Column

Comment

15 December 2023

4 min read

There’s more than one way to lose our humanity

How we treat immigrants and how AI might treat humans weighs on the mind of George Pitcher.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A grey multi-story accommodation barge floats beside a dock.

The Bibby Stockholm accommodation barge in Portland Harbour.

shley Smith, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons.

“The greatness of humanity,” said Mahatma Gandhi, “is not in being human, but in being humane.” At first glance, this is something of a truism. But actually Gandhi neatly elides the two meanings of humanity in this tight little phrase.

Humanity means both the created order that we know as the human race and its capacity for self-sacrificial love and compassion. In the Christian tradition, we celebrate at Christmas what we call the incarnation – the divine sharing of the human experience in the birth of the Christ child.

Our God shares our humanity and in doing so, shows his humanity in the form of a universal and unconditional love for his people. So, it’s an act both for humanity and of humanity.

This Christmas, there are two very public issues in which humanity has gone missing in both senses. And it’s as well to acknowledge them as we approach the feast. That’s in part a confessional act; where we identify a loss of humanity, in both its definitions, we can resolve to do something about it. Christmas is a good time to do that.

The first is our loss of humanity in the framing of legislation to end illegal immigration to the UK. The second is the absence of humanity in the development of artificial intelligence. The former is about political acts that are inhumane and the latter goes to the nature of what it is to be human.

We have literally lost a human to our inhumanity, hanged in a floating communal bathroom. It’s enough to make us look away from the crib, shamed rather than affirmed in our humanity.

There is a cynical political line that the principal intention of the government’s Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill, voted through the House of Commons this week, is humane, in that it’s aimed at stopping the loss of life among migrants exploited by criminal gangs. But it commodifies human beings, turning them into cargo to be exported elsewhere. That may not be a crime – the law has yet to be tested – but it is at least an offence against humanity.

Where humanity, meaning what it is to be human, is sapped, hope withers into despair. When a human being is treated as so much freight, its value not only diminishes objectively but so does its self-worth. The suicide of an asylum seeker on the detention barge Bibby Stockholm in Portland Harbour is a consequence of depreciated humanity. Not that we can expect to hear any official contrition for that.

To paraphrase Gandhi, when we cease to be humane we lose our humanity. And we have literally lost a human to our inhumanity, hanged in a floating communal bathroom. It’s enough to make us look away from the crib, shamed rather than affirmed in our humanity.

That’s inhumanity in the sense of being inhumane. Turning now to humanity in the sense of what it means to be human, we’re faced with the prospect of artificial intelligence which not only replicates but replaces human thought and function.

To be truly God-like, AI would need to allow itself to suffer and to die on humanity’s part.

The rumoured cause of the ousting of CEO Sam Altman last month from OpenAI (before his hasty reinstatement just five days later) was his involvement in a shadowy project called Q-star, GPT-5 technology that is said to push dangerously into the territory of human intelligence.

But AI’s central liability is that it lacks humanity. It is literally inhuman, rather than inhumane. We should take no comfort in that because that’s exactly where its peril lies. Consciousness is a defining factor of humanity. AI doesn’t have it and that’s what makes it so dangerous.

To “think” infinitely quicker across unlimited data and imitate the best of human creativity, all without knowing that it’s doing so, is a daunting technology. It begins to look like a future in which humanity becomes subservient to its technology – and that’s indeed dystopian.

But we risk missing a point when our technology meets our theology. It’s often said that AI has the potential to take on God-like qualities. This relates to the prospect of its supposed omniscience. Another way of putting that is that it has the potential to be all-powerful.

The trouble with that argument is that it takes no account of the divine quality of being all-loving too, which in its inhumanity AI cannot hope to replicate. In the Christmastide incarnation, God (as Emmanuel, or “God with us”) comes to serve, not to be served. If you’ll excuse the pun, you won’t find that mission on a computer server.

Furthermore, to be truly God-like, AI would need to allow itself to suffer and to die on humanity’s part, albeit to defeat its death in a salvific way. Sorry, but that isn’t going to happen. We must be careful with AI precisely because it’s inhuman, not because it’s too human.

Part of what we celebrate at Christmas is our humanity and, in doing so, we may re-locate it. We need to do that if we are to treat refugees with humanity and to re-affirm that humanity’s intelligence is anything but artificial. Merry Christmas.

