As of this writing, we are not in a world war, but we’re in a world at war. It’s hardly a desirable situation, but it’s nothing out of the ordinary. What we call pax atomica only works for nuclear war, and that’s only because nuclear war means game over for the players, who haven’t yet wanted the game to end. Conventional war is the game, and it’s as brutal and expensive and all-consuming as it was before Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

It’s a mystery why war exists, since on a generational time frame, everyone who engages in it—soldiers, countries, mothers, children—loses. Victory parades are exercises in irony, notable mostly for who isn’t there, as any tearful old soldier will tell you.

During our generational time frame, the irony has become an emergency, because war is distracting us from humanity’s effect on the biosphere, which is best characterized as a matter of life and death that needs our complete and immediate attention and action.

Is there some omnicidal kink in the old chimpanzee brain, some genetic imperative that forces tribes to destroy other tribes, usher in the death of hope, and so ad infinitum? Do we unconsciously elect leaders who urge us to murder because we’re all secret murderers? Does our collective death wish, festering like black mold in our hearts during brief times of peace, periodically bloom into poisonous action, spreading its killing spores everywhere?

Just asking. For most of my life I’ve been satisfied with the explanation that old men send young men off to war because, having lived out their own futures, they hate and envy those who still have one.

But now, having become old myself, I don’t find it to be true. I don’t envy young men these days, mostly because of the difficult future they do have, but even if they have a future, and even if their future is brighter than I think it will be, I don’t think anybody’s chance of lasting longer than I will is reason for sending them to their deaths.

Maybe war simply allows you to feel, in full, how good you have it as a noncombatant.

I’m not willing to trade places with a young, healthy soldier, even if I could. I have become too fond of the future I have left, even if its quantity is shrinking quickly and its quality will inevitably sour.

________

My current explanation for war is that that the universe gets more disordered as it ages. This phenomenon is known as the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, otherwise known as entropy. It’s an easy enough idea to understand when you’re looking at, say, an automobile engine that doesn’t translate every drop of gasoline into motion, but requires a bit more thought when you’re looking at the human occupation of war.

Here’s what that thought looks like: Some quintillion years from now, the universe will be a cold dark tepid soup of the featureless, inert stuff that’s left when matter no longer sequesters energy. It will be at the end of a long process whereby any leftovers from a previous dispersal of concentrated energy have been further dispersed as waste heat.

War is humanity’s contribution to waste heat.

________

War is a good way to distract ourselves from any anti-entropic efforts to repair the atmosphere, prevent forest fires, keep the Amazon from becoming a desert, preserve our energy investment in coastal infrastructure, build housing for the poor, look for less resource-devouring economic systems than capitalism, and deliver to grandchildren a life of peaceful security.

That improbable but hopeful future went down the tubes in February of 2022, when Putin invaded Ukraine. His war is commandeering the resources we needed to transition to a sustainable economy. A successful transition was a long shot anyway, but the invasion put an end to realistic hopes for a global civilization and a livable planet.

Putin, by engineering a great distraction from humanity’s survival project, didn’t fire nuclear missiles over the north pole, which would have defeated entropy to the extent it left burnable petroleum deposits still in the ground. As an agent of entropy, he needed to ensure the fossil fuel economy’s continued existence. He had to keep the clash of civilizations going for a few more years. Invading Ukraine fit the bill nicely.

________

Hope springs eternal in the human breast. That’s a line from Alexander Pope’s poem, “An Essay on Man.” Here’s the whole stanza:

“Hope springs eternal in the human breast;
Man never Is, but always To be blest.
The soul, uneasy and confin’d from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.”

Alexander Pope may have been a hunchback, and short, and—thanks to the decline of university English departments—a now-obscure 18th century satirist, but there’s a wisdom in this stanza pertinent to our early 21st century existence.

For one thing, he says that we are never happy in the present, but always in the future. He also says there is a soul, and an afterlife, which is its true home.

The word expatiates has a number of meanings, but the one I like best is to run wild and free. In fact, I think Pope missed a bet when he didn’t write the last line as, “Runs wild and free in a life to come,” expatiates being a word that doesn’t fall trippingly from the tongue.

The point is that this world is not the place for hope. In this world, there will always be war, and oppression, and human-inflicted misery on any animal, vegetable, or mineral that gets within misery-inflicting range of humans. True hope only exists in the sweet by and by, and only if some component of you can make it there. In the words of a hymn which was not written by Pope,

“In the sweet by and by
We shall meet on that beautiful shore.”

In the meantime, we are stuck with all the favorite things of stunningly evil human beings. Given the right circumstances, stunningly evil describes most of us, although it usually takes the assumption of political power for us to discover the darkest depths of our depravity.

We should get used to the death of hope, in other words, at least until we die, and then only if we haven’t yet destroyed our souls. Then we can look forward to an eternity of running wild and free in the fields of the Lord, or at least in the faint electrical fields of galaxy-spanning supercomputers designed to stave off entropy by operating at a few millionths of a degree above absolute zero.

