Remembering the Face of Your Father
October 16, 2024·8 comments·Politics
Modern culture teaches us to move on from the dead. We're told the past is irrelevant, that progress means forward momentum without looking back. But what if the inability to hear our ancestors' stories isn't evolution but catastrophic loss? What if the absence of ancestral communion explains why shame, honor, and loyalty have vanished from public life?
• Death used to be a conversation, not an ending. For most of human history, cultures from Rome to China to Egypt saw the dead as still present, still teachable, still part of the living pack. Ceremonies and stories kept them actively woven into daily life.
• The Abrahamic religions and modernity conspired to end this. First came religious prohibition against ancestor communion as "necromancy." Then came science and materialism, which declared the dead truly gone. Between them, they erased a bedrock human practice in just a few centuries.
• Without ancestors, we lost shame and honor. Stephen King's Dark Tower captures what happens when a society forgets its fathers: people lose the ability to distinguish right from wrong because they have no internal reference point for what a human should be.
• Modernity calls this liberation but it's actually alienation. The State and capital benefit from citizens with no family anchors, no stories that contradict official narratives, no loyalty to something older than the present moment. We're more controllable when we're isolated from our own past.
• The question isn't whether we can remember them, but whether we will before it's too late. Three generations is all we have before stories disappear entirely. Once no living person has ever heard your grandfather's voice or your grandmother's counsel, they're gone from existence.
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Comments
Gosh Ben, I’m struggling with this a bit. My recently deceased ancestors (past 40 years or so) of whom I have some actual memory are like most people in that they ALL had both praiseworthy traits and “warts”.
Like me.
The memories are all subjective at some level, and I’m not convinced that making those memories as objective as possible through GAI is ever going to capture the truth which I believe I KNOW - and choose to propagate - to our children. Does tasking GAI with providing an “accurate” description of an individual guarantee a legacy of our choosing?
I dunno.
My mortality is an accepted feature of life and occasionally thinking about that makes me behave better in the moment.
Would a GAI version of an individual be TRUSTED as accurate, or could it possibly be ignored as somehow manipulated? In today’s world of never ending conspiracies and data manipulation , IDK.
It’s funny Ben, because of my accident and injury, people share their stories much more freely with me than others. I think, because my portrait, the visual of my injury, tells most of my story before I have to fill in the details, they know I know pain and loss. I used to think it was so weird, perfect strangers would share very intimate, often sad and tragic stories minutes after meeting me. For a long time, I even felt guilty. Somewhere along the way, I began to realize exactly what you wrote, every one of the stories being shared, was in the smallest way, trying to keep a belief and a memory alive. It is sometimes the only thing that gets some through the next day, the next week, it simply gives people hope.
My Daughter Got Married September 28th, been thinking a lot about how being a quadriplegic dad impacted my daughters lately. Here’s 4 minutes that you can’t get back, of my 2 girls and a letter I didn’t think would be shared. Apologies for cluttering up the thread with a personal moment, but I’d love for it to live a few generations. #MayHaveCriedAlittle #SingularEvents
Thank you, Carl, for sharing your story.
Carl - that was the video that I didn’t know I needed and will always treasure. Story shared!
Beautiful and thought provoking piece.
I just came here to add that in reading Fustel de Coulanges’ The Ancient City (1864), one can argue that a key foundation of “property rights” emerged from the “property responsibilities” of maintaining the ancestral flame.
Binding these ideas together, I can’t help but consider the actual metal in which this new digital flame will reside, and what are the rights and responsibilities in owning and protecting this digital flame, right down to the metal? …and as the community will know soon, its exactly the hard problem I’ve been working on in digital identity and selfhood for about five years now with ID++ (and the storage of our personal, familial, and pack Echos).
Again, wonderful piece Ben,
/josh
I remember talking with you about this at our first Epsilon Connect!
A very moving post, and much of it rings true.
In theory the value of this technology is for the living. If we could go back and faithfully represent your father’s mind/essence, he wouldn’t know we had done so and it would make no difference to his life. The benefit would only be to us for knowing him better.
But because the technolgy exists, as it becomes known and used in this manner then it can benefit those who contribute their essences to know that they will have a lasting impact. How much better our final moments will be with the peace of mind that in a very real sense, our impact on the lives of those we love most does not end with our death nor even with theirs. We go on as long as there are others who have been loved and shaped by those we love.
Ben-
Thank you so much for writing this.
One note (or question or thought). When people used to commune with the dead, the person alive would ask the dead person for wisdom or an answer, and, unless they actually were speaking with the dead, the individual would seemingly discover, within themselves, the wisdom they needed to make a decision or to find their own answer. In other words, it was almost like a ritual that allowed them to internally deliberate and find their own “truth.” When you do this GAI thing, you seemingly remove yourself from the decision making function. You “outsource” the decision to the encapsulated wisdom (stripped of context) from those who have since passed. It’s less you, and more…Siri.
I think there is an absolutely immense amount one can learn through communing with the dead, or at least the ritual aspect of it. I think there is an absolutely immense amount one can learn in shutting of our hyper vigilant rational brain. I am very very wary of “purifying” or bottling wisdom into a thing, to cede an internal decision making process to something else. A mirage of what once was.
I hope this makes sense.
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