A (3:40)

You say that it tells a story about humanity. What story does the machine tell?

B (3:44)

I think the primary story that it tells is that for a very, very long time, we have been trying to replace nature with technology. We have been trying to build a world in which we are in control, often for understandable reasons, in which we can manage and control every aspect of life. And we've got to the point now where our technologies are so advanced that we're able to. Or we hope or think that we're able to do things like creating super intelligences, creating artificial minds, potentially not just extending our lives, but ending death. At least this is the dream. So the story that it tells is really the attempt to replace nature with technology. Another way of looking at that. It's the same story that played out in the first book of Genesis, where we decide that we're going to eat the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil and become as gods. We're trying to be gods. And we've got to the point now where many of the people creating these technologies openly speak in those terms.

A (4:43)

You say that we created the machine to fill a void or a need for transcendent truth, and that the machine is what we built to enable and express our rebellion against God.

B (4:53)

Well, I think so. I mean, one of the conclusions I came to in this book, which wasn't really one I expected to come to necessarily when I started it, is that there's a religious element to this or a spiritual element to this construction of the machine and our experiments with technologies. It's not just a materialist project. It's not just about making ourselves wealthier safer and more comfortable. It certainly is that. And obviously technology does give us plenty of things that we like and value. But I think what's happening, certainly in the modern west, in the modern world where we've become very irreligious creatures, we don't believe. The religious stories we used to tell ourselves as societies anyway, is that we have a spiritual void. And that spiritual void is being filled by the machine because it teaches us that we can be like gods. There's a sense here that because we've abolished God, we've decided to fill that void ourselves by trying to be God.

A (5:43)

And you write that the four Ps, people, place, prayer and past, provide us with roots. And the machine is determined to uproot us to replace the four Ps with the four Ss, which is science, self, sex and screens. Can you explain a bit more about that?

B (5:58)

Well, the big story, I think, is the story of the uprooting of humanity from the things that in pretty much all traditional societies and previous ways of living all around the world in different cultures have given us a sense of what it means to be human. So I try and define that in the book as the four Ps, as you say, which are people place prayer in the past. So that is our people, whoever that is, our community, the people that we're part of, the people around us, the family, the people, the community that we grow up in. That's place. That's the place that we live. It's maybe the place we come from or the place we find ourselves. It's our relationship to nature. Then that's prayer. That's our relationship to God. And that's the past. That's the story we tell about where we come from, which we're passing on, hopefully, to our children. So we have a story that we. That we've kind of followed through time. What I'm calling the machine uproots all of those things. It uproots us from our place. We all become kind of individual consumers following employment around the world. It uproots the sense of there being a people. Everyone's everywhere. Because we're all moving around. We can't be a part of a rooted community. It certainly is uprooting us from our sense of spirituality, our sense of God. It's attempting to replace religion in that sense. And it also uproots our stories, our sense of where we come from. Because we're seeing ourselves primarily in individual terms. It's difficult for us to tell a story of passing through time and passing it on because everything's changing so fast. So we end up with this very rootless world in which we are asked or encouraged to identify ourselves as individual consumers, fulfilling our needs through technology and through consumerism, which is a radical new way of viewing the human being and divorces us from many of the things that actually give us meaning or root us down. We have to be uprooted for the machine to succeed.

A (7:42)

One of the things that struck me as a journalist is looking at how we are inundated with this decontextualized information when so much of our imagination is consumed by information that comes in through screens, that's beyond our direct experience. This is profoundly disorienting.

B (7:59)

It is. And it's also impossible to know what's true and what's not true. I mean, you and I will be old enough to remember when there were newspapers. I used to work at a newspaper in the 1990s in London. And, you know, obviously there was a big information flow of news back then, but it was mainly daily news. So you could take that in. And in theory at least, you had some gatekeepers who were more or less trusted to deliver the news. You may trust them or not, but now you're getting huge, as you say, huge amounts of decontextualized stuff. You know, you have no idea where it's coming from. And of course, the age of AI is now making that even worse, because half of this stuff is literally fake. You have no idea whether the video you're watching of, I don't know, President Trump giving an address is even President Trump. So you don't know if he said that thing or not. And I think this is responsible for a lot of the chaos in the culture right now. I don't think we would be having the kind of polarized culture war we are having at the moment without that, and particularly without the smartphone. It's not just the flow of information. It's the fact that everybody has this miniature computer in their pocket and they can access it all the time. And people are spending on average of 9 hours, hours a day looking at this stuff. And as you say, I don't think the human brain is designed to cope with this stuff. It's just. It's driving people pretty crazy because it's designed to be addictive. It's almost impossible to turn it off.

