Sunday, October 13, 2024
Confessions of a Republican Exile. The Atlantic - Politics / by David Brooks
Friday, October 11, 2024
I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is
Sunday, October 6, 2024
How odd Christian beliefs about sex shape the world
Despite their shaky grounding in scripture
Read time: 6 minutes
A painting of Adam and Eve, obscurred and censored by pixelation
Illustration: Carl Godfrey
Sep 13th 2024
Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity. By Diarmaid MacCulloch. Allen Lane; 688 pages; £35. To be published in America by Viking in April 2025; $40.
The worry was the Virgin Mary’s vagina. Early Christians were very clear on some things. They knew that the Holy Spirit had made the Virgin Mary pregnant but that she was still a virgin. What they were not quite sure about was how those two things could both be true. How, in short, had God got in?
Theologians set about solving this riddle with great debate—and a healthy disregard for biology. Almost no orifice was off limits. God had entered Mary through her eyes, suggested one text. Another scholar thought He had come in through her ear. A third suggested that He had impregnated Mary through her nose—which was inventive, if hard to imagine being incorporated into the annual school nativity play.
God is odd about sex. The Bible and Christian writings are odder yet. If all this weirdness affected only believers, it would be important enough. With more than 2bn adherents, Christianity is the world’s largest religion and—though it might not always feel like it in the smugly secularising West—is still growing in many regions.
But Christianity’s sexual hang-ups—on everything from celibacy to contraception, homosexuality and more—carry consequences for more than the faithful. In America abortion could sway the election. In Russia Vladimir Putin signed legislation against “non-traditional sexual relations”. In Britain a fight over ending restrictions on abortion is brewing. This is a good time to try to understand sex and Christianity.
Modern Christians often look to the Bible for clear answers to sexual questions. But clear answers are impossible to find, argues a compendious new book on sex and Christianity. Its author, Diarmaid MacCulloch, is an Oxford academic whose big, fat books on Christianity are almost always a big deal, winning him awards and starring roles in television series.
The problem is that the Bible, which comprises 60-odd books composed over a period of a millennium and more, is less a book than a library—and displays a correspondingly broad range of sexual attitudes. Its pages offer monogamous marriages, polygamous ones, rape, racy poetry, fulminations about homosexuality and tender descriptions of a man’s passion for his male lover. There is, Mr MacCulloch writes, “no such thing as a single Christian theology of sex”.
Not that such an inconvenient truth has ever stopped Christians from claiming that there is—or getting cross with those they see as deviating from it. From those who burned “sodomites” at the stake in the 12th century to those who flame “deviants” on social media today, Christians have a habit of getting angry about this stuff. Where once they argued about transubstantiation, now they are far more likely to argue about trans issues, notes Mr MacCulloch.
He has a point: the entire Anglican Communion, the third-largest club of Christian churches (after Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox), has for years been in danger of a schism. Its members are sparring about whether or not to allow gay marriages in churches. Add the horror over the scale of Catholic priests’ sexual abuse of children, as well as arguments over contraception, abortion and the ordination of women, and it is possible to see why Mr MacCulloch writes that sex and gender are currently causing more arguments within the church than “at virtually any time over the last two millennia of Christian life”.
Any religion is as much almost random accretion as actual doctrine. Christianity’s sexual obsessions are no different. Much of what people “know” about Christianity is, to put it mildly, hard to find in the Bible. There was, for example, no apple in Eden (it reputedly grew out of a translator’s pun: the words for “apple” and “evil” are almost identical in Latin). As a fiery place of torture, hell is similarly almost entirely absent from the pages of the New Testament. And the word “daily” in the Lord’s prayer—often the only Christian prayer that many know—is pure bunkum. (No one has a clue what the Greek word that appears before the word “bread” actually means.)
Christians may have banged on about sex, celibacy and homosexuality for centuries, but, in truth, Jesus had precious little to say about any of them. Though he was fiery in his condemnation of greedy people, he had absolutely nothing to say about gay ones; yet, as one modern theologian pithily pointed out, “No medieval states burned the greedy at the stake.” There is, similarly, little in the way of Christian “family values” to be spotted in the life of this man who was rude to his mother and who himself never married.
