Confronting the Unman

by Jake Meador

One of the persistent themes that C. S. Lewis addresses in his space trilogy is that humanity has a capacity to unmake itself. Indeed, there is some sense in which Lewis sees sin as being the unmaking of the person and the Last Judgment as being a kind of non-reversible unmaking.

If you read something like The Great Divorce, part of the brilliance of his imagination is that you actually see how people in Hell become less human the longer they are there—they shrink, they become purely inward facing, and they retreat from anything beyond themselves.

You see something similar in the brilliant depiction of the Last Judgment in The Last Battle: Talking beasts who hate Aslan appear before him, see him, and something in their face changes and they lose the ability to speak.

The addition Lewis offers in the space trilogy is that this doesn’t only happen after our death or at the Last Judgment. A shadow or trace of it can happen in this life as well.

Consider the cast of villains Lewis sketches in the trilogy. Some of them are fairly easy to understand: Fairy Hardcastle, the police chief in That Hideous Strength, is a sadist. So she is after sexual pleasure, which is not a bad or disordered desire, but she derives the pleasure from torture and domination, which is bad and disordered.

Likewise, Dick Devine, also known as Lord Feverstone in the final book, is vain and driven by a lust for power. This is something any reasonably discerning human will recognize and understand. And we can respond to such a person in relatively straightforward ways. Power, after all, is not bad. But if the person is seeking to acquire power through bad means or is seeking to do bad things with power, we confront them and expose them on precisely those points.

That said, what does one do with Wither and Frost, the two most powerful villains in That Hideous Strength?

What does one do with Weston, the “unman” as he is called in Perelandra?

Hardcastle and Devine are horrifying, but also relatively straightforward problems. Pray for them. Evangelize them. Keep them very far from power or wealth if possible through just means. And if it comes to the point, use the power of the law to control them.

Weston, Wither, and Frost feel different to me, as if their attachment to their humanness is fraying. The ordinary things humans desire, and often desire in illicit ways, are beginning to lose their grip on them.

I thought about that as I read a must-read piece from Sam Kriss in Harpers profiling some of the rising generation of young business owners in the tech world. There are several excerpts I could cite here, but I’ll limit myself to a couple.

First, here is a portion of Kriss’s account of his time with Roy Lee, the owner of a company called Cluely. Cluely is AI-powered software that one runs in the background of one’s machine during online video calls. The software observes the meeting and gives the user prompts on what they should say or how to respond to specific questions.

Essentially, it tells human users what to do during video conversations with other humans so that the Cluely user can extract what they want from the other person on the call without the bother of making an effort to listen or understand them. It’s the reduction of conversation to mechanics and the reduction of the neighbor to a prop.

Here is Kriss’s conversation with Lee:

Starting a company had been Roy’s sole ambition in life from early childhood. “I knew since the moment I gained consciousness that I would go start a company one day,” he told me. In elementary school in Georgia, he made money reselling Pokémon cards. Even then, he knew he was different from the people around him. “I could do things that other people couldn’t do,” he said. “Like whenever you learn a new concept in class, I felt like I was always the first to pick it up, and I would just kind of sit there and wonder, Man, why is everyone taking so long?” The dream of starting his own company was the dream of total control. “I don’t want to be employed. I’m a very bad listener. I find it hard to sit still in classes, and I feel an internal, indescribable fury when someone tells me what to do.” He ended up co-founding Cluely with Neel because he was the first person who said yes.

Roy has little patience for any kind of difficulty. He wants to be able to do anything, and to do it easily: “I relish challenges where you have fast iteration cycles and you can see the rewards very quickly.” As a child, he loved reading—Harry Potter, Percy Jackson—until he turned eight. “My mom tried to put me on classical books and I couldn’t understand, like, the bullshit Huckleberry, whatever fuck bullshit, and it made me bored.” He read online fan fiction about people having sex with Pokémon instead. He didn’t see anything valuable in overcoming adversity. Would he, for instance, take a pill that meant he would be in perfect shape forever without having to set foot in the gym? “Yes, of course.” Cheat on everything: he recognized that his ethos would, as he put it, “result in a world of rapid inequality.” Some well-placed cheaters would become massively more productive; a lot of people would become useless. But it would lead us all into a world in which AI could frictionlessly give everyone whatever they wanted at any time. “For a seven-year-old, this means a rainbow-unicorn magic fairy comes to life and it’s hanging out with her. And for someone like you, maybe it’s like your favorite works of literary art come to life and you can hang out with Huckleberry Finn.”

Later, Kriss met with another young tech entrepreneur, Eric Zhu. Zhu made a small fortune during the pandemic and is now using his money to do this:

Unlike Roy, Eric didn’t think there was anything particularly special about himself. Why did he, unlike any of his classmates, start a $20 million VC fund? “I think I was just bored. Honestly, I was really bored.” Did he think anyone could do what he did? “Yeah, I think anyone genuinely can.” So how come most people don’t? “I got really lucky. I met the right people at the right time.” Anyway, Eric isn’t involved with the underwriting firm or the venture-capital fund anymore. His new company is called Sperm Racing.