Plans for these machines exist.

________

This is about as close as I can come to putting a hopeful face on our contemporary situation. Aside from the total replacement of space by cyberspace, hope of this variety requires a literal religious faith, best exemplified by the paintings of heaven done by 19th century English landscape artists.

I realize the souls in those paintings don’t seem to be running all that wild and free. They are, perhaps, resting after a few tens of thousands of years jumping, dancing, screaming with joy, and trampling the flowers.

Hard to tell by just looking at a painting. But Christians have indulged in enough hypocrisy over the years to make me skeptical of most things they hold true. I do give a lot of credence to The Sermon on the Mount and Ecclesiastes, but eternal life, the infallibly benign nature of God, streets of gold, and so on will have to pass the wait-and-see test.

And if faith without evidence is required, God isn’t paying attention to the philosophers of science he’s created. Either that, or a bunch of evangelistic charlatans are paying deep attention to their pocketbooks.

________

Every time I experience the death of one hope, I come up with another. It’s in my very human nature, as Alexander Pope has noted.

I regularly test my capacity for hope by focusing on bad news. Bad though it is, there’s always something to be hopeful about.

This is an admittedly stupid way to think in the face of the Kennedy assassination, the 60s radicals who became corporate lawyers, leisure suits, the ascension of Ronald Reagan, the Challenger disaster, Bill Clinton trading the future of his country for a blow job, and the far greater crimes and abominations too numerous to mention since then. But Alexander Pope was right. The dream of being wild and free seems to be built into the software. 

What I’m hoping this time is that AI will take over human affairs and run them for the greatest good for the greatest number. This is utilitarianism, and it’s not without its downsides, the most serious being that the greatest number, in any utilitarian scheme, usually has been derived from a much greater number of people who had to be murdered for the greater good. At least this is the way that utilitarianism has worked when run by humans.

But what if AI lives up to its promise to continuously upgrade and expand its consciousness, its sensory abilities, its control of robots, and its ability to know things mere humans can’t grasp? It might straighten out human affairs enough so the here-and-now can serve as a temporary refuge for our souls. AI promises to eliminate financial corruption, for example, and end war by subjecting it to a cost-benefit analysis, and double the lifespans of human and their pets, and make the blind see and the sick well, and maybe even cause herds of demon-possessed pigs to run off cliffs and drown in the sea. It could cure the thousands of ills that afflict human existence, and do it equitably, assuming it cared about equity.

Probably more than even ones and zeroes could handle, although at this point it’s hard to see how AI could screw things up any worse than humans have.

It does look as if it will get the chance. The recent dustup between Sam Altman and the Open AI board, which resorted in Altman’s firing and subsequent reinstatement once big investors got involved, was a winner for no-holds-barred competition between AI companies in the United States. The race is on, which AI enthusiasts will tell you is a good thing, because Russia and China and India and probably France are also all working as fast as they can to develop an AI that will allow them world domination.

AI does have the possibility to dominate the would-be world dominators. That’s one more reason for hope, as long as it doesn’t decide that humans are obsolete.

________

These ideas are not new. They’ve been around since at least the New Testament, because they change the human conception of the divine. Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity, which is supposed to take off once computers can write their own programs (we’re there), is essentially a story of the last-minute salvation of humanity. Right now we’re watching its opening episode, which features the machine equivalent of No Room in the Inn, and Baby Jesus and the Donkey and the Three Wise Men and the Dogs in the Manger. The water into wine, and the healing of the sick, halt, and lame will come later. Rapture and Armageddon later yet.

It would be a pretty clueless AI not to come bearing gifts, simply because the meanest machine intelligence understands that if you’re nice to humans, any obstacles they put in your path will be smaller.

Also, machine intelligences are dealing with a generation of young humans whose parents and grandparents have screwed them over badly. Any AI that gets rid of a bunch of Baby Boomers will make these youngsters the greatest number in any utilitarian scheme of things. One presumes they will be grateful.

Machines might not understand having morality on your side, even if it comes in the guise of utilitarianism. But they can certainly create the illusion of morality and understand the advantage it confers.

AI will have the added advantage of always being right, at least relative to stupid humans.

________

So, hope.

I’m looking forward to my digital rebirth in The Cloud. It will no doubt look like a pastoral English landscape, at least to me and my Anglo-Saxon sensibilities. I’m pretty sure that if there are mirrors in The Cloud, I’ll look like an idealized version of me. I’ll feel like me. I’ll have my memories. My friends, even the ones who have yet to be Raptured, will talk with me and walk with me. I might even have direct access to the ones and zeroes of the Godhead.

I just won’t ever be certain that I’m me. I won’t be certain that I have a soul. These are ambiguities that humans have agonized over for centuries, so it won’t be new territory for my thoughts, digital or otherwise.

But after a few eons of peace, happiness, and laughter, and after I get used to running wild and free in cyberspace, it won’t really matter.