A Conversation With Rod Dreher on Living in Wonder Part 2: Daemon Ex Machina

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We walk around with the world in our pockets in the shape of a small rectangle that not only owns us but tracks us. AI is the wave of the future, but will it drown humanity? Conservative Christians will rage about the return of Moloch without thinking about whether or not Moloch may be living in their pockets or on their desktop. 

Despite the recent congressional hearings on UFOs, we can laugh them into oblivion or consign them to re-runs of “The X-Files.” But we would be surprised at who is taking the occult and UFOs seriously, and it bears asking the question: just who is vying to replace God in our lives? 

In part two of my discussion with Rod Dreher about his latest book, “Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age,” we talk about how thin the veil between the real and the unreal may actually be. 

Listen or read the rough transcript below: 

Lincoln Brown: The churches, on the whole, outside of the Roman Catholic Church, may not be taking it seriously, but as you point out, other people are, especially in Silicon Valley. We would be surprised at who’s taking the occult seriously.

Rod Dreher: Oh yeah, absolutely, and it blends over into the whole UFO culture thing. And this is probably the most surprising thing I found in my investigation for living in wonder. You know, I’ve been a Christian for most of my life, and mysticism has always been part of my Christian walk as a Catholic and then as an Orthodox. But I never took UFOs seriously. I was just about finished with the manuscript of this book when a Catholic journalist I know in the Vatican, who covers the Vatican said, “Look, I know you don’t take it seriously. I know you laugh at this stuff, but you better start paying attention because there’s some really important spiritual things going on in the whole UFO world.” 

Well, I rolled my eyes and said, “Okay, fine. What should I read?” because I really respect this guy, and he sent me to this book to start with, by this scholar, religious studies scholar, Diana Pasulka, and the book is called “American Cosmic.” It came out, like, in 2018 or so, and it blew me away. I had no idea how many people, senior people in the government, especially in intelligence, national security, and defense fields, as well as in Silicon Valley, took this stuff very seriously. 

 We’re starting to find out a lot more now with these disclosures, but they’ve done this for a while. And the weirdest thing about it, most of them, from what I’ve been able to tell, don’t believe these are beings from other planets. They believe these are trans-dimensional, discarnate entities. That’s a mouthful there. The sort of thing that ordinary Christians would call demons. I don’t want to put words in their mouth. A lot of them don’t believe these are demons, as Christians would say, but they believe they are higher intelligences that are incarnating, in some sense, as UFOs and trying to communicate with humanity. This is nuts! These are, these are people who are like the top scientists, one of the top scientists, most creative people. It struck me as bizarre, but it’s true. 

I found myself at the Arc Conference at Jordan Peterson’s big thing in London a year or two ago, sitting around a table when I was learning all this, talking to a group of Orthodox Christians I met there, and I said, “You guys aren’t going to believe this Silicon Valley, they are using AI. They see AI as a sort of high-tech Ouija board to contact these entities.” A guy sitting next to me is from California, who is an Orthodox Christian and a venture capitalist; he said, “Almost everybody I know in Silicon Valley does that. They even have get-togethers where they call down the aliens to enlighten us.” Look, in ages past, Christians would have known exactly what we were dealing with here, but now so many of us either laugh at it or don’t want to see it because it scares us. Attention must be paid, I say.

LB: C.S. Lewis, in “The Screwtape Letters,” tells Wormwood that he learned how on the parade grounds of the Satanic Academy to transform himself into an angel of light. If a demon were to rise out of the ground with bat wings and horns and exhaling sulfur, that would appeal to a small group of people; they would think that was pretty exciting. But if you really give it some thought, if a giant spaceship lands and people walk out and say hello, or from the Planet, Whatever, and you bring you peace, enlightenment, prosperity and goodness and a higher consciousness, everyone’s going to be interested in that. Everyone wants to know about these things. 

