What does it mean to call our era ‘unintelligent’?
What happens when a civilization becomes better at producing answers than asking where it is going?
In a recent Substack post on Time Out of Joint, I wrote:
Time without a future is unintelligent, and our innovations will be disoriented and disorienting so long as we remain so. It treats the present as determined by forces beyond our control—what our long history has always called fate. To lose the Enlightenment perspective on history at a moment when AI enters the scene is to play a risky game.
This is perhaps the great paradox of our age as I see it. Just as ‘artificial intelligence’ appears on the scene it promises the great leap forward in the history of intelligence. But it enters history that has almost completely given up on a collective vision of a better future.
For those of us who ‘hope’ for a better future, the only hope seems to be winning the next election for our side in a landslide so dominant that the other side will be forced to reckon with our newly established power.
An age that has only this operating model for its politics is unintelligent: it is incapable of facing up to fate and necessity and seeking better possibilities; it can only hope for them.
In that essay, I returned to Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition and his warning that the loss of metanarratives would lead to a kind of nihilistic pursuit of short-term outcomes with no intention to add up to a larger purpose other than individual wealth accumulation. Already in 1979, he was calling out a problem with the educational systems of the Western world that has only seemingly gotten worse: ‘The question (overt or implied) now asked by the professional student, the State, or institutions of higher education is no longer “Is it true?” but “What use is it?”’ (51). The pursuit of knowledge was once given its legitimacy by larger metanarratives of human emancipation or the more vague ideal of the realization of a grand human Spirit (via German idealism). Now its value is measurable by the wealth it creates and the power it accrues to the one who owns and possesses the knowledge, which means contolling its technical machinery.
They have at their disposal no metanarrative or metalanguage in which to formulate the final goal and correct use of that machinery. But they do have brainstorming to improve its performance. (52)
Here Lyotard is clear that the function of metalanguage and metanarratives is in their power to orient toward a purpose that is larger than the endeavor itself. The pursuit of better performance is completely consumed within the task itself. It has no orientation to anything other than improvement of its prescribed execution. This is Augustine stealing the pears, not because he wanted the pears but because he wanted the experience of theft in and of itself.
I have been defining intelligence using various formulations, but they all amount to this: the ability to turn what appears to be fate and necessity it into possibilities that are better than what we would have gotten if we just accepted fate. To be sure, accepting fate might be an intelligent decision so long as alternative possibilties were envisioned and considered.
I don’t offer this definition because I think it is more accurate than other definitions, especially those coming out of AI research. I offer it because ‘intelligence’ is the watchword of our age. If AI enters history without a metanarrative to orient its efficiency, what will it become and what will happen to us as a result of its self-oriented pursuit of more and faster outcomes of its own invention?
Re:Enlightenment
The solution is not abandoning AI, which is a pipedream of new Luddites and will lead only to their own renewal of ressentiment. Nor is finding a new metalanguage that would rule the future. The solution is, in part, narrative—more and grander narratives that provide a power of transcendence beyond the self-contained immanence of the way technology is funded, built, and owned today.
My call for a return to the Enlightenment is not a call for a return to the Western world’s ‘civilizing’ mission. That was resource exploitation—human and natural—at scale. Rather, the Enlightenment inaugurated a tradition of curiosity, conjecture, criticism, testing, and revision that was oriented to broad based improvement of the human condition as its horizon of orientation. As Marina Garcés puts it in New Radical Enlightenment (Verso 2024): ‘There is a gap between the “civilizing” project of domination and the critical option of emancipation, which needs to be explored anew’ (viii).
To separate the civiliing project of domination from the ongoing orientation toward emancipation requires us to join in on the larger discussion of intelligence. This is one of the vital virtual locations where the possibility of a new Enlightenment is occuring. But it is steeped in engineering concerns that will almost assurredly truncate a larger vision, thus leading us to a version of engineered intelligence that moves at a much faster pace than the sum total of human intelligence, not to mention other kinds of intelligence that can be found in the Universe.
See this video from Chloe Lubinski, who leads research projects between Anthropic and ‘the world’s wisdom traditions’.
Overcoming Unintelligence
To call our age unintelligent is to provoke a reaction from within an age that is engineering intelligence at great speed and scale. This engineering effort and its clear success as a new product category has put a number of once-esoteric questions into the public eye: What is intelligence? What is consciousness? What is life? What is human? What is understanding?
