Artificial Intelligence should make us wax and wane on how it will impact humanity as a whole. Elon Musk has called for a halt to AI advancement while more recently rolling out his new AI robots, Optimus. This captures well the uncertainty implied in its development. The promise is huge, but I wonder what happens to humans whose jobs evaporate. In this sense, education comes powerfully to the forefront. What jobs require human talent if AI advances in mass? Data analysts’ jobs will erode quickly. More generally, all jobs that deal with comparative data will likely disappear. There are many white collar jobs: lawyers, research scientists, computer coders, scholars, etc. Why bother with scholars at all? Scholars synthesize data to provide new insights, but this goes at a human rate. Coders write and check code, but an AI will do this way more rapidly. How many coders will it take to keep an eye on AI if corporations utilize AI instead of humans to write code?  Humans take years to read and digest the literature to make them a scholar on a subject. An AI can read, digest, and produce new material, in an instant. If an AI lawyer could cover every piece of case-law, why would I want a human lawyer? If Musk’s Optimus can work in a labor position, why do I need laborers? What do humans do if all these jobs no longer require humans to fill them?

The answers to these questions will be born from our take on human nature generally. More specifically, what happens when humans have an abundance of time on their hands? To quote the Puritans, “idle hands are the devil’s playground.” We need not agree with this sentiment completely, but it focuses rightly on a coming crisis. To cite another cynic of our time, Yuval Harari, humans will become “useless eaters.” While my view of human dignity precludes thinking of humans in these terms, we can’t miss Harari’s point. What do humans do when they are no longer needed to work? The theological insight from the book of Genesis—that God created humankind to work—also brings forward the question about human happiness. If humans are inherently designed to find satisfaction in the work of their hands, what happens when humans no longer need to work?

Two crises look to be on the horizon: a crime crisis and an existential crisis. As we know from historical demographic data, as unemployment goes up so does crime. While the research on the connection between job-loss and crime is varied, there is sizable volume demonstrating the connection. Intuitively, it is obvious that crime should go up as job-losses happen. If income is lost and resources are sparse but needs remain, what is the solution? Either we produce what we need, or we plunder what we need. Without a job, we cannot produce so that leaves plunder. There is another answer that Marxists would offer: i.e., UBI, or universal basic income. UBI destroys social mobility, and it puts a feature into society that enables idleness to endure. Is it an instinct to improve our own lives and the lives of our children? UBI cannot provide a path to improve anyone lives except for those administering UBI, which is typically government and the elites at the top of the financial social strata. In short, universal basic income codifies a caste system where mechanics for social mobility are eroded. An idle society with no opportunity to “change their stars” commends “plundering” as a way out. The father or mother, telling themselves that their kids and their kids are worth it, will view UBI as a systemic evil to be overcome so that no matter how heinous the plundering might be, it will be justifiable, and they will sleep well at night.

If AI takes over jobs, and there is no UBI, what do humans do? Will corporations pay lots of humans with benefits and the whole nine yards when they can simply have AI and robots do the same job with potentially better results, and way cheaper? There is one situation that sound favorable; if property ownership is vast and property-owners can go back to farming and bartering, there is a path forward for society. As an aside, I do not believe UBI to be a solution, just to make it clear—as I hope I did in the former paragraph. Without property ownership and the will to return to an earlier way of life, however, what will humans do without jobs?

This is not a small problem, and it is a new problem. There has never been a time in human history when humans were not needed for the productivity of society. To be fair, AI is nothing more than human intelligence magnified with massive processing power—I’ve written on this extensively in early posts. Because it is new, how it will play out is unknown and solutions are not available. We might cite Star Trek, the Next Generation, where the technological advancements allowed humanity’s basic needs for food, water, and shelter to be eliminated, and with this, the old-economic currencies were unneeded. While such utopianism is conceivable, it doesn’t deal with the problem of limited resources. Scarcity is the center of all human envy. Population growth mixed with limited energy mixed with scarcity leads to the conclusion that there will be those who have and those who have not. If resources are extractable from other planets, we might resolve the problem of scarcity; it still seems doubtful. We don’t know, at this point, the impact of introducing new mass or new elements into Earth to even know if such is viable. Plundering, then, is a reasonable expectation for those who are under the full weight of scarcity.

The existential crisis deserves more space, but let me qualify the nature of the crisis here. A long-standing philosophical question is “what is the good life?” What brings human happiness? The American project has been outed as a failure with its adage, “pursuing what you want is the attainment of happiness.” What we should desire is central to the quest for happiness. If doing as one wants led to happiness, Americans should be joyful to astronomical levels, but what we find is a populace with greater stress than other countries and a culture fixed around grievance and envy. We suggest that the belief that the pursuit of money leads to happiness is a toxic feature too of the American myth. Satisfying work, a work/life balance, the centrality of a cause or causes bigger than ourselves, and the ongoing moral improvement of our souls, seems like a start to finding happiness, at least as this theologian sees it.

