Systems go: Dana Smith’s Thought for the week
‘Christ doesn’t preach. He instead reveals another order of being.’
In the conversations about artificial intelligence, I’ve been thinking about Operating Systems (OS). An OS is a program that manages all the other applications in a computer. Specifically, I’m wondering about my own OS: how I might be hardwired, given my culture, family, education and other privileges.
I’m also wondering if a human OS can be simplified into two basic categories: the will to power, and the will to love. The first feels fear-based; the second seems tilted in the direction of trust.
Quaker activists, challenging the status quo, have an OS I’d call a will to love. They might share meaningful statistics, but stop to let us feel what they might mean. Listening to them feels like being asked to witness a new awareness of Here/Now.
We may not be able to stop what will come, yet we can choose our OS within it. Indeed, the difference between me and a machine is that, every moment of every day, I must choose – or, rather, I’m given the gift of choice.
It doesn’t matter how many times I fail. Love waits – it bears all, hopes all, endures all. Never fails.
I think of Pontius Pilate and Christ. I return to their conversation again and again. In Mikhail Bulgakov’s version of the story, in The Master and Margarita, Pilate first pulverises Christ, just enough to make his point. This is the world you have now entered. You are meat. I am fist, flail and cross. But Jesus understands the Roman OS, and he feels for its representative. By the end of their dialogue, Pilate realises this strange vagabond, this radical innocent, is the only man he wants in his life. He wonders how he may get him pardoned in order to slip him away to one of his summer palaces where they might occasionally chat. Christ holds the only meaning that can penetrate his life.
Christ doesn’t preach. He instead reveals another order of being. He embodies an operating system of such outrageous love that, like a child, he seems only interested in how to alleviate Pilate’s pain. Or, as Rachel Muers said in her recent lecture on ‘The Seed and the Day of Small Things’, true power empowers others. It never keeps the power for itself. In this OS, maybe love is power, and the only true power on earth becomes love.
It is a questioning power: What is truth? It is truthful power: my kingdom does not look like the kingdom of this world. True power knows very little of destruction; it operates in a world of imagination, creation and co-creation.
We are at many crossroads of operating systems: artificial or human, Mars or Earth. How radical, how foolish it is, to be a Quaker on this planet in 2023 – someone who lives within the operating system of a seed. Who knew that love’s OS could cost so much, and yet so little?
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