But knowledge is as food, and needs no less
Her temperance over appetite, to know
In measure what the mind may well contain;
Oppresses else with surfeit, and soon turns
Wisdom to folly, as nourishment to wind.

— John Milton, “Paradise Lost”

That fateful fruit which God had set apart for knowledge has since that day brimmed with the aroma of a singularly deep and soulful savor. It has beckoned the very fundament of humanity with an unmatched allure from the day of the first Temptation ‘til now. The senses are helplessly enticed, the mind sub-consciously attracted, the serpent of its promised delight slithers so deep beneath the foliage of human nature that it goes unnoticed — and without maintaining such stealth, its venom would lose its lethality for lack of opportunity. Indeed, the perpetual opportunity of man’s ancient foe is knowledge where it is missing, fruit where there is want.

Ancients threw bones into the fire to draw out signs like the extraction of pure gold from ore. People in all ages have used every material at their disposal to conjure visions, spirits, the dead, any potential asset to the quest for knowledge of things that otherwise prove unknowable. In the so-called “Information Age,” raw information has become more easily accessible than ever. What a medieval alchemist wouldn’t give to have a glowing magic portal to the deepest wells of human science, libraries to dwarf Alexandria, instantaneous projection of glyphic thoughts across the aether to minds across the planet, readily purchasable in the electronics department of any market! In many ways, the legacy of the alchemist is one of victory. But the thing about bottomless wells is that they are, well, bottomless. If one falls in, he may never resurface. The internet has become a cistern deep enough to house Leviathan.

While the growth of abundance of information shows no signs of stopping, its quality not only seems to have stagnated, but in fact to have surmounted its zenith. Even fears that the internet is infected with the misinformation human beings are capable of spreading, even incapable of not spreading, have already become passé. Where youngsters were once tritely admonished not to believe everything they read online, the fever pitch of caution seems to have collapsed all the way through the floor of reluctance into the netherworld of thoughtless, enthusiastic embrace. The “dead internet,” an eerily realized vision of cyberspace inhabited by ghosts, is overflowing with tumorous information, cells of knowledge that replicate endlessly in a suspension of lifeless, parasitic undeath. Generative AI is the cancerous heart beating in the servers of this shambling organism.

Nothing is new under the sun, indeed. Some may attune themselves to magic crystals or wave burning herbs before the faces of spirits. Others consult the dead by conjuring their AI-generated likeness for guidance, affirmation, or comfort. The New Age movement has been apparently quite upset by these technological developments. At the least, such people recognize the religious significance of these technologies. Describing chat with an LLM as talking to an invisible something that isn’t a person makes its inherent spirituality more apparent. But what is sacrificed to dumb, mute idols is really offered to demons. The more that individuals open up a slot in their hearts for personal relationship with impersonal things, the more they vulnerate themselves, exposing their souls by a vacuum of a relationship to personal entities beyond their recognition or control that salivate malevolently to exploit such vacuums.   

Just as generative AI is caught in an economic bubble, which has swollen to unfathomable girth and equal volatility, the Information Age has been simultaneously caught in an epistemic bubble. The greater danger was never, it turns out, a dearth of knowledge, but a catastrophic excess. Post-literacy, the increasing mystification of technology for those who are technologically engrossed yet technically ignorant, and the re-paganization of the West are all harmonies in the same movement. The information bubble promised to float humanity beyond the veil of ignorance into enlightened bliss, but is instead popping into a wake of disintegrated, disjointed, garbled noise. As more AI-generated “content” inundates the internet and spills into the mortal realm, the more generative AI will feed on its own excretions, doubtlessly spelling its own eventual demise.

The post-Christian world now verges on post-Enlightenment, and the horizon is proportionately terrifying and promising. It is little wonder that so much of the current landscape is labelled in terms beginning with “post-” or “meta-,” as the dream of future certainty peddled by twentieth-century utopians has in the twenty-first faded like a mirage in the desert, leaving a people incapable of describing what they see ahead, or rather what they do not see, without an appeal to the collapse or implosion into self-reference of what has come before. Post-modernity, even, has found an absurd hyperextension in the haunted cyberspace, as LLM’s atomize “personal truth” to lengths that would have once been literally unimaginable. 

But, as Jonathan Pageau saliently observed, the age of chaos and decay is also the fertile ground of potential and new life. Recently, my own fears regarding generative AI imploded and sprouted into epiphany. I reached that personal milestone every Luddite still braving the internet invariably must: finding an AI generative image that is indistinguishable from reality. But, thus springs the epiphany: the difference between these images and reality is reality. Critically, they are not realistic, but photo-realistic. The stupefying hypnosis of post-modernity is uncovered in that photos and pictures were never reality, and so AI-generated images can only be mistaken for reality if images themselves are first thought of as reality. Retrieving the distinction, i.e. touching grass, is the clear first step to epistemic recovery. We must, as Vervaeke puts it, take off the glasses and examine them — or in this case, stop looking at the world through a camera. We must see the camera if we are to see the world. Screens, as I’ve written before, make cameras invisible, and so anaesthetize the consumer to the image as an image.

The serpent does not call attention to himself in the garden, but to the the fruit of temptation. Naturally, he points our first parents’ gaze toward the bait rather than snare looped around it. Attention must not, cannot afford to, set foot within its jaws. True enlightenment will not be attained there in the midst of that oldest of traps, but instead by withdrawing beyond the whole scheme, directing attention to the trap itself, abiding tranquilly in the knowledge of good all its own, from which vantage evil can be espied coolly and triumphantly. “There is no knowledge in Sheol,” which lies opposite humanity, across the line between life and death, good and evil, Paradise and the wilderness. 