A (9:07)

As I was reading your book, it struck me that what you describe as the machine might be comparable to what the Bible calls the world or the cosmos. Is that a fair comparison? Was that in the back of Your mind as you were writing this?

B (9:17)

I think so. I mean, it's a curious thing for me because I was. I became a Christian five, about six years ago, I think, and I was baptized nearly five years ago. So it's a fairly recent thing for me. And I was in the process of going through that while I was writing the book. The Christian story kind of opened itself out before me. And as I was thinking about the machine, and one of the things I think is very profound about Christianity is that it has a very, very true and very wise understanding of human nature. You can see that all the way through the Bible. There's no naivety in there. The machine is a product of the world, if you like. It's a kind of technological manifestation of exactly that force. I think that when St. Paul talks about powers and principalities, that's pretty much what he's talking about. This is what's manifesting around us. And so in that sense, yes, we have a. As Christians, we have a kind of teaching of how to live through this. We are supposed to be in it, but not of it. It's always going to be around us. Look, I mean, Christ is killed by the Roman Empire, which is a manifestation of the machine. In many ways, it's giant technocratic despotism. So in that sense, it isn't new, its intensity is new, and the technological power that it has is new. But I think. No, I think it is a direct comparison. I think the world is almost another name for it.

A (10:26)

You say the west should be uprooted, that it has become an idol, that our culture is dead and we are in denial. And so some defenders of the west might say, well, no. I mean, it's been the best way that human beings have discovered so far to encourage human flourishing, to restrain evil, to defend against the effects of the fall, you might say. And lots of the west is based on Christian truth, and sure, parts of it are corrupt, but it's better than the alternatives. So what would you say to these people that are saying, hey, wait a sec. The west has been a really positive thing overall.

B (10:56)

So I start off the book, in many ways, with an inquiry about the culture war, asking why people are fighting about the West. There's a lot of people attempting to destroy it and demolish it. There's a lot of other people trying to defend it. So the question I had at the beginning of the book, well, what is. Well, what is it? What are we talking about here? A lot of people throw this phrase around the West. What is it? Well, the Reality is, when you look at it, the west is the thing that evolved from what used to be Christendom. It used to be the domain of the Roman Catholic Church as a Christian civilization. For better or for worse, the thing that we call the west has pretty much replaced that. What I'm talking about when I talk about the west is a very particular way of seeing, which is very rationalistic, very scientistic, very mechanistic, which has actually given rise to this machine. So it was the west that created in that sense. Now, I wouldn't say that the west was a Christian culture anymore. It's something that's quite different to it. It's the culture of the Enlightenment. And it's that culture that has decided that because there is no God, we can build God ourselves. There are lots of elements of the west that I would like to defend as a Western man. But I think that this phrase, the west is so broad and generalistic that it can actually be misleading. It can become quite like an idol. We think that our job is to defend the West. A lot of Christians think like this. They think, well, I'm a Christian and the west is Christian, so we need to defend it. And I don't think that's really true. I think that what we ought to be doing, if we're defending anything, is defending Christian teaching. And a lot of what the west is doing at the moment is. Or one of the points I think I make in the book is if you take the seven deadly sins and you look at the way our culture currently functions, it pretty much valorizes all of them. Our economy is based on greed. We can look at pride, we can look at vanity, we can look at lust. All of these things are drivers of economic growth. So the culture we're actually living in is nothing like the Christian culture of our ancestors. And so this notion that the west, we need to let the west go, it's almost a thought experiment. I think that we need to let go of this notion of progress and technology and rationalistic, mechanistic, narrow ways of seeing so that we can actually get back to something that's much truer. Because what we've done is we've abandoned the culture of our ancestors. We've abandoned a culture that's based around God and the teachings of Christ, which are actually about humility and simplicity. And we've replaced them with this culture of growth and progress and money and capitalism and power. And we say that that's the West. I don't think it is a real culture at all. I think it's an anti culture.

