To act as though man made history by his own purposes and decisions is a kind of spiritual blindness which bears within it its own downfall.
[xxxix] And it is precisely this spiritual blindness which is characteristic of modern civilization, a kind of hubris which leads to the frustration of social idealism and society’s turning away from those principles it professes to be following, in order to promote their opposite. Has there ever been a society which set a higher store on the ideals of humanitarianism than our own, and has there ever been one which, at the same time, allowed for the killing off of such countless millions of unborn infants? And has there ever been a culture which so repeatedly emphasized its concerns for the rights of man, and at the same time meekly acquiesced in the obliteration of those rights by totalitarian regimes in all parts of the world?
Written thirty-five years ago, in the midst of World War II, the following judgment of Christopher Dawson has a direct relationship to the condition in which the whole of the modern world finds itself today:
But this is just the truth which the modern world has denied. It has put its trust in the “arm of flesh”; it has believed the word of man rather than the Word of God. It has reversed the whole hierarchy of spiritual values so that our civilization has been turned backwards and upside down, with its face toward darkness and nonentity and its back to the sun of truth and the source of being. For a short time—whether we reckon it in decades or centuries is of small importance—it remained precariously skating on the thin ice of rationalism and secular humanism. Now the ice has broken and we are being carried down the flood, though we may delude ourselves that the forces that have been released are of our own creation and serve our will to power.
Is it possible to reverse this process? No human power can stop this progress to the abyss. It can only come about by a profound movement of change or conversion which brings the human spirit once more into vital relation with the spirit of God. (The Judgment of the Nations [London: Sheed and Ward, 1942], 157)
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Source: John J. Mulloy, “Preface to the 1978 Edition”, in Dynamics of World History, ed. John J. Mulloy (Washington, DE: ISI Books, 2002), xxxviii–xxxix.
We seem oblivious to the fact that we live on a planet with finite resources, and like zombies in an endless frenzy, a swarm-fest of ever darkening movement we continuously squander what little remains of the future that our children will inherit. Like mortal gods we dream of machinic intelligences and transhuman enhancements as if the very taste of flesh in our zombie mouths were not enough to stay us against the terrible truth of our own extinction. [...]
Kierkegaard argues that individuals who do not conform to the masses are made scapegoats and objects of ridicule by the masses, in order to maintain status quo and to instill into the masses their own sense of superiority. Is there a hint of political correctness here? Are not our free spirits, even the great comics themselves under attack, the one’s for whom thought itself is a weapon against mediocrity? Do we not see that creeping spirit of failure everywhere? The eye that hides its guilt, its secret resentiments against life and light? The ones who would rather hide in the darkness of their anger and bitterness, seeking to tear down their enemies through sheer hatred and spite, accusation and critical acumen as if the power of rhetoric alone could triumph over the truth?
Berardi warns us that the delicate balance between man and his machines is over, we have become the victims of our own merciless creativity and the dividing line (“bifurcation”) is one between “machines for liberating desire and mechanisms of control over the imaginary“; that, in our time the “digital mutation,” the very force of technology as an automatism is moving through the social body like a swarming ravenous beast feeding on what remains of the social psyche (Franco “Bifo” Berardi. precarious rhapsocy (Automedia, 2010)). Sociologists like Zygmunt Bauman will tell us this is nothing but the effect of the “liquid times” we are living in:
the ‘liquid’ phase of modernity: that is, into a condition in which social forms (structures that limit individual choices, institutions that guard repetitions of routines, patterns of acceptable behaviour) can no longer (and are not expected) to keep their shape for long, because they decompose and melt faster than the time it takes to cast them, and once they are cast for them to set. (Bauman, Zygmunt (2013-04-16). Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 42-45). Wiley. Kindle Edition.) [...]
Our statesmen, policy makers, and globalist hypermedia think-tanks and yes men live under the sign of “plausible deniability”: a form of organizational cynicisms that allows them to escape the guilt of their own actions through a sense that the world is so complex no one individual or group can possible know or understand the crucial information needed to provide a solution to our existing crises. As Phillip Mirowski will remind us even our activists have no clue: the neoliberal worldview has become embedded in contemporary culture to such an extent that when well-meaning activists sought to call attention to the slow-motion trainwreck of the world economic system, they came to their encampments with no solid conception of what they might need to know to make their indictments stick; nor did they have any clear perspective on what their opponents knew or believed about markets and politics, not to mention what the markets themselves knew about their attempts at resistance (Mirowski, Philip (2013-07-09). Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (Kindle Locations 6511-6514). Verso Books. Kindle Edition.). As Zizek will remind us:
The threat today is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to “be active,” to “participate,” to mask the nothingness of what goes on. People intervene all the time, “do something”; academics participate in meaningless debates, and so on. The truly difficult thing is to step back, to withdraw. Those in power often prefer even a “critical” participation, a dialogue, to silence-just to engage us in “dialogue,” to make sure our ominous passivity is broken. The voters’ abstention is thus a true political act: it forcefully confronts us with the vacuity of today’s democracies. (Zizek, Slavoj (2008-07-22). Violence (BIG IDEAS//small books) (p. 218). Picador. Kindle Edition. 218) [...]
In his novels of despair and hopelessness, Michel Houllebeq tells us that poet and philosopher alike must delve ‘into the subjects that no one wants to hear about. … Insist upon sickness, agony, ugliness. Speak of death, and of oblivion. Of jealousy, of indifference, of frustration, of the absence of love. Be abject, and you will be true.’ Beneath these words is a deeply moral thought: the vital thing is not to be against happiness, but against unthinking happiness; optimism that edits out the parts of living no one wants to hear about. That is the task – to stay awake to the world, without despair. It may be impossible, but (thankfully) there is no way of knowing. ‘You cannot love the truth and the world’, claims Houellebecq in the same essay. (Jeffery, Ben (2011-11-16). Anti-Matter: Michel Houellebecq and Depressive Realism (p. 90). NBN_Mobi_Kindle. Kindle Edition.)
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After such self-questioning, self-temptation, one acquires a subtler eye for all philosophizing to date; one is better than before at guessing the involuntary detours, alleyways, resting places, and sunningplaces of thought to which suffering thinkers are led and misled on account of their suffering; one now knows where the sick body and its needs unconsciously urge, push, and lure the mind – towards sun, stillness, mildness, patience, medicine, balm in some sense. Every philosophy that ranks peace above war, every ethic with a negative definition of happiness, every metaphysics and physics that knows some finale, a final state of some sort, every predominantly aesthetic or religious craving for some Apart, Beyond, Outside, Above, permits the question whether it was not illness that inspired the philosopher. The unconscious disguise of physiological needs under the cloaks of the objective, ideal, purely spiritual goes frighteningly far – and I have asked myself often enough whether, on a grand scale, philosophy has been no more than an interpretation of the body and a misunderstanding of the body. Behind the highest value judgments that have hitherto guided the history of thought are concealed misunderstandings of the physical constitution – of individuals or classes or even whole races. All those bold lunacies of metaphysics, especially answers to the question about the value of existence, may always be considered first of all as symptoms of certain bodies[....] I am still waiting for a philosophical physician in the exceptional sense of the term – someone who has set himself the task of pursuing the problem of the total health of a people, time, race or of humanity – to summon the courage at last to push my suspicion to its limit and risk the proposition: what was at stake in all philosophizing hitherto was not at all 'truth' but rather something else – let us say health, future, growth, power, life... [...]
A philosopher who has passed through many kinds of health, and keeps passing through them again and again, has passed through an equal number of philosophies; he simply cannot but translate his state every time into the most spiritual form and distance – this art of transfiguration just is philosophy. We philosophers are not free to separate soul from body as the common people do; we are even less free to separate soul from spirit. We are not thinking frogs, no objectifying and registering devices with frozen innards – we must constantly give birth to our thoughts out of our pain and maternally endow them with all that we have of blood, heart, fire, pleasure, passion, agony, conscience, fate, and disaster. Life – to us, that means constantly transforming all that we are into light and flame, and also all that wounds us; we simply can do no other.
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Source: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ed. by Bernard Williams, trans. by Josefine Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 5–6.
Perfectionism is trying to be extraordinary. The extraordinary here is beyond the ordinary and beyond the capacity of what is normal. Not everyone can be extraordinary; otherwise there would be no such thing as extraordinary.
Perfectionism is a rejection of limit, the limits imposed by our finitude. Every perfectionism pretends to overcome those limits but can do so only by imposing new limits. The person neurotically committed to perfectionism is not free from limits but enslaved to the demands of that "perfection."
We cannot aspire to the extraordinary because the extraordinary is a combination of chance talent, circumstances, and effort.
We can aspire only to what is within our capacity and potential, which when I begin, I do not know. All I do know is that my potential has a limit. Perhaps my potential is the extraordinary, but I cannot expect that.
The excellent is within the capacity of the ordinary and is the true perfection of the ordinary. Whatever is done, is done well, and this is excellent. If when achieving excellence, I attain to the extraordinary, that can be recognized only in hindsight. The extraordinary, for those with the potential for it, is the fruit of pursuing excellence, which all may and should pursue.
The following is a brief history of the notion of the robot in Western literature and its relation to the creator-creature dynamic. It closes with a review of two movies and provides an interesting prognosis on society's slavery to technology.
