By Wayne Allensworth
“AI will replace humans for most things”—Bill Gates
More than once, I’ve written that the American Remnant cannot grow complacent or indulge in triumphalism after President Donald Trump’s stunning political comeback in November. It’s all good fun to watch Fox News personalities mock the “word salads” of Kamala Harris or again state the obvious — that we all know the difference between a man and a woman — in effect declaring victory as the Democrats’ popularity slides into a hole. Yet we must consider two things. First, the state of modern technology and humanity’s ancient desire to transcend itself on its own terms are not going away. Second, millions of voters remain convinced opponents of all we stand for. A fanatical hard core of activists and very determined technocrats is extant, waiting for their moment. Politics is only one aspect of the battle, which at its roots, is religious, one of opposing metaphysical views. The Trump Administration’s efforts to reset the global economy and tame the Swamp are only the beginning. That is the surface struggle. What lies beneath is the forever struggle.
Let me explain.
On my morning walks, I steer away from the nearby busy streets and walk a path that follows a stream. It’s alive with life. Fish and turtles and ducks and sometimes geese. Blue and gray herons, stalking prey on their stilt like limbs. And the birds singing! Dove, robins, mockingbirds, and blue jays and cardinals. And as you walk past a honeysuckle vine, maybe a hummingbird is hovering nearby, its long beak extending into the blooms. The silent beauty of a blooming flower. Sometimes the Moon is still visible in the Western sky. The weather here has been perfect. Cool mornings, warm afternoons, brought into relief by the sharp clarity of the sights of spring, dazzling in the sunlight, soft but resplendent in the evening. And the silence and stillness are that of prayerful meditation.
Then I take a turn on the path and walk back toward my house and the cars are once again flying past. Everyone is in a hurry, it seems. The noise drowns out the silence and sounds of spring. And on some mornings, the loud, growling lawn mowers and buzzing edgers cut through the air. I wonder what the world was like before all that noise. It occurs to me that we have become inseparable from our machines. Or dependent on them. In an age of so-called “high tech,” that dependency has reached another, dangerous, level. And many of us — most of us — are not conscious of what that could mean in an age of social fragmentation augmented by Internet cocoons, enclosures that breed even among the best of us a sense of omnipotence. Of control. We can manipulate our cyber environments. At what point do our machines cease to be mere tools and become psychological extensions, or replacements, of ourselves? When do our machines become a manipulator, conditioning us to accept a vision of reality that defies normal human experience? No wonder so many of us are ready to believe otherwise preposterous propositions — that we can become self-creating demi-gods of as many “genders” as you like, even one day “downloading” our own consciousness to computers, becoming immortal robots. Social media offers lonely men Artificial Intelligence “girlfriends” that won’t refuse any request.
Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey was a multi-layered tour de force, one of those layers dealing with humanity’s growing dependency on machines, a phenomenon that reinforced the hubris of the techno-fantasists who dreamed of replacing faulty human beings with digitized cyborgs. Dave Bowman, Kubrick’s astronaut on a psychedelic journey to the moons of Jupiter, realizes too late that the spacecraft’s supercomputer, the HAL 9000 programmed with a soothing voice and its own interpretation of the ship’s mission, has become a deadly threat. He disconnects it. I think all of us who are aware of the dangers of becoming tools of technology rather than using technology as tools must someday in some degree disconnect from the wired virtual universe.
The medium is the message. And the available evidence suggests that the machines we think we are exploiting are actually reconditioning us. Does how we read, for instance, matter as much as what we read? Journalist Eric Kube, writing in The Epoch Times, recently cited a paper indicating that the number of print books in a home strongly predicts academic achievement. Not so with e-books. The paper’s authors believe that the findings suggest a “screen inferiority effect.” A 2024 meta-analysis of 49 studies including thousands of readers from elementary school age through college, reinforced those findings. The studies on aggregate showed that those who read material on screens reliably scored lower on reading comprehension tests than peers who read the same text in print form. A Johns Hopkins study on screen vs. print concluded that children who read printed material had greater neural connectivity in brain regions involved in language cognition. One researcher told Kube that reading a physical book leads to “embodied reading,” that the tactile experience of reading a physical book, holding it, feeling its weight, turning pages, supports memory, comprehension, and recall.
I’m not surprised. The weightlessness of cyber information is itself indicative of its ephemeral quality. We are, after all, as Iain McGilchrist has noted time and again in explaining his hemisphere theory of cognition, embodied beings. In a technological society, abstraction and decontextualization, as well as a divorce from physical reality, reinforces the linear, narrow, controlling and manipulative Left Hemisphere of our brains at the expense of the perceptual and holistic cognition of the Right Hemisphere. The LH is given to categorization, literal interpretation of reality, and, above all, control. It is the home of the Will to Power. Of hidebound ideology. And of a disdain for emotion, empathy, imagination and intuition — the stuff of global experience and collective wisdom. The LH in its proper place aids in local problem solving through its focus on a narrow slice of reality, and together with the RH, helps us form a comprehensive understanding of our world. Ideally, the RH is “The Master,” the dominant hemisphere, the LH is the “The Emissary,” the aid to the Master. Unleashed and dominant, the LH is at the foundation of bureaucratic thinking in an administrative, managerial state. And, as McGilchrist notes, our technology dependent world encourages and strengthens the LH worldview.
Our struggle — the battle against technocracy and globalism, against the view that humans are themselves machines, dispensable “meat computers,” a threat to the planet that must be transcended by a race of cyborg supermen — will not end, short of a civilizational collapse. But even if we forget how to make computers and satellites and all the rest, as humans forgot ancient skills and knowledge with the decline and fall of the ancient world, the cycle might begin again. The point of some kind of equilibrium between the urge to conquer and control nature and the desire for peace and a settled life, between knowing control and living wisdom, will pass again. And the technocrats, bureaucrats, and mad scientists C. S. Lewis called “the conditioners” or “the innovators” will rush headlong toward the cyber straitjacket and a post-human, “transhumanist” fantasy they so desire. They have been with us forever, driven by pride, hubris, and the resentment that is the foundation of the revolutionary left’s “identity politics” victimology. They want to break all barriers, including that between humans and machines, depose figures of authority — which the post-modernists confuse with brute power — and knock God off his throne to do as they will. They have erected a digital Tower of Babel to that end.
Even if we win the current struggle with globalism, the technology that made the globalist dream realizable, at least in theory, and partly in practice, will remain. And the transnational class that took shape in the last century is still with us, though reeling from a populist revolt. We will have to remain forever diligent. We can never declare total victory. The battle against the inhuman globalist nightmare will have to be fought again and again. We have tasted the forbidden fruit and love it. We savor its nightmarish promises of dominion. Our twilight struggle against that Dystopia can never be at a permanent end. We must find ways to limit and control the technologies the conditioners want to use to limit and control us.
As for now, disconnect as you are able. Reconnect with face-to-face relationships. Love your family and cherish your friends. Rekindle the joy and awe of a connection to nature. And pray. Always pray.
Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood.
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