AI, Humanity, and the Tower of Babel

What Johnson is alluding to is well known to us today. It is the same transhumanist ideal which C.S. Lewis prognosticated with great prescience 80 years ago.

BY BERT OLIVIER

View original article at Brownstone.org.

One of the most suggestive allusions to Artificial Intelligence that I have come across lately came from Renaud Beauchard, a French journalist writing for Brownstone Institute. Right at the beginning of his essay Beauchard writes:

As the AI winter draws near, we must refuse to let any chance slip by to awaken our numbed senses. That means staying alert, at every moment, to welcome any sign. And a true labor of love is always one of those gifts that life, sometimes, brings when you are ready to receive them. That’s what a strange, luminous film projected at the Kennedy Center did for me a few days ago. Directed by David Josh Jordan, the movie is entitled El Tonto Por Cristo, which means ‘The Fool for Christ.’

What signs are we seeking? C.S. Lewis, I think, captured it best in his dystopian novel That Hideous Strength, a parable about the birth of artificial intelligence and the technocratic order that paves its way. In the story, the protagonist Mark, an ambitious academic, is drawn into an elite institute called N.I.C.E., whose demonic aims are cloaked in the language of ‘objectivity,’ a preparation for the arrival of superior beings.

It is not only the strangely portentous opening sentence (alluding to the imminent ‘AI winter’) that I immediately found intriguing, but – and this functioned as a kind of ‘sign’ to myself – Beauchard’s reference to the third of the so-called Space Trilogy of novels by C.S. Lewis, namely That Hideous Strength (published in 1945, after the earlier texts, Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra), came as a timely reminder to me. What it prompted in my memory was the almost uncanny prescience that Lewis displayed in that powerful novelistic anticipation of what we have been living through in the last six years or so. This should not be surprising to anyone familiar with C.S. Lewis’s profound literary and philosophical contribution to (the history of) Western culture, as my recent essay on the resonances between his book, The Four Loves, and the Three Colours cinematic trilogy of Krzysztof Kieslowski demonstrates.

In fact, the very title of Lewis’s novel (That Hideous Strength) – which can be read as an oxymoron, because we usually associate strength with something attractive or handsome – could be applied to the globalist cabal which relishes wielding their evil medical-technological power. Through his obedient sycophant, Yuval Noah Harari, Klaus Schwab – until recently the leader of the WEF (arguably the ‘head of the snake’) – made no bones about these neo-fascists’ megalomania when he claimed that the technocratic cabal had acquired ‘divine powers.’

A condensed account of the novel’s narrative will have to suffice. It would probably not appeal to literary purists who insist on the distinctiveness of genres, insofar as it is a synthesis of dystopian science fiction (which always thematically includes technology), Christian theology and supernaturalist mythology, and Arthurian myth. I am no purist of that sort, primarily because I believe that new genres may emerge from the experimental blending of extant ones. Its science-fictional character is significant, particularly for the present, given the quintessential feature defining science fiction – first revealed to me by science fiction authority and connoisseur, James Sey, years ago – namely, the literary and cinematic genre which demonstrates thematically that science and technology comprise a pharmakon (simultaneously poison and cure) capable of constructing new worlds, but also of destroying them. That is what That Hideous Strength achieves, even in admixture with the other thematic and generic components mentioned earlier.

As you would know if you were familiar with the novel, the narrative’s main thread concerns Mark and Jane Studdock, a recently married couple whose lives are disrupted when Mark – an idealistic academic – is accepted (‘recruited’) by the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments, with its ironic acronym, N.I.C.E. Why ironic? Because, for all appearances, it is ostensibly only a ‘progressive’ scientific organisation, but is surreptitiously motivated by sinister, supernatural motives – in fact, eerily anticipating the WEF of today and the so-called ‘elites’ who are associated with it.

