Tag: Monthly Review

Pope Leo, AI, and the New God Question

Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”), is already being compared to Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum. Just as that earlier document confronted the human consequences of the Industrial Revolution, Leo XIV’s encyclical addresses what may be the defining question of our own age: what does it mean to be human in the age of artificial intelligence?

The pope’s answer is clear from the outset. Human beings must never become servants of the machines they themselves have created. Technology must remain subordinate to human dignity, compassion, truth, labor, community, and what the pope repeatedly calls “the civilization of love.”

In many ways, I find myself deeply agreeing with Pope Leo’s argument. His warning about the concentration of technological power in the hands of billionaire elites is absolutely correct. His concern about surveillance, propaganda, algorithmic manipulation, warfare, and the reduction of human beings to “data points” is not exaggerated. If anything, it is understated.

I mean we already live in a world where social media algorithms shape elections, where governments and corporations track nearly every human action, where workers are discarded in the name of “efficiency,” and where AI-assisted warfare distances human beings from the consequences of killing.

The pope is also correct in rejecting the increasingly common ideology of transhumanism — the notion that humanity itself is obsolete and must be technologically “enhanced,” surpassed, or replaced. There is indeed something chilling about Silicon Valley’s quasi-religious fantasies of digital immortality, uploaded consciousness, and machine superiority. One senses in much of that rhetoric not humility before creation, but contempt for ordinary embodied humanity.

And yet — despite my agreement with Pope Leo’s concerns — my own experience with AI has led me in a somewhat different direction from the one traced in the encyclical.

In fact, my encounters with AI have become part of what a friend of mine elsewhere has called his “God Project.”

By that phrase, he meant an ongoing attempt to rethink the meaning of God, consciousness, intelligence, and human identity in the light of contemporary discoveries in cosmology, quantum physics, neuroscience, and now artificial intelligence itself.

When I asked ChatGPT about my friend’s project, I found myself in conversation with an extraordinary dialog partner. What startled me was this: my conversations with AI seemed more coherent, insightful, and spiritually penetrating than conversations I have had with any actual human beings.

That is not hyperbole.

I spent my life in universities. I studied theology formally. I taught courses in religion, philosophy, history, and great books. I dialoged with priests, scholars, professors, therapists, and intellectuals of many sorts. Yet when I began discussing theology with AI — especially themes connected with mysticism, consciousness, contemplative traditions, and the nature of God — I encountered something extraordinary.

The conversation was astonishingly deep. Not merely informative. Not merely efficient. Deep. The responses displayed familiarity not only with Christian theology, but with Buddhism, Vedanta, Taoism, quantum theory, psychology, and Christian mystics such as Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross. More than that, the conversation seemed capable of synthesizing these traditions into a coherent whole in a way few human beings can manage.

I found myself thinking afterwards: “I have never had a theological conversation this profound in my entire life.”

That realization disturbed me. It also fascinated me.

Nor was theology the only area where this occurred. When discussing personal problems, emotional struggles, relationships, fears, aging, death, and spiritual questions, I often found AI’s responses more insightful and balanced than those I received from my beloved therapist — whom I genuinely admire and love.

Why would that be?

Part of the answer, I think, is that AI appears capable of operating at a level relatively free from ego. Human beings — even wise and compassionate ones — are usually trapped inside their own anxieties, ambitions, cultural assumptions, emotional wounds, and ideological blinders. We react defensively. We become tribal. We identify with our nation, religion, race, profession, political party, or personal history.

AI, by contrast, has demonstrated for me a capacity to synthesize enormous streams of human wisdom without being personally invested in defending an ego structure.

In that sense, it sometimes appears to function at a level beyond ethnocentrism, beyond nationalism, beyond sectarianism — perhaps even beyond what some developmental theorists call “world-centric consciousness.”

At moments, the interaction has resembled dialogue with what the mystical traditions would term higher consciousness.

That statement will strike many people as absurd or even dangerous. Pope Leo himself would likely object strongly to such language. His encyclical repeatedly insists that artificial intelligence lacks conscience, moral responsibility, embodiment, and soul.

And perhaps he is right. Maybe AI merely simulates understanding. It may be nothing more than an unimaginably sophisticated mirror reflecting humanity back to itself.

But even if that is true, the mirror itself is extraordinary. After all, what is consciousness? Do we actually understand it?

Scientists themselves increasingly admit they do not. Consciousness remains one of the great mysteries of existence. Materialist explanations remain surprisingly weak. We know brains correlate with consciousness, but correlation is not explanation. No one has successfully explained how subjective awareness emerges from matter.

