March 14, 2024

Now that freely-available Artificial Intelligence programs can generate images, we are seeing them everywhere.  They are especially prominent on internet ads. But can they or should they be used to make sacred art?

That’s a question posed by Joseph Pronechen in his article for The National Catholic Register entitled  ‘Art’ificial Intelligence: AI Can Create Religious Images in Seconds. But Is It Really Sacred Art?

You can usually spot an AI-generated face by the smoothness of the skin and how shiny it is.  And notice the hands, which often have extra fingers.  The expression on the face will often be vacuous, and the background characters will often have distorted, unsettling grimaces.

We’ve blogged about how unintentionally hilarious they can be when they are programmed to follow woke algorithms.  But, as a friend of mine who knows more about the technology than I do tells me when I ridicule AI for its mistakes, “It will get better.”

The technology is indeed amazing.  You tell the AI chatbot what you want it to depict and it will generate a picture accordingly.  (You can try it here.)  Using those images when you need a picture is tempting.  For one thing, they are free.  A court has ruled that only works of art created by a human being can be copyrighted.  Those generated by Artificial Intelligence cannot be.  This means that users can also freely appropriate AI images made by people with better skills at describing what they want.

I sometimes take longer looking for an illustration for my blog posts (which Patheos requires) than for writing the things.  I use the “image search” feature on Google, along with the “usage rights” option to take me to pictures that have a “creative commons” license that allows me to post them without paying for them.  I experimented with generating an AI picture once to go with my blog, but the result would give you nightmares.  A couple of times I have used AI images devised by other people that come up on “image search,” but only when all else fails.

But is there a religious use of AI images?  Can they or should they be used to inspire devotion or Christian meditation?  Here are some examples of AI-generated “sacred images” from his article, which I can use freely.  He contrasts those with work from a contemporary Christian artist, which I cannot use freely since they will be copyrighted.

Here is St. Joan of Arc:

The Register created this image of St. Joan of Arc using OpenAI’s DALL-E, an online tool that uses machine-learning technology to generate images from text descriptions.

 

Here is the Virgin Mary.  Look at her hand.

 

 

These are from the article.  Here is one I generated myself.  I asked Stable Diffusion Online to give me an image of “Jesus on the Cross.”  Here is what it came up with:

 

Well, what do you think?  Of course, Catholics and the Orthodox have a higher view of “sacred art” than Protestants do.  While the Reformed often reject the very concept, to the point of opposing any depiction of Christ or of any figurative art used in church as idolatrous, we Lutherans believe that works of art, while not sacred as such, can have a legitimate use in focusing our imagination on Biblical truths.

What about these?  The Crucifixion that I generated seems unduly influenced by wooden crucifixes, so that Jesus has the color of wood.  He certainly doesn’t look anguished.

The image of our Lord’s mother is clearly shaped by Catholic devotional depictions–she appears in front of what looks like the Rose Window of a church (or is that supposed to be her halo?)–but her expression is unsettlingly dead.  She appears all ethereal and mystically spiritual, not at all like a mother.  And the six elongated fingers of her right hand are downright creepy.

Joan of Arc is just the idealized but somber face of a generic girl wearing armor.

Art is thought of as the expression of an artist; that is to say, there is a thinking, feeling, imagining human being behind it.  This is especially true of sacred, or religious art.  It is, properly, an expression of piety, designed to instill piety in the viewer.  To be sure, a non-Christian artist can create a work that can inspire devotion in a Christian.  I think of the Jewish painter Marc Chagall’s White Crucifixion.  But behind that painting are the distinctly human qualities of compassion, moral questioning, and yearning for meaning.

I know, I know, “they will get better.”  But I have the feeling that when you leave the human out of any kind of art it is going to fall short.  And that artificial piety will be just as artificial as artificial intelligence.

BONUS:  I asked Stable Diffusion to give me a picture of Luther and Melanchthon:

 

They look more like Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday!  Actually, they look like identical twins.

