquest.  It seems, given their choice of refuge the Anglo Saxons also saw themselves as Orthodox at the time, not Roman Catholic.

In England post Conquest, the Norman Archbishop of Canterbury, Anselm, was to redefine the understanding of salvation as satisfaction by Christ's death to God, pictured as some feudal Lord.  Anselm was canonised by Rome, but this theological innovation separated Roman Catholicism further from the Orthodox Church.  

And what does this tell us about how we as the English should live today?  The Anglo Saxons were a peaceful and deeply Christian people, an Orthodox people it seems.  We can either metaphorically look to Constantinople or accept the settlement of the Norman Conquest.  This does not mean political schemes, but rather a spiritual change - rediscovering our lost spiritual heritage.  To some extent that would put us in the tradition of the English reformers such as Tyndale who reverted to the Greek rather than the Latin to try to rediscover a less legalistic faith.  Of course that English reformation was seized control of by the elites and became instead an orgy of iconoclasm, very contrary to the spirit of Orthodoxy.

We need to rediscover the Grail of the faith.  We need to return to English Christian spirituality prior to the Conquest and no longer accept the co-option into the Papal institution by our Norman conquerors.  We must return to the faith of our fathers. 

 

What is a woman? The divine feminine

 When the leader of His Majesty's loyal opposition in the United Kingdom, one Sir Keir Starmer (a tricky lawyer by profession) was unable to define what a woman is he was rightly mocked.  It also seemed to be revelatory of a joke played upon all of us by  the woke lobby,  A woman can be defined by biology and the woke postmodernists would have us deny scientific reality for the purposes of their political and cultural agenda of destroying the West.

In reality though, we cannot answer the question of a woman through biology alone.  Human beings, male and female, while rooted in their biology are more than mere biological and material beings.  The feminine as much as the masculine is only fulfilled if we achieve our cultural, even our spiritual telos.  Just as we are not fully human until we are transfigured through a life of faith, so we are not fully Man or Woman until we fulfil our higher purpose.  In this sense the postmodernists actually help us.  They differentiate between sex and gender, dismissing gender as a social construct.  And in a sense they are right.

Except it is not always just a social construct.  We cannot be completely understood as biological and material beings alone.  We are social, cultural and spiritual.  The trouble with the post-modernists is they have not escaped the empirical Enlightenment paradigm, where things are understood from the bottom rather than the highest point.  Reality begins in the divine, as real as the earth is in the hierarchy.

The story of the West since the Reformation onwards has been a project to erase the feminine from the world.  First with the removal of the Mother of God by the more radical Reformers as the Reformation progressed, then with the rejection of the feminine attribute of intuition in favour of pure rationalism during the Enlightenment.  Today this persists with Anglo-Saxon feminism, whereby a woman is understood to have reached her potential only if she behaves and works like a man in late capitalist democracy.

We remain thinking in an upside-down paradigm.  Instead of understanding the world from the heavenly, we dismiss the heavenly and try to understand by material facts alone.  If men and women are merely biological and have no spiritual side then we reduce them to mere male and female, determined by base natural urges.  In this way we have the 1950s housewife as part of the economic system, motivated by her biological, material and pecuniary needs and preferences alone  The answer from the feminists is not to rediscover the traditional feminine, but to turn women into men ( and a particular type of man at that - the office worker in global capitalism, the proverbial pen-pusher, the tech obsessive or the banker).

There is a more genuinely traditional understanding of Men and Women and it rests in complementarity and the erotic.  Eve came from Adam's side.  We are parted to be reunited in our complementary difference.  Just as the monastic represents in a sense the feminine in his relationship with the masculine Christ or just as the Church is understood as the feminine in relationship with her head - Christ, so Man and Woman reflect the pattern of the divine.  With this comes man's headship, the woman's fundamental support of the man and the full expression of our purpose and telos as a reflection of the cosmic pattern of Christ and the Church.

This does not mean reducing men and women to economic functionaries as attacked by feminism, but neither does it mean equality in the sense of identical interchangeability.  It means rather divine vocation in marriage and even in every other interaction between the genders.

It means to be fully human we need to reach our potential as imago dei and as Man and Woman.  In that sense we have the ultimate archetype in the Mother of God, who supplicates and protects with her veil over Constantinople.  A figure of maternal care, but also feminine strength.

One saw this Marian strength in the babushkas of the USSR as they saved the Church, organising the baptism by priests of their grandchildren secretly.  This was participation in the transfigured feminine in the mould of the Theotokos it seems.

At a lower level, and with care not to return them to an idolatrous status above the Theotokos, we even have the pagan pantheon, where the feminine attributes were understood in goddesses as different as Hera or Hestia, Athene or Demeter, Artemis or Aphrodite.   These goddesses or daemons do tell us something about the feminine just as Hephaestus or Ares about the masculine - as long as we remember all these attributes are gathered up and transfigured in Christ and His Mother.  

The 1950s housewife, infatuated with technology making bourgeois domesticity more convenient, or the radical feminist keen to become a wage slave are a false dichotomy and simply different faces of secular modernity that we must overcome if we are to be fully human.  While in one sense there is neither male nor female in Christ, identity is only ever transfigured, never annihilated.

In answer to the question, what is a woman? an Enlightenment scientific answer on biology alone will not do.  Yes gender encompasses biological sex and the two are essentially linked, but it is far more and is fully realised through the telos of the feminine or the masculine.