The Maturity of the Church

It is a paradoxical law of early liturgical study that the greater the biblical element in any given prayer the less primitive it is likely to be.

Henry Chadwick, The Early Church

Makers

The distinction between the artist and the man who is not an artist thus lies in the fact that the artist is living in the “way of grace,” so far as his vocation is concerned. He is not necessarily an artist in handling his personal life, but (since life is the material of his work) he has at least got thus far, that he is using life to make something new. Because of this, the pains and sorrows of this troublesome world can never, for him, be wholly meaningless and useless, as they are to the man who dumbly endures them and can (as he complains with only too much truth) “make nothing of them.” If, therefore, we are to deal with our “problems” in “a creative way,” we must deal with them along the artist’s lines: not expecting to “solve” them by a detective trick, but to “make something of them,” even when they are, strictly speaking, insoluble.

Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker

While Sayers’ is the most compelling explanation I’ve read so far of what the artist can offer the Church, the paragraph above should be placed side by side with this. Egyptian gold can be shaped into more than one thing.

We Are Leviathan

It’s so obvious in retrospect that Elon Musk bought Twitter to turn it into an AI farm. I’ve known this was the long-term play of technocrats for a while. I just hadn’t put two and two together (or X and X?).

Mary Harrington has noted what makes this potential AI (named Grok) different from others: rather than pulling information from static data, Grok draws on the “living” hive-mind that is Twitter. As if that isn’t disturbing enough, Harrington takes it one step further into politics:

This provides a potential solution to one of 21st century’s thorniest problems: how do you govern a demos that is both reflexively anti-authoritarian, but that also yearns for strongman governance?

In other words, young people today want to do what they want and they want to be told what to do. Justice means no human being should hold power over another, but it takes a strong, decisive authority to enforce that equality. What’s a young person to do? If Elon’s AI experiment works, it’s possible that young people could begin to trust the radically democratic central authority that is Grok. After all, Grok’s intelligence will be drawn from the people, so its decisions will be guided by what the people want without any personal biases. Right? Right?? In fact, feeding information to Grok could become part of your civic duty. Don’t you want a just society?

Harrington:

I hope this is all just my over-active imagination. But I can picture a near future in which it’s considered far more meaningfully democratic to pour your opinions and political passions into the LLM than to cast your vote. Isn’t this potentially a far richer way of contributing your perspective, than merely casting a ballot once every five years? When your words, sentences, opinions and sentiments form part of the billions of such phrasings that go to make up the totality of what the egregore knows, is that not a more representative form of participation in governance than casting a ballot? 

It might feel a little less like being borne down upon by Leviathan, and more like becoming part of Leviathan. It might, indeed, feel legitimate.

How long till we see “I tweeted” stickers proudly displayed on election day?

Sloan

I’ve read bits and bobs by Robin Sloan before (thanks to link-meister Alan Jacobs), but I’ve never really spent time on his site or in his newsletter. I’ve been enjoying it very much recently, especially this edition. Some favs:

  • His habit of creating “mini-sites” for his books. I love this idea and would love to do it with my own projects.
  • Random asides, like this: “The wheel gets a lot of credit — and sure, wheels are handy — but more and more, I think the key to human civilization is probably: the pump.”
  • Or this: “A starling only knows a murmuration from the inside — a scrum of dark feathers, the bird beside them breathing hard. They can’t see or understand the larger object. […] Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe one starling gets to watch. Maybe, every morning, a single bird is chosen to sit it out, and regard, with wonder and satisfaction, their own species.”
  • And, of course, the ongoing updates about his olive oil production business.

On Trinitarian Art

If the creative artists had been called in to give evidence about the filioque clause, they must have come down heavily on the Western side of the controversy, since their experience leaves them in no doubt about the procession of the ghost from the son.

Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker

Frustrated

The Devil is the most discontented creature in the world. He is the proudest creature there is, and the most discontented creature, and the most dejected creature.

Jeremiah Burroughs

Contentment

There are no works that God has made—the sun, moon, stars and all the world—in which so much of the Glory of God appears, as in a man who lives quietly in the midst of adversity.

Jeremiah Burroughs

Only Through Time

We must not, that is, try to behave as though the Fall had never occurred nor yet say that the Fall was a Good Thing in itself. But we may redeem the Fall by a creative act.

That, according to Christian doctrine, is the way that God behaved, and the only way in which we can behave if we want to be “as gods”. The Fall had taken place and Evil had been called into active existence; the only way to transmute Evil into Good was to redeem it by creation. But, the Evil having been experienced, it could only be redeemed within the medium of experience—that is, by an incarnation in which experience was fully and freely in accordance with the Idea.

Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker