Standing in the Center of the Unknowing as the World Cries. What to Do?

This day, four springs bubble beneath the spring-fed pond of my consternation. The horror and the beauty, the abysmal ignorance and the boundless creativity that mix together in these waters leave me immobile, temporarily I hope. I do not know how long it will be before I know which way to go.

The first spring was an article in the New York Times, Sorry, but This Is the Future of Food, which argues that intensified high-tech factory farming is better for the environment than regenerative, local, organic farming, and is the only way to sustainably feed the world. A transient passion flared in me to rebut the article, to expose its tacit assumptions, to refute its logic, and to locate it within a larger world-destroying mythology. No sooner than I opened a blank document to begin writing, I felt a wave of weariness. I have already written this. I have already laid out the arguments that industrial agriculture maximizes yield per dollar and yield per unit labor, not yield per hectare. I have already established (to my own satisfaction anyway) that humanity best serves nature not by retreating from it and minimizing our footprint, but by participating more fully as a new extension of ecology. I have already described the perils of over-reliance on carbon metrics as a proxy for sustainability and advanced an alternative “living earth” paradigm that elevates water, soil, and biodiversity—the organs and tissues of a living physiology—to primary importance, and I have detailed how agriculture fits into that paradigm.

I hope I have not wearied the reader with that brief summary of the article I will not write. Maybe I should write it. Maybe I should say what needs saying again and again and again. And I would, maybe, overcome my weariness and do it if there were not so many other springs bubbling beneath me.

The second spring is a conversation I had with a friend, Kalah Hill, with whom I’d not spoken for at least a year. In the “old story” she might be called a sex worker. I’m not sure how to describe her: perhaps as an “erotic coach” or therapist who works with individuals and couples for healing and liberating intimacy in the erotic sphere. She is a very brave woman; her professional path has not been easy as it crosses the intense negative ideas and projections that surround that kind of work. What the world needs most sorely, it rejects most cruelly. Even I, who admire her, feel the urge to clarify that I am not her client, so that I may keep a safe distance from her aura of taboo. In fact, it is with sheepishness and not righteousness that I confess not to have much engaged this kind of healing. Kalah described to me how her work is blossoming and conveyed to me some of its impact on her clients, and I felt hope stirring in me for this world. I do not think that ecocide and genocide could coexist with the kind of healing and liberation she offers, if it were to spread widely.

That leads to the third spring, a Caitlin Johnstone column: Meditations On A Six Year-Old Amputee Crawling Through Gaza With The Help Of A Roller Skate. How does Kalah’s work (or anyone’s who works one-on-one in the world’s more affluent corners) make sense in light of the relentless horror of Gaza? I read the daily reports coming from that part of the world, another hospital bombed, another 20 or 30 or 40 people slaughtered because, it is claimed, one of them was a “Hamas operative,” and I want to run out into the street shouting, “Enough already! Haven’t we learned? This must stop!” I want to put everything else down and wail and tug on your arm and pull you into the horrified bewildered anguish that human beings are doing this to one another, again and still. Yet more horrifying, to me, is that the same enabling devices, the same mindsets and rhetoric, continue to function as effectively as ever, as if we have learned nothing. My own attempts to confront them head-on in those I perceived had power to alter the course of events came up empty, maybe less than empty, maybe counterproductive, as I bounced off an iron curtain of logic and justification that cordons off an entirely separate reality. To accept its terms of discourse is already to lose the debate. To reject its terms of discourse is to exclude oneself from the conversation. The terms of discourse include things like, “American interests,” “justified response,” “terrorism,” and all the subtle and not-so-subtle ways of dehumanization, dehumanization, dehumanization, and the division of the world into us and them. As I tore at the iron curtain, those within drew it even tighter about them. “The IDF is the most moral army in the world. The casualties are exaggerated. The aid organizations are anti-Semitic. The videos are fake. And in any case, Israel has no choice against fanatical enemies who want to wipe every Jew off the face of the earth.”

Do I continue tearing at the curtain? If not, then what? I don’t know, and I was moved that Caitlin Johnstone does not pretend to know either.

Paradoxically, I find hope in the exhaustion of hope that comes at the end of our wits.

I do know something though: the iron curtain runs not just around the warmongers and genocide excusers, but within them as well, walling them off from feelings that, if felt, would make the killing intolerable, whether “justified” or not. Therefore I trust what calls the healers of the world. I trust that their work is not done in obliviousness to the crimes against humanity that are happening in Palestine and many other places right now (Haiti, Congo, Ethiopia, Syria, Sudan…). They do not tear at the curtain; they seduce those within it to exchange iron for silk.