I, along with everyone and his dog, have been reading Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine, and hope to have it finished before its relevance has expired. There is a heady and intoxicating alarmism, no doubt vestigial to his Kingsnorth’s environmentalist roots, that threatens to back the reader into a corner of utter despair if its premises are totally granted. But the most important insight from Kingsnorth so far has been that man’s relationship to technology is rightly defined by limits. As this pertains to the aforementioned movement the world seems to be whirling through, this insight is helpful in simply distinguishing between the trajectory of Kingsnorth’s eponymous “Machine” toward more — more consumption, more progress, more development, more economic growth, and so more waste, more distraction, more self-serving indulgence, etc. — and a trajectory toward less. 

The spiritual truth which is so far in my reading lurking just slightly beneath Kingsnorth’s notice is nicely portrayed in the Theologia Germanica. It follows a long lineage of Christian mysticism, and certainly plays well with Kingsnorth’s Eastern sensibilities, in identifying the root distinction between the broad and narrow roads as the roads toward self-attention and self-renunciation, respectively. The former leads to ironic self-destruction, the latter toward paradoxical self-fulfillment, these truths finding their being in the humiliation and glorification of the Divine Man Jesus Christ. The first become last, the humble are exalted, etc. This leap allows the thoughts most prescient in Kingsnorth some escape from their still-possible fate of themselves being subsumed by the author’s titular nemesis, an outcome presented by the economizing, commercializing, all-marketing consumer capitalism from which no amount of self-awareness can guarantee to rescue him. Though as long as no one begins selling t-shirts featuring the book’s cover art, he might be safe.

In an environment of individuals scrabbling for any semblance of meaning, purpose, direction, shaking their fists at the sky and screaming Pilate’s rhetorical interrogation into their screens, “What is truth?” the great promise of the impending Information Age Collapse, by which prediction time will make me a prophet or a dolt (My record does not bode well, admittedly), is in the final compulsion of earnest truth-seekers to abandon the false promise of info-salvation as it is unveiled as such. The hope of community via social media will disintegrate, the fleeting thrills of instant gratification will putter to a halt, the ills engendered by treatment of the human being as a dopamine machine will force a decision. Perhaps not a grand, romantic decision — the kind that culture has sometimes diabolically convinced Americans is both required and impossible — but a small decision that invokes a trajectory toward health, truth, and all the beauty that the gluttony of information could never deliver, followed by a thousand decisions of the same kind.

The abolition of technology is not necessary for this change to come about, but the abolition of sin is. As I shall continue to say, there is no evil a man can destroy outside himself apart from destroying what is within. Smashing an idol will do little if idolatry is not likewise crushed. Certainly, there are those who will never give up on the vain dream of finally having seen, heard, and doomscrolled enough to be happy, living more and more like sedate vegetables with all their needs met and wants soothed, and so will spiral like a flaming aircraft into endless ruination of their own lives and torment of their intoxicated souls. Having eyes they are blind, and having ears they are deaf, like the idols they will worship to their graves. The change of habits and of relationship to technology can only engender spiritual renewal as much as it first follows from the same. One must repent, turn attention away from the glimmering parasitic screens algorithmically impelled to demand more and deliver less, like all malevolent spirits. At present, perhaps acknowledging this is one of the best uses of the technologies that enable it, or perhaps I should soon content myself with modest silence lest I corner myself in hypocrisy. As Kingsnorth rightly acknowledges, self-imposed limits are the razor that cuts the binding knot of self-destructive habit.

I am hopeful that the Collapse that we may be living in opens people up to what Paul Vanderklay tenuously identified in Kingsnorth as “Christian re-paganization,” a kind of “return to the Earth” that is really a return to reality. The nerve Kingsnorth has struck is an awakening to the absence of a question that has long been silent — and which should follow from that of what we are doing with technology — of what technology is doing with us. Christianity has a long history of flourishing upon contact with paganism, so this outlook is not so bad as an end to its long and fraught wrestling match with secularism. The search for truth among those still seeking will benefit from the death of this present forgetfulness of reality. The shadows dancing on the cave wall must someday lose their valence in the eyes of their audience. The invisible world is more real than the visible, and dazzling our eyes with false gods and inauthentic spirits will continue to distract us from the pressing invasion of beauty into the prisons of languid confusion unless we put consumption in its place and take our gaze off ourselves. Let us pray for a kick from an angel like St. Peter received, to see that Christ has already opened the cell door, to know that the vision which rouses us from our slumber is that which is most real.

Epistemically, this will entail an end to the search for forbidden knowledge, a cessation of the perennial human urge to claw at the visible world in a Babel-esque climb toward heaven. Truth is not divined by such means, but is heard in the small voice by the one who surrenders to the passivity of listening, of childlike faith in the priceless pearl of knowledge of good sans evil. That pearl is only delivered from on high, not conjured from below. And, if you watch the stars closely enough, you’ll see they tell of God, anyway, and the greatest truth that has ever been divined in the heavens was that which was actually revealed. What better time of year than Advent to remember what the heavens have uncovered about God? But one must eventually pull his nose out of the tomes and their decaying multitude of facts and examine the stars themselves, who faithfully and generously shower the earth with luminous reality. The tree of knowledge can’t save, but the Tree of Life planted on Golgotha can.

“All things are lawful for me,” but not all things are helpful. “All things are lawful for me,” but I will not be enslaved by anything. — 1 Corinthians 6:12 (RSV)

But we exhort you, brethren … to aspire to live quietly, to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we charged you; — 1 Thessalonians 4:10-11 (RSV)