Mah Adam V’Tedayhu, Ben Enosh vTechashveyhu
What is a human that you,
God, should know us? What is humanity that you should consider us?
These questions, from the
opening of the Yizkor service, always awaken in me the memories of those I have
loved and lost, but, for me, this year, they also have particularly technological
resonance. I’ll come back to the Yizkor piece, but I want, in a year when I
could have, I supposed prompted Chat GPT to write a Yizkor sermon,
I want to think about what is
left of the human, now there has been this technological encroachment onto what
we had previously considered our inviolate territory.
Mah Adam
V’Tedayhu,
There was a time when humans
felt inviolate, because you needed a human to operate a loom or answer the
telephone or win at chess, or …
In 1637 Renee Descartes wrote
We can easily understand a
machine being built to emit [words]; But [Descartes continued] it could never happen
that [a machine would] arrange its speech to reply appropriately to everything
said in its presence.[1]
I suppose Descartes did well enough, holding accurate for
almost 400 years.
And these Large Language Models are really only just getting
started.
Mah Adam
V’Tedayhu
What’s left for the human now technology has so triumphantly
moved in on the front lawn.
Here’s the good news. For me, this sense of humanity losing
more and more of the things that, once, we felt were unique to us feels
familiar. I’ve been here before. And it’s OK. I think.
Because this argument about humans losing out to technology
reminds me of an argument about God, an argument I’ve never felt to be very
persuasive.
I mean, God used to be held as important in ways we no longer
understand as God’s unique preserve. There’s that story about pomegranate seeds
and the changing seasons, or the idea that God rides a chariot bearing the sun
from horizon to horizon, that sort of stuff.
And, for centuries now, technology, science – progress – has chipped
away at any sense that these things are, indeed, an inviolate part of what really
makes God, God.
And there are, I suppose, some for whom God was only ever a
useful concept to explain things science had yet to explain instead; the approach
to theology often called ‘God of the gaps.’ For those whose theology was only
ever a theology of the gaps, I suspect the advances of technology replaced any
need to think about God long ago. I wonder how people who feel that technology
replaces the need to consider God important feel about humanity losing out to
technology in a similar way.
For what it’s worth, I’m not one of those people.
For as long as I’ve had a theology, understanding more about
the world hasn’t lessened my sense of the mystery of existence. I don’t feel
God is less impressive because I understand (to the extent I understand) the
structure and function of DNA or the mechanics of the Big Bang. Those are
things that fill me with wonder and amazement at the sheer existence of it all.
Marvin Fox, in a review of Abraham Heschel’s book, Who is
Man, wrote this
In the benediction on
drinking water, we express thanks to God "by Whose word everything was
created." To see all the marvels of creation in a simple glass of water is
a high achievement. When we not only see but also respond with awe and
gratitude for the water itself and for all that it mirrors, that is an even
higher achievement.[2]
An understanding of technology, of science, I think, allows
us to see the marvellous in the world, to be in awe of science and technological
progress. It should inspire within us gratitude, not a dismissive rejection.
And so too the human. The tech is definitely impressive, it might be changing
the future of job markets, but to me it feels as far away from removing a role
for humanity, as the discovery of the structure of DNA feels as removing the
need for a relationship with God.
Perhaps the real theological gift of an increased
understanding of science, is that it frees the notion of God from a swathe of
projections dating from the time we had no better explanations to give. God was
always God, even when we used to think God hauled the sun across the heavens in
a chariot every morning. And so too the human. The thing that was truly special
about humanity was never our technical accomplishment - that we could make
cloth, or play chess, or write a passable undergraduate-level essay. And maybe,
now we are no longer in danger of claiming that these technical accomplishments
are at the heart of who we are, we are freed to understand more deeply - who,
really, is the Human.
One we put aside the technical accomplishments of human
technology, we can work out who really are we and what we really should be
doing.
I know we’ve been here before. Technology’s advances have
long been accompanied by a suggestion that now, finally now, we’ll have more
time to do different things. I mean, that was said about emails, right? But I wonder
if this might be different – I wonder if we are going to have think entirely
differently about who we are, no longer thinking about ourselves in terms of
technological accomplishments we may or may not do better than machines, but
instead about the very nature of our humanity.
My greatest companion on this quest, has been Abraham Joshua
Heschel’s book, Who is Man. It’s a book based on lectures given in the
1960s. Heschel used the masculine term for humanity. I’m not going to correct
that as I quote from the book, though I’m as sure he would written in a less
gendered way if he were alive today.