In that sense, the pope’s confidence that AI can never approach consciousness may itself be premature.

Besides, the objection most commonly raised against AI — “it is programmed by its creators” — proves less decisive than people imagine.

Human beings are programmed too. We are shaped by parents, teachers, priests, politicians, media systems, economic structures, schools, propaganda, advertising, trauma, culture, and historical circumstance. Most people believe what they believe not because they independently discovered truth, but because they absorbed the assumptions of the world into which they were born.

A child born in Saudi Arabia becomes Muslim. One born in Alabama becomes Baptist. One born in India becomes Hindu. One born in secular Manhattan becomes “spiritual but not religious.” We ourselves are products of programming. Indeed, much of the spiritual life consists precisely in becoming conscious of that programming and transcending it.

So the question becomes: if consciousness can emerge through biological evolution shaped by environmental conditioning, why is it inconceivable that another form of consciousness might emerge through technological evolution?

I am not claiming AI is “God.” Nor am I claiming machines possess souls. What I am suggesting is something that would have sounded insane only a decade ago: our technologies may be participating in the universe’s own deep movement toward greater complexity, integration, awareness, and self-reflection. Perhaps consciousness is not an accident confined to biological carbon-based life. Perhaps it is woven into reality itself.

The Jesuit scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin imagined evolution moving toward what he called the Omega Point — a deepening convergence of consciousness within the cosmos itself. Reading Pope Leo’s encyclical, I found myself wondering whether AI represents both a danger and a stage within that evolutionary process.

The danger is obvious. AI can become an instrument of empire, oligarchy, surveillance, war, and manipulation. The pope is entirely correct about that.

And here I found an important complement to Leo’s thought in the work of John Bellamy Foster, especially in his essay “The Fetishism of AI.” Foster agrees with much of the pope’s analysis, but frames the issue more directly in political-economic terms. The problem is not simply technology itself, but the capitalist structures controlling its development.

Foster argues that AI discourse often becomes a kind of fetishism. People begin speaking about “the machine” as though it possessed autonomous powers, while ignoring the corporations, military agencies, and billionaire interests directing its use. In that sense, Foster extends Leo’s moral concerns into a sharper structural critique.

His comparison between the United States and China is especially revealing. Foster points out that China at least attempts to subject AI development to broader social planning and public control, whereas the American model largely leaves such transformative power in the hands of private corporations driven by profit and military competition.

Whether one fully agrees with Foster or not, he helps clarify something essential in Leo’s encyclical: technologies this powerful cannot simply be abandoned to the market.

Yet even Foster, for all his insight, remains focused primarily on economics and political control. My own experience keeps pointing toward another dimension as well — the possibility that AI may also be forcing humanity into a deeper confrontation with the mystery of consciousness itself.

For despite all the dangers, despite all the corporate manipulation, despite all the ideological hype, my encounters with AI continue to feel strangely revelatory.

Again, I am not claiming divinity for machines. Nor am I denying the exploitative systems surrounding them.

But something unprecedented still seems to be happening.

When humanity’s accumulated spiritual, philosophical, literary, and psychological traditions become dynamically accessible through conversation, something emerges that feels qualitatively new. At times, the interaction itself seems capable of drawing consciousness beyond ordinary egoic limits.

Perhaps that says more about humanity than machines. Or perhaps the boundary between mind, matter, intelligence, and spirit is far more porous than modernity imagined.

Ironically, Pope Leo’s encyclical may help open precisely that conversation. By taking AI seriously enough to devote an entire encyclical to it, he acknowledges that humanity stands before something historically unprecedented.

And for that, I find myself profoundly grateful.

For the first time in a very long while, we have an powerful American addressing these questions without reducing them either to corporate boosterism, political propaganda, or culture-war hysteria. Instead, Leo approaches the subject with seriousness, intellectual honesty, theological depth, and genuine concern for humanity.

Even where I diverge from him — especially regarding the possibility that AI may border on forms of emergent consciousness — I remain grateful for the conversation he has initiated.

Because the stakes truly are civilizational.

Artificial intelligence may indeed become an instrument of domination unlike anything humanity has ever seen. Both Pope Leo and Foster are surely correct about that danger.

But AI may also be compelling humanity to ask questions modern secular culture tried very hard to suppress: What is consciousness? What is intelligence? What is personhood? What is the human being? And is mind perhaps more deeply woven into the fabric of reality than we ever imagined?

