Rob Horning, on “the emergent way of seeing” encouraged by generative AI:

No one is entitled to a unique experience, or at least to a unique representation of it. The photo that one takes of some event doesn’t belong to the picture taker; it belongs to the “field of what is representable,” which once was the shared possession of an entire culture but is becoming the property of AI companies, who are trying to turn that field into a closed, proprietary model. Then, every image you take of “your” experience will be quickly demonstrated to be derived from an existing idea already latent in the total model of all possible experiences. […]

[We end up with] the sense that “a model could have generated this” whether it had or not. It projects a subjectlessness onto a scene, subtracts the specific intentionality from any point of view, and sees the average, the predictable, the over-seen, exalted into a kind of glossy, mediocre sublime. No one is missing out on anything. Behind everything distinctive is an ordinary pattern if you scale up enough. And that is the scale at which tech companies want us to situate our consuming selves, where we plug into a feed not to “connect with people we know” — a local and financially inconsequential level that can only sustain so much time on device, and which is readily revealed as an inadequate substitute for better and more secure ways of keeping in touch — but to connect with the machine and to learn how to see the way it sees and enjoy its endless bounty.

What percentage of my life is taken up with re-staging the pillows on our living room couches? I shudder to think…

William T. Cavanaugh:

What takes place in the modern era…is a reconfiguration of space that is much more profound than the creation of an expanded common space through the gathering up and coordination of formerly scattered elements into one. What happens is a shift from “complex space”—varied communal contexts with overlapping jurisdictions and levels of authority—to a “simple space,” characterized by a duality of individual and state. There is an enfeebling of local common spaces by the power of the center and a simultaneous parochialization of the imagination of Christendom into that of the sovereign state. To say that the state “creates” society is not to deny that families, guilds, clans, and other social groups existed before the state. Rather, the state “creates” society by replacing the complex overlapping loyalties of medieval societates with one society, bounded by borders and ruled by one sovereign to whom allegiance is owed in a way that trumps all other allegiances.

This seems like an extremely important point—one that will take me quite some time to fully, if ever, assimilate into my thinking. Cavanaugh explains a little further on, “This creation of a unitary space requires the church’s absorption into the sovereign and the absorption of any other bodies that would threaten the unity of Leviathan.” This clarifies why he had said in the Introduction that, in order to “resist the colonization of the Christian imagination by a nation-state that wants to subordinate all other attachments to itself,” it will be necessary “to complexify political space.” Cavanaugh counsels that we need “to create forms of local and translocal community that disperse and resist the powers invested in the state and corporation,” ultimately expressed in “a kind of Christian micro politics that comes first and foremost from grass-roots groups of Christians.” I’m intrigued, to say the least, though I really have no idea what such proposals would look like in concrete terms.

William T. Cavanaugh:

The story of the death of the sovereign God and his rebirth in the sovereign state is not a story of the progressive stripping of the sacred from some secular remainder. It is instead the transfer of care for the holy from church to state. We not only expect the state to provide technical solutions to market imbalances. In a deeper sense, we want the state to absorb the risk involved in living a mortal human life. We want the state to defer the consequences of our actions to some undefined future. In other words, we want the state to help us cheat death.

Finished reading: The Community of the King by Howard A. Snyder 📚

I didn’t find all of Snyder’s arguments compelling, but The Community of the King is still a useful book for thinking about the relationship between community and structure, people and organization. Snyder overreacts—too strongly, in my judgment—against “institutional” models of the church, going so far as to suggest that the church is not an institution (though he acknowledges that the church possesses many of the characteristics of an institution). In my view, it seems better to grant that the church is an institution, but then define it in a way that avoids many of the pitfalls that Snyder rightly identifies. His best advice comes when he counsels that form and structure are subservient to function. While I would probably say there are more normative “formal” elements than Snyder, I agree with him that much in the way of structure must be willing to give way in order to allow the church—understood as the people of God—to function as it should and to exercise the gifts as God allows.

Howard A. Snyder:

Kingdom witness and church growth are not matters of bringing to the church what it needs for success in the way of methods, techniques or strategies. Kingdom faithfulness is a matter of removing the barriers to life and growth. Once these barriers (not only personal sin but also human traditions, worn-out structures and fundamental misconceptions about the nature of the church) are removed, the church will grow through the dynamic of God within it.

Currently reading: Migrations of the Holy by William T. Cavanaugh 📚

Currently reading: On Repentance And Repair by Danya Ruttenberg 📚