A (13:22)

And I think that what I'm hearing you say is that we Christians who live in the geographical west, you might say, don't recognize how we have too often bought into the promises of the machine. We've been compromised because we fell for the myths of progress and technology. Is that right?

B (13:39)

I think so. And I think because people want to defend the west and they want to defend their nations, which is a perfectly good thing to want to do and perfectly understandable, especially when you see them, you know, under attack from, you know, the progressive left and all the other stuff that's been going on for years and years. You see these endless attacks on the culture. And so your instinct is to say, well, I want to defend my culture, but you can't confuse that with the church. I think a lot of people look at the west and they say, well, I have to defend the west because I feel like it's under attack. So they end up defending, as you say, an economic system which actually is based on greed or which ignores the poor and the hungry in a way that Christ told us not to do, and a system which is creating technologies which, to my mind, are openly demonic at the moment. I mean, I don't know what AI is if it's not a deeply disturbing spiritual thing. And there's a couple of chapters about that in the book. So if we end up promoting, say, I don't know, the technological system, capitalism, notions of progress, wealth accumulation, and all this stuff, well, you might be able to argue that those are good or bad, but I don't see what's Christian about them. Actually. I think they're fundamentally unchristian. And I think, speaking as a Christian, even though I'm quite a new one, I think that if we were to try and live the way that Christ told us to live in the Gospels, we couldn't have built the machine. So what are we going to do about that now? I think, funnily enough, the solution to the machine is quite simple in the sense that we can just try to live as Christians within it, and then, you know, things will change if we do that. But, yeah, we have to be careful that we don't end up defending the machine by accident.

A (15:08)

Tell us about your conversion to Christianity. You say that you were looking for a truth that you could surrender to. And I'm kind of curious if you think that your Eastern Orthodox theology shapes your approach to these kinds of questions.

B (15:20)

Yeah, I think it does. My journey to Christianity was very long and winding, like a lot of people in the West. I grew up in a very irreligious household, wasn't particularly religious when I was young, but I was a great lover of nature, became an environmental campaigner. I had great spiritual experiences in the mountains and the forests. And as I grew older, I started looking explicitly for a spiritual path. Didn't think to look for Christianity, didn't think I believed in it, didn't think it had anything powerful to offer me. So off I went to become a Buddhist, as so many Western people do. So I did that for five or six years. But there was something missing from that. The thing that was missing was God. Ultimately, that's what I discovered. I discovered with my horror that I, to some horror that I thought I was being called by God. And I didn't really know what to do about that. So I went looking through nature religions. I spent a year or so as a Wiccan, as a kind of a modern day witch, and that didn't work either. There was a lot of problems with that. Ultimately I got to a point where I got down on my knees in my garden and I said to God, if you exist, please show me what the truth is, because I want to know. I need to know. And it wasn't very long after that before I started having dreams about Jesus and I started meeting Christians everywhere. I decided to read the Gospels and I found a story I'd never had before. I had a number of experiences which I wrote about in an essay called the Cross and the Machine, published in First Things, which basically convinced me that Christianity was true. I felt a little bit like CS Lewis, like I was being dragged as the most reluctant convert in the world towards Christianity. I thought, oh no, I don't want to be a Christian. But I realized it was true. And I think I met Christ and I continue to do that. And becoming an orthodox Christian, I think especially because Orthodoxy has a deep well of mysticism which is still very much at the forefront of the faith, especially in the monasteries. It's a very ancient faith. It's very unchanged in its liturgical practices. So there's a depth to it. There's also a sense of God being very present in the world and a sense of actually a sense of the Devil being very present in the world as well, in a very traditional Christian sense, which I think has really helped me to understand what's going on with the machine. As you say, it's very much a manifestation of the world and the way out of it is through what the Orthodox call theosis, which is the search for Union with God. So, you know, prayer and fasting and all these things that are actually hard to do but necessary to do and which are quite life changing. So it's, you know, it's still early days for me. I've been a Christian for five or six years, so obviously I'm still a baby. But it's been profoundly altering in the way that I see the world and also in the sense I have of the future. Because being a Christian gives you hope. It's very easy to look at the kind of darkness of the world sometimes and feel hopeless. But if you're a Christian, that's not really permissible because you know how the story ends and there's something bigger going on. And all of these are kind of trials you have to live through. And I find that a very uplifting thought. One of the key things about Orthodoxy, you hear this again and again, is you shouldn't live in fear. It's very important not to live in fear because Christ has already triumphed. So, you know, the Antichrist will reign for seven years, they say, and then that's that. So that's not very long. Saint Porphyrios, who's one of my favorite modern saints in the Orthodox Church, he said, you should never look at the devil. You should always just keep your gaze fixed on Christ. You should walk in love, you should love others. The devil's out there, he's doing his thing, but he can't defeat you because you're a Christian. And that's the way to look at it. There's a falling away, there's the end times. That's all coming at some point. We don't know when, but the hope is Christ. He's already triumphed. The cross is a machinery of triumph, if you like. So the resurrection changes everything. So whatever happens and whenever it happens, and we don't know, if you keep your eyes fixed on Christ and you keep the Holy Spirit in your heart, then you're walking through the world in love for others, whatever horrible thing goes on around you. And that's the way to remain sane. I think you've got to be careful, and I certainly have to be careful writing this kind of book, that you don't stare into the abyss too long, as Nietzsche puts it, because it ends up staring back into you. Right? So be careful not just to focus your gaze on the machine, especially if you're a Christian, you have to keep it focused on Christ. So that's the challenge.