Mark becomes increasingly entangled in N.I.C.E.’s agenda of reengineering humanity and eliminating organic life altogether (something that seems to occur at the end of the movie, Transcendence, directed by Wally Pfister, 2014), while Jane – who gradually feels estranged from her husband – starts experiencing what turns out to be prophetic dreams. She feels constrained to seek help from a group at St. Anne’s Manor, under the leadership of Dr. Elwin Ransom, the character encountered throughout the trilogy as its chief protagonist. He is a scholar and spiritual leader, who is also in contact with celestial beings and is dedicated to counter N.I.C.E.’s demonic plans and forces.

From the above it should already be apparent that the novel explores profound themes: the corruption of institutions (which makes it a roman noir, albeit with a few twists), the menace of unrestrained scientific and technological power, the conflict between faith and dogmatic materialism, and last but not least, the redemption of relationships. One of the important occurrences in the plot consists of the awakening of Merlin, the legendary Arthurian wizard, who becomes a key ally in the battle against N.I.C.E. This situates the novel, at least partly, in the realm of fantasy, of course. The climactic events unfold at N.I.C.E.’s headquarters in Belbury, where the druid Merlin, empowered by divine forces, dislocates the organisation’s grip on control by sowing paralysing linguistic confusion among its members, during what was supposed to be its pivotal banquet, leading to its collapse.

This is also where the biblical story of the hubristic tower of Babel reveals its relevance. During the crucial N.I.C.E. banquet, Merlin invokes a supernatural curse echoing the biblical event directly, stating that those who have ‘despised’ God’s word would lose the capacity for linguistic communication. This ‘Curse of Babel’ has an immediate and catastrophic effect, insofar as the leaders of N.I.C.E., who prided themselves on manipulation and control through language, are abruptly reduced to uttering rebarbative nonsense, incapable of being understood by others.

In other words, the Curse of Babel manifests itself through the fact that their speeches become nonsensical gibberish, plunging them into confusion and chaos. This echoes the consequence of God, in the Old Testament, inflicting such pandemonium upon the builders of the Tower of Babel. Just how consequential linguistic confusion or misunderstanding can be was memorably explored in the film, Babel, by Alejandro González Iñárritu (2006), serving as a reminder of the paradigmatic status of the Biblical story in Genesis 11:1-9.

That the N.I.C.E. in Lewis’s novel appositely anticipates the WEF of today is readily apparent where Mark – in conversation with the aptly named Professor Frost, who is devoid of all human feelings (p. 317-319) – advances an argument in favour of preserving the human species, instead of reducing it through war. In response, Frost repudiates Mark’s opinion, stating unequivocally that there may have been a time when war had to preserve people who were still ‘useful’ at the time, but that in the present era, such people have become a ‘dead-weight’ – reminiscent of what the globalist murderers call the ‘useless eaters’ today. More pertinently, however, Frost resorts to the rhetoric of eugenics, telling Mark that the ‘scientific war’ of their day is aimed at preserving scientists, and

‘…to eliminate retrogressive types, while sparing the technocracy and increasing its hold on public affairs. In the new age, what has hitherto been merely the intellectual nucleus of the race is to become, by gradual stages, the race itself. You are to conceive the species as an animal which has discovered how to simplify nutrition and locomotion to such a point that the old complex organs and the large body which contained them are no longer necessary. That large body is therefore to disappear. Only a tenth part of it will now be needed to support the brain. The individual is to become all head. The human race is to become all Technocracy.’

If this strikes you as being familiar, don’t be surprised. Lewis actually anticipated the thinking of the eugenics-besotted, control-obsessed billionaire-class globalist technocrats of today with astonishing accuracy, as current WEF-leader Larry Fink’s remarks at a summit in Saudi Arabia in 2024 openly revealed:

During the WEF’s summit in Riyadh, Fink assured attendees that collapsing populations in nations around the world will not be a problem for the global elite.

In fact, Fink gloated that the collapse of civilization would be an advantage for those ‘big winners’ who have been ‘substituting humans’ with ‘machines.’

Fink continues by bluntly declaring that the goal of the globalists is the maximum destruction of the planet’s population.

‘I can argue that in developed countries, countries with declining populations will benefit,’ Fink said during the WEF panel discussion.

‘The big winners are those with shrinking populations.’

‘That’s something that most people never talked about,’ he admitted while saying the quiet part out loud.