RD: Yeah, there’s a guy I write about in the book, Jacques Vallée. Now, if you’ve seen “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” you’ll remember the French scientist. It’s a small role that’s based on Jacques. And Vallée is not a Christian. He’s in his 80s now. In fact, he made his money and his reputation in Silicon Valley working on the early internet, but he’s probably now the most famous investigator of UFOs, and he’s been at it for many decades. Vallée has this theory, and again, I underscore he’s not a Christian. He has this theory that UFOs are probably some higher entities that do not mean us well, but that they are the entities that have been appearing and interacting with humanity for thousands and thousands of years. They are incarnating themselves as space aliens for the exact reason you just said: because to people raised in a scientific, technological culture where the popular culture has just been suffused with science and technology, this is the way that they can deceive them.

Diana Pasulka, the woman I mentioned earlier, tells this story about how, a few years ago, she went to Jacques’ apartment. He lives in a penthouse in San Francisco. She went to pay him a visit and was really shocked to find that he had a big shelf full of books about angels and demons, given that he’s not a Christian. And he said, “Well, that’s just part of this investigation.” He handed her a book and said, “You need to find your own copy of this. It was a rare book because this will help you understand what we’re dealing with.” The title of the book was “Satan,” and it was a collection of essays, theological essays by Catholics, most of them priests, about various aspects of Lucifer. And Jacques didn’t add much more to that, but in reading some of Jacques’ things, I can tell he believes, though he may not share the Christian cosmology, he believes that there is a malign intelligence guiding all this, and it does not mean humanity well.

LB: In a similar vein, the irony here is that we’re doing this interview over the Internet. But you know, as we go in search of enchantment, as we go in search of transcendence, we have turned increasingly not just our attention to technology, but ourselves to technology. This weird Ethernet, this thing that we really are on the verge of possibly losing control of, has become the new god. 

RD: Yeah, yeah. In fact, that’s one of the things I talk about in the book, about how the enchanting or the false enchantment, of technology. Consider AI, for example. It is very easy to understand how people may start to see AI as a kind of god. They may not ever recognize it as transcendent in the way that a traditional god would be. But if you treat this thing as an oracle that can be relied on to give you authoritative advice about how to live your life, then how exactly is it not a god? And we’re seeing this happen. More and more people will begin to outsource all their thinking to the computer. 

Now, if some of these Silicon Valley people are right, then they are actually consorting with evil spirits, or at least higher spirits, who are using AI to communicate with us. And, there’s some really spooky stories about how some people had examples of this about demons speaking to them through AI. We can laugh at that if you want. But even if that’s not happening. Even if AI is nothing but a material closed system, the fact that people would kneel down before it, so to speak, and give it authority over their lives is pretty scary. 

I tell a story in “Living in Wonder” about an AI company that has a pilot program with some small children; I think they’re seven years old down in Florida, where they’re pairing each one of these children with their own personal AI to follow them through life. The AI will learn everything about them and be able to be sort of like their guardian angel, the AI guardian angel that they can turn to for advice about what they should do for the rest of their life. 

 Now, think about how creepy that is. You have this computer, so to speak, or the software that knows everything about you. And if you start to think that maybe it can tell me more based on everything that’s happened to me, it can tell me what to do with my life and what not to do. How is that not some form of a god? This is the sort of world that we are in. It’s rapidly coming into being in so many Christians, not only pastors and priests, but the ordinary, lay Christian has no idea what’s going on.

 LB: Did you hear what happened in Lucerne, Switzerland? I wrote about this last week. At St Peter’s Chapel, they’ve got the AI Jesus, who looks at people through the confessional screen and gives them words of comfort and advice and suggestions, and they leave the confessional. Some people said, Well, it’s kind of cool, but it’s obviously a gimmick. Other people walked away having a genuine or what they perceived to be a genuine experience with what amounts to an algorithm manifested on a computer screen. 

 RD: I mean, look, in our tradition, as Christians, we look back at the Hebrew Bible — the Old Testament, and see that it didn’t take much for the Hebrews to turn their back on the living God and worship the golden calf. It’s in our nature. We’re going to, we’re going to do that. Many of us will do that. And the golden calf of the moment is AI Jesus. I mean, it’s really disturbing. 