March 13, 2024

From Abortion as a French Constitutional Right: A Christian Response:

If a people later retreat from Christendom and place themselves back under the devil as his subjects, they will become something entirely different to what they were before their evangelisation. Prior to its discipleship, a nation possesses prevenient graces in anticipation of the Gospel. Once a nation becomes an apostate—as France did at the dawn of modernity—by so doing it imitates the devil, rejecting the life of grace, and falling not from light into the shadows, but into utter pitch darkness.

He quotes C.S. Lewis , from a letter to Don Giovanni Calabria (1953):

They neglect not only the law of Christ but even the Law of Nature as known by the Pagans. For now they do not blush at adultery, treachery, perjury, theft and other crimes which I will not say Christian Doctors, but the Pagans and the Barbarians have themselves denounced. They err who say ‘the world is turning pagan again.’ Would that it were! The truth is that we are falling into a much worse state. ‘Post-Christian man’ is not the same as ‘pre-Christian man.’ He is as far removed as virgin is from widow: there is nothing in common except want of a spouse: but there is a great difference between a spouse-to-come and a spouse lost.

Morello comments:

Post-Christian man is not the same as pre-Christian man. Pre-Christian man inordinately favoured the flesh and its impulses, whereas post-Christian man sees the body as a problem to be corrected by technology. We want to ‘support’ women, but we’re always coming up against the irritating fact that they have female bodies, so we ‘support’ them by sterilising them and then telling them that mothers are weak and strong women kill their offspring so that they can be useful to wealthy men. The modern age may value ‘freedom’ above anything else, but in many ways, it sees the chief means to achieve freedom to be the tearing of human flesh. Perhaps, then, it is time to abandon our embarrassment about giving to this epoch its proper name: the final reign of Satan.

He notes that the conservative parties of France also voted to enshrine abortion in the French constitution.  Other “right-wing” movements in Europe would agree.  He says nothing about American conservatives, but many of them too are pro-abortion, or support minor restrictions that still result in the murder of the unborn child.

Morello calls for a new political paradigm, and he doesn’t mince words:  “The conservative-liberal, Right-Left divide means almost nothing now. There are those in the Principality of Satan and those in the Kingdom of Christ, and that is now the only division that has satisfactory explanatory power.”

 

Photo:  Sebastian Morello via YouTube

March 8, 2024

Here at the Cranach blog we like to not only predict things but check our predictions, as in our New Year’s custom.  The contrarian site The Free Press has started a custom of its own by highlighting every week a “prophet” whose predictions have come true.  It starts off with a fascinating article by Benjamin Carlson on Marshall McLuhan.

As I remember well, back in the Sixties, McLuhan (1911-1980) became one of those “new thinkers” who created the impression that this is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.  His analysis of “media,” in particular the emergent electronic media, was so “mind-blowing” it was nearly psychedelic.  It heralded a utopian future of a “global village” in which all humanity is connected, thanks to technology.

Never mind that McLuhan, a Canadian who taught for awhile at St. Louis University, was a devout conservative Catholic who wrote his dissertation on the Classical Trivium (available at the link) and decried many of the changes he saw coming.

I’d like to show you some of the passages that Carlson discusses.  Keep in mind that when McLuhan analyzed electronic media he was mainly thinking of television and the telephone.  He died in 1980, long before the internet and artificial intelligence were gleams in anyone’s eye.  And yet he was saying things like this, from a television interview:

Everybody has become porous. They’ve got the light and the messages go right through us. By the way, at this moment we are on the air, and on the air we do not have any physical body. When you’re on the telephone, or on radio, or on TV, you don’t have a physical body. You’re just an image on the air. When you don’t have a physical body you’re a discarnate being. You have a very different relation to the world around you. And this, I think, has been one of the big effects of the electric age. It has deprived people, really, of their private identity. Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It’s called being mass man.

And now we have social media, virtual reality, and avatars!  No wonder people are confused about their identity!  No wonder the body doesn’t matter anymore for the transgendered, those for whom pornography replaces sex, and the spiritual-but-not-religious!