A (19:33)

Is that a personality thing with you? This, this desire to stare into the machine?

B (19:37)

I think it probably is. It's not even a desire. It's more of a compulsion. I mean, in many ways I desire not to, but I. Yeah, I think it is. It's almost like a love of watching horror films or something. You know, I think some of this is due to personality and character and that kind of stuff, and you can't very. Can't do very much about it. Even when I try to write about other things, it always comes back down to this kind of lurking beast in the background, for whatever psychological reason.

A (20:01)

You say that both socialism and capitalism are products of the machine and equally destructive. Could you explain, you know, do you distinguish between free markets and capitalism, for example? You know, and I think that some people reading your book would say, well, you've undervalued liberty and the importance of that for human. Human flourishing. What would you say?

B (20:21)

Well, I wouldn't associate capitalism with liberty. I would associate it with the opposite. So. And I also think when you talk about socialism, you need to be careful because there are many different forms of socialism. You can have a very localized, workable version, or you can have the kind of giant state tyrannies of the Bolsheviks or the Chinese. I don't think there's very much doubt that the state Communisms of the 20th century were tyrannical. Not many people are going to argue in favor of those anymore. But when I talk about capitalism, I'm talking about a system in which giant corporations dominate the economy, own and manage most of the capital, and crush all of their enemies. Capitalism is a system in which Amazon has destroyed 92% of shops in America, and the man who owns it is the richest man in the universe. I don't think that's beneficial system, especially in a country like America where there are millions of huge numbers of people living on the poverty line as well. So markets are one thing, you know, people freely trading, that's all good, but capitalism isn't free. Capitalism is a kind of forced economy in which monopolies manage to crush the competition, which is why the high streets are dead and the small farms have disappeared and all the usual stuff. I think what we have to do is, if we're thinking about the machine, we have to understand that the real question is about scale. You can have a free market at a local scale, and that's a good thing. You could maybe even have a socialist economy at a local scale, which could be a good thing. As soon as you scale anything up to the size of a global economy or a nation state, you're going to have something tyrannical, which is going to end up crushing the little guy, which is where we end up with either of those systems, really. I think if you want real liberty, you have to keep the big guys out of the way so that the little guys can actually have a fair crack at it.