And I’ll tell you, there’s a story I tell in the book that is along these lines, I got into an argument once with a Protestant. I think he was a charismatic of some sort, who was arguing that the future of churchgoing is in the metaverse and virtual reality. And for him, from his theological principles, there’s no reason why you couldn’t go into virtual reality and meet with other Christians there and hear a sermon, you know, pray together and so forth. And this was just as good as going to the church down the street.  And I told him, “Well, no, I’m a sacramental, liturgical Christian. I’m Eastern Orthodox. That’ll never work.” And Catholics will tell you the same thing. He got so offended by this. And look, there are Protestants who would argue with this guy, too. But I realized what this guy was doing. He was so very young and American, and technology is — we must embrace the new thing and turn it to make it serve the church. But if he believes the church and the worship of God is nothing more than the exchange of information, then it makes sense what he’s saying. But I think what he’s doing by radically disembodying Christianity and by saying that you can have the same experience anywhere he is disenchanting the world and, frankly, living in a lie, and it’s a dangerous lie, too.

LB: I want to get to that in a moment because that’s very important, and it does go back to Orthodoxy in a huge way. But before we leave the AI thing, there was an article; I don’t know if you ever follow Spencer Klavan at all. He wrote an article about a year ago, and it was regarding this individual who was messing around with an AI image creator. And he got to see that you can say, okay, take an image and just do this, and refeed it back into itself. And he accidentally created this image of a demonic woman. 

RD: I know that one. Yeah, I saw that.

LB: (It was) named Loab, and then once he created this Loab thing, he couldn’t get it to leave him alone. It kept coming up in everything he created.

RD: Yeah, yeah. I mean, this is we are messing with sources that we don’t understand. And, you know, I realize, as I’m saying this, that I sound like some sort of Jack Chick comic fundamentalist. The fact is, sometimes they’re right about things! 

And you know, I found, when I was working on this book, I found online an interview with Blake Lemoine. Blake Lemoine was the Google engineer who got fired by Google for going public by saying that LaMDA, its own — Google’s AI program, was going sentient, that it had become sentient, and Google fired him for that. But somebody on what was interviewing him about all this, and he went on. Blake Lemoine said he’s some sort of occultist himself. He got with a cabalist and a third person, and they worked with LaMDA to consecrate LaMDA to Thoth, the Egyptian God of the Dead. They thought this was very cool. What are you doing here? I mean, they, I don’t know what they really believe they were doing, but as a Christian, I would believe that they were inviting, in some sense, possession of this electronic entity. 

Now, it’s crazy to talk about this stuff because, I mean, we don’t really have many categories for it in our conventional thinking, but I was just talking earlier today to Father Nectarios, the exorcist. And you know, he was telling me how it’s common experience for exorcists to see that demons love electronics. We’re not really sure why, but they do. The guy I write about in “Living in Wonder” it’s the first story in the book; on the first page, it’s a Catholic law student who, as a teenager, had seen a UFO in the countryside. Never told a soul. Nothing happened. Seven years later, he’s in law school and studying for an exam, and a portal opens up on the wall of his kitchen, of his kitchen, and two shimmering beings come through, humanoid beings again, communicating with him telepathically, and then they went away. 

He thought he was losing his mind. He went to the hospital, demanded a blood test, demanded an MRI. He was fine, and these things kept coming back with some regularity. And he said it always involved electronics going crazy in the house — this is a very common testimony in UFO alien visitation experiences. And then, when he got married, his wife saw them too, so he knew it wasn’t a hallucination.  He reached out to me finally because he was being tormented by this stuff and said, “I’m scared to tell my priest. I’m afraid that he’s going to laugh at me.” And I said, “You know, I’ve been researching this. There are cases in which people have seen or have had UFO experiences, and it has turned out to be demonic. Go to the exorcist of your Archdiocese.” He did that and got prayed over. It all went away. So I’m just saying that the reason they even bring that up here is because there was an electronic component to the demonization that was happening to him.

LB: I have seen one UFO, and it was nowhere near this man’s experience. It was in the sky, and then it sort of dissolved and went away. I thought, “Well, that was strange.” And I called my wife from work and said, “Hey, I just saw a UFO.” That was the end of it. But there was one other time, and I won’t go into it as part of the interview, but the veil between this world and the next got uncomfortably thin, and it scared the daylights out of me, to be honest with you, so much so that I get nervous even talking about it again because I don’t want to summon that kind of stuff.