Letter #11: Miracle or Apocalypse?
The patented Klavan Humanity Test
Dad,
Okay, this is really getting good, just in time for me to leave next week on vacation to Cambodia—where I intend to sit cross-legged on a rickety wooden pier chanting “Om Shanti Shanti” or some other magic spell while the so-called first world plummets into an apocalyptic sinkhole and a techno-atrocity forged from the amalgamated remnants of cyborg humanity stalks abroad in the land, gaze blank and pitiless as the sun. Good luck, I guess?
If you haven’t been raptured by the time I get back, I really hope we’ll pick up this thread about humanity being the point of everything. Because I think it’s desperately important, and I also think it opens up a whole new territory of conversation.
On the one hand, we’ve landed on a core principle we can both confidently stand by. You put it beautifully: “The job of being human is to journey toward the image of God within us.” If a hunk of scrap metal can screw in a million widgets a nanosecond, but it warps that image, who gives a crap about the machine? It’s dust compared with us.
On the other hand, what happens when the machines really do start making the lame walk and the blind see? You can already look up videos of this sort of thing, where brain implants or wearable devices bring the light of the world streaming into eyes that had gone dark. It puts a catch in your chest. I’d even say there’s a chance it’s part of God’s plan.
Because opening deaf ears and giving speech to silent mouths—restoring the human connection with each other and with the world—sounds suspiciously like what I’ve heard that Jesus guy got up to while on earth. He didn’t just talk about it, as in a comfy metaphor: he did it physically, like, with his hands. Then he said, “whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and even greater things.” Then he just tractor-beamed on out of here while the rest of us were like, huh?
But sure enough, it was the Christian West that created the conditions for science eventually to flourish. The same science that now threatens to submerge us in a nightmare, and the same West that is now in crisis. So is it possible that some of these technological achievements represent a righteous fulfillment of our calling as stewards and restorers of the cosmos? Or is it all a twisted parody of real divine healing, a diabolical illusion that will end us up with the whole sinkhole-and-pitiless-beast scenario? Because I’d really like to avoid that if we can.
But I suspect the better path lies through a good use of our machines—not in a headlong flight away from technology altogether. So we are going to have to figure out a way of applying the patented Klavan Humanity Test to these new inventions as they come along. And who better than us, the patent holders?
Love,
Spencer
 | A guest post by
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I think part of the reason that we are even having to have the conversation about whether humanity is something special in the universe is because we have narrowed our experiences so much through what christians used to call sin (the real kind, not the kind fundamentalists use to beat people over the head) or what we might today call pleasure overload.
Our experiences have become stale, one note. We seek only what gives us pleasure in every moment and avoid any other sensation simultaneously missing out on a kaleidoscope of feeling and life. We think emotions are like primary colors. Anger, excitement, sadness, contentment. We forgot that feeling is abiut much more than that. That the poets, the composers, the painters of yesteryears, in a word the artists - were using their mediums to communicate those marvelously complex and seeminly underscribable emotions.
Today everything is thought. We are abused by rationality. Modern art has to be thought instead of felt. From this perspective we are doubtful of the specialness of us and no wonder. We need the entirety of human experience for our uniqueness in God’s eyes to be apparent enough as to not need rational justification.
I can't wait to hear the answer to this last question, because it is a problem I have been wrestling with for years. Flight from the perversity of these monstrosities feels right, but I keep grinding against the rock of the virtue of prudence and using our tools wisely, uncomfortable as that can sometimes be.
Safe travels, Spencer. I hope you find all that you're looking for and more on your trip. And thank you both again for this beautiful conversation! I'm going to start praying for the Klavan family.