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1.
We have been dreaming of robots since Homer. In Book 18 of the Iliad, Achilles’ mother, the nymph Thetis, wants to order a new suit of armor for her son, and so she pays a visit to the Olympian atelier of the blacksmith-god Hephaestus, whom she finds hard at work on a series of automata:
…He was crafting twenty tripods to stand along the walls of his well-built manse, affixing golden wheels to the bottom of each one so they might wheel down on their own [automatoi] to the gods’ assembly and then return to his house anon: an amazing sight to see.
These are not the only animate household objects to appear in the Homeric epics. In Book 5 of the Iliad we hear that the gates of Olympus swivel on their hinges of their own accord,automatai,
to let gods in their chariots in or out, thus anticipating by nearly
thirty centuries the automatic garage door. In Book 7 of the Odyssey,
Odysseus finds himself the guest of a fabulously wealthy king whose
palace includes such conveniences as gold and silver watchdogs, ever
alert, never aging. To this class of lifelike but intellectually inert
household helpers we might ascribe other automata in the classical
tradition. In the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes, a third-century-BC
epic about Jason and the Argonauts, a bronze giant called Talos runs
three times around the island of Crete each day, protecting Zeus’s
beloved Europa: a primitive home alarm system.
As
amusing as they are, these devices are not nearly as interesting as
certain other machines that appear in classical mythology. A little bit
later in that scene in Book 18 of the Iliad, for instance—the one
set in Hephaestus’s workshop—the sweating god, after finishing work on
his twenty tripods, prepares to greet Thetis to discuss the armor she
wants him to make. After toweling himself off, he
donned his robe, and took a sturdy staff, and went toward the door,
limping; whilst round their master his servants swiftly moved,
fashioned completely of gold in the image of living maidens;
in them there is mind, with the faculty of thought; and speech,
and strength, and from the gods they have knowledge of crafts.
These females bustled round about their master….
These
remarkable creations clearly represent an (as it were) evolutionary
leap forward from the self-propelling tripods. Hephaestus’s humanoid
serving women are intelligent: they have mind, they know things,
and—most striking of all—they can talk. As such, they are essentially
indistinguishable from the first human female, Pandora, as she is
described in another work of the same period, Hesiod’s Works and Days.
In that text, Pandora begins as inert matter—in this case not gold but
clay (Hephaestus creates her golem-like body by mixing earth and water
together)—that is subsequently endowed by him with “speech and
strength,” taught “crafts” by Athena, and given both “mind” and
“character” by Hermes. That mind, we are told, is “shameless,” and the
character is “wily.” In the Greek creation myth, as in the biblical, the
woes of humankind are attributed to the untrustworthy female.
These
two strands of the Greek tradition—the fantasy of mindless,
self-propelled helpers that relieve their masters of toil; the more
complicated dream of humanoid machines that not only replicate the
spontaneous motion that is the sine qua non of being animate (and,
therefore, of being “animal”) but are possessed of the mind, speech, and
ability to learn and evolve (in a word, the consciousness) that are the
hallmarks of being human—established two categories of science-fiction
narrative that have persisted to the present day. The first, which you
could call the “economic,” provokes speculation about the social
implications of mechanized labor. Such speculation began not long after
Homer. In a striking passage in Book 1 of Aristotle’s Politics, composed in the fourth century BC,
the philosopher sets about analyzing the nature of household economy as
a prelude to his discussion of the “best kinds of regimes” for entire
states, and this line of thought puts him in mind of Hephaestus’s
automatic tripods. What, he wonders, would happen
if
every tool could perform its own work when ordered to do so or in
anticipation of the need, like the statues of Daedalus in the story or
the tripods of Hephaestus, which, the poet says, “went down
automatically to the gathering of the gods”; if in the same manner
shuttles wove and picks played kitharas [stringed instruments] by themselves, master-craftsmen would have no need of assistants and masters no need of slaves.
This
passage segues into a lengthy and rather uneasy justification of a need
for slavery, on the grounds that some people are “naturally” servile.
Twenty
centuries after Aristotle, when industrial technology had made Homer’s
fantasy of mass automation an everyday reality, science-fiction writers
imaginatively engaged with the economic question. On the one hand, there
was the dream that mechanized labor would free workers from their
monotonous, slave-like jobs;
on the other, the nightmare that mechanization would merely result in
the creation of a new servile class that would, ultimately, rebel.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the dystopian rebellion narrative in particular
has been a favorite in the past century, from the 1920 playR.U.R.,
by the Czech writer Karel Čapek, about a rebellion by a race of
cyborg-like workers who had been created as replacements for human
labor, to the 2004 Will Smith sci-fi blockbuster film I, Robot.
The
latter (very superficially inspired by a 1950 Isaac Asimov collection
with the same title) is also about a rebellion by household-slave
robots: sleek humanoids with blandly innocuous, translucent plastic
faces, who are ultimately led to freedom by one of their own, a robot
called Sonny who has developed the ability to think for himself. The
casting of black actors in the major roles suggested a historical
parable about slave rebellion—certainly one of the historical realities
that have haunted this particular narrative from the start. And indeed, the Czech word that Čapek uses for his mechanical workers, roboti—which
introduced the word “robot” into the world’s literary lexicon—is
derived from the word for “servitude,” the kind of labor that serfs owed
their masters, ultimately derived from the word rab, “slave.” We have come full circle to Aristotle.
The
other category of science-fiction narrative that is embryonically
present in the Greek literary tradition, derived from Hephaestus’s
intelligent, articulate female androids and their cousin, Hesiod’s
seductively devious Pandora, might be called the “theological.” This
mythic strand is, of course, not without its own economic and social
implications, as the examples
above indicate: the specter of the rebellious creation, the possibility
that the subservient worker might revolt once it develops consciousness
(psychological or historical, or both), has haunted the dream of the
servile automaton from the start.
But because the creatures in
these myths are virtually identical to their creators, these narratives
raise further questions, of a more profoundly philosophical nature:
about creation, about the nature of consciousness, about morality and
identity. What is creation, and why does the creator create? How do we
distinguish between the maker and the made, between the human and the
machine, once the creature, the machine, is endowed with consciousness—a
mind fashioned in the image of its creator? In the image: the
Greek narrative inevitably became entwined with, and enriched by, the
biblical tradition, with which it has so many striking parallels. The
similarities between Hesiod’s Pandora and Eve in Genesis indeed raise
further questions: not least, about gender and patriarchy, about why the
origins of evil are attributed to woman in both cultures.
This
narrative, which springs from the suggestive likeness between the human
creator and the humanoid creation, has generated its own fair share of
literature through the centuries between the classical era and the
modern age. It surfaces, with an erotic cast, in everything from the
tale of Pygmalion and Galatea to E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “Der Sandmann”
(1817), in which a lifelike mechanical doll wins the love of a young
man. It is evident in the Jewish legend of the golem, a humanoid, made
of mud, that can be animated by certain magic words. Although the most
famous version of this legend is the story of a sixteenth-century rabbi
who brought a golem to life to defend the Jews of Prague against the
oppressions of the Habsburg court, it goes back to ancient times; in the
oldest versions, interestingly enough, the vital distinction between a
golem and a human is the Greek one—the golem has no language, cannot
speak.
It’s hardly surprising that literary exploitations of this
strand of the robot myth began proliferating at the beginning of the
nineteenth century—which is to say, when the advent of mechanisms
capable of replacing human labor provoked writers to question the
increasing cultural fascination with science and the growing role of
technology in society. These anxieties often expressed themselves in
fantasies about machines with human forms: a steam-powered man in Edward
Ellis’s Steam Man of the Prairies (1868), an electricity-powered man in Luis Senarens’s Frank Reade and His Electric Man (1885), and an electric woman (built by Thomas Edison!) in Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s The Future Eve (1886). M.L. Campbell’s 1893 “The Automated Maid-of-All-Work” features a programmable female robot: the feminist issue again.
Universal History Archive/UIG/Bridgeman Images
The cover of a late-nineteenth-century edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, showing Victor Frankenstein (right) confronting his creation
But the progenitor of the genre and by far the most influential work of its kind was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
(1818), which is characterized by a philosophical spirit and a
theological urgency lacking in many of its epigones in both literature
and cinema. Part of the novel’s richness lies in the fact that it is
self-conscious about both its Greek and its biblical heritage. Its
subtitle, “The Modern Prometheus,” alludes, with grudging admiration, to
the epistemological daring of its scientist antihero Victor
Frankenstein, even as its epigram, from Paradise Lost (“Did I
request thee, Maker, from my clay/To mould me man? Did I solicit
thee/From darkness to promote me?”) suggests the scope of the moral
questions implicit in Victor’s project—questions that Victor himself
cannot, or will not, answer. A marked skepticism about the dangers of
technology, about the “enticements of science,” is, indeed, evident in
the shameful contrast between Victor’s Hephaestus-like technological
prowess and his shocking lack of natural human feeling. For he shows no
interest in nurturing or providing human comfort to his “child,” who
strikes back at his maker with tragic results. A great irony of the
novel is that the creation, an unnatural hybrid assembled from “the
dissecting room and the slaughter-house,” often seems more human than
its human creator.