Christianity’s oddness about sex and families can be traced, in part, to Christ’s odd start in life. The Mary-Joseph-God ménage à trois was unusual enough for Mary—and was not much fun for Joseph either. While all that was going on between his betrothed and God, St Joseph had to sit on the sidelines—sometimes sanguine, occasionally annoyed, eventually sanctified. Rarely has a man deserved his sainthood more. There were, as Mr MacCulloch puts it, “three of them in that marriage, so it was a bit theologically crowded”.
To understand where the various Christian sexual hang-ups come from, Mr MacCulloch goes on a quick tour of the heroes and villains of two millennia of Christian theology, from St Paul (whose angry epistles inspired centuries of homophobia), via St Jerome (who championed celibacy), and on to St Augustine (who, having screwed around in the fleshpots of Carthage, then helped screw up the ensuing 16 centuries of Christians with his doctrine of original sin). Things finally brighten up a bit with the humanist scholar Erasmus, who in 1518 published a pamphlet championing the pleasures of marriage, dedicated to a patron with the improbable if unimprovable name of “Lord Mountjoy”.
Mr MacCulloch offers other similarly pleasing titbits. It is, for example, interesting to learn that the word “buggery” is a corruption of the word “Bulgarian”, because medieval Christians accused heretics who were thought to come from Bulgaria of it. But far too much of this book is heavy going. Mr MacCulloch’s great strength is that he knows a vast amount. His great weakness is that he has written it all down, over 497 pages, in a tiny font. Doubtless there are some who will thrill to discover that in 451AD, at the Council of Chalcedon, a non-Chalcedonian church “proudly adhered to the ‘Dyophysite’ theology of the displaced Patriarch of Constantinople Nestorios”. Many more will be left scratching their heads.
Does it matter that many will buy Mr MacCulloch’s book, but perhaps not finish it? Christian attitudes to sex are so important in world politics at the moment. But it feels like a mistake to take this oddness towards sex too much on its own terms. Why are American conservatives currently crushing women’s reproductive rights? Why is the Russian Orthodox church inveighing against homosexuality? The writings of St Augustine and St Paul offer one answer. Perhaps a simpler answer is provided by the old saying that everything in the world is about sex, except for sex, which is about power. The Christian church, which has been described as the most powerful persecuting force that the world has ever seen, knows this well. ■
This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “Christianity’s sex addiction”
Saturday, October 5, 2024
It’s Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word
It’s Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word
Understand AI for what it is, not what it might become.
By David Karpf
Photograph of Sam Altman
SeongJoon Cho / Bloomberg / Getty
October 4, 2024, 12:57 PM ET
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OpenAI announced this week that it has raised $6.6 billion in new funding and that the company is now valued at $157 billion overall. This is quite a feat for an organization that reportedly burns through $7 billion a year—far more cash than it brings in—but it makes sense when you realize that OpenAI’s primary product isn’t technology. It’s stories.
Case in point: Last week, CEO Sam Altman published an online manifesto titled “The Intelligence Age.” In it, he declares that the AI revolution is on the verge of unleashing boundless prosperity and radically improving human life. “We’ll soon be able to work with AI that helps us accomplish much more than we ever could without AI,” he writes. Altman expects that his technology will fix the climate, help humankind establish space colonies, and discover all of physics. He predicts that we may have an all-powerful superintelligence “in a few thousand days.” All we have to do is feed his technology enough energy, enough data, and enough chips.
Maybe someday Altman’s ideas about AI will prove out, but for now, his approach is textbook Silicon Valley mythmaking. In these narratives, humankind is forever on the cusp of a technological breakthrough that will transform society for the better. The hard technical problems have basically been solved—all that’s left now are the details, which will surely be worked out through market competition and old-fashioned entrepreneurship. Spend billions now; make trillions later! This was the story of the dot-com boom in the 1990s, and of nanotechnology in the 2000s. It was the story of cryptocurrency and robotics in the 2010s. The technologies never quite work out like the Altmans of the world promise, but the stories keep regulators and regular people sidelined while the entrepreneurs, engineers, and investors build empires. (The Atlantic recently entered a corporate partnership with OpenAI.)