Heschel starts with the way in which a human being is unfinalisable.
Where is man? At what stage of his life and in what situation
of his existence do we meet him as he really is? Is he the same as father or
mother as he is as salesman or soldier? Does he remain the same from the cradle
to the grave, from the cave to the rocket?
To insist [Heschel continued] that I must be only what I am
now is a restriction which human nature must abhor. The being of a person is
never completed, final. There is no standing still.
For Heschel, the human is special because we aren’t done yet.
Our essence is not based on any specific technical accomplishment already achieved,
but rather, in the idea that there is a difference between who we are today,
and who we could be. It’s part of what we are doing here, in Shul on Yom Kippur.
We aren’t scraping the data of the world into our operating systems because we
are programmed to do so, we are measuring our actual state against our ideal – and it makes
us existentially hungry to review, reflect and try better, or at least it
should.
For Heschel, we know that we have this gift – a life – and
that that gift requires as a certain response. As he puts it;
In spite of our pride, in spite of our acquisitiveness, we
are driven by an awareness that something is asked of us, that we are asked to
wonder, to revere, to think and to live in a way compatible with the grandeur
and mystery of living.
If Descartes
thought the essence of existence was thinking – cogito ergo sum, Heschel makes
the case that “I am commanded therefore I am.”
It’s living in
this genuine relationship with the mystery of living that, for Heschel, is the
source of everything most special about humanity. It’s the source of morality
and creativity, of obligation and hope. This is the essence of humanity that
will be, I think, hardest for a machine to truly mimic, and even if it does
mimic – mimicking isn’t really the thing.
I think love, too, is touched by a sense of marvelling at the
mystery of life – it feels radically amazing to be in love, to love. I think
love too, will be something safe from the encroachment of the robots for some
time longer; Pygmalion’s best attempts put gently aside for now.
Heschel’s fear, writing in the 1960s, before the advent of
Facebook, or frankly before the BBC started broadcasting colour television,[3] was that we would run away
from celebrating the gift of our lives and instead divert ourselves from our
true task with triviality.
The man of our time [he wrote] is losing the power of
celebration. Instead of celebrating, he seeks to be amused or entertained. To
be entertained is a passive state—it is to receive pleasure afforded by an
amusing act or a spectacle. Entertainment is a diversion, a distraction of the
attention of the mind from the preoccupations of daily living.
Celebration, on the other hand, was, for Heschel, “ris[ing] above the confines of consumption.”
I like that line. I suspect
that, for humanity to have a bright future, and I believe in our future, we
need to rise above the confines of consumption and the limits of technological
accomplishment. We need to lean into our ability to celebrate existence, to
seek to better our lives as if they really were works of art, to do the thing
that Francis Bacon said was job of all artists; “to deepen the mystery within
each [of us] so that [we] have no choice but to give up shallowness.”
Who is the human? A questing, marvelling, hoping being, who
feels an obligation to prove worthy of the gift of life, a being who wants to
love and be loved. This is the essence of what it means to be a human, even in
the age of AI.
After all, if all you want is
a piece of technology produced, you’ll be able to get a computer to write it or
a robot to build it. If you just want an 1800-word sermon, Chat GPT has got you
covered. I hope you are here because you want something human, from a human,
from me. We’ll have to learn how to appreciate the human for being a human.
The good news is, we’ve got experience appreciating that humans
are more than our technological achievements. By we, I mean the people here, at
this most sacred time on this most sacred day.
These are the moments just before Yizkor, when we come
together to remember those we have loved most, who have passed away. And we
know, deeply and painfully, what was special about those we stand here today
remembering. We know, as deeply as we have loved, who is that man, and that
woman. It’s not their technological accomplishments as mighty as they might be.
It’s not the way they sought distractions of shallow entertainment, but their
celebration of life, ‘the way they rose above the confines of consumption’ to
touch our lives.
It’s not about being serious, it’s often about being rather
silly – the things that touch me most as I stand at funerals or shiva services
or around deathbeds, it’s about love and the way that love is the ultimate
marker of who we are as humans.
We know all that when we think of the lives of those we
remember at this time. Our charge is to bring that knowledge into the way in
which we live our own lives, the celebration of the grand mystery of our own
existence. There’s plenty left to do, for us as humans. We need to leave
memories of a life lived nobly in the face of the remarkable miracle of our
existence. That is who we are, that is what we must strive to be.
Chatimah Tovah
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