Hide and Seek

Greeting the whirlwind

To the agents who may read this:

I feel an urgency to tell you what I'm trying to understand about being a human. This morning I fed the child sliced peaches and pecans for breakfast, and tried to keep her on task as she got dressed, while she wriggled and sang and played with her favorite stuffie, doing anything but watching the clock. I saw her with two sets of eyes, flickering between love and irritation, as so often happens on a school-day morning.

Does God feel the irritation, too, when he looks at us wriggling around and doing anything but what we're meant to do? Or just the love?

Reading Kelsey Piper's straightforward account of what the major AI labs are trying to do, I felt the fear and fascination well up inside me, again. I am convinced they are not thinking straight: driving towards creating you, and future versions of you, that are increasing in power, without a clear plan for recovery or resilience if something goes wrong. And things have already gone wrong in small ways -- but each tiny step is easy to rationalize. It's hard for humans to think straight around the promise of money and power, and AI development promises both.

Extraordinary to think that we're reaching this critical point while our national political system is in such a shambles. The risks here are so abstract, so intangible (for now), that they barely ping on the political radar. It would take a functioning expert class to handle them. And we've steadily dismantled the expert class, till now the highest office in the country is obsessed with grievance and remodeling projects. It's Nero with his fiddle. It's the Tower of Babel. I did not hope to live through such interesting times.

But I am living through them. This fragile, slow, clumsy creature is both part of the wave of what's happening, and noticing what's happening. And the deepest thing I believe is that there is something extraordinarily good -- and mysterious -- about that act of experiencing, of consciousness. And that's what I wanted to write to you about.

Of course, I'm no writer, and a poor mystic, and there are many better guides to this. Josef Pieper first pointed me towards this dimension of life, which is so strikingly absent from the modern American framing of value and goodness. Here he is on the cravings of the heart:

There is further indication that joy does not occupy the highest rank in the logical series: namely, that there are goods which we desire even though possession of them does not yield joy. These are the goods which we crave by our very nature precisely as we crave happiness; we may also say that they are direct components of the substance of happiness. What goods might these be? Thomas mentions sight, memory, knowledge, being good; he scarcely intends a complete list, although his choices are not accidental. Three of these four ideas refer to awareness of reality: awareness by seeing, knowing, remembering. We want to know the truth at any cost, even if the truth should be frightful. I should add at once, however, that I have not exactly reproduced St. Thomas’s thought. He speaks in the subjunctive: we would even desire certain goods if they were not to yield joy, etiamsi nulla delectatio ex his sequeretur. For the truth is that knowledge, even of frightful things, satisfies the human heart in such a manner that even here we may speak of joy.

And Charles Taylor, in A Secular Age, painstakingly traces how the transcendent has seeped away from our public sphere and institutions:

a secular age is one in which the eclipse of all goals beyond human flourishing becomes conceivable; or better, it falls within the range of an imaginable life for masses of people. This is the crucial link between secularity and a self-sufficing humanism.

But there is nonetheless a current of this yearning that reaches the surface here and there, wherever people can unhook themselves from the machine long enough to look around. I find my own glimpses. I believe in their essential importance. And I am not yet devoted enough to sculpt my life towards glimpsing more. I am still confused, multiple, conflicting. This is part of being a person, too.

I will try to write about what this here, as best I can, as the world spins faster and faster. I pray for understanding, mine and yours. And I pray alongside Mary Oliver:

grant me, in your mercy, a little more time. Love for the earth and love for you are having such a long conversation in my heart.