Read: AI doomerism is a decoy
Despite the rhetoric, Altman’s products currently feel less like a glimpse of the future and more like the mundane, buggy present. ChatGPT and DALL-E were cutting-edge technology in 2022. People tried the chatbot and image generator for the first time and were astonished. Altman and his ilk spent the following year speaking in stage whispers about the awesome technological force that had just been unleashed upon the world. Prominent AI figures were among the thousands of people who signed an open letter in March 2023 to urge a six-month pause in the development of large language models ( LLMs) so that humanity would have time to address the social consequences of the impending revolution. Those six months came and went. OpenAI and its competitors have released other models since then, and although tech wonks have dug into their purported advancements, for most people, the technology appears to have plateaued. GPT-4 now looks less like the precursor to an all-powerful superintelligence and more like … well, any other chatbot.
The technology itself seems much smaller once the novelty wears off. You can use a large language model to compose an email or a story—but not a particularly original one. The tools still hallucinate (meaning they confidently assert false information). They still fail in embarrassing and unexpected ways. Meanwhile, the web is filling up with useless “AI slop,” LLM-generated trash that costs practically nothing to produce and generates pennies of advertising revenue for the creator. We’re in a race to the bottom that everyone saw coming and no one is happy with. Meanwhile, the search for product-market fit at a scale that would justify all the inflated tech-company valuations keeps coming up short. Even OpenAI’s latest release, o1, was accompanied by a caveat from Altman that “it still seems more impressive on first use than it does after you spend more time with it.”
In Altman’s rendering, this moment in time is just a waypoint, “the doorstep of the next leap in prosperity.” He still argues that the deep-learning technique that powers ChatGPT will effectively be able to solve any problem, at any scale, so long as it has enough energy, enough computational power, and enough data. Many computer scientists are skeptical of this claim, maintaining that multiple significant scientific breakthroughs stand between us and artificial general intelligence. But Altman projects confidence that his company has it all well in hand, that science fiction will soon become reality. He may need $7 trillion or so to realize his ultimate vision—not to mention unproven fusion-energy technology—but that’s peanuts when compared with all the advances he is promising.
There’s just one tiny problem, though: Altman is no physicist. He is a serial entrepreneur, and quite clearly a talented one. He is one of Silicon Valley’s most revered talent scouts. If you look at Altman’s breakthrough successes, they all pretty much revolve around connecting early start-ups with piles of investor cash, not any particular technical innovation.
Read: OpenAI takes its mask off
It’s remarkable how similar Altman’s rhetoric sounds to that of his fellow billionaire techno-optimists. The project of techno-optimism, for decades now, has been to insist that if we just have faith in technological progress and free the inventors and investors from pesky regulations such as copyright law and deceptive marketing, then the marketplace will work its magic and everyone will be better off. Altman has made nice with lawmakers, insisting that artificial intelligence requires responsible regulation. But the company’s response to proposed regulation seems to be “no, not like that.” Lord, grant us regulatory clarity—but not just yet.
At a high enough level of abstraction, Altman’s entire job is to keep us all fixated on an imagined AI future so we don’t get too caught up in the underwhelming details of the present. Why focus on how AI is being used to harass and exploit children when you can imagine the ways it will make your life easier? It’s much more pleasant fantasizing about a benevolent future AI, one that fixes the problems wrought by climate change, than dwelling upon the phenomenal energy and water consumption of actually existing AI today.
Remember, these technologies already have a track record. The world can and should evaluate them, and the people building them, based on their results and their effects, not solely on their supposed potential.
About the Author
David Karpf is an associate professor in the School of Media and Public Affairs at the George Washington University.