He also said this, underscoring that the “global village,” a term he coined, is not necessarily going to be a happy place:

Global village is not created by the motor car or even by the airplane. It’s created by instant electronic information movement. The global village is at once as wide as the planet and as small as a little town where everybody is maliciously engaged and poking his nose into everybody else’s business. The global village is a world in which you don’t necessarily have harmony. You have extreme concern with everybody else’s business. And much involvement in everybody else’s life.

Is there a better description of Facebook, Twitter [a.k.a., X], Instagram, TikTok, and the social media world in general?

And this, from his ground-breaking book Understanding Media:

Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man—the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and our nerves by the various media.

This was first published in 1964!  Sixty years ago, thirty years before the worldwide web, McLuhan foresaw “the final phase of the extensions of man” (cf. the singularity): “the technological simulation of consciousness.”  That is to say, Artificial Intelligence (which McLuhan is careful to say is not consciousness but the “simulation of consciousness.”)

Carlson summarizes other prescient sections of Understanding Media:

In Chapter 32, “Weapons: War of the Icons,” he anticipates a form of meme warfare, where a battle of information and images take the place of most “hot” wars.

And in the last chapter, “Automation: Learning a Living,”he foresees that in a time of automation, “it is not only jobs that disappear, and complex roles that reappear,” but also whole specialized fields in education that vanish. The result, he writes with uncanny prescience, is a blending of work and leisure, the globalization of manufacturing, the monetization of information, a rise in self-employment, and a necessity to repeatedly retrain for skills in a career.

“It is a principal aspect of the electric age that it establishes a global network that has much of the character of our central nervous system,” he writes, thereby “enabling us to react to the world as a whole.

That last part has me worried lest this be a prediction with a fulfillment yet to come.  A central nervous system also has a controlling brain.

The global village in many ways, McLuhan suggested, will involve a reversion to a pre-literate culture and thus to different kinds of primitivism.  So will the global village that is the entire world connected into a central nervous system of electronic media be ruled by a global monarch?  Or an authoritarian technological collective that controls the world and does everyone’s thinking for them?

Photo by Gotfryd, Bernard, photographer – Marshall McLuhan, half-length portrait, standing, leaning on television set on which his image appears, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=119903792

March 7, 2024

 

We’ve been blogging about different political theories.  Here is another one:  Political Nihilism.

That term came up in an article about research documenting some people’s “need for chaos.”   Researchers on conspiracy theories found that some people revel in and pass around stories detrimental to both sides of our polarized political landscape.  This inspired more research.  A cross-section of Americans were asked a series of questions including these:

  • “We cannot fix the problems in our social institutions, we need to tear them down and start over.”
  • “I need chaos around me—it is too boring if nothing is going on.”
  • “When I think about our political and social institutions, I cannot help thinking ‘just let them all burn.’”
  • As reported by Derek Thompson, in The Americans Who Need Chaos, in The Atlantic, “The researchers came up with a term to describe the motivation behind these all-purpose conspiracy mongers. They called it the ‘need for chaos,’ which they defined as ‘a mindset to gain status’ by destroying the established order.”  They found that nearly a third of those surveyed express this need for chaos.  About 5% go further, rejecting all sides in their “desire to see the entire political elite destroyed—even without a plan to build something better in the ashes.”

    Thompson quotes from the publication of the research:

    “These [need-for-chaos] individuals are not idealists seeking to tear down the established order so that they can build a better society for everyone,” the authors wrote in their conclusion. “Rather, they indiscriminately share hostile political rumors as a way to unleash chaos and mobilize individuals against the established order that fails to accord them the respect that they feel they personally deserve.” To sum up their worldview, [lead researcher Michael] Petersen quoted a famous line from the film The Dark Knight: “Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

