The Digital Geopolitics of Spiritual War

An overview of the "inflection point"

With events moving, like tech, at an accelerating speed, I’ll be shifting to shorter posts like this one, a brief survey of the geopolitical situation seen, as it ought to be, from the vantage point where technological and theological issues intersect.

This week, the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life hosted a conference in D.C. on “The Ascent of China & Artificial Intelligence” — an event I couldn’t make it back on an airplane to attend, but for which I was asked to write a brief minority report of sorts.

Discussants focused on the impact of China’s coming AI strides on manufacturing, finance, and national security — a serious matter to be sure. “China is behind the United States in Artificial Intelligence but catching up fast,” as the event page notes.

Predicted to spend $15 billion on AI projects in the coming year, Chinese researchers have the advantage of the government’s monitoring of its population for years, gathering enormous amounts of data that AI platforms can use to improve their learning. Announced official policy is for China to be dominant in AI by 2030.

Theirs is a trajectory with inescapably military dimensions, a point of reasonable alarm for at least one faction of the US security establishment. My current thinking, however — based on extensive conversations ranging from the US to Europe to Israel and across political, media, and religious institutions — leads to the conclusion that the threat of US-China conflict in the age of AI is grave, but does not amount to the very worst danger we face today. And it is on that topic that I focused my remarks here below.

In many ways, of course, this terrain is highly sensitive, increasingly touchy to traverse in public or semi-public discussion. But in the interest of presenting insights still much too absent from the discourse, such as it is, I’ll try, going forward, to unpack the geopolitical situation facing each of the major digital powers.

My working thesis continues to be that despite great strengths in some areas, each of them is weak and/or highly vulnerable to strategic disruption or out-and-out attack. I think we’re seeing the consequences of that dynamic playing out right now in real time. The present complex of international conflicts and crises is attributable to the clandestine digital war that has been waged for years now already amid lattices of complex relationships and aims.

This is a war rooted, in turn, in the scramble to reestablish sovereign political authority necessitated by the meteoric rise of digital technology. Despite — or because of — the unity of these problems in that all-important sense, bundling them into a single war for that always-elusive global domination, on the theory that digital technology at last offers the victor a type of triumph categorically different from all that captivated human ambition before, would be a catastrophic mistake, itself categorically different in its horror and misery from all previous such errors of judgment.

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Some spiritual and technological aspects of the present geopolitical situation

Artificial intelligence is the future not only of our country but the future of humankind. Here there are colossal possibilities and threats that are hard to predict today. Whomever becomes a leader in this sphere will be the master of the world and I would very much like it that there is no monopoly of this in any specific pair of hands.

Who said it? Vladimir Putin, in 2017 (mentioning “Russia” instead of “our country.”) But who among the five top-tier digital powers would not now say the same? Each of the US, UK, Russia, China, and Israel is under great pressure to become the leader in AI. In the digital age, he who is not the leader appears destined to be not the master but a servant or slave. Accordingly, each digital superpower is compelled to reason that the only path to world mastery runs through digital world war — a conflagration without precedent or parallel on earth, a wager of incalculable risk with outcomes impossible, even for the most advanced AI itself, to predict.

This means the “multipolarity” invoked by the non-Western bloc is already here, despite the protestations of the “rules-based international order” — which, as evinced by America’s increasingly arbitrary and improvised foreign policy, already no longer exists. The question is whether the West’s digital powers — the US, UK, and Israel — can do anything about it.

The answer to that question appears to turn on the way in which many gentile and Jewish elites of the Western ruling class have abandoned their inherited religions in favor of a new project to construct a new religion around the worship of technology. This endeavor itself appears sharply divided: on one side, superhumanists promising individualist emancipation from the constraints of merely human life; on the other, transhumanists invoking a new and utopian collectivity through our merger with our machines.

Yet on closer inspection these two sides are one — demanding, in each case, both a cyborg fusion of the human with the digital and a theocratic fusion of regime power with digital religion. The only real debate or true struggle is over who shall be the priestly caste in charge. Needless to say, a cyborg theocracy, whoever sits at the top, is incompatible with, and fatal to, the American form of governance and the American way of life. If both Jews and Gentiles fail to muster spiritual alternatives sufficient to overcome the massive temptation to worship technology and the logic of absolute and unbounded technological “progress”, “Judeo-Christian values” will swiftly prove unable to stop the trans-formation of the West’s “rules-based” regional order into a cyborg theocracy bent on planetary domination and transformation.

In thinking about US responses to China in the AI arms race, the place to begin must be the religious core of America and the spiritual disciplines and institutions required to rescue American civilization from “transitioning” forcibly into the progenitor of a homogenous world cyborg theocratic state.

Failure here will leave the West’s religious future in the hands of a divided and compromised Catholic church; a fragmented, declining, and increasingly heretical Protestant movement; a fractured Jewish faith failing to come to grips with tech’s theological challenge, and a Russian Christianity primed, in its increasingly eschatological and militant attitude, to become the ultimate enemy other of a West that, by the ancient Church’s lights, grows openly more satanic by the day.

Viewed correctly in this way, the supervening existential geopolitical threat faced by Americans is not the rise of cyborg China, as significant as that challenge is, but an apocalyptic world religious war pitting Christian Russia against post-American cyborg theocracy — the chief figure of which, it is easy to suppose, practicing Christians will be apt to see as the Antichrist.

The western way of war is religious. The key to mustering a viable modus vivendi with China in the age of AI is the establishment of a durable peace between the West and Russia on the basis of ancient spiritual strength sufficient to prevent the worship of technology from usurping and disfiguring our form of government, our way of life, and our humanity itself.