Of course it’s AI generated. It’s too perfect not to have been! Credit: Dall-E
Can we believe in AI? What does it mean to believe in AI? Is there truth in AI? Can AGI be in any sense profound, or revelatory? In many respects, AGI represents an imminent (immanent?) apotheosis in the modern liberal project: a realization of the bureaucratic, scientific model of the modern world, in automated magnificence. It heralds the potential for what Aaron Bastani calls – perhaps tongue-in-cheek – fully automated luxury communism. It appears on our horizon as a new end of history, our new Berlin Wall moment, our New Jerusalem. The State as a politico-philosophical project has intellectually been a quest for individual freedom; the most freedom, for the most people, avoiding the Hobbesian dystopia of all against all. Could AGI allow humankind to transcend the state as the fundamental organizing structure?
Caravaggio, The Crucifixion of Saint Peter, 1601. The Catholic Baroque was defined in opposition to Protestantism, as everything that Protestantism was not.
As a young man in college – a boy, really – I invited as an officer of the Society of Saints and Scholars at University College Galway (or NUI Galway, as we were being invited to call it) the ‘revisionist historian’ David Irving to come and give a talk on his philosophy of history. To say that he was controversial would be an understatement, although I do remember thinking at the time that the pejorative ‘revisionist’ in the soubriquet to which he was referred seemed both unnecessary and political. Were not all historians in some way revisionist? Otherwise, what was their function? In any case, and I don’t quite remember the ins and outs of the thing, there was a lot of hoo-hah and the event never happened, notwithstanding the man’s acceptance of our invitation.
In the modern lexicon, the phrase ‘gospel’ means something that is undeniably true. But does truth change over time?
In his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life), the late Pope John Paul II defended capital punishment, ‘…to redress the disorder caused by the offence’. While the pontiff considered the problem ‘in the context of a system of penal justice ever more in line with human dignity,’ it was heavily caveated; it was an almost reluctant accession to conservatism. Nevertheless, ‘[p]ublic authority must redress the violation of personal and social rights by imposing on the offender an adequate punishment for the crime,’ the pope wrote. Within two years, however, it was no longer church teaching. The update in 1997 to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, while recognising that the death penalty had long been considered appropriate on the part of legitimate authority, that was no longer the case. ‘Today,’ the Catechism goes at section 2267, ‘there is an increasing awareness that the dignity of the person is not lost even after the commission of very serious crimes. In addition, a new understanding has emerged of the significance of penal sanctions imposed by the state. Lastly, more effective systems of detention have been developed, which ensure the due protection of citizens but, at the same time, do not definitively deprive the guilty of the possibility of redemption.’ In 2020, Pope Francis cemented the position of the Church in the encyclical Fratelli Tutti. ‘There can be no stepping back from this position. Today we state clearly that “the death penalty is inadmissible” and the Church is firmly committed to calling for its abolition worldwide,’ Pope Francis writes in section 263. How could an institution so committed to dogma, doctrine, and a unitary truth shift so dramatically in such a short period of time?
State Legitimacy 