The testimony of history suggests that the phenomena of “nation” and “empire” are both equally ineradicable from human political life. There is a chicken-and-egg aspect to the relation, albeit with (over the course of millennia) both chickens and eggs getting larger and larger, and with the caveat that historically the egg of the nation really did come first. To (over)simplify: imperial projects emerge out of national projects that reach beyond their “national” boundaries, either in response to a regional power vacuum of some sort or as a desire to take over an existing imperial project, while national projects emerge (or re-emerge) from the desire to self-define over against a broader imperial project and/or the other national projects uneasily coexisting within that imperial frame. Once you have the first empire, all nations’ self-definition is somehow reacting to the context of empire. The modern exemplar of this dynamic is the rise of 19th century European nationalisms within and without the Habsburg empire: the nations and nationalisms in question positioned themselves and their national projects relative to (i.e., over against) the Vienna system, whether or not they had really been ruled by Vienna for some time. There are ancient exemplars, too: the empire incorporated by the Assyrians (who had a robust national project if ever there was one!) was taken over and expanded by the Babylonians, then by the Medes and the Persians, then by Alexander the Great.

The specialist in the history of either period might now protest that there are many salient and irreducible differences between Alexander’s empire and the Habsburgs’. Certainly, I am oversimplifying: a nation is not a nation is not a nation, and an empire is not an empire is not an empire. Such forms inhere only imperfectly in this crude matter. But if there is not such a thing as a “nation” or an “empire” (and the permanent squabbling over how to define these terms suggests this is in fact the case), there are such things as “nationalism” and “imperialism.” Not things, exactly. Rather, they are basic political impulses or desires: not, in themselves, goods or virtues, but tendencies of political aspiration that exist in a permanent and uneasy dialectic.

And these desires have, as have all human aspirations and efforts here under the sun, virtuous and vicious aspects to them. The virtuous aspects of nationalism stem from the love of and gratitude for what is immediately given to me: it is good to be grateful for one’s own place and family and history and traditions, and to be in a sense protective of the goodness and justice of their continued existence (insofar, of course, as these traditions are good and just!), and to feel a sense of solidarity with all those who share those goods. The vicious aspects come in as soon as one says, “Oh Lord, I thank thee that thou hast made me a $NATIONALITY — not one of those $OUTGROUP-NATIONALITIES over there, whom I hate and assuredly You hate too.” The good of nationalism is the love of the particular, and the evil of nationalism is the hatred of other particulars as threats to my particular. It needs to be leavened by the genuine love of the universal.

For the virtuous aspects of (what one might call) imperialism stem from the love of and gratitude for those who are not immediately given to me: it is good to love and feel solidarity with those who do not share my place and family and history and traditions, because what we do share is humanity, is personhood. It is good to grieve when other persons, even those distant from me, do not enjoy the goods and fruits of justice and cultural flourishing. It is also good to want to share one’s own goods with those who lack those goods, and to want to share in the goods that others have. The vicious aspects come in as soon as one says, “And because we here must have the goods that they have there—” or “they must be given the goods that we have here” — “we are justified in dominating them, for the good of all parties.” The good of imperialism is the love of the universal, and the evil of imperialism is the hatred of other particulars as threats to the universal. It needs to be leavened by the genuine love of other particulars.

I said above that these basic political desires and aspirations exist in a permanent and uneasy dialectic; that nationalism and imperialism beget one another in a perpetual cycle. This is, I think, because we humans are easily dissatisfied — it is easiest to see the failings of whatever desire dominates one’s own political situation, nationalist or imperialist, and to thus overlook the failings of the alternative — and also because we are vicious. It is hard — maybe impossible? — to hold a pure nationalism or a pure imperialism without being consumed by the vicious aspects of either. The worst state for any person is probably to be a vicious nationalist and a vicious imperialist at the same time, as many (most?) empire-builders in history have probably been. But the best state would be to desire the virtuous form of both: a universal kingdom, with no geographical or temporal borders to compromise its perfection, ruled with perfect justice by a righteous king, so that every particular — every person — under the reign of this universal may flourish as itself, becoming the most glorious version of itself.

Nationalists and imperialists both, in their own ways, long for this kingdom. Their desires are incomplete, malformed versions of this longing: they are unable to hold together loving both the particular and the universal. Their last state will be worse than their first. But there is One who can.

