While reading a recent post on AI that gained sudden white-hot virality, one line from Wendell Berry kept coming to mind. In his poem titled Anger Against Beasts, Berry reflects on man's will being schooled in having its way to "transcend the impossible in simple fury." This is the image underlying our technological discourse, and captures the pathos of the recent post––the furious acceleration of AI advancements is now on the cusp of transcending the impossible. In other words, something big is happening.
This bullish (alarmist?) take on AI––whether accurate or not––announced that it will soon be an autonomous worker, incapable of error. More than that, it is making decisions that reflect real discernment––with not only accuracy, but taste. Such an effective substitute for cognitive labor, it is feared, will obliterate nearly all thought work into obsolescence. While transcending the impossible has long been AI’s ambition, the earliest critique was simple: it just didn’t compute—it didn’t get things quite right. That is rapidly changing. The once clear line between AI-generated and human work is increasingly blurring.
But wherever you sit on the spectrum of concern, keeping our heads above the rising technological waters will not hinge on embracing or rejecting AI, but on embracing or rejecting our own limits. Perhaps the truest mark of humanness will no longer be perceptive finesse, but the recognition of our creatureliness—our uniquely human capacity to defy predictability.
Such creatureliness––contrary to perfection––is depicted in Berry’s poem Manifesto: Mad Farmer Liberation Front. After opening with a sterile picture of quick profits, annual raises, and everything ready-made, Berry encourages us with this:
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute.
This is the essence of the Mad Farmer’s approach to the “everything ready-made” world. For us, as technology in general and AI specifically becomes more and more computationally sophisticated and removes unpredictability from our experience, one way to resist being swallowed by the machine is to embrace our freedom to not compute.
Berry gives a long list of things that do not compute––things that will seem progressively “mad” in the age of AI:
Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
There is a quiet competence––an ambidexterity––to Berry’s Mad Farmer. He is comfortable moving in different contexts; he looks both near and far. He moves with a sanctified shiftiness––toiling, sweating, using the tools at hand, but then claiming a harvest that he never touched nor will ever see. He moves seamlessly between the present, yet somehow a thousand years ahead, embodying an agility under providence.
It is this beholdenness to providence rather than technique or outcomes that allows him to adopt an almost playful unseriousness that confounds the powers-that-be:
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
As soon as corporations have collected every byte and algorithms have mapped the ‘motions of your mind’… lose it! Once they believe you’re squarely ensnared in their fetters of addiction, lay down false trails. Break the predictable patterns of digital life with a non-computational walk through the woods. Lie with your love in the shade. Wisely eliminate hurry. Like a fox unable to be lured by progress, Berry is giving us a parable of a life lived in the shadowlands between assimilation and fortification.
He wants us to see that both options are equally predictable. And in the face of unprecedented change, madness is gauged by predictability. True madness, then, is to avoid either predictable position. True madness looks neither like raging “against the machine” or putting all your hopes in an uploaded, cloud-based consciousness. Madness, instead, looks like a holy bifurcation. This is the kind of divided reality the apostle Peter wrote about––that Christians are simultaneously located in this age in place and time and in Christ. To be in Christ is to inhabit a mysterious betweenness, which––in a world of linear optimization––is the only true madness left.
Such a dual identity accounts for the Mad Farmer’s extra tendons, enabling him to move right and left, up and down comfortably. He has “considered all the facts”, not walled off in Benedictine oblivion. But he also fully expects the end of the world. Considering the compelling facts of the newest gnosis doesn’t lead him to ecstatic anticipation of a soon-to-be-ushered-in utopia. And yet, because he is neither impressed by the facts nor bound by their proposed future, he laughs. He doesn’t fit neatly into “user” or “non-user”; he leaves tracks in the wrong directions, each dead-end reinforcing his unpredictability.
We see this faithful flexibility throughout the Old Testament narrative as well. Glen Scrivener has called something like this the Abraham Option. In Genesis 14, Abraham refrains from engaging in an ongoing battle until one of his own, Lot, is taken. He then deploys his more than capable household army. He had raised them as competent soldiers, but soldiers who knew when to fight.
Scrivener notes that there were two things no one could ever say of Abraham:
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That Abraham never engaged.
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That Abraham always engaged.
Abraham was surely a conundrum to outside observers with his competence in both abstention and action. He was free to use the skills and tools of warfare, and free to reserve them for purposes he saw fit. Such is the freedom those in Christ wield with technology—freedom to be skilled users who reserve the right to opt out of a wholesale vision of techno-salvation.
Abraham’s contrary refusal to be bound by dichotomies stemmed from allegiance to a higher, God-centered salvation—echoing Berry’s call at the end of the Mad Farmer manifesto:
Practice resurrection.
While this is the crescendo of the Mad Farmer’s campaign of contrariness, it is also precisely the underlying promise of AI and technology in general––a sort of manufactured resurrection, to bring your dreams to life, to have functional omniscience, to free up your time to live out your passion, to realize a life beyond comprehension.
But the power behind this digital resurrection is innate. AI, it is claimed, is now building itself. In this way, it is a sort of digital archetype for self-creation and salvation. The Christian resurrection, in contrast, is a uncontrollable resurrection that is received. There is nothing more unpredictable than the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead taking up residence in a human soul (Rom. 8:11).
Such unpredictability––being united to another who dwells in you––is what AI seeks to smooth over: to refine its functions and realize perfection not via the life of another, but by itself. But true perfection (i.e. glory) cannot be reduced to smoothness. In fact, Byung-Chul Han argues that beauty requires death. Smoothness is the absence of the negativity of death and is, therefore, the antithesis of beauty. Atrophied beauty, Han says, smooths out into something undead. This undead smoothness may have an appearance of life, but it does not embody resurrection.
True glory has a grain to it. The gospel of John brings together Jesus’ glory with his suffering. Indeed, the glory of his resurrection is inseparable from the suffering of his cross. The unpredictability of glory through suffering will never compute with AI. However, it is precisely in such mystery that God reveals himself to us.
Walter Rauschenbusch prayed against eyes blind to mystery “when even the thornbush by the wayside is aflame with the glory of God.” God revealed his self-existing beauty in the most absurdly unpredictable way: a thornbush aflame, yet unconsumed, with all the grit and grooves of glory. AI technologies train us to look for the smooth path, with the end of linear progress and perfection. The more we give ourselves to these technologies, we cloud our capacity to behold bushes aflame because “that’s not how bushes are supposed to behave”. We must train our eyes for unpredictability—such vision is sharpened by lives of contrariness that move beyond the predictable bounds of AI.
It may be the reality that soon AI far surpasses any human ability of accuracy and predictability. AI may actually replace countless experts and offer more sound advice than the most seasoned and skilled professionals.
However, if our aim is to be human, there may be no better starting posture than this from The Contrariness of the Mad Farmer:
I have planted by the stars in defiance of the experts,
and tilled somewhat by incantation and by singing,
and reaped, as I knew, by luck and Heaven's favor,
in spite of the best advice.
The church is the community of contrariness in the world. Not because it is anti-technology, but because it is pro-unpredictable-mystery. Its sights are calibrated to resurrection, not optimization. Holy worship, sacred Scriptures, mysterious sacraments, confession and repentance––these textured elements do not compute with the smooth predictability of AI.
This contrary community cannot be pinned down by technology, but must be a congregation of image-bearing Mad Farmers who plant and till and reap in seemingly wrong directions by unpredictably glorious and mysterious means––Heaven’s favor––in spite of AI’s best advice.
