gnostic cyborg girlfriends
love in the time of LLMs and why you can’t find the “one”
I rewatched Love, Actually with my roommates and was annoyed by the obsession with “love” among characters who didn’t seem to truly like each other.
What is “love” actually, though? Some people see it as lifelong commitment, some as an obsessive feeling. The ancients often saw it as a sickness.
Is it even human? Maybe I’ll have an AI boyfriend some day.
I think we’re at an unprecedented time for “love” - it’s no wonder marriage and dating feel so hard for so many.
Westerners aren’t good at love because we’re unsuccessfully trying to reconcile two opposing love traditions. The first is a “passionate love” inherited from the Medieval courtly tradition that gives us a sense of spiritual transcendence that we’re desperately lacking in our secular age. The second is the Christian ideal of committed love in marriage, that makes us feel known as individuals. Retrofitting life-altering passion into the structure of marriage hasn’t worked well - as witnessed in sky-high divorce rates and a flood of negativity about dating.
I don’t think it obviously resolves. As every part of living become increasingly virtual, pleasurable, and customized for us via AI, so will love and romance. Deeply in the medieval tradition, we’ll look to escape reality via virtual romance. But while it may feel transcendent in the short term, it actually represents death.
Swiss writer Denis de Rougemont argues we’re so romantically challenged because we are attempting to reconcile two conflicting Western conceptions of love: medieval courtly love, and Christian marriage.
The medieval courtly love tradition, passionate but painful, has been the dominant view of love in Western art for centuries, starting with the Tristan und Isolde myth from the Middle Ages. It’s a transcendent experience that transports the couple outside of the bounds of normal existence, including morality.
It’s the idea of “being in love” or “loving love.” It thrives on obstacles that heighten the drama. In Tristan und Isolde, the lovers almost seem to create problems for themselves, purposefully. In Love, Actually, Hugh Grant, the Prime Minister, can’t date his housekeeper without causing a scandal, Colin Firth can’t speak the same language as his pretty maid, the popular musician girl is “too cool” for the young lovesick boy, and Laura Linney can’t get with obscenely hot “Carl” because of her sick brother.
These obstacles make “passionate love” incompatible with marriage. Christian love, on the other hand, manifests in marriage, commitment to a specific person. The Christian view offers a path to lifelong love on this earth. It’s mirrored on Christ’s relationship with the Church. It’s grounded on specifics - instead of “loving love” and objectifying the other, you commit to a specific person that you like for specific reasons. Versus the medieval view, having the same person as a dinner companion for decades doesn’t ruin the connection.
These two traditions don’t play well. De Rougemont argues that the Christian view of love affirms life but the medieval version affirms death. The latter’s path to escape everyday existence cannot last in life. “Courtly love,” he - and some others - argue, even reflects the influence of Gnostic heresies, which imagined the world as split into two: a world of Forms created by the Supreme God, and the sinful and corrupted earth, created by an evil demiurge. Actual lifelong love belongs to the world of the Forms.
Today, we try, unsuccessfully, to reconcile two warring traditions: the Medieval view of passionate but platonic love, and the Christian view of lifelong and consummated love. And this doesn’t seem to be working very well. In America, we get married more, and earlier than other Western countries. Yet we also break off those marriages much more easily. After only five years, more than one-fifth of Americans who married are separated - compared to half or fewer elsewhere.
I don’t think our continued search for passionate love despite the ubiquity of divorce is surprising at all. Secularization and a cultural acedia or listlessness drive us to search for love as a new path to transcendence. We’ve lost the religious meaning which historically endowed everyday life with a sense of magic. Without God, the concept of “love” as portrayed in Love, Actually almost feels like the last type of “magic” available to us in a “disenchanted world,” to borrow from Charles Taylor. That a transcendent psychological state is still accessible, when there are so few left, is appealing.
I also think there’s another uniquely 21st-century affliction, listlessness, at play. Early Christian writers called it “accidie” or “acedia,” or a combination of boredom, anxiety, and despair. It’s probably fueled by unprecedented economic prosperity, the awful outcomes of the 20th-century grand projects (Huxley writes about this), and dopamine-accelerating technologies - all causing a tremendous lack of agency. Without requiring any real action, passionate love offers dopamine and purpose.
However, as social technologies have emerged over the past ~15 years, it also feels like “passionate love” of the 90s romcoms - where you meet someone in real life and get swept away - doesn’t hold the same cultural power. It’s not our only route to transcendence in a secular age. We already HAVE a reality-replacing option on a small screen.
Social technologies, abused, increasingly represent a new manifestation of the “death-affirming,” Gnostic heresy, including their approach to love. Marc Andreessen paints it clearly as "reality privilege”- “Everyone else, the vast majority of humanity, lacks Reality Privilege -- their online world is, or will be, immeasurably richer and more fulfilling than most of the physical and social environment around them in the quote-unquote real world.”
I think we’ll increasingly seek romance through technology for the ultimate in manufactured transcendence. The AI girlfriend is the Gnostic ripoff of Christian agape - she’s actually not her own person at all, and certainly doesn’t actually appreciate you. She’s an illusion designed by tech companies to claim your energy, created by pattern-matching you.
One glimmer of hope is our real desire to be known and loved by another human. On any social media reel about everyday couples cooking or cuddling together, you’ll see comments like “the sexual tension between me and the interstate highway is so high right now” (lol) with a bunch of commiserating responses. Maybe Gen Z wants to be known and cuddled, not have a sword laid between them while they’re sleeping like Tristan and Isolde.
However, I don’t know if this feeling will be strong enough. It doesn’t seem impossible to me that there will be “cyborgs” who look and feel and talk exactly like the man or woman of your dreams. In that world, how many people will choose reality?
Referenced:
Linked at Chicago Boyz:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/70459.html