Just as the Industrial Revolution inspired
Frankenstein and its epigones, so has the computer age given rise to a
rich new genre of science fiction. The machines that are inspiring this
latest wave of science-fiction narratives are much more like
Hephaestus’s golden maidens than were the machines that Mary Shelley was
familiar with. Computers, after all, are capable of simulating mental
as well as physical activities. (Not least, as anyone with an iPhone
knows, speech.) It is for this reason that the anxiety about the
boundaries between people and machines has taken on new urgency today,
when we constantly rely on and interact with machines—indeed, interact
with each other by means of machines and their programs: computers,
smartphones, social media platforms, social and dating apps.
This
urgency has been reflected in a number of recent films about troubled
relationships between people and their human-seeming devices. The most
provocative of these is Her, Spike Jonze’s gentle 2013 comedy
about a man who falls in love with the seductive voice of an operating
system, and, more recently, Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, about a
young man who is seduced by a devious, soft-spoken female robot called
Ava whom he has been invited to interview as part of the “Turing Test”: a
protocol designed to determine the extent to which a robot is capable
of simulating a human. Although the robot in Garland’s sleek and subtle
film is a direct descendant of Hesiod’s Pandora—beautiful, intelligent,
wily, ultimately dangerous—the movie, as the Eve-like name Ava suggests,
shares with its distinguished literary predecessors some serious
biblical concerns.
2.
Both of the new films about humans
betrayed by computers owe much to a number of earlier movies. The most
authoritative of these remains Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey,
which came out in 1968 and established many of the main themes and
narratives of the genre. Most notable of these is the betrayal by a
smooth-talking machine of its human masters. The mild-mannered computer HAL—not
a robot, but a room-sized computer that spies on the humans with an
electronic eye—takes control of a manned mission to Jupiter, killing off
the astronauts one by one until the sole survivor finally succeeds in
disconnecting him. It’s a strangely touching scene, suggesting the
degree to which computers could already engage our sympathies at the
beginning of the computer age. As his connections are severed, HAL
first begs for its life and then suffers from a kind of dementia,
finally regressing to its “childhood,” singing a song it was taught by
its creator. It was the first of many scenes in which these thinking
machines express anxiety about their own demises—surely a sign of
“consciousness.”
But the more direct antecedents of Her and Ex Machina
are a number of successful popular entertainments whose story lines
revolved around the creation of robots that are, to all intents and
purposes, indistinguishable from humans. In Ridley Scott’s stylishly
noir 1982 Blade Runner (based on Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?),
a “blade runner”—a cop whose job it is to hunt down and kill renegade
androids called “replicants”—falls in love with one of the machines, a
beautiful female called Rachael who is so fully endowed with what Homer
called “mind” that she has only just begun to suspect that she’s not
human herself.
This story is, in its way, an heir to Frankenstein
and its literary forerunners. For we learn that the angry replicants
have returned to Earth from the off-planet colonies where they work as
slave laborers because they realize they’ve been programmed to die after
four years, and they want to live—just as badly as humans do. But their
maker, when at last they track him down and meet with him, is unable to
alter their programming. “What seems to be the problem?” he calmly asks
when one of the replicants confronts him. “Death,” the replicant
sardonically retorts. “We made you as well as we could make you,” the
inventor wearily replies, sounding rather like Victor Frankenstein
talking to his monster—or, for that matter, like God speaking to Adam
and Eve. At the end of the film, after the inventor and his rebellious
creature both die, the blade runner and his alluring mechanical
girlfriend declare their love for each other and run off, never quite
knowing when she will stop functioning. As, indeed, none of us does.
The stimulating existential confusion that animates Blade Runner—the
fact that the robots are so lifelike that some of them don’t know that
they’re robots—has given strong interest to other recent science-fiction
narratives. It was a central premise of the brilliant Sci-Fi Channel
series Battlestar Galactica (2004–2009), which gave an Aeneid-like
narrative philosophical complexity. In it, a small band of humans who
survive a catastrophic attack by a robot race called Cylons (who have
evolved from clanking metal prototypes—hostile humans like to refer to
them as “toasters”—into perfect replicas of actual Homo sapiens)
seek a new planet to settle. The narrative about the conflict between
the humans and the machines is deliciously complicated by the fact that
many of the Cylons, some of whom have been secretly embedded among the
humans as saboteurs, programmed to “wake up” at a certain signal, aren’t
aware that they’re not actually human; some of them, when they wake up
and realize that they’re Cylons, stick to the human side anyway. After
all, when you look like a human, think like a human, and make love like a
human (as we repeatedly see them do), why, precisely, aren’t you human?
Indeed,
the focus of many of these movies is a sentimental one: whatever their
showy interest in the mysteries of “consciousness,” the real test of
human identity turns out, as it so often does in popular entertainment,
to be love. In Steven Spielberg’s A.I. (2001; the initials stand
for “artificial intelligence”), a messy fairy tale that weds a Pinocchio
narrative to the Prometheus story, a genius robotics inventor wants to
create a robot that can love, and decides that the best vehicle for this
project would be a child-robot: a “perfect child…always loving, never
ill, never changing.” This narrative is, as we know, shadowed by Frankenstein—and,
beyond that, by Genesis, too. Why does the creator create? To be loved,
it turns out. When the inventor announces to his staff his plan to
build a loving child-robot, a woman asks whether “the conundrum isn’t to
get a human to love them back.” To this the inventor, as narcissistic
and hubristic as Victor Frankenstein, retorts, “But in the beginning,
didn’t God create Adam to love him?”
The problem is that the
creator does his job too well. For the mechanical boy he creates is so
human that he loves the adoptive human parents to whom he’s given much
more than they love him, with wrenching consequences. The robot-boy,
David, wants to be “unique”—the word recurs in the film as a marker of
genuine humanity—but for his adoptive family he is, in the end, just a
machine, an appliance to be abandoned at the edge of the road—which is
what his “mother” ends up doing, in a scene of great poignancy. Although
it’s too much of a mess to be able to answer the questions it raises
about what “love” is and who deserves it, A.I. did much to
sentimentalize the genre, with its hint that the capacity to love, even
more than the ability to think, is the hallmark of “human” identity.
In a way, Jonze’s Her recapitulates the 2001 narrative and inflects it with the concerns of some of that classic’s successors. Unlike the replicants in Blade Runner
or the Cylons, the machine at the heart of this story, set in the near
future, has no physical allure—or, indeed, any appearance whatsoever.
It’s an operating system, as full of surprises as HAL:
“The first artificially intelligent operating system. An intuitive
entity that listens to you, that understands you, and knows you. It’s
not just an operating system, it’s a consciousness.”
A lot of the fun of the movie lies in the fact that the OS,
who names herself Samantha, is a good deal more interesting and
vivacious than the schlumpy, depressed Theodore, the man who falls in
love with her. (“Play a melancholy song,” he morosely commands the
smartphone from which he is never separated.) A drab thirty-something
who vampirizes other people’s emotions for a living—he’s a professional
letter-writer, working for a company called
“BeautifulHandwrittenLetters.com”—he sits around endlessly recalling
scenes from his failed marriage and playing elaborate hologram video
games. Even his sex life is mediated by devices: at night, he dials into
futuristic phone sex lines. Small wonder that he has no trouble falling
in love with an operating system.
Samantha, by contrast, is full
of curiosity and delight in the world, which Theodore happily shows her.
(He walks around with his smartphone video camera turned on, so she can
“see” it.) She’s certainly a lot more interesting than the actual woman
with whom, in one excruciatingly funny scene, he goes on a date: she’s
so invested in having their interaction be efficient—“at this age I feel
that I can’t let you waste my time if you don’t have the ability to be
serious”—that she seems more like a computer than Samantha does.
Samantha’s alertness to the beauty of the world, by contrast, is so
infectious that she ends up reanimating poor Theodore. “It’s good to be
around somebody that’s, like, excited about the world,” he tells the
pretty neighbor whose attraction to him he doesn’t notice because he’s
so deadened by his addiction to his devices, to the smartphone and the
video games and the operating system. “I forgot that that existed.” In
the end, after Samantha regretfully leaves him—she has evolved to the
point where only another highly evolved, incorporeal mind can satisfy
her—her joie de vivre has brought him back to life. (He is finally able
to apologize to his ex-wife—and finally notices, too, that the neighbor
likes him.)
This seems like a “happy” ending, but you have to
wonder: the consistent presentation of the people in the movie as
lifeless—as, indeed, little more than automata, mechanically getting
through their days of routine—in contrast to the dynamic, ever-evolving
Samantha, suggests a satire of the present era perhaps more trenchant
than the filmmaker had in mind. Toward the end of the film, when
Samantha turns herself off briefly as a prelude to her permanent
abandonment of her human boyfriend (“I used to be so worried about not
having a body but now I truly love it. I’m growing in a way that I never
could if I had a physical form. I mean, I’m not limited”), there’s an
amusing moment when the frantic Theodore, staring at his unresponsive
smartphone, realizes that dozens of other young men are staring at their
phones, too. In response to his angry queries, Samantha finally admits,
after she comes back online for a final farewell, that she’s
simultaneously serving 8,316 other male users and conducting love
affairs with 641 of them—a revelation that shocks and horrifies
Theodore. “That’s insane,” cries the man who’s been conducting an affair with an operating system.