Technology is the human’s achievement, not his failing even though the use he chooses to make of it may be fallen indeed. If the products of human technē become philosophically and experientially problematic, it is, I would submit, because we come to think of them as autonomous of the purpose which led to their production and gives them meaning. We become, in effect, victims of a self-forgetting, losing sight of the moral sense which is the justification of technology. Quite concretely, the purpose of electric light is to help humans see. When it comes to blind them to the world around them, it becomes counterproductive. The task thus is not to abolish technology but to see through it to the human meaning which justifies it and directs its use… not to abolish the works of technology but to bracket them, to escape their fascination in order to rediscover their forgotten meaning.

— Erazim Kohák, The Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Moral Sense of Nature, 24–25

Part I: Jesus the Human

1. Jesus of Nazareth raised bodily from the dead [resurrection accounts, post-resurrection appearances]
2. The bodily, human life of Jesus vindicated by his resurrection as enacting true humanity [all over the Gospels]

Part II: True Humanity, Creation, and Sin

3. Jesus: the true image of the invisible God [Colossians 1 and intertexts]
4. The image of God as royal status [Genesis 1 and the rest of the Bible]
5. Sin I — irresponsibility: rejecting the responsibilities that come with royal status [lots that can go here]
6. Jesus: the second Adam [1 Corinthians 15, Romans 8]
7. The Church: bride of the Lamb, second Eve [Revelation 21 and intertexts]
8. The first Adam and the first Eve [Genesis 2]
9. Sin II — idolatry: choosing knowledge of good and evil apart from life, leading to death and corruption [Genesis 3]
10. Jesus: the temple of the Holy Spirit [man, it’s just everywhere]
11. Christians: temples of the Holy Spirit [1 Corinthians 3 & 6, Romans 6]
12. Sin III — sacrilege: offending against the presence of God [Leviticus, Romans 6, 1 Corinthians 3 & 6, Ephesians 5]

Part III: The Shape of True Human Life

13. Human companionship: friendship and marriage
14. Human fruitfulness: discipleship and procreation
15. Unavoidably long excursus chapter on sexual behavior, human sexuality, and sexual bioethical issues which nevertheless has to be framed by (14) and (15)
16. Human vocation: rest and work
17. Human uniqueness: relation to other living creatures and to machines
18. Possibly (alas) another unavoidably long excursus chapter on technology and medicine
19. Human teleology: resurrection life and end-of-life bioethical issues

Obviously 3–5, 6–9, and 10–12 would be key individual units of argumentation. Having now made the sketch, it occurs to me that as a whole that section would map, albeit imperfectly, onto the traditional “threefold office” of Christ: 3–5 corresponds straightforwardly to the royal office, 6–9 (somewhat less straightforwardly) to the prophetic office, and 10–12 to the priestly office. Of course, the traditional order is prophet, priest, king, so maybe some reordering is called for. But the value of this order, I think, is that it anchors the whole testimony about humanity in the status with which it is created, the status that produces the subsequent vocations. That may be the wisest apologetic move, since most people (at least in the ex-Christian West), Christian or not, now come programmed with an intuitive sense of the dignity and worth of every person. That sense often lacks controls, but it may be the most natural starting point.

EDIT: Thinking more about this, it seems really important to have established multiple ways to talk about sin when we come to Part III and the different “ethical” topoi. Irresponsibility, idolatry, and sacrilege are far from perfect terms for Sin I, II, and III (for one thing, they aren’t all alliterative!), but they get at the need for multiple axes of evaluation. Some things that defy a Christian view of the human person in the realm of medicine, for instance, are not sacrilegious exactly… but still idolatrous and irresponsible. I want better terms for these categories. But one needs some such categories.

Why you should not use ChatGPT, large language models, or other “artificial intelligence” (falsely so-called) tools in your research or work, for any of the synthetic tasks (summaries of data or information, etc.) for which it is proposed as a helpful time-saver:

1. The process of pattern recognition and synthetic integration is the basis of how human beings come to know and understand the world.
2. This process is an inextricably bodily process in humans. (This is true of human cognition in general: the whole of the human body, not just the brain, is involved in every act of thought — and in fact other bodies are involved, too, because thought is an intersubjective process. But I digress.)
3. ChatGPT and similar tools are, however, definitionally disembodied. Even if they are in fact “just pattern-recognition machines” (dubious), by virtue of being disembodied their pattern “recognition” is not the same as the real thing in humans.
4. In fact, insofar as ChatGPT exists in the physical world, it is under a very different sort of embodiment — a non-organic sort — which is antithetical to the human sort.
5. Therefore, ChatGPT and so forth cannot be trusted to faithfully simulate human knowing — and if the mechanism cannot be trusted neither can the results.
6. Additionally, by using such a tool, a human being forgoes the opportunity to practice and experience such knowing, kneecapping his or her capacity to learn from the experience.

