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In this week’s briefing

Let AI help you see the purpose of life, hear powerhouse podcasters review nearly 50 years of conflict between Iran and the United States, discover the theological society that meets in hell.

We Have Ceased to See the Purpose: Essential Speeches of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (The Center for Ethics and Culture Solzhenitsyn Series)

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Can anything good come out of Liechtenstein?

When Alexandr Solzhenitsyn traveled there in 1993 to receive an honorary doctorate from the International Academy of Philosophy, the famed Russian dissident had visited the tiny European monarchy of some 30,000 people twice before. But this trip marked massive global changes at the end of the 20th century. The Soviet Union had fallen less than two years earlier.

Unlike other hosts who felt Solzhenitsyn’s wrath, Liechtenstein received his thanks. When the Iron Curtain fell across Europe at the end of the Second World War in 1945, Liechtenstein protected anti-communist Russians. British and American leaders, however, placated Joseph Stalin instead. They sent hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens living in their occupied territories back to what they knew would be certain death for many in Russia.

In his acceptance address, Solzhenitsyn returned to a common indictment of the modern West: “We have ceased to see the purpose.”

No, all hope cannot be pinned on science, technology, or economic growth. Victorious technological civilization has simultaneously instilled in us a spiritual insecurity. Certainly, its gifts enrich, but enslave us as well. All is interests, we must not neglect our interests, all is a struggle for material things; but an inner voice faintly prompts us that we’ve lose something pure, elevated—and fragile.

What, Solzhenitsyn asked, are we living for?

That’s still our question more than 30 years later as we head into the middle of the 21st century.

What are we living for?

Seen within this context of Western history and technology, the unprecedented and widespread adoption of artificial intelligence offers us an unexpected gift. But we can’t receive it until we surrender.

Don’t pretend you can keep up with AI. Don’t pretend you can control AI.

Make no mistake: AI will leave you behind.

It already has.

While AI enthusiasts warn that you better get on board the train, its engineers say that train has already left the station.

And no one’s driving the locomotive.

The German sociologist Hartmut Rosa termed our experience of modern technological phenomena Social Acceleration in his 2013 book by that title:

Simply put, technical acceleration tends to increase the pace of social change, which in turn unavoidably increases the experienced pace of life, which then induces an ongoing demand for technical acceleration in the hopes of saving time, and so on back around the circle.

Rosa’s theory explains why AI enthusiasts promise time savings even though early experience of AI is greater productivity and anxiety. That anxiety may be simply the cost of doing business with computers that now have a mind of their own, with power and speed far outstripping any meager human efforts. The resulting productivity could produce economic and scientific breakthroughs we judge as worth that cost. Or those productivity gains may simply prove necessary in a world of falling birthrates and declining population.

But to judge what’s necessary, that remains a human task. AI might have already left us behind. It’s still up to us, however—as individuals, as families, as communities, as educators, as employees and employers—to exercise wisdom in how we deploy these technological powers. We still decide when and how to engage, what’s for good and what’s for ill. We’re not helpless against constant technical acceleration.

The machines may work what appear to us as miracles. But they can never generate wisdom. They can never help us see the purpose.

What are we living for?

“We must not simply lose ourselves in the mechanical flow of Progress,” Solzhenitsyn said in 1993, “but strive to harness it spiritually—for our own sake; not become the mere playthings of Progress, but rather seek or deepen ways of directing its might towards the accomplishment of good.”

AI has left you behind. So how can AI help you see the purpose of life? AI will do some good. But what good will you live for?

COLLIN HANSEN

Editor in Chief

Revolution In Iran | Fall of the Shah (Part 1)

The Rest Is History | Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook

The powerhouse podcasters Holland and Sandbrook couldn’t have known how timely their January series would be. Israel and the United States struck Iran in February, and the war continues through March with no clear end in sight.

No fans of the moralist U.S. president Jimmy Carter, Holland and Sandbrook recount the sudden and unexpected fall of the shah and triumph of the Iranian Revolution in 1979. What had been a staunch U.S. ally during the Cold War overnight became its implacable enemy led by the ayatollah, who condemned the United States as the “Great Satan.” Revolutionaries stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took 66 hostages on November 4, 1979. Attempting to rescue them, eight U.S. servicemen died on April 24, 1980.

A decade that began for the United States with Vietnam in shambles, then reached a low point with President Nixon’s resignation due to Watergate in 1974, ended with Americans powerless to protect their allies—or even their own diplomats—in Iran.

