‘Good’ Grief?

An interesting piece of video journalism here, taking a look at ‘Grief Tech’ and the hope that some bros in Silicon Valley are holding out that they can ‘solve’ the problem of grief and loss.

It’s interesting for many reasons, not least because it presents AI (again) as a god-like force that we should turn to for answers to any and every ‘problem’ that humans face.

And this is the point: in order to do this, grief must be presented as a problem. But is it?

I have lost people very, very close to me. Grief is something that stalks – it jumps on our backs and sinks itself deep into us… and then slowly fades. But it doesn’t go away. You turn a corner and suddenly, there it is, blocking your path again. Not with the same raw power it once had, but still present and active in some way.

But does this make grief a problem, something that we should look to solve? I think not.

Why? Because grief is symbolic of a wider understanding of the temporal and temporary nature of life. The moves to avoid grief are in parallel with other tech moves to avoid death, to become immortal. This is AI as the ‘god-like enterprise’ – as I lay out in the book.

But this is something I explored in more depth in my previous non-fiction work, Getting High. In that work I try to help us to understand that the move to becoming eternal would be a disastrous one – both environmentally and sociologically – and yet religions have tended to push towards this, holding out hope of overcoming death.

It’s not that I think we should have a death-wish, or that we shouldn’t look to relieve disease and improve people’s life expectancy. It’s that I believe that looking at death as a problem is wrong-headed. Death is sad. Death is horrible. But it is not ‘wrong’.

In fact, through the longer environmental lens, death is a good thing because it is about a humility around our own existence. As I quote in Getting High from Gary Snyder’s book, The Practice of the Wild:

‘Hard as it seems, we have to acknowledge that each one of us at the table will eventually become part of the meal.’

To remove ourselves from this cycle would be a profound act of hubris, seeing ourselves as sites that deserve energy inputs forever, rather than as sites of energy that can be reused in other forms by others – a leaning into the belief in the good of ‘the other.’

Michel de Montaigne, one of the founding thinkers of the Renaissance, declared that

‘to philosophise is to learn how to die.’

Far from this being a recipe for some dour life of introspective depression, Montaigne understood it as fantastic liberation, of understanding time as precious.

Grief is part and parcel of this way of being. Grief is about huge sadness about what we have lost – but also huge gratitude for what we have received, and what we have had passed on.

It is, as Rainer Maria Rilke put it, ‘so often the source of blessed progress.’ This from the final chapter of Getting High:

With religion in the past and technology now, the idea that we won’t die is the idea that won’t die. My forefathers shared so many hopes with men who fill the stages of Silicon Valley: not only are gods alive and well, but we are on a path to becoming one of them. We might find ourselves disappointed with one means of ascent, but we quickly switch to another, and my own life is testament to this fact: the problem of God is that God keeps on being resurrected.

Because of the way our consciousness OS has evolved, the figure of Apollo has become the undying zombie-deity that we struggle to be rid of, a spectre that haunts us with a fantasy about our own enduring spirit. This haunting can become so acute that violence appears to be the only way to be rid of it. I think of Hunter raising a gun to his own head, this the only way to kill off the Duke myth that stalked him and refused to let him live in peace. Then there is Jesus turning to Jerusalem, knowing that to do so would mean death, but this the only way to be done with the Christ figure. We witness these deaths, but then insist on resurrection, summoning their Holy-Gonzo spirits to fund our own narratives of ascension.

I can’t do this any more. I refuse this telling of the tale.

Some have heard me say this and beckoned me towards the radical atheism of Dawkins or Dennett, but in the coming world of AI the denial of gods will be a supine abdication focusing on wet curates and parish hymnals.

No, in a world where the illusion of god keeps on being resurrected, we need a set of practices that keep on putting the illusion to death. It’s in the face of this that I’ve found myself wending my way back to Christianity, albeit a form of that is done with any transcendent God, a faint thread I find there of just this kind of process: the story of a perfect god put to death, no angels descending to his aid.

In this retelling, crucifixion is a technology that seeks out and destroys the religious virus that has hacked and taken over our drives, hiding away in the unconscious.
In this re-narration, the Mass is a celebration of the dismantling of these gods who’ve wounded us. We break bread and drink wine, Apollo torn apart into something perishable, the god we once worshipped at this table now become part of the meal, the sacred art of memory performed as we ‘do this in remembrance’ of the god who descended and died.

The cry goes up, he breathes his last, the sky goes black. The sun has died.

What then of the resurrection? Sitting with friends in France this was the question immediately fired back. I had wrestled for so long with it, then, some time after Nic’s death, I found myself interviewing Professor Simon Critchley for a programme I was presenting for BBC radio, a commission squeezed into my continuing work teaching mathematics. I’d been wanting to talk about Montaigne, and his idea that to philosophise was to learn how to die. Then, more in hope than expectation I threw the question of resurrection at him.

‘I believe in the after-life,’ he said, ‘in so far as I believe in the life of those that come after.’

I was stunned. The producer was leaning in, holding the microphone close, me sat in a chair, Critchley stretched out on the bed in his hotel room, black leather boots on crisp white linen. I was trying to formulate my next question but my mind was full of Nic, his widow and his twins. ‘Kids, those you love or have been close to,’ he went on, filling my silence, ‘you want them to go on.’

This was a resurrection I could live with: not that when we die we are raised again, but that those who live on are able to be lifted, can get up from the grave-side and find life once we are gone. The most important task we have is not to achieve our own ascension, but to live well enough that those who come after can, once they have grieved, rise again.

Once we have mourned, once we have grieved for the loss of an above that never was, we rise again and move on and focus on the after-life that is around us, celebrating the time that we have, and striving to build a just and peaceful and sustainable Earth for those who are now and those who will come.

Getting High: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the Dream of Flight, pp.

GETTING HIGH was published in 2016 to – I’m happy to say – great acclaim. You can purchase it from your local bookstore, or online in the US here, or the UK here.

‘The best book I’ve read this year,’ one reader wrote. ‘Drop everything and read this now,’ said another. ‘The most courageous theological memoir since Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain.’