Dr. Scalise

The relationship between the original Great Awakening (17 – 18 century in America) and the American revolution is well understood. This original Great Awakening was marked by a dedication to the reading and study of Scripture, communal revivalism–which is a community devotion to forming society in light of biblical directives and guidance–and codification of biblical values into the then colonies’ moral structures. A misnomer which can be dismissed by reviewing the pre-1776 government literature is that many of of the Founding Fathers of America were bent towards Deism. Deism is the idea that God exists, that God set the world into motion, but that God is absent in the world on the day to day and instead the world is governed by so-called “natural laws.” A true Deist would not have a place for God entering into the world in the form of a man, which means a true Deist has no place for the truth or possibility of Jesus Christ. There is robust literature leading up to 1776 and after that directly and indirectly refers to the Biblical texts or to being a protestant Christian, which is a referendum against the idea that the general tenor of the Founding Fathers was deistic. Instead, the original Great Awakening with its emphasis on the actual words of Scripture was the ideological quarry from which the American revolution gathered a great deal of resources. The famous adage on many of our coins, e pluribus unum, “out of many, one,” may need to be inverted to help us understand how 1776 happened and was sustainable: ex uno plures, “out of one, many.”

Why does all this matter at this precise moment in 2024? The present cultural milieu of the conservative Right in America is expanding its influence to welcome those who are not historically conservatives through something popularly referred to as “the great awakening.” The great awakening of today should be starkly differentiated from the original Great Awakening. The latter was centered on the Christian God and the Bible while the former, today’s great awakening, is centered on seeing through the lies that have brainwashed, deceived, and captured many Americans for decades if not longer. The original Great Awakening was built ex uno plures, out of one protestant ideology, many colonies united to form the United States. I am not saying that Protestantism is a uniform set of beliefs; however, even today, there are foundational cornerstone beliefs that all conservative Protestant groups agree-upon. We can disregard the captured elements within Protestantism, often referred to as “liberal” or “progressive” protestantism, which really are an extension of American leftism or “wokeism.” Today’s great awakening is more the inverse of the original Great Awakening: e pluribus unum, out of many religious positions and worldviews, one people is coming together against the elites. My question for our moment in 2024 regards today’s great awakening’s sustainability. Can a group of non-ideologically aligned persons sustain the unity required to sustain the changes that come after the elites are defeated? The question is relevant because we want to know if our present struggle against globalism/elitism will provide my kids and their kids a brighter future. If the current struggle against globalism/elitism results in 4 years of conservative-MAGA rule but then retraces to the typical RINO and Democrat binary rulership, then little will be made of the current great awakening. It will not be seen as something that improved the lives of our kids or their kids; it will be little more than a populist trend tied to a strong personality–Donald Trump–that did not have the unifying ideological foundation to give it lasting effect.

In view of such a danger, I appeal to the original Great Awakening. The hopes of staying unified and not becoming immediately divided will reside in our ability to agree upon a formal set of documents as characterizing our identity and ethos. The way that the internet works with social media has made the idea of an immovable document that sets the identity and ethos all the more important. Social media makes things change fast; social movements change fast. An immovable document called the Bible has the battle-tested history behind it. First, the Bible upended Rome and ancient Greco-Roman values: much to the disapproval of Nietzsche. Then it spread to the Nordic tribes. It battled a sister religion Islam to a stalemate, and finally the Bible undergirded the American revolution. What has made America great are the ideals that came from and were sustained by Protestant Christianity and the Bible that identified it. My plea is that the current great awakening turn towards what we believe and move beyond focusing on what and who we dislike. We defeat the elites, and then what? Yes, the current great awakening is united by the belief in personal liberty and its protection from government. However, once the elites who use government to violate that freedom are defeated, whose definition of freedom will keep the unity of the people together? Christian freedom is about learning the good and doing it so that one’s ability to use their freedom expands and deepens, but it is not about just doing whatever someone wants. American freedom is often defined as “do as one pleases.” Islamic Americans must face the difficulty that the final goal of Islam is to establish theocracy wherever it gains standing and within that Sharia Law that comes out of it will prohibit the proselytizing by other religions: i.e., Islam does not protect the right to “freedom of religion.” Thus, Islam’s freedom of religion prohibits others’ religious freedom. My point is that today’s great awakening cannot stop with the negative: “we are joined as one people to stop the elites from violating our freedom.” It must go on to affirm the nature of that freedom at a level and depth that only a religion can provide.

It is to be remembered that every question about how to go about life is a religious question. Let’s take progressive wokeism as a religion for a moment. What makes a religion or cult? There are either founding documents or a measure of “divine right” which is the unilateral issuance of one’s word as law. Furthermore, there is either a fideism to the beliefs or a rational participation in those beliefs. Fideism, by the way, is the unmoving faithfulness to one’s religion or worldview despite evidence that contradicts it, and it is usually identified by a staunch close-mindedness to even hearing the counter-evidence. Western, progressive wokeism has the same belief-structure of all cults and religions although it leans to the side of the more irrational religions/cults. There is divine right, which are the talking points of the current media apparatus as it represents and reaffirms the “top liberal candidate or leader.” Wokeism expects fideism to its word and its beliefs. The implied beliefs within the “divine right” of wokeism may change but the fideism to those words are expected to be believed, upheld, and to be punished if any deviance happens. Wokeism’s position on abortion, which really is one of the only well-known policies of Kamala Harris’ 2024 democrat platform, codifies profiteering on a mother’s preference to kill her unborn baby as a defining feature. This affirms that “freedom to personally prefer” is more valuable than human life. It is a dark belief, but it can be wondered how many democrats think of it this way. More likely, the good democrat is merely staying within the cult’s requirement to be faithful to wokeism’s divine right.

Dr. Scalise