Telling a New Story

First Things has published yet another article lamenting the refusal of universal truth, and the retreat into "private" or "personal truth" as a way for people to explain the universe. They correctly note that this is untenable, but they don't seem to understand what's going on.

The primary issue is not the retreat into "personal truth."
The primary issue: men are built to listen to and reflect stories.

The overarching text which formed the civilizations of Greece and Rome was the Illiad/Odyssey. Everyone knew it, everyone quoted it, that text was the story pagan life built itself around.

Western Civilization was the Catholic Bible. The Catholic Bible had a relatively coherent story line with beginning, middle and end. 

Society is now re-orienting itself according to a much larger text that does not yet have a beginning, middle and end: the Internet.  The Internet is a cacophony of disparate, often conflicting stories. To retain a coherent story, every person has to retreat into his own self-constructed shell, because the Internet has not yet coalesced into one story-like, universal narrative. Worldviews are in a significant state of flux. No one can abide this, but no one has been able to fix it.

Until the Internet finishes this process and again presents a consistent story, the "private truth" approach is the only way for people to maintain the necessary story-like coherence our worldviews require. It is very likely that AI chatbots are, intentionally or not, being constructed so as to provide that coherent story-like worldview. We pursue these synthesizers of enormous information because we desperately need a story-teller. No AI currently has dominance. Whichever AI wins and gains dominance will be the story-teller going forward.

Jews do dominate a fair number of these AI endeavors, but the leaders in the field are primarily secular and they are not clearly winning. ChatGPT and Sam Altman may have been first movers, but it is increasingly unlikely that they win this race. Christians are not participating in the AI race, so their worldview will almost certainly not be  the dominant story-telling paradigm. Same for Muslims,  Haredi, Hindus, and most other religious viewpoints. 

We don't know what the new story will be, or what values it will espouse. The transition from the Iliad and Odyssey moved the value system from one based on personal honor and personal courage in the face of overwhelming odds to a society based around personal self-sacrifice, rationality and love (service to others) as organizing principles. The Internet will eventually tell a story that is unlikely to be based on either of these value sets. 

Elon Musk has famously stated his attempt to colonize Mars is not strictly about making mankind a multi-planetary species. It is also primarily his belief that mankind needs a dream to pursue. Musk is absolutely correct. His Mars colonization plan is almost certainly a necessary component of the emerging story mankind will use to organize itself, but is almost certainly not sufficient.

Godel obliterated the way Western society looked at itself. Western society was built around the ideas of Christianity, which included and emphasized that God was pure rationality, and therefore the embodiment of all truth.

While Godel was a theist, a man who even produced a proof demonstrating that Anselm's proof for the existence of God was valid, the Incompleteness Theorems shattered one of the foundational concepts of Western civilization - the idea that Pure Rationality (i.e., the Christian God) could embody the fullness of truth. World civilization has never really recovered from that shock.

Men need a story that forces them to reach beyond what they think they can achieve on their own. This is what drove the popularity of Christianity, it was what drove the Avengers' movies and every adventure movie ever made. As Musk correctly intuits, Mars is a good start, and grounding in reality is foundational, but we need an organizing story in which to place both of these goals. That is what every society on earth is currently trying to create.