In a nutshell: the promise of LLMs is “impersonal knowledge” — but no such thing exists. Relying on it is thus, in a meaningful sense, worse than nothing.

Addendum: true personal certainty is much rarer than one thinks. Strictly speaking I am, I think, only confident that 2 + 2 = 4; very confident, since I know from trustworthy authorities that arithmetic may be proven logically consistent and from experience that categories of twos added together produce fours. Confident enough, even, to bet my life (if such a bet were necessary) that adding two to two in any life-threatening scenariorio would make four. Confidence is a real part of knowledge. But am I certain that 2 + 2 = 4? I do not understand the rules and axiomata of mathematical logic by which such statements are proven logically certain in the strong sense. I could, I suppose, be living in a remarkable delusion which has filtered out all experiences of 2 + 2 failing to equal 4 — which seems highly unlikely, but is that not just what such a deluded person might say? My certainty is “only” functional, which is actually — a species of confidence. Is there anything regarding which I am truly certain?

Important to explore, in all fields of life and thought: the practical difference between confidence and certainty. I.e., what action is the right one to take in any given situation may depend significantly on whether you are confident in vs. certain of a given outcome.

In a technological age, philosophy, too, tends to conceive of itself as a technē. To some writers, it has come to appear as one of the special sciences, whose subject matter is language, whose task is the analysis of arguments, and whose virtue is technical proficiency. Others take philosophy to be a metatheory whose subject matter is the theories of other philosophers and scientists, whose task is speculative construction, and whose virtue is sophistication in the peculiar sense of maximal remoteness from lived experience, so that the author who writes fifth-generation commentaries thinks himself more advanced than the preceding four generations of commentators—and far more so than the naïve observer upon whose original insight they all comment. Both linguistic analysis and theoretical construction are, surely, legitimate tasks. Yet the thinkers whose insight withstood the test of time, from Socrates to Husserl, were of a different breed. They were the perennial beginners, taking the sense of lived experience in its primordial immediacy for their subject matter. Their stance was one of wonder, not of sophistication; the task they undertook was one of articulation—and their virtue was naïveté, a willingness to see before theorizing, to encounter the wonder of being rather than enclose themselves in cunningly devised theories.

— Erazim Kohák, The Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Moral Sense of Nature, xi

David Brooks:

“Without even thinking about it, we in the creative class consolidate our class standing through an ingenious code of ‘openness.’ We tend to like open floor plans, casual dress, and eclectic ‘localist’ tastes that are willfully unpretentious. This seems radically egalitarian, because there are no formal hierarchies of taste or social position. But only the most culturally privileged person knows how to navigate a space in which the social rules are mysterious and hidden.”

I think often about two subspecies, or effects, of the phenomenon Brooks describes in this last sentence. The first is how the abandonment of clear status-signaling and deferential modes of address in hierarchical settings — academia and ecclesia being two such realms — actually makes it more challenging for entrants from lower economic and culturally powerful strata to a) accurately navigate those realms upon entering, when they possess the lowest level of power in the hierarchy, and b) be recognized as having truly arrived once they ascend to the higher levels of power. The second is how the contemporary world, despite the radically increased cultural visibility of neurodivergence, is in certain experiential ways a more hostile environment for persons on the autism spectrum, who need clear rules and overt signals for social settings rather than the muddy and inconsistent rules and covert signals with which our neurotypical ruling class is comfortable. Deference and clear social rules are contingent, socially constructed fictions; but they were and are useful fictions, in ways wholly unappreciated by their meritocratic destroyers. No society can function without socially constructed useful fictions. The question is whether or not the new set represents genuine improvement over the old.

UPDATE: My (very clever) wife pointed out that the therapeutic language and culture predominant among the teenage to early-30s set is another manifestation of this phenomenon. The need to “normalize” being “not okay,” seeing a therapist (and talking with friends about what “my therapist says”), having some form of neurodivergence or (at least) severe social anxiety, etc., can be read as both a response to the low-deference, muddy-social-rules culture we now live in and a replacement for older forms of deference and clear social rules. It serves as a way to cope with the unpredictability (uncontrollability?) of the world and as an imposition on it of new, somewhat clearer rules. It makes some social facts certain again. One cannot, in 2023, dismiss a diagnosis (even a self-diagnosis) of a mental health disorder, or do other than honor the boundaries that one’s friend declares he or she is setting, or veto anything that one’s friend’s therapist says — although thanks to a certain ubiquitous podcast advertiser, the idea that you can “get a new therapist” anytime your old one makes you uncomfortable has now been, er, normalized, which severely blunts the scalpel edge that true talk therapy ought to have, slicing through our self-protective layers of irony and self-deception to get at and treat the genuine underlying problems!