Joining in these questions is a vital undertaking, but the formation of these questions as ‘What is?’ may lead us to unhelpful answers. ‘What is?’ questions narrow our vision as they strip away anything that doesn’t feel like an essence. These questions, once the darling of Aristotelian Scholastics, are now engineering questions possed by those who must specify the scope of what they are building—what they are being paid to build to generate massive returns on the invested capital. These questions both mystify and aggrandize the endeavor by claiming the Aristotelian lineage while obscuring the vast capital and resources required to build the answer to their definitions. This claim is not new. Neil DeGrasse Tyson has been claiming for years that Physics has taken over Philosophy’s questions and made it obsolete as a human endeavor.
These are not the wrong questions, but they are not the best questions. An Enlightenment view orients to ‘How does it work?’ and ‘What can we do with it?’ These are more practical questions that orient us beyond simply trying to technically reproduce what we are able to define.
Such knowledge, however, needs orientation. ‘What can we do with it?’ does not automatically answer itself. That question begs an orientation to a future that provides meaning to the present endeavor and inquiry. This is narrative knowledge. I don’t just mean entertaining storytelling. I mean orienting toward the downstream effects that we seek. I mean taking the percolating events of time and wrapping them in stories that give them the possibility of adding up to something more than what is immanent to the engineering project.
The Daily Examen
Seneca describes his daily examen as the present oriented to a better future through a review of the past:
When the light has been removed and my wife has fallen silent, aware of this habit that is now mine, I examine my entire day and go back over what I’ve done and said, hiding nothing from myself, passing nothing by. For why should I fear any consequence from my mistakes, when I am able to say, ‘See that you don’t do it again, but now I forgive you’. (On Anger,3.36.3)
What does this examen do? It takes the singular events of percolating time and makes them add up—not as condemnation, but as minor corrections, as events that will be lived again but not as a hard-coded eternal recurrence.
He is crossing a threshold by assembling his percolating moments into a story of himself. How did the day go? What are you happy with? What could you have done better? These questions are without effect and without meaning unless they are part of a narrative of the self constructing its future out of a belief that he can be better than he was today.
This only happens when the narration of events assembles them within a larger context of future improvement. The narrative reviews the past in such a way that the eternally recurring present is open to other possibilities—i.e., the examen is intelligence.
The Confession
Writ larger as a metanarrative of a single life, Augustine retrospectively turns an episode without narrative into one with meaning.
The malice of the act was base and I loved it—that is to say I loved my own undoing. I loved the evil in me—not the thing for which I did the evil, simply the evil: my soul was depraved, and hurled it down from security in You into utter destruction, seeking no profit from wickedness than to be wicked. (Confessions, 2.5.9, F.J. Sheed translation)
Percolating time—the seemingly disconnected events of a life—reviewed and strung together by narrative. Without this narrative, the self-consuming urge remains meaningless and without a future. It is pure immanence and time is not experience as continuity but as scraps that have no inherent connection, no duration. The narrative turns isolated events into the possiblity of something better.
What is a confession? The ability to connect the events of one’s life to a larger story; to make sure that there is a larger narrative in which to sequence the percolating events. The ability to transcend the individual experiences of percolating time. It is intelligence learning to orient toward a better future. Otherwise, life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound a fury.
Conferences
In the second of John Cassian’s Conferences, the Abbot Moses tells the story of two brothers making a pilgrimage across the desert. They both have decided ‘that the only food they would take would be whatever the Lord Himself offered them.’ Facing starvation, a group of Mazices, known for their ‘innate barbarism’, ‘rushed with bread to the two men’. Only one accepts the bread; the other dies because the food ‘had been offered by man’. Moses narrates this as a lesson in discernment:
Both had started out with a wrong decision. One, however, with the help of discernment changed his mind about something which he had rashly and imprudenlty decided. The other man stuck to his foolish presumptuousness. Knowing nothing about discernment he drew down upon himself the death which the Lord had wished to avert. (Conferences 2.6)
Discernment is the ability to hold open the present to better possibilties while pursuing a purpose. The recalcitrant brother pursues purpose without orientation to the future. He has made a decision, and he is going to let the decision play out regardless of the future it brings. He travels within the hard-coded eternal recurrence of his decision, which amounts to a blindspot—he cannot see God acting through what he could only see as barbarians. For the brother who lived, discernment held open his narrative to other possibilities.