If shame, horror, and disgust at past episodes of genocide, and the mantra “Never again!” were sufficient to stop future episodes, they would have stopped a long time ago.

My feeling of futility at tearing at the iron curtain is akin to that engendered by the NYT piece on industrial agriculture. Will we ever learn? Will we ever learn the lesson of the technical fix—endlessly applying technology to solve the problems caused by previous technology? Will we ever realize the limitations of counting and measuring? Will we graduate from the reductionistic approach to food, farming, and medicine?

It is no mere coincidence that divide-and-conquer reigns as the supreme approach to science, governance, politics, and global empire. A deep connection also links the dehumanization of the oppressed with the desacralization of the objects of industrial agriculture and industry in general. The reduction of human to enemy, to consumer, to sex object, to something less than what the human is, is akin to the reduction of nature and life to resource, to commodity, to a set of quantities.

The final wellspring of my unknowing that is alive in me today is the subject of my last few weeks of research: artificial intelligence. AI is an unstoppable hurricane sweeping through the economic, social, political, and psychological landscape. In future essays I will elaborate on what I have come to understand: that AI is the culmination, the completion, of an age of humanity, of the civilization of modernity. It consolidates all of recorded human knowledge (recorded human knowledge—that word is key) and recorded human cognition. As such, it tends to encode multiple levels of orthodoxy (beyond those introduced intentionally by the developers), and risks entrenching and intensifying the limitations and blind spots inherent to them. Therefore, AI will be an amazing tool at solving problems on a superficial level, of extending orthodox solutions to new extremes, but it will not disrupt the fundamental patterns that generate those problems in the first place. It can explore genetic sequence space to develop even more powerful ways to, as the NYT article celebrates, “[harness] the RNA tech behind the Covid vaccines” to create, not just “a biopesticide that constipates crop-killing potato beetles to death without poisoning the soil,” but whole new classes of genetic pesticides for all crops. When these substances generate unintended consequences, AI will come to the rescue again. But it will not free us from the loop.

I could say similar things about other technologies of control, whether over society or the material world. In the paradigm of Ascent, which equates progress with an increasing ability to control the world around us, AI is the culminating technology. But it will not, by magnifying our power to control, deliver us from the failures of control itself. The totalitarian mind (and I mean that term to apply beyond politics) always blames any failure of control on not enough of it. It does not understand that control also breeds the very chaos it seeks to address. It does not understand, for example, that surveilling, confining, imprisoning, and murdering a subject population will never bring true security. It does not understand that killing every bug and weed won’t in the long run produce more food. It does not understand that suppressing desire with willpower causes the unfulfilled desires to come out sideways. It does not understand that more precise control of neurotransmitter levels won’t bring mental health. It does not understand that the final solution is never final. Artificial intelligence can help us do all those things better, but it won’t deliver us from the futility of control. In fact, it threatens to take its perverse consequences to a new level.

Recognizing these limits, we may be able to turn AI toward another purpose. And we may be able to expand its training data to include knowledge and cognition that is represented poorly, if at all, in the totality of civilization’s digital records.

There are other fundamental limits to the power of AI, for example as represented in the work of people like Kalah. But I want to return to the theme of consternation that launched this essay. Perhaps the new level of perverse consequence, the failure of AI to improve wellbeing, will bring us to our wits end. If it is indeed the culmination of our age, then it also portends a next one. Indeed, the technology itself is not based on a reductionistic control paradigm at all. Therefor it is potentially a bridge to a next civilization.

Whether it will meet that potential is not a technological question though. It is a question of our readiness and willingness to heal from the Age of Separation in which we have lived. Are we ready to let go of the belief systems that dictate control? When we are, peace in Israel/Palestine will be an important sign. I don’t know how to bring it about. Sure, I’ve submitted my proposal for what “we” should do. I felt like I was squeaking in the wind. Partisans to the debate on each side thought I was being naively generous in my view of the other. The chasm is enormous. Nonetheless, even in the face of continued slaughter and the transfer of the methods of ethnic cleansing and territorial expansion to other lands, against all evidence, the belief that healing is possible refuses to die. I have seen enough “impossible” healing in my life to trust that. If Israel/Palestine can heal, everywhere can heal. If it does not heal, if the global body of humanity continues to bear this hemorrhaging wound, eventually the whole world will be sucked into its vortex. The technologies of control as applied to human beings will spread everywhere and reach unimaginable heights of precision. There will be nowhere to escape them, and contrary to their promise we will have less security, less abundance, and less health, not more.

I would love to end this piece with a call to action, with a solution, with a map for a path forward. Instead I will end with my bewilderment at sitting upon all four of these bubbling springs, this queer admixture of waters. Thank you.