Spirit and The Cost of Cognition

If it can be repeated, it will be replaced—soon.

Three short N.B.’s before my new essay:

1) Next Summer’s Cluny Conference: Tickets for the ZOE Conference (“Life Abundant in an Artificial Age”) are available to subscribers of this newsletter at a 20% discount until Nov. 10. Please use code “antimimetic” at checkout. While speakers haven’t been announced yet, I can tell you that Girard’s name will surely be invoked (for those interested in the mimetic and anti-mimetic dimensions of the theme, abundant life…)

2) Hiring for a Full-Time Role: I’m hiring an apprentice—either part-time or full-time—in a marketing and operations role ASAP. It’s not for the tame, as you’ll be thrown quickly into the publishing industry and the media worlds and tasked with approaching everything differently (there are no good models!)… But the upside is practically infinite, and we’ll have a lot of fun building something important together. If interested, please apply here.

3) DC Halloween Event / SF Party: Cluny is hosting Dasha Nekrasova for a live event on campus this Friday, Halloween. Tickets are sold out, but you can livestream the conversation here starting at 6pm ET on Oct. 31. I may or may not show up dressed in a very scary costume.

I’ll also be in San Francisco on Nov. 12 to co-host a small party and conversation on technology, desire, and agency with Lighthouse HQ founder Minn Kim and special guest. If you’re interested in attending, please inquire here.

Now on to this week’s essay.

A Bull Market in the Humanities, Pt. 2

I wrote about a year and a half ago that I expected a bull market in the humanities. Someone who seemed genuinely frustrated, and doubted the premise, remarked that the hero image seemed ironic: an AI-generated image of bulls reading books, running through the streets. That’s when I knew I’d written something important.

Now that I’ve seen much more of the development of generative AI, I feel even more strongly about my basic thesis: the humanities (at their best) will define our century as much as they did the the 15th through 17th centuries. After a 300 year wait, they are coming back—but now with surprising possibilities and capabilities that will go far beyond the technology of the book.

I would also now add a surprising element to my 2024 essay: as the cost of cognition approaches zero, that which is repeatable will be replaceable—and will indeed be replaced—by AI (a favorite saying of Palantir Co-Founder Stephen Cohen), which opens up an aperture for those who truly undertake creative acts. In short, we are going to be forced by the technology to be more creative; we will be impelled to do that which only the spirit can animate.

Where there are dry bones, I see opportunity.

The hand of the Lord was on me, and he brought me out by the Spirit of the Lord and set me in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me back and forth among them, and I saw a great many bones on the floor of the valley, bones that were very dry. He asked me, “Son of man, can these bones live?”

Ezekiel saw a valley of dry bones; we see a civilization of dry souls. Yet the Spirit still breathes.

That which is most human—the religious sense, incarnational experiences (like liturgy, dancing, jazz), or the act of giving creative expression to that which we come into contact with in the world—all will take on more importance as AI fundamentally replaces many repeatable functions. Because of that, our time and energy is going to flow to that which gives the most meaning. We’re headed back to the oldest questions of existentialism—hopefully not the Sartrean variety, but that’s up to you and me.

I have been doubling-down on in-person experience the past year, and I’ll continue to do so. I’m learning how to be a parent. I’m praying: “Lord, I believe; help me unbelief.” There is a lot of handwringing over the so-called “fertility crisis”, and the role that a loss of faith or religiosity might play in that. But the question I would pose is: do people have children because they have faith, or do they have faith because they have children?

Art will become more important, not less. The humanities will become more important, not less. Education will need to become about the training of perception and not the transfer of facts.

There will be a return to the heart and the affective sphere in everything from film to literature, because the one thing that AI can’t replicate is human experience. And business will become more about narrative than ever before—so yes, there will be a bull-market for Lulu Cheng Meservey’s storytelling genius and her writing in

Flack

.

Business will become more mystical (we’ve already seen mysticism transfer out of religion and into entrepreneurship) after the nuts and bolts of finance and operations will be executed by AI-driven technology that can do those things more efficiently than we ever could. Aesthetics will matter more than ever. Relationships and networks, which have always been important, will become even more important in a world where things like IQ are neutralized by the tech. We will want to work with people we like and trust, through unmediated contact.

Few institutions are operating at the nexus of all of these things. That’s precisely why I believe the Cluny Project is going to be so important. Out of our fragmented and siloed world, those who possess the skill of integration and integrated knowledge—who possess a capacity to see and respond to the whole of reality, not just a narrow segment of it—will be best positioned to build the future.

And you will not gain that by becoming a STEM major—unless, of course, you supplement that study and work with something more.

Enter the lay seminary. Enter the monastery. Enter the new places and kinds of experiences which will emerge in the twenty-first century—experiences much like the liminal space that used to be the jazz club, or the Athenian gymnasium—where people can unplug from the machine and forge their identity in an environment that is both aspirational and encourages the agentic, where they are challenged to be and become more.

We will have to flee from comfort and into those dangerous spaces where we feel that we may not survive. In short: we will need rites of passage.

A Brief Word About ‘The Machine’

I don’t believe the most important rite of passage involves being “against the machine”, to borrow the title of Paul Kingsnorth’s new book—a title which is amusingly mimetic.

No, the very machines we demonize could be the very things which unlock and make available untold riches of the humanities: thousands of texts that have lain buried, untranslated, unknown; connections between texts that nobody had seen patterns in before; more personalized education that frees up time for tiny experiments in the real-world, where children who learn faster can move at their own pace and not get stuck with the rest of the class, who want to bang their heads against a wall and lose interest in learning altogether, like I did; new forms of craftsmanship, where digital fabrication tools revive the sensibility of the artisan rather than replace it; neural networks that reassemble forgotten architectural blueprints and resurrect lost cathedrals in virtual space before a single stone is laid in the real world; biotechnologies that don’t make us less human, but make it possible to understand the body as a living text, one that we can finally read with humility and awe; even financial systems—yes, the blockchain and its descendants—that could restore trust and transparency to exchange, returning the idea of covenant to commerce.

The “machine” is not the problem. The problem is our formation—whether we enter into relationship with these tools as children of God or as anxious, mimetic animals trying to become gods ourselves as Yuval Noah Harari would have it.

In an age of powerful AI, we will need new ways to understand ourselves and what it means to be human. The questions will be raised; they already are. There are ancient answers to these questions, of course. But there will also be new ones. Are we prepared to ask the right questions?

I fear that we’ve asked so many questions about AI that we’ve ceased to ask the right questions about ourselves.

Perhaps the recently canonized saint, Carlo Acutis, a young Italian computer programmer who died at the age of 15 from acute promyelocytic leukemia, offered the best probe (which is an inverted question) for our age when he said: “All people are born as originals, but many die as photocopies.”

The question becomes: given that you were born an unrepeatable person—with a unique set of gifts and talents and familial and historical circumstances unlike any other human who has ever lived—how are you going to maintain that unrepeatability in an age of social contagion and replicating machines? How will you continue to practice and cultivate that which is unrepeatable?

I recently took my toddler daughter to Disneyland in southern California. I had 4-5 hours with her by myself while my wife was at a work conference. As I walked through the park looking at and riding decades-old rides filled with outdated automatons, I couldn’t help but wonder: who will be the Walt Disney of our century?

The magic will be plentiful, but the magicians are few.