Article

Comment

Politics

Race

7 March 2024

4 min read

Claims of institutional racism let politicians off the hook

They need to be mindful of something else baked into our institutions.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A TV roundtable discussion with five people against a backdrop of Parliament.

Politicians and pundits discuss the Lee Anderson issue.

Racism charges have recently divided very neatly along political lines. Tearing chunks out of each other at the Despatch Box, prime minister Rishi Sunak and Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer have both bet their houses by playing the race card on each other.

Starmer claims the Conservative Party wallows in Islamophobia, having withdrawn the whip from its former deputy chairman for stating publicly that Islamist extremists control the Mayor of London. For his part, Sunak, yah-boos back that Labour didn’t have a runner in the Rochdale by-election, after suspending its candidate for peddling an anti-Israel conspiracy theory.

Rochdale was duly won by the famously pro-Arab former Labour MP George Galloway. Sunak wants us to hold that Labour is as antisemitic as it was under Jeremy Corbyn.

So there we have it. Labour is antisemitic and the Tories are Islamophobic (not a good word, but the currency of the moment). Pick your prejudice and vote accordingly at the general election.

Whatever the validity or otherwise of these claims, it’s in the interest of both parties to accuse their opponents of being rotten to the core with these attitudes. It doesn’t really work for them to claim that Sunak personally is an Islamophobe or Starmer an antisemite.

This has to be about the whole political parties over which they preside. It’s really about institutional racism. So when a Conservative MP, Paul Scully, has to apologise for calling some parts of Birmingham and London “no-go areas” for non-Muslims, it’s taken as a reflection on Conservatives as a whole.

Similarly, it’s an insufficiency to criticise particular journalists for their reporting bias; a former BBC director-general has to call the entire corporation “institutionally antisemitic.”

The apartheid governments of South Africa were systemically racist, the Conservative and Labour parties – and the BBC which reports on them – are not.

I have a big problem with these generalisations. The political parties contain racists of both kinds, antisemitic and Islamophobic, as well as very many members of no racism at all (thankfully). And I happen to know from personal experience that the BBC operates an informal policy of equal-opportunities bigotry – there are as many Islamophobes as there are antisemites in the organisation, though together they amount to a small minority (again thankfully).

There is, consequently, no institutional racism in these places of work, though they are all rich in the employment of racist individuals because, alas, so is the world.

Institutional racism was a term coined in the Sixties, but it really only gained traction as an indictment of the Metropolitan Police in 1999’s Macpherson Report into the racist murder of teenager Stephen Lawrence.

I was uneasy with that terminology then and remain so now. Police officers are (or can be) racist; the constabularies for which they work are not. If they were so, they would train their officers to be racists – and they didn’t and do not.

Their training may have been rubbish in all sorts of ways, but there is a world of difference between omission and commission. The apartheid governments of South Africa were systemically racist, the Conservative and Labour parties – and the BBC which reports on them – are not.

Our politicians might be mindful of that, whatever their faith or none. And they might like to note some of the imperatives of its teaching

Two matters stem from this. The first is simply that individuals are responsible for racist attitudes, not the organisation for which they work, although those organisations have a duty to call out racists in their midst.

The other is to recognise what we are, institutionally and systemically. The UK’s uncodified constitution has two Churches established in law, the Church of England and the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. The monarch is the supreme governor of the former, as well as head of state.

That is simply the way it is and, this side of disestablishment of the Church, it follows that (in England and Scotland at least) we live in a Christian country, however few of its inhabitants now attend its churches. In short, Christianity is baked into our systems and institutions.

Our politicians might be mindful of that, whatever their faith or none. And they might like to note some of the imperatives of its teaching: care for the afflicted in the story of the Good Samaritan; the welcome of strangers in the report of the Syrophoenician woman who seeks crumbs from the table; the love of neighbour; Paul’s universalism.

This (and much else besides) is meant, in law, to define who we are. We might expect an elected servant of the state such as Lee Anderson, the Tory suspended from his party for claiming a Muslim power grab of London, or Azhar Ali, the Labour candidate similarly booted out for claiming that Israel conspires to murder its own citizens, to know something of the national creed that defines our parliamentary democracy.

That parliament doesn’t contain institutionally racist parties, any more than the BBC or our police forces are systemically racist. Rather, we should hold individuals to account, whoever they are. Because, ultimately, claims of institutional racism let individuals off the hook. Institutional Christianity does not.