What intrigued me most from the four-part series came in an almost off-hand exchange between Holland and Sandbrook at the end of part four. Looking back on revolutions of the 20th century, Holland and Sandbrook claimed the Iranian Revolution is more consequential today than the Russian Revolution of 1917. While you won’t meet communists today, you’ll still see the effects of Islamic terrorism, they said.

Given the continued global influence of communist China, I don’t think the Russian Revolution should take a back seat to any other in the last 110 years. But for anyone who thought Islamic terrorism began in 2001, or American involvement in the Middle East started with Kuwait in 1991, this podcast will shed light on why Iran has played a central role in American concerns for the region.

The Great Divorce

C. S. Lewis

Near the end of 1944, C. S. Lewis published the first installment in his series “Who Goes Home? or The Grand Divorce: A New Fantasy” in The Guardian Anglican newspaper. Known in subsequent publication as The Great Divorce, Lewis began writing after he finished his final volume of the “Ransom trilogy,” That Hideous Strength, later published in August 1945. Akin to The Screwtape Letters, his earlier series in The Guardian, Lewis employed theological fantasy to drive personal, spiritual introspection.

As with earlier imaginings of a permeable border between heaven and hell, Lewis envisioned an opportunity for the “Ghosts” of hell to leave their grimy city. After hopping a bus to heaven, the Ghosts engage their “solid” counterparts in mostly friendly banter about the cost to enter this brighter side of the afterlife. The narrator, like Lewis himself, is guided by the spirit of the Victorian era Scottish poet and minister George MacDonald.

Among many vivid scenes, the heavenly visit from the Episcopal Ghost stands out. It might be the most devastating critique of liberal theology I’ve read.

“Do you really think there are no sins of intellect?” asks the bishop’s former colleague, a “bright” or “solid” ghost in heaven.

“There are indeed, Dick,” the bishop responds. “There is hide-bound prejudice, and intellectual dishonesty, and timidity, and stagnation. But honest opinions fearlessly followed—they are not sins.”

The bishop boasts of what he risked by pursuing intellectual honesty. He rejects the bodily resurrection of Jesus. His onetime colleague won’t have it. Since he made this “risky” move, the bishop only became more popular, sold more books, received more speaking engagements, and was elevated in the church hierarchy.

Some risk!

“At College, you know, we just started automatically writing the kind of essays that got good marks and saying the kind of things that won applause,” the friend says. “When, in our whole lives, did we honestly face, in solitude, the one question on which all turned: whether after all the Supernatural might not in fact occur? When did we put up one moment’s real resistance to the loss of our faith?”

Errors, when sincerely held, don’t suddenly lose their fault. But the bishop remains concerned with expanding his “wider sphere of influence,” a proper platform for his God-given talents for theological ingenuity.

“I can promise you none of these things,” the friend responds. “No sphere of usefulness: you are not needed there at all. No scope for your talents: only forgiveness for having perverted them. No atmosphere of inquiry, for I will bring you to the land not of questions but of answers, and you shall see the face of God.”

The bishop can’t understand. Words are subjective. Answers can never be final. Free inquiry is the goal. Nothing is worse for the soul than stagnation.

“You think that, because hitherto you have experienced truth only with the abstract intellect,” says the friend, echoing Jonathan Edwards. “I will bring you where you can taste it like honey and be embraced by it as a bridegroom. Your thirst shall be quenched.”

The friend invites the bishop to become like a child again, when he could ask questions and receive answers. Rejecting the command of Jesus in Matthew 18:3, the bishop also misapplies Paul from 1 Corinthians 13:11, saying he has rejected childish things. After all, religion is speculation, not fact.

His friend won’t let him off the hook: “What you now call the free play of inquiry has neither more nor less to do with the ends for which intelligence was given you than masturbation has to do with marriage.” What of religion? The friend offers Christ, Forget speculation! Hear from someone who knows everything you ever did. “I will bring you to Eternal Fact, the Father of all other facthood.”

Memorably, the bishop shuts down the conversation because he has to get back to hell. So he can present a paper for his Theological Society.

In hell.

There’s much work to do in correcting Jesus, who was after all a young man when he died.

“He would have outgrown some of his earlier views, you know, if he’d lived,” the bishop says. “As he might have done, with a little more tact and patience.”

In perhaps the most famous lines of The Great Divorce, Lewis writes, “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’”

It’s true for us. And it’s true for bishops, too.

Next week on Unseen Things

The Hansen family is on spring break! The newsletter will return April 4 before Easter.