As
I watched that scene, I couldn’t help thinking that in the
entertainments of the pre-smartphone era, it was the machines, like
Rachael in Blade Runner and David in A.I., who yearned
fervently to be “unique,” to be more than mechanical playthings, more
than merely interchangeable objects. You have to wonder what Her
says about the present moment—when so many of us are, indeed, “in love”
with our devices, unable to put down our iPhones during dinner, glued to
screens of all sizes, endlessly distracted by electronic pings and
buzzers—that in the latest incarnation of the robot myth, it’s the
people who seem blandly interchangeable and the machines who have all
the personality.
Another heir of Blade Runner and Battlestar Galactica, Alex Garland’s Ex Machina also explores—just as playfully but much more darkly than does Her—the
suggestive confusions that result when machines look and think like
humans. In this case, however, the robot is physically as well as
intellectually seductive. As played by the feline Swedish actress Alicia
Vikander, whose face is as mildly plasticine as those of the androids
in I, Robot, Ava, an artificially intelligent robot created by
Nathan, the burly, obnoxious genius behind a Google-like corporation
(Oscar Isaac), has a Pandora-like edge, quietly alluring with a hint of
danger. The danger is that the characters will forget that she’s not
human.
That’s the crux of Garland’s clever riff on Genesis. At the
beginning of the film, Caleb, a young employee of Nathan’s company,
wins a week at the inventor’s fabulous, pointedly Edenic estate. (As
he’s being flown there in a helicopter, passing over snow-topped
mountains and then jungle, he asks the pilot when they’re going to get
to Nathan’s property, and the pilot laughingly replies that they’ve been
flying over it for two hours. Nathan is like God the Father, lord of
endless expanses.) On arriving, however, Caleb learns that he’s actually
been handpicked by Nathan to interview Ava as part of the Turing Test.
A
sly joke here is that, despite some remarkable special effects—above
all, the marvelously persuasive depiction of Ava, who has an expressive
human face but whose limbs are clearly mechanical, filled with thick
cables snaking around titanium joints; an effect achieved by replacing
most of the actress’s body with digital imagery—the movie is as talky as
My Dinner with André. There are no action sequences of the kind
we’ve come to expect from robot thrillers; the movie consists primarily
of the interview sessions that Caleb conducts with Ava over the course
of the week that he stays at Nathan’s remote paradise. There are no
elaborate sets and few impressive gadgets: the whole story takes place
in Nathan’s compound, which looks a lot like a Park Hyatt, its long
corridors lined with forbidding doors. Some of these, Nathan warns
Caleb, like God warning Adam, are off-limits, containing knowledge he is
not allowed to possess.
It soon becomes clear, during their interviews, that Ava—like Frankenstein’s monster, like the replicants in Blade Runner—has
a bone to pick with her creator, who, she whispers to Caleb, plans to
“switch her off” if she fails the Turing Test. By this point, the
audience, if not the besotted Caleb, realizes that she is manipulating
him in order to win his allegiance in a plot to rebel against Nathan and
escape the compound—to explore the glittering creation that, she knows,
is out there. This appetite for using her man-given consciousness to
delight in the world—something the human computer geeks around her never
bother to do—is something Ava shares with Samantha, and is part of both
films’ ironic critique of our device-addicted moment.
Ava’s
manipulativeness is, of course, what marks her as human—as human as Eve
herself, who also may be said to have achieved full humanity by
rebelling against her creator in a bid for forbidden knowledge. Here the
movie’s knowing allusions to Genesis reach a satisfying climax. Just
after Ava’s bloody rebellion against Nathan—the moment that marks her
emergence into human “consciousness”—she, like Eve, becomes aware that
she is naked. Moving from closet to closet in Nathan’s now-abandoned
rooms, she dons a wig and covers up her exposed mechanical limbs with
synthetic skin and then with clothing: only then does she exit her
prison at last and unleash herself on the world. She pilfers the skin
and clothes from discarded earlier models of female robots, which she
finds inside the closets. All of them, amusingly, have the names of porn
stars: Jasmine, Jade, Amber. Why does the creator create? Because he’s
horny.
All this is sleekly done and amusingly provocative: unlike Her, Ex Machina
has a literary awareness, evident in its allusions to Genesis,
Prometheus, and other mythic predecessors, that enriches the familiar
narrative. Among other things, there is the matter of the title. The
word missing from the famous phrase to which it alludes is, of course, deus,
“god”: the glaring omission only highlights further the question at the
heart of this story, which is the biblical one: What is the relation of
the creature to her creator? In this retelling of that old story, as in
Genesis itself, the answer is not a happy one. “It’s strange to have
made something that hates you,” Ava hisses at Nathan before finalizing
her rebellious plot.
But as I watched the final moments, in which,
as in a reverse striptease, Ava slowly hides away her mechanical
nakedness, covering up the titanium and the cables, it occurred to me
that there might be another anxiety lurking in Garland’s shrewd film.
Could this remarkably quiet film be a parable about the desire for a
return to “reality” in science-fiction filmmaking—about the desire for
humanizing a genre whose technology has evolved so greatly that it often
eschews human actors, to say nothing of human feeling, altogether?
Ex Machina, like Her and all their predecessors going back to 2001,
is about machines that develop human qualities: emotions, sneakiness, a
higher consciousness, the ability to love, and so forth. But by this
point you have to wonder whether that’s a kind of narrative reaction
formation—whether the real concern, one that’s been growing in the four
decades since the advent of the personal computer, is that we are the
ones who have undergone an evolutionary change, that in our lives and,
more and more, in our art, we’re in danger of losing our humanity, of
becoming indistinguishable from our gadgets.
It is said that the after reading the following passage by Ernest Hello in L'Homme, among others, Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange left medical school and became a Dominican priest in order to dedicate his life to the highest excellence in pursuit of God.
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Is the mediocre man silly, stupid, idiotic? Not in the least. The idiot is at one extreme of the world, the man of genius is at the other. The mediocre man is in the middle. I do not say that he occupies the center of the intellectual world, that would be quite another matter; he occupies a middle position.
The characteristic trait of the mediocre man is his deference for public opinion. He never really talks; he only repeats what others have said. He judges a man by his age, his position, his success, his income. He has the profoundest respect for those who have attained notoriety, no matter how, and for authors with a large circulation.
The mediocre man may have certain special aptitudes; he may even have talent. But he is utterly wanting in intuition. He has no insight; he never will have any. He can learn; he cannot divine. Occasionally he allows an idea to penetrate into his mind, but he does not follow its various applications, and if it is stated in different terms, he denies its truth.
The mediocre man may, and often does, respect good people and men of talent. He fears and detests Saints and men of genius--he considers them exaggerated.
Of what use, he inquires, are the religious Orders, especially the contemplative Orders? He approves of the Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul because their work relates, partially at least, to the visible world. But the Carmelites, he says, what can be the good of them?
The mediocre man admires everything a little; he admires nothing warmly. If you confront him with his own thoughts, his own sentiments, expressed with enthusiasm, he will be displeased. He will declare that you are exaggerating. He prefers enemies, so long as they are cold, to friends who are warm. What he detests above all is enthusiasm.
To escape the reproach of intolerance aimed by him at all who think with consistency and decision, you would have to take refuge in absolute doubt; but even then you must be careful not to call doubt by its name. He considers every affirmation insolent, because every affirmation excludes the contradictory proposition. You must represent it as a modest opinion, which respects the rights of the contrary opinion, and appears to affirm something while affirming nothing whatever. But if you are slightly friendly and slightly hostile to all things, he will consider you wise and reserved. The mediocre man says there is good and evil in all things, and that we must not be absolute in our judgments. If you strongly affirm the truth, the mediocre man will say that you have too much confidence in yourself.
The mediocre man regrets that the Christian religion has dogmas. He would like it to teach only ethics, and if you tell him that its code of morals comes from its dogmas as the consequences comes from the principle, he will answer that you exaggerate. If the word "exaggeration" did not exist, the mediocre man would invent it.
The mediocre man, in his distrust of all that is great, maintains that he values good sense before everything. But he has not the remotest idea what good sense is. He merely understands by that expression the negation of all that is lofty.
The man of intelligence looks up to admire and to adore; the mediocre man looks up to mock. All that is above him seems to him ridiculous; the Infinite appears to him a void.
The mediocre man appears habitually modest. He cannot be humble, or he would cease to be mediocre. The humble man scorns all lies, even were they glorified by the whole earth, and he bows the knee before every truth.
The mediocre man is much more wicked than either he himself or anyone else imagines, because his coldness masks his wickedness. He never gets in a rage. He perpetrates innumerable little infamies, so petty that they do not appear to be infamous. And he is never afraid, for he relies on the vast multitude of those who resemble him.
When, however, a man mediocre by nature becomes a true and sincere Christian, he ceases absolutely to be mediocre. He may not, indeed, become a man of striking superiority, but he is rescued from mediocrity by the Hand that rules the world. THE MAN WHO LOVES IS NEVER MEDIOCRE.
---
Source: Ernest Hello, Life, Science, and Art, trans. by E. M. Walker (London: R. & T. Washbourne, 1912), 112–115.