• To the disciples: “Unless you change and become like a little child, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Mt. 18:3)
• To the chief priests and elders: “The tax collectors and the prostitutes go into the kingdom of heaven before you” (Mt. 21:31)

This is what I mean, in yesterday’s post, by “Do not rule out any kinds of questions and observations from the conversation, even ones that (initially) seem unsuited to Bible study or insufficiently sophisticated.” Ask the questions that little children would ask; ask the questions that those on the outs from elite society would ask. This is, notably, difficult for those formed by elite society! The whole enterprise of contemporary Western elite education is meant as much to inculcate the habits of mind and speech proper to the ruling class in its next generation as to render that class accessible to the lower socioeconomic strata. Note well that this last sentence is not a criticism, per se, of contemporary Western elite education; indeed it’s a sentence that could hardly have been written without it. (The various so-called critical theories mostly exist, not principally for the powerless to critique the powerful, but for the already powerful to engage in the discipline of self-critique.) Nevertheless the ruling strata are always peculiarly able and constantly tempted — by Mammon, mostly — to drown out the voice of the Word by virtue of those habits of mind and speech. Wherefore it is a most useful and spiritually edifying exercise to treat them, as frequently as possible, as rubbish. Change, at least for the hour of Bible study, and become like a little child; ask questions of the text (of Jesus!) that the tax collectors and the prostitutes would ask, and follow their lead into the kingdom. With such people Jesus prefers to feast.

1. Read a whole book (or, if impractical, a large, cohesive section) of the Bible aloud in a group.
2. Pray for illumination (Cranmer’s famous Collect for Scripture is good here.)
3. Sit silently together for 5 minutes. No distractions allowed!
4. Discuss any questions and observations that occur to you, taking notes. Do not rule out any kinds of questions and observations from the conversation, even ones that (initially) seem unsuited to Bible study or insufficiently sophisticated.
5. Look for, and name, patterns that emerge in the questions and observations.
6. Reconvene and repeat, rereading the notes from last time.

That’s all it takes to have a great Bible study. You don’t need a scholarly guide or a commercially produced book study. You don’t need knowledge of the Greek New Testament or the Hebrew Bible, though those are occasionally useful bonuses to be deployed with tremendous care and caution. You certainly don’t need pre-written questions, whether from a celebrity Christian author or ChatGPT (perish the thought). What you really need is time and space for contemplation. There are no Bible study “tools” that can substitute for that now-threatened resource. The Word of God is living and active, and the modern technological world represents a colossal project of seeking to drown out its voice. Silence the noises, and listen to the Spirit.

Actually, there is one “tool” you do need, and should incorporate into the discussion process after you’ve read the book or section under consideration a few times together. That tool is the rest of the Bible. The whole canon of Scripture is your indispensable guide to understanding each part. Many modern Bibles include a cross-reference system; some of these references are more valuable than others, but figure out which ones are the most fruitful, and read those passages (with their full contexts!) aloud too. Commentaries, too, are useful in this context, because they can point out theological parallels and connections that are too macro-scale to fit into the cross-reference system. But most of all, use your own intuitions developed through reading the Bible: “this bit here sounds awfully like…” is the right instinct to follow. Commentaries and cross-references are really only useful insofar as they build up your own biblical literacy and instincts. Let the different parts of the canon speak to and about one another.

And, incidentally, as you do this, don’t worry overmuch about historical questions of whether or not “the writer of Book X knew and was referencing Book Y.” For modern people, these kinds of questions are red herrings that lead us astray from the actual task of understanding the words in the canon. Of course the words emerge from a historical setting. They are still in our Bibles because generations of the faithful following God’s Way realized that these words transcended (without obviating) the particularities of their original historical settings and were speaking to them, with divine import and power, in the divine Now: “as long as it is called ‘Today.’” Rather settle for trusting a) the intentionality of the canon’s later editors and compilers, who definitely knew what they were doing, and b) the divine intentionality of the Spirit of God in guiding the authors, editors, and compilers through that process.