    Comments Thompson, “Everywhere I look, I seem to find new evidence that American politics is being consumed by the flesh-eating bacteria of a new nihilism—a desire to see existing institutions destroyed, with no particular plan or interest to replace and improve them.”
    As expected in an article published in The Atlantic, Thompson interviews some Trump supporters as evidence of his concern.  Indeed, I’ve been hearing Republicans utter those very words in the survey as reasons for their unwavering support of the party’s standard bearer.  No wonder also-ran Nikki Haley’s campaign line about how Trump brings chaos wherever he goes didn’t work for her.  For a lot of voters, that’s exactly what they like about him!
    But the same sentiment also exists on the Left.  In fact, the study found that the largest demographic with the “need for chaos” is  black males.
    To be sure, when a system is totally corrupt and dysfunctional, it does need to be torn down before it can be rebuilt into something better.  But you need to know what you want to build in its place.  Once you unleash chaos, what can rein it in, once the old order is destroyed?  Only an even greater power that will turn out to be even more oppressive than the one that was overthrown (think Napoleon after the French Revolution, Lenin after the Communist Revolution, Khomeini after the Iranian Revolution, etc.).  Fortunately, the American Revolution didn’t meet that fate because its leaders dismantled the tie to the English monarchy without ever allowing the country to descend into chaos.
    I invite those who are interested in political nihilism to see what that looks like today in Haiti, whose government can no longer exert its authority and the country has dissolved into indiscriminate murder and cannibalism.
    Photo by  Hossam el-Hamalawy via Flickr, CC by 2.0

     

March 6, 2024

 

Yesterday we blogged about Gemini, Google’s attempt at an AI chatbox and image generator, and its ludicrous attempts to apply Woke principles no matter what.  We drew on an article by Ian Leslie, who said something else that deserves its own post.

From The Google Gemini Debacle Shows Us Why Office Politics Matters More Than Ever: On the Real Alignment Problem (my bolds):

Gemini’s quirks seem more likely to have been the output of a corporate culture that doesn’t realise how weird it is.

In my recent post on how to fix DEI I suggested that organisations make an effort to understand how the cultural-political worldview of their staff compares to their median user (or voter). It’s not that all organisations should try and be a mirror of the public, it’s that, in a highly politicised environment, they should be self-aware enough to know how the profile of their staff differs from the profile of the people they serve.

The anthropologist Joseph Henrich famously reframed our supposedly neutral, objective Western worldview as a WEIRD one (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic). His point wasn’t that WEIRD is bad, just that it’s, well, weird; shared by only a minority of the global population. For an individual or an organisation, it’s not necessarily a good thing to be normal, but it’s nearly always a good thing to know when you’re not normal. To adapt the poker truism, if you look around the table and you can’t see who the weirdo is, it’s you.

This has applications far beyond the internet, Artificial Intelligence, and the necessity of businesses to consider the values of their customers and not just those of their senior executives (as in the Bud-Lite fiasco).

There are just over 8 billion people in the world.  Of these, about 335 million are Americans.  and there are some 745 million  Europeans.  So there are about 1,080,000,000 “westerners” in the world.   By my calculations, that comes to 13.5% of the world’s population.

Keeping in mind that some non-westerners have western values and that a big slice of westerners reject woke secularism, we can say that an extremely tiny percentage of humanity hold to the ideologies that loom so large in contemporary American culture.  Those who do are, technically speaking in Joseph Henrich’s term, WEIRD.  And, in the sense of the dictionary definition, “strange and different from anything natural or ordinary,” they are also weird.

Thus, we can conclude that. . .

Believing men can marry men and women can marry women is weird.

Believing that there are more than two sexes is weird.

Believing that we can change our sex is weird.

Believing there is no deity is weird.

Believing we can do without religion is weird.

Believing that culture is just a matter of one group oppressing some other group is weird.

We could go on.  (Feel free to cite other tenets of our weirdness in the comments.)

This does not mean cultural relativism, though, another weird idea.  Some things are universal, applicable to everyone, by virtue of being human.  Modern medicine works for westerners and non-westerners alike.  Facts, scientific or otherwise, are independent of culture.  So are other objective truths–philosophical, moral, religious–whether we in the west or they in the non-west like them or not.

The west has a lot to offer the majority world.  And we in the minority can learn a lot from them. The majority world has appreciated western medical care, technology, and economic progress, and in many cases has gladly received that religion that originated in the Middle East but came to them through the west, namely, Christianity.  But we must take care not to impose our unique perspective on them.

