I have mostly been laying low in face of the information revolution of these times. I do write an occasional blog post, these Walking Thoughts. And I finally caved in to my wife’s proposal of longstanding that I send out my annual Christmas letter online, not via the U.S. mail. But not until very recently have I been smashed dumbstruck by AI’s power.
The occasion? I have lately begun getting email promos for – blast the trumpets! – chalices!!! And these ads are from companies with whom I never have done any business!!! The potential market for chalice-purchasers is surely quite small in the U.S., certainly, let’s say, compared to Volvos. Yet somehow the chalice-marketers found me!
Now I’m starting to have thoughts that people a lot more attuned to these things than I am have been having for some time. Somebody – or some huge information company in the sky – has figured out how to find people who perhaps have purchased chalices once or twice. I, for one, have innocently been assuming that I’ve been pretty much invisible. I don’t even own a smart-phone. True, I own a dumb-phone, but who these days is interested in dumb? Marketers, I guess.
Which brings me to a theological point. I grew up in the era when “demythologizing” was the fashion, a movement led by the German New Testament scholar, Rudolf Bultmann. That was understandable, I think, in the Post World War II era, which was still numbed by the power of the Nazi myth of Nordic superiority and the Thousand Year Reich. So demythologizing was still a life-and-death issue back then.
But that issue, important as it was, has never been my top concern, then or thereafter. Rather, along the way, I had become fascinated, not to say driven, by one New Testament theme that clearly is mythological. Early on in my theological career, in my own way, I had begun to take the New Testament theme of “the principalities and powers” of death with deep seriousness. Don’t demythologize and thereby disregard that theme, I soon and often began to say to myself. That’s for real.
Think of it this way. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. For me, there was something about Nazism that was horrendously more evil than a mere total of all the individual bad deeds of many Germans in the nineteen-twenties-and-thirties. Paul Tillich, who had to flee Germany in those times, was surely on to something when he postulated the theological construct – “the demonic.” The Nazis, in my judgment, were a case in point. They embodied the demonic. QED. The demonic was – and is – for real.
Beware of the principalities and powers, then. In the language of the streets that I learned back when I was fostering a community organization in an inner-city setting: somebody’s always out to get you.
Now, as I listen to myself thinking out loud, I’m at the edge of shaking. Does the fact that some AI manipulations discovered me, hidden in my own – so I have hitherto thought – obscure ecclesial corner, off the beaten public path, have anything to do with what I take to be the real historical fact that the good olde USA may be only a hair’s width away from totalitarian domination by the demonic forces of a home-bred American fascism?
Is this weird or what? I began by thinking about how a certain company marketing chalices had found me and I ended up thinking about Hitler.