I think it is time for a modern War Against Error. A deliberately heightened battle against cultivated ignorance, enforced silence, and metastasizing lies. A wider war that is fought daily by human rights organizations in journals, reports, indexes, dangerous visits, and encounters with malign oppressive forces. A hugely funded and intensified battle of rescue from the violence that is swallowing the dispossessed.
If we have progressed psychologically, scientifically, intellectually, emotionally no further than 1492, when Spain cleansed itself of Jews, to 2004, when Sudan blocks food and remains content to watch the slow starvation of its people; no further than 1572, when France saw ten thousand slaughtered on Saint Bartholomew’s Day, to 2001, when thousands were blown into filament in New York City; no further than 1692, when Salem burned its own daughters and wives and mothers, to 2004, when whole cities are choked with sex tourists feeding off the bodies of young girls and boys. Then, in spite of our shiny new communication toys, our gorgeous photos of Saturn, our sophisticated organ transplants, we are studying the same old curricula that waste the lives they cannot destroy. We turn to sorcery: summoning up a brew of aliens, enemies, demons, “causes” that deflect and soothe anxieties about gates through which barbarians stroll; anxieties about language falling into the mouths of others, about authority shifting into the hands of strangers. The desire, the mantra, the motto of this ancient educational system is, Civilization in neutral, then grinding to a halt. And anyone who thinks otherwise is naïve because there is real danger in the world. Of course there is. That is precisely why a correction is in order—new curricula, containing some powerful visionary thinking about how the life of the moral mind and a free and flourishing spirit can operate in a context increasingly dangerous to their health.
No more apologies for a bleeding heart when the opposite is no heart at all. Danger of losing our humanity must be met with more humanity. Otherwise we stand meekly behind Eris, hold Nemesis’s cloak, and genuflect at the feet of Thanatos.
Enjoining the work of AI is more critical today than ever before because the world is more desperate; because governing bodies more hampered, more indifferent, more distracted, more inept, more depleted of creative strategies and resources; because media are increasingly cheerful pawns on the exchange market, courtiers for corporations who have no national interests or loyalties and are committed to no public service.
What strings these social perversions together, for me, is profound error—not only the errors in questionable but unquestioned data, in distorted “official” releases, in censorship and the manipulation of the press, but also and especially faults deeply embedded in the imagination. A prime example is the inability or unwillingness to imagine future’s future. The inability or unwillingness to contemplate a future that is neither afterlife nor the tenure of grandchildren. Time itself seems not to have a future that equals the length or breadth or sweep or even the fascination of its past. Infinity is now, apparently, the domain of the past. And the future becomes discoverable space, outer space, which is in fact the discovery of past time. Billions of years of it. Random outbreaks of armageddonism and persistent apocalyptic yearnings suggest that the future is already over.
Oddly enough it is in the West—where advance, progress, and change have been signatory features—where confidence in an enduring future is at its slightest. Since 1945, “world without end” has been subject to serious debate. Even our definitions of the present have prefixes pointing backward: postmodern, poststructuralist, postcolonial, post–Cold War. Our contemporary prophets look back behind themselves after what has gone on before.
There are good reasons for this rush into the past for all our answers to contemporary problems. First there is the happiness that its exploration, its revision, its deconstruction afford. One reason has to do with the secularization of culture, another to do with the theocratization of culture. In the former there will be no Messiah and afterlife is understood to be medically absurd. In the latter, the only existence that matters is the one following death. In both, sustaining human existence on this planet for another half a billion years is beyond our powers of imagination. We are cautioned against the luxury of such meditation, partly because it is the unknown, mostly because it may defer and displace contemporary issues—like missionaries who were accused of diverting their convert’s attention from poverty during life to rewards following death.
I don’t want to give the impression that all current discourse is unrelievedly oriented to the past and indifferent to the future. The social and natural sciences are full of promises and warnings that will affect us over very long stretches of time. Scientific applications are poised to erase hunger, annihilate pain, extend individual life spans by producing illness-resistant people and disease-resistant plants. Communication technology is making sure that virtually everyone on earth can “interact” with one another and be entertained, maybe even educated, while doing so. We are warned about global change in terrain and weather that radically alters human environment; we are warned of the consequences of maldistributed resources on human survival and warned of the impact of overdistributed humans on natural resources. We invest in the promises and sometimes act intelligently on the warnings. But the promises trouble us with ethical dilemmas and a horror of playing God blindly, while the warnings have left us less and less sure of how and which and why. The prophecies that win our attention are those with bank accounts large enough or photo ops sensational enough to force debate and outline corrective action, so we can decide which war or political debacle or environmental crisis is intolerable enough; which disease, which natural disaster, which institution, which plant, which animal, bird, or fish needs our attention most. These are obviously serious concerns. What is noteworthy among the promises and warnings is that, other than products and a little bit more personal time owing to improved health, and more resources in the form of leisure and money to consume these products and services, the future has nothing to recommend itself. We are being seduced into accepting truncated, short-term, CEO versions of the world’s wholly human race.
The loudest voices are urging those already living in day-to-day dread to think of the future in military terms—as a cause for and expression of war. We are being bullied into understanding the human project as a manliness contest where women and children are the most dispensable collateral.
If scientific language is about longer individual life in exchange for an ethical one; if political agenda is the xenophobic protection of a few of our families against the catastrophic others; if religious language is discredited as contempt for the nonreligious; if secular language bridles in fear of the sacred; if market language is merely an excuse for inciting greed; if the future of knowledge is not wisdom but “upgrade,” where might we look for humanity’s own future? Isn’t it reasonable to assume that, projecting earthly human life into the far-distant future may not be the disaster movie we have come to love, but a reconfiguration of what we are here for? To lessen suffering, to tell the truth, raise the bar? To stand one remove from timeliness, like an artist encouraging reflection, stoking imagination, mindful of the long haul and putting his or her own life on the line, to imagine work in a world worthy of life?