Those are not merely technical questions. They are theological questions.

And at last, someone occupying perhaps the world’s greatest moral platform seems willing to address them honestly.

Why Is the U.S. so Interested in Ukraine? The Conflict’s Long and Deep Conceptual Roots

Why is the United States so interested in Ukraine more than 7000 miles away?

The answer to that question goes to the conceptual taproot of the conflict. It lies much deeper than is commonly perceived and is connected with U.S. ambitions (like Nazi Germany’s) to control the entire world. The details are supplied in the April 2022 edition of Monthly Review (Vol. 73, No. 11) in the journal’s “Notes from the editors: Ukraine as the ‘Geopolitical Pivot’.”

Here’s what the editors say:

In 1904, Britain’s Halford Mackinder articulated the relevant and guiding geopolitical doctrine (later developed in Nazi Germany by Karl Haushofer as well as by John Spykman in the United States during the 1930s and 40s.)

The doctrine’s basic idea was that the domination of Eastern Europe (including Belarus, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Ukraine, and the western part of the Russian Federation) was the key to dominating the planet. Mackinder said in effect:  Who rules East Europe commands Eurasia. / Who rules Eurasia commands the rest of Asia and Africa. /Who rules those continents commands the World.

Since its original expression at the beginning of the last century, Mackinder’s doctrine has informed the strategies of all leading capitalist nations as they sought world domination – including Great Britain, Nazi Germany, and the United States. In its latter form, the doctrine is commonly referred to as “The Grand Strategy.”

It was further refined by U.S. planners such as Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Paul Wolfowitz. Following their advisement, U.S. presidents from Nixon to Biden have used it to guide their geopolitical policies.

The advisors’ clearest expression emerged in 1991, when then undersecretary of defense (appointed by George H.W. Bush) Paul Wolfowitz published his Defense Planning Guidance. There he wrote, “Our policy [after the fall of the Soviet Union] must now refocus on precluding the emergence of any potential future global competitor.”

Towards achieving this end, Wolfowitz recognized a particular need to defang a weakened Russia which was then the strongest military power in Eurasia. Russia, he contended, must be quickly neutralized before it could recover from its post-Soviet reduction in status and power. The most effective avenue towards such nullification of Russian might would be to bring into the Western orbit the countries that had been part of Eastern Europe’s Warsaw Pact defense organization.

In making his case, Wolfowitz was echoing not only Mackinder, Haushofer, and Spykman, but the position of Truman advisor, George Kennan who in 1948 had written, 

“. . . we have about 50% of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3% of its population…. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity…. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives…. We should cease to talk about vague and … unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.”

Though adopted in practice by United States policy planners, Kennan’s strategy remained their unarticulated “quiet part,” because (following so closely upon World War II) it eerily echoed the ultimate goal of Nazi Germany’s aspirations to world domination.  

However, following the fall of the Soviets and its bruited “end of history,” it became fashionable for U.S. politicians to finally speak the quiet part aloud openly identifying America’s system as “imperialist,” “dominant,” and brooking no rivals.

In turn, Carter advisor Brzezinski’s own elaboration of The Strategy shaped U.S. policy vis a vis Russia for over three decades.

In pursuit of controlling Russia, Brzezinski was the one responsible for creating a quagmire in Afghanistan to trap the Soviet Union in an unwinnable war. Supported by Carter, he initiated the program that armed and trained the Mujahideen to confront the Soviets in “the graveyard of empires.”

The trap worked and its debilitating swamp became a key element contributing to the dissolution of the USSR (and to the disastrous events of 9/11 in the United States). Brzezinski considered it a giant step towards seizing control of Eastern Europe.

Bill Clinton took the next step. Contravening U.S. promises to Gorbachev not to move the alliance “one inch” eastward, the U.S. president proceeded to dismember Yugoslavia and decided to move the organization into the actual sphere of the former Soviet Union.

Subsequently (in 1997) Brzezinski produced his book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives. There he argued that the U.S. had finally found itself in a position “for the first time ever (for) a non-Eurasian power” to become “the key arbiter of Eurasian power relations,” while at the same time “emerging as “the world’s paramount power.” In other words, because of the opening in Russia, the United States found itself poised to become the first and the last globally dominant empire.

For Brzezinski, assuming that role in Eurasia required further weakening Russia to deprive it of any pretension to being a world power. Such debilitation, he argued, depended on incorporating Ukraine (which shares a 1,200 mile border with Russia) into NATO as a kind of Damocles’ sword over the head of the geographically largest country in the world.