Returning to Frost’s observation, above, that ‘…the individual is to become all head…,’ the last term assumes a central place in Lewis’s narrative, specifically as ‘The Head,’ which is what the head of a beheaded criminal, François Alcasan, has become through sustained technological preservation by N.I.C.E. scientists. It is not difficult to see in The Head as a forerunner of contemporary Artificial Intelligence (AI), notwithstanding the fact that it is not literally a machine. Why? Because, as the narrative indicates, it functions very much like the AI of today; to wit, a disembodied intelligence that, in addition to providing information, plays a crucial controlling role regarding events and global planning.

The Head’s integration with N.I.C.E., and its ability to influence human behaviour, plan global conquests, and control infrastructure, arguably – in Lewis’s treatment of it – anticipated fears about autonomous AI systems gaining control over human society. It is therefore no understatement that The Head serves as a powerful philosophical and literary precursor to AI, embodying as it does the dangers of a dehumanised, centralised (or, in the case of many such entities, decentralised, but ultimately coordinated) intelligence, operating without any moral or spiritual constraints.

In the novel, The Head is described as a ‘Macrobe’ – a non-human, if not inhuman, unearthly intelligence suggestive of a consciousness that is a fusion of technology (despite originally having been part of an organic body) and supernatural evil. Apropos of this uncanny entity (half-organic, half-technical), in a review of the novel, Phillip E. Johnson writes (I quote at length):

The NICE turns out to be demonic in inspiration, and intends to impose upon England a regime of ruthless social engineering that Joseph Stalin would have admired. The apparent ‘Head’ at the NICE’s mansion at Belbury is the head of a guillotined murderer, kept alive with advanced life support systems, but this gruesome object is merely the conduit for orders from the dark powers. Belbury’s human leaders recruit and flatter Mark, but the human resource they really want is Jane. She is a seer, whose visions involve the return to life of the magician Merlin, long entombed under Bracton Wood. If Belbury can unite its materialist magic with Merlin’s old–fashioned kind, it can achieve its dream of freeing the mind from messy organic life. ‘In us organic life has produced Mind. It has done its work. After that we want no more of it.’

Does that sound far–fetched? Artificial intelligence visionaries are keen to make it a reality. While the biologists make plans to reprogram the human genome, the cybergurus dream of uploading the human mind into advanced computers. Freed of the limitations of biology and possessed of superhuman intelligence, these ‘spiritual machines’ might explore and conquer the cosmos. Or they might not bother to do so, since they could create a virtual reality for themselves that would be better than the real thing. Then ‘we’ would truly be like God. But who is ‘we?’ In real life, as in C. S. Lewis’ fiction, the dark side of the technological utopia is that it implies a huge difference in power between the few who do the programming and the many who are programmed. Belbury’s chief scientist understands that ‘it is not Man who will be omnipotent, it is some one man, some immortal man.’ Those who understand what is at stake pursue a murderous rivalry to gain control of the power to program.

What Johnson is alluding to is well known to us today. It is the same transhumanist ideal which C.S. Lewis prognosticated with great prescience 80 years ago – where consciousness is detached from biology and wielded for domination – and which we know the globalist technocrats have been promoting for some time now. In Lewis’s novel he had the literary license to combine supernaturalism and magic to undermine and eventually destroy the technocrats of N.I.C.E. – Merlin’s ‘Curse of Babel’ serves hilariously well to cause mutual linguistic incomprehension, and hence pandemonium, at their banquet, assisted by the creatures magically conjured up to destroy these transhumanist evildoers.

But what do we do today to rid humanity once and for all of their equally unscrupulous contemporary counterparts, or at least to disempower them conclusively? We lack a Merlin, and a Ransom (the leader of the St Anne’s group combating the technocrats). Nevertheless, the technocrats of today are arguably – like their precursors in Lewis’s novel – linguistically confounded by the fact that we, their adversaries, are fluent in the language of moral responsibility and unshakeable commitment to the values of civilization, instead of destruction, which is their forte. In sum, we have ethical resolve, courage, and the determination, never to give up in our fight against this merciless foe.

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