Intelligence and Impasse
Hamlet finds himself in a no man’s land, unable to act, unable to find an alternative narrative to vengeance—though he is the hero of a revenge play. The play drags on—at four and a half hours it is long even by Elizabethan standards. It is the experience of a narrative that cannot find a future.
The soliloquy meditates on a question that names the nihilism of the no-man’s land, the narrative that cannot become the future encoded in the formula. Is his question an intelligent one? Yes, it is it the question of an intelligence that has found itself at an impasse and needs to become inventive.
In all these cases, we see how the present does nor does not transcend the present based on how the narration of experience works.
Transcendence
Michel Serres writes repeatedly in Humanistic Narratives, ‘We all need a narrative to exist.’
Were we to remain plunged, immersed, in temporal, vital, and worldly immanence, the narrative wouldn’t be able to be said, constituted, gathered together, unified; it would lose consistency and duration, like the unity of its subject. (Humanistic Narratives, 66)
Bataille called this pure immanence ‘water in water’, and Serres is clearly using Bataille’s language in these pages. How does consciousness emerge from this water in water? Homo erectus built hand axes and likely harnessed fire. Did our human ancestors gain a separation from the water that became conscious experience as a result?
Before written language, Homo sapiens painted caves in northern Spain and France. Was this another episode in the emergence from the water? Before pictograms and cuneiform, these are intentional acts that show us that intelligence is the work of separation of water from water—not yet codified knowledge, not yet subjects manipulating objects, but perhaps the beginnings of narrative as the power to give meaning to the water and in doing so to separate from it—to transcend the purely absorbed immanence of an undifferentiated present.
Wrested from the Fates
Lucretius tells us that the volition of animals and humans is ‘wrested from the fates’. It is born of a struggle amidst colliding atoms that creates a new kind of causality. It is the emergence of volition (voluntas) from fate as the pure immanence of water in water.
He describes the experience of being ‘thrust forward by a blow delivered from a formidable force’ (De Rerum Natura 2.272). This response is not yet a proper experience. It is atoms colliding with atoms, and only when a group of allied atoms forms an ability to experience the blow as something to be resisted does something like volition begin to emerge from the non-experience of atoms in the void:
So do you see that, even though an external force pushes a crowd of us, often compelling us to move forward against our will and sweeping us along precipitately, there is in our breasts something with the ability to oppose and resist it? (2.278-84)
Because ‘nothing can come from nothing’ and everything that is anything must emerge from the interactions of atoms in the void, the volition (will) described here must emerge from prior causal powers, which Lucretius defines as ‘blows and weights’. These causal powers pre-exist the volition, which can only emerge as an orchestred resistance to simply being involuntarily knocked around by swerveing bodies. From this resistence, the coordinating power of the mind emerges and gains power over the causal chain:
What, I ask, is the source of this power of will (voluntas) wrested from the fates, which enables each of us to advance where pleasure leads us, and to alter our movements not at a fixed time or place, but at the direction of our own minds? For undoubtedly in each case it is the individual will that gives the initial impulse to such actions and channels the movements through the limbs. (2.255-62)
And again, a few lines later we read:
But the factor that saves the mind itself from being governed in all its actions by an internal necessity, and from being constrained to submit passively to its domination, is the minute swerve of the atoms and unpredictable places and times. (2.289-94)
Given that nothing comes from nothing and everything that is anything is a temporary assembly of atoms, Lucretius can only be describing an emergent causal power. He is therefore describing the transcendence of the volition from the water in water of more primitive causal relations—blows and weights that cause atoms to submit passively to whatever is happening around them. When some embodied collection of atoms—a human being, a racehorse—gains a power to resist other atoms, the beginnings of volition are present. But volition cannot arrive fully formed in an instant. It first learns resistance, and as it becomes more practiced in this resistance, it gains other powers of coordinated and purposeful motion. It starts issuing orders—it ‘gives the initial impulse to such actions and channels the movements through the limbs.’
Downstream, this power learns to orient itself morally and purposefully to a future of its own choosing. It learns to choose between Venus (the godess of love, springtime, abundance, and rebirth) and Mars (the god of the fury of war). Such power is narrative power—the power to weave together language in such a way that a collection of atoms can see itself has having a past and a future—even if these are finite boundaries—and to orient to that future by discerning good (Venus, God) from evil (Mars, the devil).
To give up on such narratives is to give up on time as having a future. It is to be unintelligent.