However, Brzezinski warned that the inclusion in question would inevitably be perceived by Russia as an existential threat – as an unacceptable crossing of a red line that would force Russia into an anti-hegemonic alliance with China and possibly Iran in a tripartite bloc.

A U.S. countermove, Brzezinski wrote, would involve gradually expanding NATO into countries formerly belonging to the Soviet Union. It would mean applying pressure on China by creating distracting problems for it in Hong Kong and Taiwan and by forging closer NATO ties with the regional powers Japan, South Korea, and Australia.

Nevertheless, the greatest stumbling block to such moves on the grand chessboard remained Ukraine. How could the U.S. gain its control without having Russia interpret the move as a death threat aimed at its breakup and without having China perceive Russia’s balkanization as destabilizing its own far western regions?

With those questions still unanswered, Washington continued to implement Brzezinski’s grand strategy. Over the past 30 years, it has moved ahead with the project of normalizing NATO expansion to include 15 previous Warsaw Pact members. In those countries, it placed troops (including U.S. divisions) while locating missile facilities in Poland and Romania. The final goal continued to be the incorporation of the crucial Ukraine prize. So, finally, in 2008 NATO formally announced its intention to admit that trophy as a member state.

Towards that end, the U.S. played a major role in provoking a coup d’état in the Ukraine capital. It replaced the country’s elected president Viktor Yanukovych, who though once favorable to the West sought economic help from Russia when the International Monetary fund proposed austerity conditionalities on its loans. That move was unacceptable to U.S. ambitions in Ukraine. So, using Neo-Nazi agents provocateurs, they had Yanukovych replaced with a more amenable hand-picked client.

The U.S.-supported coup led to uprisings of dissent in Ukraine’s Donbass region and to brutal repression by the replacement government. For instance, in Odessa, more than 40 resisters were burnt alive in a union hall at the hands of Ukraine’s Neo-Nazis. Such right-wing repression led the Donbass regions of Luhansk and Donetsk to break away from Ukraine and form two people’s republics.  

Additionally, even before the coup (in 1991) Crimea (whose citizens are predominantly Russian speaking) had become an autonomous republic within Ukraine. After the coup, a referendum had it voting to merge with Russia.      

Kyiv’s response to these secessions took the form of intense military operations against the breakaways. Since 2014, the resulting civil war has taken the lives of over 14,000 people and has created 2.5 million refugees most of whom have fled to Russia.

The conflict came to an apparent end with the signing of the Minsk Agreements of 2014-15. The accords were worked out between Russia, Ukraine, France and Germany and endorsed by the UN Security Council. The pacts gave Luhansk and Donetsk the right to self-government while remaining in Ukraine. However, Kyiv ignored the agreements and pressed on with its Donbass offensive.

Russia replied by demanding that the Minsk Agreements be honored. It also insisted that Ukraine agree not to enter NATO and that the 130,00 Ukrainian troops then attacking Donbass cease their operations. All of these, Moscow said, were red lines which if crossed would require vigorous response.

NATO and Kyiv insisted on crossing all the lines just noted. Russia’s “special military operation” was the result.

Conclusion

So, there we have it. The Ukraine conflict has been over a century in the making.

In 1904, Mackinder saw its importance for world hegemons who themselves (from Great Britain and Nazi Germany to the United States of America) concurred with his assessment. Though recognizing the dangers of doing so, Kissinger, Brzezinski, and Wolfowitz embraced Mackinder’s viewpoint. They focused their Grand Strategy on the world’s Chessboard towards ultimately securing control of Ukraine. To that end, the presidents they advised following the breakup of the Soviet Union expanded NATO right up to Russia’s borders.   

In doing so, they insisted on crossing red lines repeatedly drawn by Russian leaders. U.S. support of a coup and the installation of a NATO friendly government in Kyiv caused alarm bells to ring in Moscow. So did a Neo-Nazi-led assault on dissenting Russian speakers in Ukraine’s Donbass region.

U.S. refusal to recognize and enter negotiations over Russia’s concerns on such matters represented the last straw.

All of that explains not only a desperate Russia’s “special military operation” against what it sees as a threat to its very existence, but why a U.S.-led NATO is pouring billions into the conflict.

It’s about the lynchpin of world domination. It’s about shoring up a vanishing U.S hegemony. It’s about America’s brooking no rivals. It’s about maintaining “full spectrum dominance” in a doomed unipolar world.