Some Reflections… Self-Limitation And The Infinite Longing
By GEORGE A. KENDALL
The longer I hear people talking about their “bucket lists,” the more irritated I get. A bucket list is a list of things you want to do before you die, a list you draw up if you are old or terminally ill or otherwise don’t expect to live much longer.
The idea is that there are pleasures you want to enjoy while there is still time, because once you are dead there is nothing more, certainly no pleasures. In other words, the whole idea makes sense only on the assumption either that there is nothing after death, or if there is something, it is worse than what we have now. It reflects a utilitarian worldview which says that life is about packing the short time we have here with as many pleasures as we can.
But this project is obviously an exercise in futility, because whether or not I believe in a life after death, our basic desire, built into our nature, is for an infinite good. No matter how many pleasures I pack into my life in time, even if I were to live a billion years, all of it is finite, and, compared to infinity, it is nothing. When you die, there will be all kinds of pleasures you missed out on in life, but assuming that you go to eternal life, not eternal death, you will have, maybe not precisely those pleasures, but joys so total as to render the earthly joys, the kinds of things you might put on a bucket list, irrelevant.
Another problem with the bucket list idea is that it is based on the assumption that life is about taking care of yourself, making sure you experience as many pleasures as you can, while you can. But for Christians, life is about service, to God and to man, about self-giving. So the right kind of bucket list would consist of ways you can love and serve God and others and thus come into possession of the eternal, infinite Good.
And here is another questionable fad — the idea known as the Singularity, being pushed by a number of mad scientist types. According to this notion, we are in the process of developing artificial intelligence (AI) in more and more complex and sophisticated machines which will ultimately become many times more intelligent than any human being, no matter how brilliant. When that point is reached, we will be able to interface human beings electronically with these machines, in such a way that the human mind itself will become many times more powerful (by a factor of a billion, according to some). At that point, there will be a world-transforming leap beyond all of previous human history.
One of the “benefits” will be the ability to transfer the contents of the human brain, including consciousness and memory, into a machine, and keep transferring those contents as the machines need to be replaced. Thus we will be able to live either forever or for a very long period of time (depending on which of these lunatics you listen to).
The first problem with all of this is that the very concept of artificial intelligence, which requires that we be able to reduce the intellect to data, is an absurdity. A “thinking” machine would lack one essential ingredient — a soul. Now a machine may be able to carry out hugely complex feats of computation, but it cannot engage in true abstract thought, which requires the ability to grasp the immaterial forms of things, something the soul, being itself immaterial, can do. So for all the talk, artificial intelligence just isn’t going to happen.
There are also serious problems with the notion of human beings, once they have their consciousness, personality, and memories stored in these machines, being able to live for a very long time or perhaps forever. Any finite increase in our longevity, even to as much as a million or a billion years, will fail to replace eternity as something to be desired, because we have a built-in longing for the infinite.
And when it comes time to die, even after a billion years, it will still seem too soon. And we will long for more.
But if we could live forever, the life we have would still be finite, though without an end. There would be unlimited duration in time, but for finite beings, existence in time would remain finite. What we really long for is eternity, unlimited being, and that cannot be obtained by technological means.
My guess is that if we could get the ability to live forever in time, it would be a horror, not a blessing. As aeons of time passed, suicide would increase, and all these immortal people would, I suspect, eventually take that way out. The idea of endless duration in time without any transition to a fundamentally different mode of being, beyond time, might be a good definition of Hell.
Speaking of which, I am reminded here of C.S. Lewis’ novel, That Hideous Strength, in which a group of scientists (mad ones, of course) manage to get access to the head of a murderer right after he is guillotined. They immediately connect it to a huge network of tubes, wires, etc., which keep it alive. From then on, they consult the Head, now demonically possessed, regarding the decisions that need to be made by their evil organization, the NICE (National Institute for Coordinated Experiments). Their insane quest for power over nature and other people has left them enslaved to the Evil One. Those looking forward to the Singularity are traveling on the same road.
I am an agnostic on the subject of global warming (though I have my suspicions regarding the political motivations behind much of the allegedly scientific “evidence” being put forward in support of the hypothesis). However, whether that hypothesis is correct or not, there is not much room for doubt that an industrial revolution that has been going on for more than two centuries now at breakneck speed, putting all kinds of noxious substances into the air and water, and eventually producing a huge economy where people want and get more and more material goods, cannot be good for either the natural or the human environment (the latter meaning institutions like the family, local communities, religion, traditions, etc., which, like nature, were relentlessly attacked as the industrial juggernaut rolled along).
So probably a lot of environmental damage is being done, and something needs to be done about it. But what? The politicians and activists who prowl about the world ranting about global warming can only come up with government programs — things like taxing carbon emissions, banning cars, banning meat, and so on. Cong. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — “AOC” — wants to ban kids. But we all know that few government programs do anything other than aggravate the problems they supposedly want to fix. This problem is beyond their reach.
Runaway, out-of-control industrialization happened because of the great weakening of Christian faith, leading people, as noted above, to look for the satisfaction of the infinite longing which only God can satisfy, in the accumulation of material things, which, as also noted above, is futile.
Only self-limitation will bring the runaway industrial economy under control. If people were to return to using their resources frugally, making rational decisions about what they really need and what they can get along without, the market would have to respond to this and things would change. But this can only happen when there is a very large-scale return to Christ.
For this we need evangelization and prayer.
(©2019 George A. Kendall)