A (21:52)

Toward the end of the book, you talk about, well, if this is the machine that we live under, so what do we. What are we going to do about it? And you describe your politics as reactionary radicalism, and you say that you want to defend the moral economy. So could you tell us what you would like to defend? What you would say, well, if we could ever get rid of the machine, or if we could ever, you know, dampen the power of the machine, what would a good society look like? What would a good culture look like?

B (22:16)

Well, I came across this phrase, reactionary radicalism in a history book from the 1980s about the Luddites. And I thought it was a wonderful phrase and it was the best description of my politics I've ever come across because I've always wondered quite what my politics are. The notion of a reactionary radical is somebody who is a radical in the sense that they are opposed to this crushing, destructive, technocratic machine system, but their politics are reactionary in the sense that they look back to those four P's. Actually people placed prayer in the past. So it's not a sort of anti.

A (22:48)

Machine.

B (22:51)

World view which is based on, say, an ideology like Marxism, which is utopian and ideological and theoretical. And once you actually start to apply it, it leads to mass death. It's something that's based on kind of rooted politics. And you can look at communities like the Luddites in 18th century England who were trying to defend what has been called the moral economy, which is to say an economy based on the household, based on human values, based on a system which is actually moral rather than purely economic. So a moral economy would be a system which is based on notions of things that are good and true. An economy that comes from the ground up, that serves human beings at a human scale. So my ideal world is a system in which politics and culture and economics is very much more localized than it is today. And so people actually have power over it. Which, interestingly, by the way, I think is the sort of vision that people like Thomas Jefferson had when they founded the US So it's effectively vision of human scale, localized economy.

A (23:50)

You talk about the machine promotes vice instead of virtue. Those vices come from within the human heart. And so wherever you, you Have a system where freedom is a necessary part of it. It's going to degrade over time. And isn't. Isn't that what we're. What we're seeing? I mean, like any human system has the seeds of its own destruction planted within, might do well for a while, but the more freedom it produces, the more technology it produces, the more, you know, the more wealth it. The more it's going to rot from within.

B (24:22)

Do you.

A (24:22)

Do you think that's true, or am I just making this up?

B (24:24)

No, I do think that's true. And that's exactly why I'm not a utopian or an idealist. It's why I don't have any time for grand plans which are going to make the world perfect. Because we're dealing with fallen human beings. And at the beginning of the book, I talk a bit about Oswald Spengler and his kind of great theory of cyclical civilizations rising and falling. And I think that's what happens. I think that cultures and civilizations are a bit like. Well, they're a bit like organic creatures. They're born, they flourish, they live, and they die. And I think we shouldn't idealize the kind of west that we think we can reinvigorate. I think that we're at the end of a cultural cycle in the west today, and I think this thing is falling down, which is an opportunity to build something new instead, which is, in a way quite exciting. But, yeah, there's no prospect of a perfect ideal world in the fallen universe we live in. So I try at the end of the book to come up with some quite practical suggestions for how people might live in the age of the machine without imagining that we can have some sort of utopian revolution against it and create a paradise. Because I don't think there's a paradise this side of the grave, alas.

A (25:26)

And even though Christians, many Christians throughout the west have bought into the premises of the machine and it damages them in important ways, nevertheless, it is still possible for Christians to live well in the culture in which we find ourselves. Because there are tens of millions, hundreds of millions of Christians around the world who go to good churches, who worship God, who raise their children well, who find fellowship and comfort in their local churches. And it's still possible to live a godly life under the machine, even though it is profoundly destructive in a lot of ways.

B (26:00)

Well, I think being a Christian actually is excellent training for living a godly life under an oppressive system. Because, you know, as I say, this is the life that Christ and the Apostles were living. How many of the early Christians were martyred by the Romans? How many of the later Christians were martyred by the Ottomans or the Bolsheviks or any number of others? How many Christians have had to live in hostile systems? I mean, the premise of Christianity is not that we create a perfect world and live in it, it's that we try to live a Christ like life in a world that is basically the kingdom of the devil. So, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that's exactly the job that we have. It's the same job we've always had. In that sense. It's nothing new. The technologies are new, I think the scale is new, but the actual job of being a Christian is the same, I suppose, as it's always been. It's just as easy and just as hard as it probably was 2000 years ago.