Last April, Eric held a live sperm-racing event in Los Angeles. Hundreds of frat boys came out to watch a head-to-head match between the effluvia of USC’s and UCLA’s most virile students, moving through a plastic maze. (There was some controversy over the footage: Eric had replaced the actual sperm with more purposeful CGI wrigglers. “If you look at sperm, it’s not entertaining under a microscope. What we do is we track the coordinates, so it is a sperm race—it’s just up-skinned.”) He’s planning on rolling the races out nationwide. Eric delivered a decent spiel about sperm motility as a proxy for health and how sperm racing drew attention to important issues. His venture seemed to be of a piece with a general trend toward obsessive masculine self-optimization à la RFK Jr. and Andrew Huberman. Still, to me it seemed obvious that Eric was doing it simply because he was amazed that he could. “I could build enterprise software or whatever,” he told me, “but what’s the craziest thing I could do? I would rather have an interesting life than a couple hundred million dollars in my bank account. Racing (sperm) is definitely interesting.”

As Kriss notes in the piece, the irony of Roy Lee is that he hates being told what to do (by humans) so he has made an AI-enabled program to tell him what to do. Zhu, meanwhile, seems to lack any moral or aesthetic measure to define what is worthwhile and so he lands on “interesting” as a guide and quickly discovers that the profane can be deeply “interesting” to a certain sort of person.

What this story suggests to me is that it is becoming easier to flay away our humanity. And it worries me deeply when I consider where that process will lead or end.

In an older piece for us, Stiven Peter argued that many younger Americans have grown up without moral guidance, without models to show them the good life, and even without a clear notion of what a good life might look like. The result is a certain directionlessness, a deep sense of being lost. The problem is not simply that they need someone to direct them out of the dark wood of error, as it were, but that they aren’t even really aware of being in the dark wood, or even that such a thing as a dark wood (or heaven or hell) even exist.

All they seem to know is a kind of spiritual and existential void that, to admittedly mix metaphors, seems to overlay the world itself and refashion how they see the physical world around them and the people that are in it. Other friends of mine have suggested something similar, as has Freya India in her extensive writing about young women.

If those challenges were already in place prior to ubiquitous AI technology, what happens now? If Zoom and direct messaging on chat apps has already inserted itself between us and our friends, producing deep loneliness and anxiety as an outcome, what happens when we can insert a further layer of mediating technology between us with the sole purpose of helping us to get what we want from others without the bother of knowing them or listening to them?

There is more than one way we could try to name the evangelistic and cultural challenge here. One could, I think, argue that what is on display in Kriss’s profile is not so much a true unmaking of the human person as a human person, which really does only happen at the end of all things. Rather, what is in view is a predictable sort of development in technology that has far greater continuity with the past and, therefore, should be received with care, but not necessarily dismissed as something wholly new and threatening. There are dangers with this technology, as there are with any. Because the form is new, the dangers it poses may also be new and require careful deliberation from us in order to avoid the threats and deploy the tech in acceptable ways. But ultimately the challenge of AI is the same as any other emerging technology. In that case, to suggest that ubiquitous AI use might somehow threaten our humanity is overwrought and alarmist. Ultimately, all that is happening is people are doing what people always do: Seeking the genuine goods that all people desire and some are doing so through illicit or dangerous means.

Take the example of the two entrepreneurs mentioned above: Might one argue that the good that Lee and Zhu desire is something like “agency in one’s own life”? If so, Lee himself become recognizable: The reason he doesn’t mind Cluely telling him what to do but rages against people telling him what to do is that Cluely at least is something he has made and something which pays him financially through the growth of the business. Zhu, likewise, has amassed enough of a fortune to allow him to do whatever he likes, and what person hasn’t sometimes dreamt of the same thing? If you analyze it that way, then my language above about ‘unmaking’ and ‘the unman’ is unwarranted and perhaps dangerous.

There is something about that explanation that doesn’t land with me, however. Set Lewis aside and consider the broader fear one can find pervading so much 20th and even early 21st century literature: Whether you get there via the usual routes of Orwell or Huxley or you navigate there via Zamyatin, Bradbury, or P. D. James, there is a persistent concern with what ascendant political and technological and cultural forms might do to our sense of ourselves as human creatures. Orwell fears a political regime so powerful that it erodes even a person’s own internal sense of agency and self-identity, a fear he shares with Zamyatin. Huxley fears a technical ecosystem so pleasurable, in a deeply simplistic way, that we lose our appetite for more complex expressions of human connection, care, and work. Bradbury echoes this fear, of course, as does a film like Wall-E. James is perhaps the most disturbing of all, as Charlie Clark argued some years ago in these pages. For James the danger is less about political systems or technology, but about how human beings might come to lack affection for life itself, as if they have lost interest in existing.

Is it so strange to read Kriss’s account of this rising generation of technologists and hear in his reporting an echo of these fears? I raise the question knowing full well that it can be a cliche to do so and that I am hardly the first to fear the translation of dystopia out of the pages of literature and into our shared reality. The fact that this is cliche and not uncommon amongst a certain class of writer does not make the fear misplaced. Cheat on everything? The person who sincerely believes that to be an unobjectionable path seems to me a person already quite lost in a morass made up in equal measure of the fears of Orwell, Huxley, and James. And what might name might we use for such a process, if not the unmaking of the person, the ascent of the “unman”?

Stanley Hauerwas has said that Christians will have done well if, in a hundred years, we are known as the people who don’t kill our unborn or our elders. That is true. But Kriss make me wonder if even that is too rosy an assessment of the situation we are facing: Perhaps Christians will have done well if, in a hundred years, we are known as people who still talk to each other face to face and without the aid of a machine, as people who still try to build worthy and beautiful things with their hands.

Perhaps, assuming we ourselves can manage so much, we will be amongst the few that still do.