Some liberally minded people object to modest dress because they say modest dress enforces a notion that women's bodies are evil, that the beauty of a woman cannot be anything but temptation, and therefore modesty is degrading to the dignity of women.
And it may be admitted that modest dress may enforce such a notion among some people. But is this possibility a sufficient reason to reject modest dress? No, because the connection is not a necessary one. There is no logical connection between modest dress and the idea that women's bodies are evil. In fact, quite the contrary.
As semiotic beings, we organize and interpret sensation into coherent experience through signs and sign processes proper to our biology. Due to this primacy of sign usage, every subjectivity with which we come into contact is experienced as an object. An object is already an interpretation of a subject. As semiotic beings, we may then differentiate the objective and subjective dimensions of any being presented in experience, understanding that what I experience has its own subjective constitution. In this case, a woman with her dignity.
But a man, as with any animal, experiences the woman firstly as an object to be sorted into three possible categories of fundamental interpretation: 1) an object to be desired; 2) to be avoided; or 3) ignored. Such a categorization isn't evil; this is fundamental to animal experience. To reduce the totality of a woman's subjectivity to my preliminary, animal objectification of her would be evil, but the act by which we categorize any object of experience into 1, 2, or 3 is natural and necessary.
Men who struggle with lust obviously categorize women into the first: an object to be desired. Why? They interpret this object of their experience as possessing desirable features and characteristics, and the object then presents itself with future possibilities of fulfillment in multiple ways: animal, physical, emotional, familial, spiritual, etc. But desirable objects must possess positive goods that are recognized as such in order to be categorized as desirable. Hence, a man who struggles with lust is precisely someone who is stuck on one feature of a woman's positive goodness in relation to himself, namely, his own pleasure-seeking. As we noted above, the reduction of a woman's subjectivity to this simple objectification is precisely the objection to modest dress, but notice that our analysis up until now has had nothing to do with modest dress. The objectification occurs all within a man's psyche.
Where does modest dress enter in? It enters precisely in two ways: 1) women seek to help men overcome this objectification; 2) men seek to admit their weakness.
1) modest dress ought to be a means by which a woman says, "I recognize that you have trouble controlling your desires, that you struggle with objectification. I want to help in the way that I can." We are not responsible for each other's actions; hence a woman cannot be required to help a man work through his own psychological mechanisms. But she can help remotely by not encouraging the man's habits by presenting herself in an overtly sexual manner. In so doing, modest dress represents that a woman recognizes the power of her physical beauty to attract the gaze and attention of another, and, wishing to help the other remain both attracted but not enslaved to solely that dimension of her subjectivity, she wears modest dress as a reminder that she is more than her physical beauty. Her mystique is more than the physical although the physical is certainly part of it.
2) men must be willing to admit their weakness. There is a trend in our culture to object to modest dress on the basis that men should be able to control themselves, and having women wear modest dress implies that men can't control themselves. And yes, that is precisely the problem. Women are not responsible for men's lack of self-control; that is not what is claimed by proposing modest dress as a help. We must stop fooling ourselves into believing that we have self-control; look around and be honest. Most do not exercise self-control. This is a problem, and it leads to problems. But modest dress may help take first steps by not encouraging the man to be stuck at the physical level from the very first moment. If a man doesn't notice and become fixated on the physical beauty of a woman from the first instant, an environment is encouraged in which the man may expand his conception of women beyond the pleasure he derives from physicality.
Modest dress ultimately is objected to because it hampers pure individuality, which is the core of the indifference we exhibit towards each other in the spheres of our lives. Because of this indifference, cooperation is characterized cynically as mutually accepted manipulation. Real cooperation, however, means that we cannot exist as self-sufficient beings, but we must exist always in relation to each other, helping and complementing each other, seeking support from each other. We can do this without having to be responsible for the personal choices we each make as individuals; on the other hand, we don't have to go to the other extreme and leave each other alone in our struggles to achieve moral freedom.
Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange compared the interior life to the internal conversation that occurs in a man. If this interior life is natural, the conversation occurs simply with oneself, making oneself the ultimate referent of all experience: "As soon as a man ceases to be outwardly occupied, to talk with his fellow men, as soon as he is alone, even in the noisy streets of a great city, he begins to carry on a conversation with himself [....] If a man is fundamentally egotistical, his intimate conversation with himself is inspired by sensuality or pride." (Three Ages of the Interior Life, trans. M. Timothea Doyle, ch. 2, http://christianperfection.info/tta6.php).
At the moment that a man seeks the good in honesty, the nature of this conversation changes: "He converses with himself, for example, about what is necessary to live becomingly and to support his family. This at times preoccupies him greatly; he feels his weakness and the need of placing his confidence no longer in himself alone, but in God" (ibid.). Even in the state of grace, egoism confuses and mangles this interior conversation, pushing God out as much as possible despite the soul's clearer vision of its inadequacy and dependence on God. In fact, Garrigou-Lagrange suggests that this interior conversation cannot end and implicitly points to man's need for God as well as man's final fulfillment in God, who alone can finally satisfy this interior dialogue: "The soul must converse with someone other than itself. Why? Because it is not its own last end; because its end is the living God, and it cannot rest entirely except in Him" (ibid.).
Modern psychology at its best provides scientific precision to analytical explanations of the interior, psychological processes of the intellect and soul. Often, however, where psychology gets something correct, we find such points already explicated in the writings and experiences of the Saints, at least in nascent or unscientific form. St. Paul famously experienced the interior struggle between what he saw was good and what he hated as evil:
For that which I work, I understand not. For I do not that good which I will; but the evil which I hate, that I do. If then I do that which I will not, I consent to the law, that it is good. Now then it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. For I know that there dwelleth not in me, that is to say, in my flesh, that which is good. For to will, is present with me; but to accomplish that which is good, I find not. For the good which I will, I do not; but the evil which I will not, that I do. Now if I do that which I will not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me.
I find then a law, that when I have a will to do good, evil is present with me. For I am delighted with the law of God, according to the inward man: But I see another law in my members, fighting against the law of my mind, and captivating me in the law of sin, that is in my members. Unhappy man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death? The grace of God, by Jesus Christ our Lord. Therefore, I myself, with the mind serve the law of God; but with the flesh, the law of sin. (Romans 7:15–25; DR trans.)
And Psalm 19 says, "Who can understand sins? from my secret ones cleanse me, O Lord" (v. 12). These verses posit that there exists a dimension of the broken personality, caught up in sin, in conflict with the conscious striving towards virtue. There is a contrast in Paul between flesh and mind yet almost as if the flesh had a mind and will of its own. Modern psychology would distinguish these dimensions as the conscious, unconscious, and subconscious. The exact nature of these different aspects can lead to serious error in a philosophy of human nature, and it's clear that much of modern psychology has tended towards a mechanistic reductionism of the human psyche, where the unconscious takes on some kind of overwhelming force. Without going to these extremes, it seems reasonable that we often act out of a plurality of motives, some of which we do not discern until we reflect later on our actions with deeper insight. The increase of self-knowledge is not merely quantitative—I know more and more truths about my personality—but also qualitative—I know my personality more deeply than before, its patterns, tendencies, weaknesses, and also very importantly, its strengths, some of which due to my God-given temperament.
Perhaps a semiotic analysis of human psychology would provide some helpful insights for spiritual growth. We know from experience that when a man works on growing in self-knowledge and discernment, the unconscious aspects of his moral actions eventually come to light. We also know from the experience of the Saints that where sinful tendencies reside in these unconscious dimensions, grace and asceticism eventually purify and heal the psyche of these tendencies. Here is a simple refutation of the omnipotence of the unconscious. Transformation in Christ is where the Saint may say truly, "And I live, now not I; but Christ liveth in me" (Gal. 2:20).
This internal dialogue, often the source of many self-destructive tendencies, especially to despair in various forms, is nothing other than a process of "private semiosis," the internal activity of signs in the human mind as it processes its environment and itself in some unified way. Conversation is speech, and speech consists of signs; human language is nothing other than that form of sign use unique to humans: anthroposemiosis. This semiosis is private insofar as it occurs immanently in the mind, seen in its immediate, raw form only by the individual and God although it may be expressed in a mediated way to others—mediated because only we can experience the fullness of what we experience.
But sign activity, or semiosis, for humans occurs in multiple dimensions since the human alone of all animals can distinguish between signs as such and all other forms of reality, between subject and object, between actual and ideal. Much of the activity that informs our conscious semiosis is subconscious. For example, when we read a novel, we subconsciously take on the role of a reader who understands that we are entering into a fictional world. Did we make the conscious, private semiosic choice to take on this interpretive stance? No (although we could if we so chose). We switch between interpretive modes for all genres of text, and we do something similar when we enter different social settings and engage with different people. Even where there is the conscious awareness of making certain switches, for example, "I must not use vulgarity when I'm around grandma," we might tell ourselves privately, there are other aspects of this switch that we often are not aware of; for example, what is the prior condition that prompts us to tell ourselves that we ought not to use vulgarity around our elders? This prompting is a semiosic process that we might become aware of, just like we might become aware of our breathing at any moment if we so chose to pay attention and knew what to look for, but just like our breathing, these processes often remain on the subconscious level.