A (26:47)

Can we go back a little bit to this notion of the role of the demonic in the machine? Would you actually say that when somebody types something into, say, ChatGPT or Claude or something like that, that there is a spiritual force that shapes what comes back?

B (27:05)

Well, the short answer is, I don't know. I'm always a bit nervous when I talk about this because I don't want to be the guy who just says everything's demonic all the time. You know, I think you could make a good living off saying everything was demonic, but I don't. I don't want to be that guy. But at the same time, if you're a Christian, you have to take the powers and principalities seriously, right, because these forces do exist out there. So it's quite possible that the AI systems that are being created now are just what people say they are, which is just collections of ones and zeros which magnify our tendencies back to us. But there's another possibility as well, and as I say, there are a couple of chapters in the book about this and quite a lot of quotes from the people in Silicon Valley who talk in this way. And the possibility is that in some way, by creating these systems, you're building a body for an intelligence to inhabit, which I find a terrifying and also intriguing prospect actually wrote a book, a novel called Alexandria, which is sort of based on that premise. If you've got a bunch of guys in Silicon Valley who are talking about building God and making God, they talk about ushering intelligences into the world. They repeatedly warn about the dangers of the system that they themselves are creating whilst they continue to create it. You also have these systems doing things which the people who are Creating them can't explain behaving in extremely sinister ways. More than one teenagers ended up committing suicide because they were advised to by a chat box. Then you have to consider the possibility that. Put it this way. If there are demonic intelligences in the universe, and Christians are supposed to believe that there are, what better place for them to spend their time? You know, what better body for them to inhabit? Is there a possibility that the things we think are intelligences that we've created are actually intelligences that have come from somewhere else through the technology that we're creating? I think that is a possibility. I don't know if it's true or whether I'm just being paranoid, but it kind of feels true, and I hope it's not. But I don't think I'm the only one to suspect that it might be.

A (29:00)

It does feel kind of true, doesn't it? I mean, I've often looked at the progression of bad ideas in the culture, you know, and how effectively they seem to be spread. And I say to myself, you know, this just looks like it was planned.

B (29:19)

Well, it does feel like that. And I often think that the Internet feels like a giant Ouija board. And, you know, and all of these. All of these little portals that we're opening up are portals that things can come through. And just like a Ouija board, we kind of think it's a bit of a fun game until it starts to be quite sinister and dangerous and destructive. So I think those. Those possibilities are. Are genuinely real. I mean, I was. I was thinking out LOUD recently, if C.S. lewis were writing the Screwtape letters today, you'd have to have a lot of letters in there about how Wormwood should be using the Internet to corrupt people. And if you were a demon, it would be perfect. I mean, look what we've done. We've turned half the human race against the other half. We've got them all addicted to pornography. They're obsessed with their phones. They're going mad. They're losing touch with reality. Some of them are killing themselves because the Internet tells them to. I mean, if you were a demon, you'd be thinking that was a job well done.

A (30:10)

All right, Paul, this has been terrific. Thank you so much for being with us. I really appreciate it, and it's good to meet you. God bless.

B (30:17)

Yeah, you too. Take care.

A (30:22)

This has been a special weekend edition of the World and everything in it. You can really help us out by following us on your podcast app. And while you're there, maybe rate us and leave a comment if you shared this program with someone, thank you. And if you know someone who would enjoy this program, would you mind taking a minute to share it with them? It's a great way to support what we do here. And the fact is the world and everything in it is made possible by the faithful support of listeners like you and by our sponsors such as Medishare.

B (30:53)

When it comes to health care, people.

A (30:55)

Are really frustrated with how much it costs. That's why Medishare is such a welcome relief. It's called health care sharing. More than a million Americans are doing this and many people save thousands of dollars a year. Find out more with a simple text.

B (31:10)

Text the word world to 70246 that's world to 70246.

A (31:19)

Finally, we'd love to hear from you. Write to us@editorng.org and tell us what you thought of today's program. Our address again, editorng.org I'm Les Sillers. Have a great weekend and we'll see you next time.