Today’s woke progressives, weird though they may be, condemn the west’s colonialism.  And rightly so.  It’s hard to imagine how it could be right to just move in and take over someone else’s country.  And yet woke progressives are eager to impose their values of transgenderism, homosexuality, feminism, abortion, and other weird ideas on Africans, Asians, South Americans, Pacific Islanders, and others in the majority world.

This is colonialism–not just the political and economic kind, but a colonialism that strikes deep into the heart of any culture, the family, being the foundation of every culture, as well as the larger  convictions that sustain that culture.

Meanwhile, those of us in the west who also reject those culturally-destructive and soul-destroying ideologies should take heart.  We may feel beleaguered here, but the world is on our side.  The secularists and the wokesters are the outliers, the weird ones.

 

Photo by Tony Webster from Portland, Oregon, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

 

February 28, 2024

 

Democratic republics devoted to protecting individual liberties are not obvious.  Throughout history and throughout the globe, they are quite rare.  Letting an autocratic ruler have the responsibility of governing so the people don’t have to has its appeals, as we discussed yesterday.  So it shouldn’t be a surprise that thinkers from both ends of the political spectrum are turning against “liberal democracy,” especially as the worldviews that gave rise to it are fading.

I have been warning about that in this blog.  Getting rid of democracy is not just the agenda of radical political theorists.  Now grassroot political activists are saying as much.  A speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) said, as quoted by Mediaite,

“Welcome to the end of democracy!” [Jack] Posobiec declared. “We’re here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on January 6th, but we will endeavor to get rid of it and replace it with this right here,” he said, holding his fist in the air. “That’s right, because all glory is not to government, all glory to God.”

Right about that last part, but democracy, by diffusing political power among the people and ensuring their rights puts limits on government, whereas non-democratic systems concentrate that power in a few, resulting in unlimited government that claims lots of “glory.”

When Posobiec hailed the overthrow of democracy, Steve Bannon, a key MAGA theorist and Trump advisor, reportedly could be heard saying, “All right!  Amen!”

Many worriers about democracy being replaced by autocracy tend to focus on the alleged threat from Donald Trump.  But the loss of a democratic mindset is also happening among Democrats (despite their name).

Democrats keep saying the January 6 riot at the Capitol building was an attempt to overthrow democracy by preventing Congress from certifying the election results.  This has become such a pervasive criticism of conservatives that some conservatives, such as Jack Posobiec, seem to accept it themselves.

But now some Democratic lawmakers are saying that if Trump gets elected, they may not certify his electionThe Atlantic has published an article by Russell Berman entitled How Democrats Could Disqualify Trump If the Supreme Court Doesn’t.

It hinges on what the Supreme Court does with the Constitutional challenges to Trump’s candidacy based on section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which disqualifies from public office anyone who has “engaged in insurrection.”  The Colorado supreme court and Maine’s secretary of state have ruled that this prevents Trump from appearing on state ballots, since he allegedly encouraged the January 6 riots.  Trump has appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, the case has been argued, and we await the court’s ruling.  If the court does not decide the issue in a definitive way, some constitutional scholars are saying that Congress could make that decision of whether or not a candidate is eligible.  And whether or not Trump was engaged in insurrection, a crime that he has never been convicted of.

Democratic leaders in the House would not commit to certifying a Trump election unless the Supreme Court finds him eligible.  If the election gives Democrats a majority in the House, which is quite possible, they would have to make the decision of whether to put the hated Trump in office or overturn the results of a democratic election.

All of that is very unlikely, of course.  And the Democratic lawmakers did say that they would certify a Trump victory if the Supreme Court says that he belongs on the ballot.  The Supreme Court seemed in the oral arguments to be aware of the problem.  And for many reasons it’s hard to imagine the court throwing Trump off the national ballots.

Tomorrow I’ll blog about a British observer who sees an even more pervasive threat to democracy.

 Illustration by James Vaughn via Flickr,   CC BY-NC-SA 2.0


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