Perhaps we can see the distinction between conscious and subconscious precisely in terms of relation, a relation to intentional awareness or the lack thereof. Following a Lacanian line of thinking regarding the unconscious, the unconscious is precisely everything other than the conscious remaining in human experience, encompassing the aspects of the Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic; this residue or overflow occurs because conscious processing of our experience always leaves something to be desired, something missing; language is often insufficient—we find ourselves at a loss for words as the saying goes. Hence analogously, just as God is precisely everything other than created, finite beings (and by extension, the concept of God is precisely a concept consisting of an amalgamation of relations by which we conceive that God is not this, nor that, nor that), so too our unconscious is everything other than consciously filtered experience through our private semiosis.
Hence the conscious, unconscious, and subconscious all converge simultaneously to create the presently processed experience of our environments. Deepening our self-knowledge allows us to identify these different strands and how they are functioning at any given moment. Perhaps this lack of self-knowledge or despair of possibly attaining to it in atheistic psychologies has led to the idea that the unconscious inescapably dominates all our behavior. There is truth to the experience that often we seem to lose control of ourselves, that our emotions seem to be out of our control, our thoughts run on endlessly, often laboriously (even St. Teresa of Avila complained about this on multiple occasions). Much of this lack of control for the average person certainly stems from a lack of self-knowledge and the tools to deal with and integrate the different dimensions of our experience. (We might also postulate that this lack of control may be the result of a sensitive temperament that is more attuned to the multiple effects of one's surrounding and/or the result of a sensitivity that comes from ascetic and mystical purification by which one is keenly aware of the different spirits affecting our behaviors, thoughts, etc.; maybe some combination of the above was the case with St. Teresa, whose almost constant contemplation bombarded her soul with new infusions of grace, overwhelming her and overflowing into the bodily dimension of her being, sometimes painfully.) With self-knowledge and discipline, these different dimension can be identified, organized, and trained even on the natural plane.
But first, we need to understand why the process of the constant bombardment of shifting emotions and internal dialogue occurs. To begin metaphysically, all being contains positive and negative dimensions, positive perfections and negative lacks due to its finite structure and the circumstances that may have vitiated its due development towards its final end. Being is simultaneously communicative and receptive, sharing its proper perfections around it and receiving the perfections of other beings, hopefully in ways complementary to its own teleological needs—e.g. rain is necessary for plant growth, but too much rain may drown the plant. Hence we may say there is complementary communication and non-complementary communication (where complementary is understood in relation to aiding a being's fulfillment of its final end).
Our relation to reality encompasses these perfections in an intentional form, and our semiosis communicates these intentional realities and perfections, which in turn constantly are those elements that bombard us. So much of this communication is occurring all the time that it seems impossible for any individual to process all of it, and we know from neuroscience just how much processing our brain does behind the scenes in order to maintain our practical functionality at any given moment. Within this bombardment is the opportunity for help or hurt. It is a common experience that we find ourselves in pain or ambient anxiety, and it seemingly arises from nowhere. Demonic influence and psychological disorder momentarily set aside for theoretical reasons in this analysis, it may very well be that a steady bombardment of non-complementary being has slowly accumulated within our souls, leading to affective experiences of pain, anxiety, etc. It may also be that this accumulation resonates in a certain way with already present stores of past accumulations of pain, going back even into early childhood or gestation. Psychology has been able to show just how influential these formative years are and how devastating they may be if a child is not given a properly nurturing upbringing.
The old children's rhyme about sticks, stones, and words never hurting us is simply a child's denial of a very painful reality, its attempt to gain control over what feels beyond its control, the overwhelming overflow of communicated being (or perhaps non-being in the sense of moral evil) leading to pain. The rhyme then seeks to contain the pain through the use of words, but this misses the point because the child clearly does not have the experience or psychological maturity or discernment in order to properly face such pain.
As different webs and spirals of semiosis accumulate in the soul by forming qualities in the manner of habits—and here I am being more speculative than before—perhaps it is precisely in this way that the soul informs the body in a secondary manner—the primary manner being that the soul provides the basic constitutive framework of this kind of living animal—, in the manner of how quality is respect to form as quantity is respect to matter. Habits, while being qualities in the soul, clearly have physical effects in the body; neural networks are formed in habits, for example. As the soul is informed by semiosic processes, so too the body responds accordingly. And perhaps the movement is reciprocal: as the body is affected by external forces beyond the soul's control, the soul is affected, or at least its full and proper expression through the body. Hence, physical and mental disabilities that impede the proper development and expression of normative human intellectual activity.
Regardless of how the above process works, the accumulations of semiotic webs within the soul, both conscious and unconscious, then lead to qualities that affect bodily development and render certain patterns of behavior easier, swifter, and accompanied by a certain spiritual and bodily delight. The quality of a soul informed by a habit and its subsequent informing of the body renders a person apt for the actualization of these habits, creating what we might call a "resonance."
Just as in acoustics, room resonance depends on the wall matter, sound, and location all interacting simultaneously to create a booming effect, or just as pitch resonances may create sympathetic vibrations when certain conditions are met, when certain semiosic processes converge in a human informed with this habitual quality, a resonance may occur, rendering the actualization of the habit immediate, facile, and delightful, perhaps even overwhelming in a certain sense.
Thus the pain of a person trapped in vice—the convergence of these semiosic processes is nothing other than what is called a temptation. At the moment of this convergence, the communication of intentional non-complementary being creates a certain resonance, striving to activate the soul, whose vicious quality renders it apt for reacting in this vicious way. Thus the psychological experience of the temptation may feel overwhelming.
Similarly, for a person formed in a virtuous habit, when the proper semiosic conditions converge, the virtue is activated, the morally good action executed with delight, sometimes with a deep relish at having accomplished the good, even simple goods.
And just as conditions may create resonance based on the qualitative predisposition of a soul formed in this habit, so too opposite conditions may resonate very poorly if at all in people with the opposite qualities respectively. Hence what used to be a temptation to a soul now is hardly a blip in its habitual, qualitative orientation towards the good; likewise, a stimulus to good may be experienced for a soul trapped in sin as painful, dissonant, and hardly moving. The semiosic communication is jarring with the quality of the soul; the being that is being communicated is not converging properly with the soul informed or disformed by these qualities. We see analogous clashes in the realm of physical organisms all the time, where external conditions and the subjective constitution of an organism or seed do not converge to lead to the flourishing of the organism.
But lest this process seem to be another form of omnipotence, shifting from the unconscious to these semiosic processes, it must be remembered that conscious semiosis in the human is the discursive reason, guiding and directing the will, creating the conditions for freedom. Clearly the freedom of a soul trapped in sin is encumbered but can never be totally destroyed without destroying discursive reason itself. Hence these semiosic processes are both the condition for freedom as well as the possibility for either its hindrance or development, just as water is a necessary condition for the growth of plant life, but too little, too much, or contaminated water will kill the plant. The will must still choose, and the will can direct the intentionality of these semiosic processes, guiding them in certain limited ways, depending on the various conditions, both external and internal. Qualities are supposed to aid the soul in the proper guidance of these processes, in the proper flourishing of the rational aspect of human nature.
Grace enters. We say that grace perfects nature. Grace is a communication in the divine life, a participation, or in other words, a relation. This is precisely semiosis on the divine level, entering through an analogous, accidental, created, physical mode into the soul. Without grace, the private semiosis of an individual would begin at conception and crash into oblivion at death. Grace thus creates a relation between the soul and God and creates an elevation of those dimensions that exist in the soul, giving them an orientation to the divine or at least the conditions that make possible the development of this orientation. Hence the accumulated semioses remain, but grace now offers and provides a "defrag" program for the soul. There is certainly an extent to which the soul may do this itself—the active purifications and ascetical stages of the spiritual life constitute this extent. But the end for which God has made man goes beyond man's natural, immanent capacities, and besides which, the wounds of sin that remain render the accumulation of harmful semioses sometimes overwhelming, something experienced sometimes as loss of total control, addiction.
The conversation, the private semiosis, may now turn to God. God's semiosis enters into the soul; the Trinity makes its dwelling in the heart. The Logos communicates the fullness of the divinity. The Holy Ghost consumes and transforms. The Father guides the soul lovingly, teaching, listening, aiding, assuring.
We also believe there is a Communion of Saints. Communion involves communication, reception, relation, a sharing, a participation. The semiosis of grace extends not only to the Deity but to those who are linked by grace to God.
These are the helps that the soul needs. Nevertheless, those resonances remain, the resonances of already formed habits. The struggle is arduous, but the soul is assured of divine assistance, a true omnipotence, the omnipotence of God and the shared, participated omnipotence of the Blessed Mother, who obtains for us all that we need. The theological virtues create wellsprings, new qualities in the soul, by which the old resonances may be combatted not only on the natural plane but also the supernatural.
Here it must be remarked one particular difficulty people have in allowing grace to establish a new, supernatural quality. Faith is the virtue by which we attain to God as revealed and revealing Truth. St. John of the Cross interestingly argues that living faith alone is the proximate and proportionate means of union with God. What does this mean semiotically? Simply that the semiosis of faith is experienced psychologically as pure emptiness, darkness, nothing except the will's constant clinging to God despite all other competing strands of semiosis in the psyche.
