Can Christ help us speak with the world and understand it better than its opposite? It’s a matter of the AI revolution and the rule of law.
The techno-billionaire Peter Thiel is fascinated by the anti-Christ. He gave lectures in Rome and recently even wrote an essay for the US Catholic magazine First Things (https://firstthings.com/the-pope-and-the-antichrist/). It is a very Western Christian subject, and for people who read this stuff from outside the Christian culture, maybe ¾ of the world, it may be very puzzling, perhaps incomprehensible.
These arguments perhaps risk reinforcing a quasi-Christian elitism— they may be defensive, timid reasons that refuse to confront the world today as it actually is and would rather reduce it to ideas a thousand years old. Forgetting that Bonaventure and Aquinas, in their own time, had also studied Muslim and Jewish theology.
To speak of the Antichrist, you need Christ. What is Christ to most of the world? The overwhelming majority of the world does not naturally think in the theological vocabulary Thiel employs. Are Christians not supposed to speak to the rest of the world? Are they supposed to wage war on it?
Perhaps one needs to speak to the many within the Christian world who are deaf to these arguments and to the vast numbers outside the Christian world who are indifferent to them.
Ruling is understanding
The miscalculation seems odd coming from the Chairman of the Board of Director of Palantir, a company all about intelligence. Does Palantir understand the information it gathers? “Knowledge is power” is the motto of SOAS, the original school of British colonial bureaucracy — to govern, you must understand your subjects; you must project yourself toward the other.
How would his essay translate into Chinese, Hindi, and Bahasa Malay? How would people who don’t read the Bible but read the Sutras, the Mahabharata, and the Quran understand Thiel’s anti-Christ?
Intelligence means understanding. Having information and raw data is important, but understanding them is even more so. Does Palantir collect data without understanding it, or does it aim to understand what it collects? Or does Palantir work differently from Thiel’s anti-Christ theology? Why, then?
Religion and its spaces vary across places.
Traditional Chinese houses are closed off from the outside. The gardens and spaces are enclosed by walls that keep those inside from seeing out and those outside from seeing in.
Houses in the West also enclose an interior space, but they have windows designed to see everything outside — nature, other houses, other people. The people outside can also see the house and its inhabitants, under certain conditions. A level of privacy is calibrated by those inside with curtains moving over the windows.
Traditional Chinese houses have no windows facing the outside world. The world enters only through gates, which incidentally have a threshold to make evil spirits stumble and fall.
Chinese temples, places of worship, are not spaces for gathering in large crowds to listen to a preacher, but rather spaces that include both open and enclosed areas. There, people wander, pray, and seek inspiration alone or with the help of a monk who strolls through the same spaces. There are no regular religious services, where a crowd, small or large, feels united in front of a priest.
In the West, temples are enclosed spaces where people gather as a group to seek contact with the metaphysical. The vast rooms with tall, tinted windows high on the walls stretch the earth toward the sky. Here, the guidance of a priest is essential.
Can the same Christ be present in different physical and mental spaces? Certainly, he must be. Whether or not one believes in him, Christ can’t be confined to a particular architectural design.
These differences are important for understanding how diverse parts of the world will respond to the same changes occurring today.
Capitalist turns
Capitalism is at a turning point with AI. Old workers of all kinds and shapes will be disappearing, replaced in the near future by AI and, later, by AI-controlled robots. It could be far more disruptive than the early mechanization of production in the 19th century.
People’s contribution will not disappear; it will have to evolve into something more sophisticated. People will need to contribute more in the form of doubts, criticism, and creativity, something that, so far and for the foreseeable future, machines will be incapable of.
This forthcoming greater contribution from the people could be even more important to capitalism than the disappearance of millions of outdated jobs. Bill Mundell has been arguing that we need more capitalists to save capitalism (https://youtu.be/jDBOcQFIFTE?si=Y7u_Prz5-I9RvHho ).
This is in fact ancient. In Roman legions, every last legionnaire was entitled to his share of the spoils. A legionnaire had to buy his own armor and weapons. The percentage increased with rank. In the Renaissance, it was similar: people had a fixed pay (soldo, hence soldiers), plus a percentage. The same was true on merchant ships, etc. It was a Western hallmark for centuries.
Modern mass slavery, which began on American plantations for the new industrial commodity cotton, might have changed it. The owner of the plantation bought slaves, fed and housed them. He anticipated all the capital and thus tried to recoup his investment as soon as possible, exploiting the slaves without killing them. With the abolition of slavery and the advent of workers’ salaries, capitalists somehow parceled out slavery. They didn’t pay for the whole time and the survival of the slave for years, but only for the time the capitalist used.
The company could go bust and fire workers who didn’t work (harder and more dramatically, as with a slave). Still, the capitalist had a reason for this ‘exploitation’ because he had to advance all the capital for the new, expensive machinery. The workers’ personal investment was nonexistent. They were poor, with little or no education, so the capitalist had to front it all and recover his investment ASAP. Now?
Now, ‘workers’ front all their investments in education (the weapons of modern times), while the capitalist has a more limited initial investment. Plus, the capitalist needs proactive contributions from his employees, not passive service to almighty machines. Therefore, companies should revert to the old legions’ dividends of the spoils.
Rule by law OR Rule of law
AI-driven machines and proactive workers may pull societies in different directions, with more or less authoritarianism.
Authoritarian states want rule by law. It provides security and welfare. If the ruler fails to provide security and welfare, he’s brutally ousted.
Liberal states want the rule of law to be grounded in duties, rights, and mutual trust in fair play. It’s very robust and can endure a lack of security or welfare if the trust holds. It’s hard to break, though it remains highly volatile. If the trust doesn’t hold, even with security and welfare, everything falls apart.
Does Thiel want to reinforce or weaken mutual trust? The USA is traditionally based on the rule of law, and continuing with it would be easier. Desirable or not, moving from the rule of law to rule by law isn’t easy or seamless. If something goes wrong, the passage will eat its rulers.
Moreover, the world is very complex and diverse; whoever wants to rule it or speak to it must get out of his Church, big or small, with or without tall, tinted windows. In a few religious words, he may want to seek Christ rather than fuss about the anti-Christ.
Mr. Thiel, what do you think should be the best path for it?
