The poetry of Easter

I haven’t followed the furor over Matt Goodwin’s book (MattGPT-gate) particularly closely, but there was an aspect to it I found interesting: the question of why it so mattered to people that the author’s integrity would be undermined if it was indeed written by AI. 

Certain critics of Goodwin did exemplify his own line of defence — that the criticism was just the usual leftist refusal to allow questions about immigration to be posed at all. Being ideologically driven, he claims, people hate it because they hate the case he (and/or his AI assistant) makes in it. Yet many others didn’t exemplify this pattern at all, and were clearly frustrated that someone could possibly have failed to shoot on target at the vast open goal of Britain’s multicultural failures.  

Criticising the use of AI because you disagree with the case being made is different to criticising the use of AI because you value issues of integrity over ideology. In the latter case, the question is about what authorship means, what composition is, and how a particular individual can or can’t be credited with something bearing his name. 

Sane and reasonable people share a deep unease about AI writing when it threatens to confuse that boundary. The problem is that organic human intelligence has been confusing that boundary in recent years anyway. 

People of the post-truth era don’t care if Cicero said much the same thing as an AI hallucination in different words. Many regurgitate tedious talking points as means of constructing an inauthentic identity all the time. Social media functions through perpetuating patterns via mediated replications. An author’s generic “influencer profile” now drives sales in a way vastly disproportionate to distinct literary quality. Algorithmic vibe-surfing dominates over the awkward and time consuming business of saying something original or sifting painstakingly through evidence. All this has been disrupting society before AI became a thing — so why do people get so upset by it?

The answer is that, at some primary and fundamental level, people bear an intuitive sense that true composition reflects a genuine person. Genuine persons are individual, concrete and unrepeatable entities. When persons are misconceived as general, fungible, and replaceable, a deep unease results. Someone presenting AI writing as their own work is enacting just this misconception — he is taking something which any other person could have produced with the same general prompts — and pretending it derives from his unique, irreducible, and unrepeatable person. 

Many have argued that the writing that most fully and extensively reflects an individual’s person is the medium of poetry. The unique combinations of syntax and cadence, the distinctive grammatical lilt of the constructions at play, have all been said to offer some unparalleled level of derivation from a particular person that no other medium can enable. It is indeed difficult for reason to make much sense of poetry, and perhaps this is why. You can’t summarise and explain Coleridge’s “Kubla Kahn” without reading it, and then an attentive reading unsettles most summaries and explanations of it in any case.  Reason doesn’t like this. Reason doesn’t like particulars, because particulars are unpredictable. 

Organic or natural intelligence, just like artificial intelligence, prefers general concepts, abstract reasoning, and predictable patterns. In some ways these are the things that human reason exists to deduce and then calculate with. The young child sees only specific persons, but the sophisticated intelligence knows they’re just homo sapiens. The young child thinks their home is the centre of the world, the sophisticated intelligence knows all young children think this way. 

But when reason is faced with circumstances it cannot explain away, it has to accept its own limits. No-one likes encountering limits to reason, because that entails a loss of control.  

The historical struggles of reason with basic components of Christian tradition reflect this truth. One can point to St Paul calling the cross of Christ a “scandal” (Gal 5:11), or the early Church Father Tertullian claiming “I believe because it is absurd” to give early examples. The forming of early Christian theology arose in the midst of precisely this struggle between the general and the particular. The Ancient world preferred the smoothly reasoned generalities of Plato and Aristotle to the harsh and awkward particularity of Israel claiming to be the chosen people on the basis of direct revelation. 

The latter case won the day, and reason was formed anew on the basis of Scripture in the first centuries of the Church. A unique and unrepeatable person — Jesus Christ — was placed at the very centre and high-point of a complex metaphysical cosmos having borne the same flesh that was wounded in a particular place and time to the eternal heavens.

Supernaturally-informed reason lets mystery take the central place

Sometimes people talk about the ethical consequences of secularism. At other times they draw attention to the emptiness of a disenchanted search for meaning. Few people ask about how a genuinely non-Christian culture might affect the way people reason. The supernaturally-informed reason of Christendom had unseated and dethroned the purely natural and organic reason of the ancient philosophers. Natural reason seeks to dominate and take charge. Supernaturally-informed reason lets mystery take the central place. 

The challenge of Easter is the contention that ultimate and universal meaning is disclosed in a set of particular, specific historical events — and a decidedly odd, indeed incomprehensible set of events at that. Again and again natural reason tries to make this more palatable and general. The result is exactly what Easter means if you work from general prompts. It’s then a morality fable about being kind, or welcoming everyone, because then it’s just an instantiation of some general meaning you can apply elsewhere. Or it just by degree from Eid or the Chinese New Year or Diwali for “all those celebrating”, reduced to the category of just another religious festival and deprived of its disruptive power. 

These aren’t just the sorts of responses that human beings have always made to the events of Easter to try and explain them away and stay in control. They’re also quintessentially AI-type responses — the computational sense-making of pattern recognition seeking to categorise and calculate because that’s all it can do.

If genuine poetry is intrinsically linked to personhood, if it really is a genre of writing that has some intangible quality that can never be reduced to mere intelligence, the only category for making sense of what Easter is, is as a form of poetry. Poetry is that genre that by definition requires personal authorship. Poetry is what no intelligence can replicate without that authorship. The only remaining question, then, surrounds who wrote this particular story. For St Peter the answer was obvious enough — for he describes the one who hung on the cross and then rose from the dead as “the Author of life” (Acts 3:15).