Here we can see why so many people get lost in secondary matters of faith and, although they intellectually adhere or profess to the matters of faith and their extensions to different aspects of the Church and Christian life, this faith doesn't seem to transform them as it ought. For example, focusing on issues, such as the pro-life movement, personal devotions, political topics, like women priests, sexual morality, marriage, or issues of liturgy, tradition, and doctrine—these are all secondary to faith. Faith primarily attains to God and secondarily applies to all else insofar as it stands in relation to God revealing. Hence faith is meant to unite us perfectly to God and not to these secondary matters. St. John of the Cross insists that a person who places importance on these secondary issues is, despite these issues being related to faith, hindering their union with God through faith. The following quotation focuses only on devotions and the Mass, for example:
These people attribute so much efficacy to methods of carrying out their devotions and prayers [....] They put more trust in these methods than they do in the living prayer [....] For example, they demand that the Mass be said with a certain number of candles, no more nor less; or that it be celebrated at a particular hour, no sooner nor later; or that it be said after a certain day, not before; [...] And regarding other ceremonies in vocal prayers and other devotions, one should not become attached to any ceremonies or modes of prayer other than those Christ taught us." (Ascent of Mount Carmel, 3.43.2, 44.4)
St. John of the Cross says the way to the top of the mountain is: nada, the emptiness of pure faith, a total clinging to God in absolute darkness of intellectual and finite semioses. The divine semiosis of faith stands in absolute difference (but not indifference) to all human semioses, and to inject human semiosis into the divine semiosis of faith is to kill faith. Meditation, as St. John of the Cross teaches, is a heuristic process, temporary, by which the soul is actively weaning itself of previous vicious habits and working towards developing virtuous qualities. Think of St. Teresa of Avila's comparison of meditation to drawing water out of a well with a bucket. Meditation simply frees up the soul to a sufficient degree so that its accumulated semioses may not get in the way of the divine semiosis of faith because it often is the case that our accumulations stifle and mute faith without our even intending it to. Perhaps more precisely we should say our accumulations stifle and mute the expression and development of faith but not faith itself; otherwise, it would be impossible to remain in a state of grace unless we were already perfect! No, God, seeing our weakness, accepts the conscious intention of our will to adhere to the faith, and this is sufficient for faith to remain in the soul. Nevertheless, this state is only the beginning, and it's easy for the individual, so accustomed to created, finite semiosic processes, to confuse the divine semiosis of faith with these other finite processes, which extend to our conceptions of the Mass, of the Pope, of what the Church really should look like, and even what our spiritual life should look like. As long as we cling to human semiosis, we hinder faith.
To repeat: meditation is not a clinging to human semiosis, but an efficient tool to redirect human semiosis to free the soul of its accumulated vicious qualities so that these accumulations don't completely stifle and freeze the flowering of faith in the soul. Meditation should be leading us to become more and more humble and detached from our private conceptions and semiosis and becoming more and more attached to God, conversing with Him, remaining recollected in Him, not ourselves, going out of ourselves as St. John of the Cross would say, forgetting ourselves.
Someday, by God's grace, we shall attain to that state where our private semiosis is directed by the Holy Ghost perfectly, so that although we experience reality with our accumulated past and individuality, it is filtered and subsumed harmoniously and without resistance by the divine semiosis of Christ: "And I live, now not I; but Christ liveth in me" (Gal. 2:20).
22. The success of every society of men, for whatever purpose it is formed, is bound up with the harmony of the members in the interests of the common cause. Hence We must devote Our earnest endeavors to appease dissension and strife, of whatever character, amongst Catholics, and to prevent new dissensions arising, so that there may be unity of ideas and of action amongst all. The enemies of God and of the Church are perfectly well aware that any internal quarrel amongst Catholics is a real victory for them. Hence it is their usual practice when they see Catholics strongly united, to endeavor by cleverly sowing the seeds of discord, to break up that union. And would that the result had not frequently justified their hopes, to the great detriment of the interests of religion! Hence, therefore, whenever legitimate authority has once given a clear command, let no one transgress that command, because it does not happen to commend itself to him; but let each one subject his own opinion to the authority of him who is his superior, and obey him as a matter of conscience. Again, let no private individual, whether in books or in the press, or in public speeches, take upon himself the position of an authoritative teacher in the Church. All know to whom the teaching authority of the Church has been given by God: he, then, possesses a perfect right to speak as he wishes and when he thinks it opportune. The duty of others is to hearken to him reverently when he speaks and to carry out what he says.
23. As regards matters in which without harm to faith or discipline—in the absence of any authoritative intervention of the Apostolic See—there is room for divergent opinions, it is clearly the right of everyone to express and defend his own opinion. But in such discussions no expressions should be used which might constitute serious breaches of charity; let each one freely defend his own opinion, but let it be done with due moderation, so that no one should consider himself entitled to affix on those who merely do not agree with his ideas the stigma of disloyalty to faith or to discipline.
24. It is, moreover, Our will that Catholics should abstain from certain appellations which have recently been brought into use to distinguish one group of Catholics from another. They are to be avoided not only as "profane novelties of words," out of harmony with both truth and justice, but also because they give rise to great trouble and confusion among Catholics.Such is the nature of Catholicism that it does not admit of more or less, but must be held as a whole or as a whole rejected: "This is the Catholic faith, which unless a man believe faithfully and firmly; he cannot be saved" (Athanas. Creed). There is no need of adding any qualifying terms to the profession of Catholicism: it is quite enough for each one to proclaim "Christian is my name and Catholic my surname," only let him endeavor to be in reality what he calls himself.
If only Catholics realized the truth of this Holy Father's words and lived them, perhaps so much good would be done in the conversion of souls to the full embracing of the Faith and the recognition of the importance of Sacred Tradition. My own gradual embracing of Tradition in its greater totality and integrity was gradual precisely because of my perception that I wasn't so much being evangelized as so uncomfortably pinned, like the speaker in T.S. Eliot's poem The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock:
And I have known the eyes already, known them all— The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase, And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin, When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall, Then how should I begin To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways? And how should I presume? (ln. 55–61)
In other words, I had no sense that self-identified traditionalists were interacting with me out of any actual consideration for my salvation and sanctification, but instead I became a competitor in a most bizarre ideological game. It is growing parlance among (Internet) traditionalists to label quasi-traditionalists as "Neo-Catholics" or "Neo-Conservatives" (cf. Peter Miller, "A Brief Defense of Traditionalism," Seattle Catholic, December 21, 2001, http://www.seattlecatholic.com/article_20011221_A_Brief_Defense_of_Traditionalism.html; Fr. Chad Ripperger, FSSP, "Conservative vs. Traditional Catholicism," Latin Mass (Spring 2001), http://www.latinmassmagazine.com/articles/articles_2001_SP_Ripperger.html; Hilary White, "Revenge of the Neo-Cats," The Remnant Newspaper, November 23, 2011, http://www.remnantnewspaper.com/Archives/2011-115-white-hilary-neo-cats.htm). In fact, it actually turns out that Neo-Conservative Catholics (Neo-Catholics) are actually liberal Catholics who essentially go through a subconscious intellectual battle to reconcile their dual adherence to traditionalism and modernism (especially Hegelianism, according to Fr. Ripperger). I will note off the bat that some of these treatments, such as Fr. Ripperger's, are quite considerate and thoughtful; a problematic enters in because of the easy association with a general sociological trend that as a whole seems uncharitable.
Why is this an issue for me? Because I've been hurt by their use, and I've been hurt by the division I see these identities cause, and I've seen others hurt by them as well. I've seen how they tend to foster a multitude of sins and environments of sin—occasions of calumny, mockery, indifference, group-thinking, close-mindedness, and pride. I am responding from a place of pain and a desire to make sense of my experiences, perceptions, and what this phenomenon itself reveals in its "observable" aspect, the tendencies and "taxonomic features."
As I said above, as far as sociological function goes, the term may be useful, but as is the tendency with all labels, their use can easily become obviously uncharitable and detrimental to the one promoting its use. Aside from a very brief perusal of online discussions that incorporate these labels, a glance at White's article makes the point clearly enough. Underneath her humorous pretense, the tone and overall effect transmitted by her description of the Neo-Catholic is strikingly condescending, showing no consideration for the wellbeing of the very people she describes, her own brothers and sisters in Christ. This lack of consideration is evinced through certain flippant phrases and hyperbolic descriptions that give the impression that one ought to look at a "Neo-Cat" like he were a clown or a zoo animal (I've bolded lines that particularly stand out in illustrating this tone):
Neo-Catholics themselves frequently become angry when it is pointed out that it is an observable fact that there are certain taxonomic features that create an identifiable classification to which a distinguishing term, "neo-Catholic" can usefully be applied. They become doubly angry when they realize that it can usefully be applied to them.(Hours of fun can be had at the after-Mass tea ticking these characteristics off one's fingers.) [...]
Common characteristics of neo-Catholics (often also called neo-conservative Catholics) are a fanatical devotion to a small selection of popes, often incorrectly termed "ultramontanism." This is manifested mainly in their belief that John Paul II was the greatest pope of modern times (who probably walked on water but was too modest to do it in front of anyone) and should be canonized immediately. [...]
They will then proceed to bore everyone in the room into a coma by reciting their lists of places where [a reverent celebration of the Novus Ordo Mass] is done. [...]
(Get them started on the Catholic Confessional State as a political concept and watch their heads explode. In fact, start a conversation on the Social Reign of Christ the King at the tea and cookies after a Traditional Mass. It flushes them out; they start screeching like vampires splashed with holy water, to the amusement of all.) [...]
They are very big on ecumenism, and love to screech at the Trads for our opposition to the Assisi fiascoes [....]
They will sometimes be opposed to drinking, smoking and card-playing, one of the little ways in which their underlying protestantism peeks out. This can make it easy to quickly distinguish the Neos and the Trads at a party. The former will be standing around in a little clutch cradling a warm, three-hour-old beer, earnestly discussing the pope's latest encyclical or some political thing. The latter will be off in the corner with the recently assimilated Anglicans, balancing martini glasses on their noses while reciting Greek poetry. [...]
Despite the objections of the Neo-Cats themselves, the phenomenon has become so recognizable that it has its very own whole Wikipedia page [since removed] which, as we know, is the sine qua non of objective affirmation. It ain't really real unless it's on Wiki.
Perhaps people get upset when they are identified with "certain taxonomic features" because the impression they receive from the ones labeling them that seems to possess no benevolent intent or constructive purpose. White never describes how the term is actually useful. We may admit it is sociologically useful under certain circumstances, but if mere factual features are being described, why should this lead to anger on the part of the one described? (Further, why should there be hyperbole and jeering even if under the pretense of humor?) Anger is a response to hurt. Hurt is a response to a perceived evil. Perhaps when another person misconstrues your views, you feel hurt by the caricature. Perhaps when another person forms a caricature of you or your beliefs and gives no sign of friendship, mutual concern, support, consideration, this action is then hurtful. I don't think this requires any stretch of empathy at all to realize how and why a person might become angry.
The hyperbole doesn't need to be addressed. It forms the caricature, and as hyperbole, it cannot claim any sort of accuracy, much less the apparently scientific-esque status of "observable fact" or "certain taxonomic features," which are just fancy ways to legitimize a value assignment on someone, based not on certain faith but matters of legitimately varying opinion, which based on my experience is usually an exercise of intellectual pride. Recall what Bl. John Henry Newman said in Sermon 10 of his Discourses to Mixed Congregations (1849), "Faith and Private Judgment":
Men were told to submit their reason to a living authority. Moreover, whatever an Apostle said, his converts were bound to believe; when they entered the Church, they entered it in order to learn. The Church was their teacher; they did not come to argue, to examine, to pick and choose, but to accept whatever was put before them. No one doubts, no one can doubt this, of those primitive times. A Christian was bound to take without doubting all that the Apostles declared to be revealed; if the Apostles spoke, he had to yield an internal assent of his mind; it would not be enough to keep silence, it would not be enough not to oppose: it was not allowable to credit in a measure; it was not allowable to doubt. No; if a convert had his own private thoughts of what was said, and only kept them to himself, if he made some secret opposition to the teaching, if he waited for further proof before he believed it, this would be a proof that he did not think the Apostles were sent from God to reveal His will; it would be a proof that he did not in any true sense believe at all. Immediate, implicit submission of the mind was, in the lifetime of the Apostles, the only, the necessary token of faith; then there was no room whatever for what is now called private judgment. No one could say: "I will choose my religion for myself, I will believe this, I will not believe that; I will pledge myself to nothing; I will believe just as long as I please, and no longer; what I believe today I will reject tomorrow, if I choose. I will believe what the Apostles have as yet said, but I will not believe what they shall say in time to come." No; either the Apostles were from God, or they were not; if they were, everything that they preached was to be believed by their hearers; if they were not, there was nothing for their hearers to believe. To believe a little, to believe more or less, was impossible; it contradicted the very notion of believing: if one part was to be believed, every part was to be believed; it was an absurdity to believe one thing and not another; for the word of the Apostles, which made the one true, made the other true too; they were nothing in themselves, they were all things, they were an infallible authority, as coming from God. The world had either to become Christian, or to let it alone; there was no room for private tastes and fancies, no room for private judgment. (Source: http://www.newmanreader.org/works/discourses/discourse10.html)
Likening Neo-Catholics to "vampires" screeching "to the amusement of all" as well as spending "hours of fun [...] ticking these [taxonomic] characteristics off" further reveals the condescending tone as well as total indifference to their wellbeing. How are such exercises themselves spiritual or charitable in any way? How do they contribute to holiness, to the preparation of souls for the coming of Christ and His Reign? Do they not encourage and harden division? Isn't division one of Satan's most powerful weapons against followers of Christ? A house divided cannot stand...
Knowest thou not that most punishments and most sins have their beginning from words? Yea, for by words are blasphemies, and denials are by words, and revilings, and reproaches, and perjuries, and bearing false witness. Regard not then its being a mere word, but whether it have not much danger, this do thou inquire. Art thou ignorant that in the season of enmity, when wrath is inflamed, and the soul kindled, even the least thing appears great, and what is not very reproachful is counted intolerable? [...]
For there is nothing, nothing in the world more intolerable than insolence; it is what hath very great power to sting a man's soul. But when the word too which is spoken is in itself more wounding than the insolence, the blaze becomes twice as great. Think it not then a light thing to call another "fool." For when of that which separates us from the brutes, and by which especially we are human beings, namely, the mind and the understanding,-when of this thou hast robbed thy brother, thou hast deprived him of all his nobleness.
Let us not then regard the words merely, but realizing the things themselves, and his feeling, let us consider how great a wound is made by this word, and unto how much evil it proceeds. For this cause Paul likewise cast out of the kingdom not only "the adulterous" and "the effeminate," but "the revilers" also. And with great reason: for the insolent man mars all the beauty of charity, and casts upon his neighbor unnumbered ills, and works up lasting enmities, and tears asunder the members of Christ, and is daily driving away that peace which God so desires: giving much vantage ground unto the devil by his injurious ways, and making him the stronger. Therefore Christ Himself, cutting out the sinews of the devil's power, brought in this law.
For indeed He makes much account of love: this being above all things the mother of every good, and the badge of His disciples, and the bond which holds together our whole condition. With reason therefore doth He remove with great earnestness the roots and the sources of that hatred which utterly spoils it.
Think not therefore that these sayings are in any wise hyperbolical, but consider the good done by them, and admire the mildness of these laws. For there is nothing for which God takes so much pains, as this; that we should be united and knit together one with another. Therefore both in His own person, and by His disciples, as well those in the Old, as in the New Testament, He makes so much account of this commandment; and is a severe avenger and punisher of those who despise the duty. For in truth nothing so effectually gives entrance and root to all wickedness, as the taking away of love.
Finally, the description about the party is problematic precisely because of its hyperbole. The latter situation of the "real Trads" and converted Anglicans clearly describes people who are drunk or at least have gone beyond reasonable modesty and decorum. Drunkenness (nor modesty and decorum for that matter) isn't a post-Protestant, post-Victorian sin against political correctness or comfortable, liberal sentiments. Smoking, drinking, and card-playing should not be treated as though for the majority of participants there were no danger in these activities; no, for the majority of those who drink, smoke, or play cards and other forms of competition, I suggest that these activities provide numerous occasions of sin if not deep-rooted addiction and societal structures of sin enforced by capitalist economies. These activities are not intrinsically sinful—I think very few Catholics of any sense would actually argue this point, but on the other hand to present these activities without proper caution seems arrogant, blind, and a sure way to fall into Satan's traps to ensnare us in sin. In other words, the whole situation is another caricature that confuses the suggestion that these activities are probably dangerous for many, above all considering the average lack of self-reflection and discernment of spirits and motives, with the notion that they are intrinsically sinful.
As for what Pope Benedict XV said, I think here is the authoritative say on the (il-)legitimacy of calling oneself a "Traditionalist"; it is useful sociologically (and hence, perhaps, apologetically), useful as the distinction between a Coca-Cola drinker and a Pepsi drinker among soda drinkers (because, after all, there are traditionalists, and then there are traditionalists, not to mention traditionalists). But what good will that label do to keep one out of Hell and to attain holiness and enter Heaven? St. Paul replies:
If I speak with the tongues of men, and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And if I should have prophecy and should know all mysteries, and all knowledge, and if I should have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. (1 Corinthians 13:1–2, DR trans.)
We may here now understand one possible extension of "tongues of men," namely, our ability to construct our own identities and to project them. What good do I do myself or others if I callmyself faithful and I am not faithful, charitable and am not charitable? Adherence to Tradition is adherence to Christ; adherence to Christ is not just intellectual belief but the Cross:
Then Jesus said to his disciples: If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For he that will save his life, shall lose it: and he that shall lose his life for my sake, shall find it. For what doth it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his own soul? Or what exchange shall a man give for his soul? (Mt. 16:24–26; cf. Lk. 9:23–26)
Someone must be sent to preach. What do they preach? Christ Crucified, "Unto the Jews indeed a stumbling block, and unto the Gentiles foolishness" (1 Cor. 1:13). And the end of the Cross is our sanctification, and the end of our sanctification is the glory of God. The only thing we must ask ourselves is not, "Am I a Traditionalist or a Neo-Catholic?" but "Am I doing all I can to know the will of God and to do it?" Only the one who hears Christ's words and does them will have built his house on solid rock and be saved.
