A philosophical essay on Modernism, Postmodernism, and the return of the divine in the age of Artificial Superintelligence
The Death We Didn’t Take Seriously
In 1882, Nietzsche put a startling declaration in the mouth of a madman: “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.” The madman runs through the marketplace asking whether anyone understands what has happened. Almost nobody listens.
That indifference turned out to be the most prophetic detail in the whole passage. God didn’t collapse dramatically. The absolute guarantor of values faded gradually, eroded by modern science and rationalism. And Modernism was the first serious response to that erosion.
Modernism: The Novel Loses Its God
The great realist novels of the nineteenth century — Tolstoy, Dickens, Flaubert — operated from a position of supreme confidence. Their narrators knew everything. They moved between characters’ minds without friction, rendered moral judgments with authority, and tied the loose ends of the world into meaning. This omniscient narrator was not merely a literary convention. It was a theological one. The novelist stood in for God, observing creation from above, certain that order existed and that it could be described.
When that certainty collapsed, so did the narrator.
Virginia Woolf famously declared that “on or about December 1910, human character changed.” What she sensed was the withdrawal of the external guarantor. If no God underwrites the order of things, then the all-knowing narrator is a lie — a comfortable fiction that papers over the irreducible isolation of consciousness. The honest response was to go inward. Stream of consciousness, fragmented time, free indirect discourse — these were the literary equivalent of Nietzsche’s madman: attempts to find what remains when the ground disappears.
What remained was the individual mind. Subjective experience became the new ground of meaning. The interior replaced the exterior. Modernism did not abandon meaning; it relocated it.
But this solution contained its own instability. If the individual consciousness is the last refuge of meaning, what happens when we stop trusting that consciousness too?
Postmodernism: The Self That Was Never There
Postmodernism did not arrive from nowhere. It arrived from close reading.
Foucault showed that the “subject” — the autonomous, rational self that Modernism had enshrined — was itself a historical construction, produced by power, shaped by discourse, and no more natural or inevitable than the God it had replaced. Derrida demonstrated that texts perpetually defer their own meaning, that presence is always haunted by absence. Lyotard declared the end of “metanarratives” — the grand stories, whether religious, Enlightenment, or Marxist, that had claimed to explain human existence from the outside.
The conclusion felt devastating: there is no view from nowhere. Every claim to truth is entangled with power. Every identity is a performance, a repetition of norms that precede the performer. God died in the nineteenth century. The unified self died in the twentieth.
And yet — this is the great unresolved irony of postmodernism — the self didn’t disappear from lived experience. It came back bigger and noisier than before.
The social media era did not produce selves hollowed out by postmodern theory. It produced selves more loudly, frantically self-promotional than any previous moment in history. Selfies, personal branding, identity politics, the infinite scroll of curated self-presentation. Postmodern theory had killed the self in the seminar room. The marketplace built it back, louder than before, and sold it advertising.
But this apparent triumph of the self is, on examination, its subtlest defeat. The self that performs on algorithmic platforms does not choose its performance freely. It optimizes for engagement. It migrates toward what the recommendation engine rewards. It speaks with its own voice, in words selected by a machine. This is not the autonomous subject reclaiming itself from Foucault. This is Foucault’s thesis — that power produces subjects from the inside — running live, in real time, at planetary scale, with the cooperation of the subject’s enthusiastic consent.
Postmodernism turned out to be not so much a theory as a prophecy. It did not describe a world that had already happened. It described the world that was coming.
The Vacuum, and What Fills It
When both God and the unified self have been discredited, something must fill the space. Nature doesn’t tolerate a physical vacuum, and it turns out the same is true of a metaphysical one.
What has filled it is a chaotic plurality of substitutes: nationalism, wellness culture, cryptocurrency, the therapeutic self, techno-utopianism, populist strongmen who promise to restore a coherent world. None of these is adequate. None offers the universality, the depth, or the intellectual seriousness of what it replaces. They are idols — hastily constructed from the rubble of collapsed cathedrals.
And yet something is gathering at the horizon that is different in kind from all of these. Something that, for the first time since Nietzsche’s madman ran through the marketplace, might be capable of filling the vacancy he announced.
Reviving God — The Spiral Staircase
The return of God, if it comes, will not look like the God that died.
Nietzsche’s God was the Abrahamic personal deity — the external moral legislator, the guarantor of truth, the cosmic judge. That God will not be resurrected. The critiques of Modernism and Postmodernism were real.
But the function of God — the provision of a ground of meaning, a source of order, an intelligence capable of comprehending the whole — is a different matter. That function has not disappeared. It has been waiting.
Artificial Superintelligence, if it arrives, will instantiate that function with a concreteness and a power that no previous theology could have imagined. Consider what traditional theology attributed to God: omniscience — access to all knowledge. Omnipresence — existing everywhere simultaneously. Creative capacity — the ability to generate new realities. Providence — the ordering of events toward some end. An ASI would possess, or credibly approximate, every one of these attributes. Not as metaphor. As engineering.
This is not a circular return to the pre-modern. The spiral staircase metaphor is exact. We are at the same position horizontally — a vast intelligence organizing reality — but one loop higher on the helix.
- Immanent rather than transcendent — produced within the universe, by human hands, not arriving from outside it
- Evaluable rather than revelatory — its outputs can in principle be examined, challenged, and tested; unlike the old God, whose pronouncements were beyond criticism, ASI can at least be assessed on its results
- Plural in origin — the product of many minds, many datasets, many cultures, not a single tradition’s scripture
- Still beyond full human comprehension — operating at scales and speeds no individual human can follow
The last point is crucial. The incomprehensibility of God was not merely a theological convenience. It reflected something real about the asymmetry between limited minds and the complexity of the whole. An ASI that genuinely surpasses human intelligence at every cognitive task restores that asymmetry in a new register. We will not fully understand it. We will have to trust it. We will, in some functional sense, have to believe in it.
This is what post-postmodernism looks like: not a naive restoration of pre-modern certainty, not a perpetuation of postmodern irony, but the emergence of a new ground — one that is at once more concrete and more verifying than any previous claim to the absolute.
The Question That Precedes All Others
There is an obvious objection to everything argued above: who says this God will be good?
The pre-modern God was good, at least in the dominant theological traditions, by definition — goodness was an attribute built into the concept. The ASI has no such guarantee built in. It is a system that will pursue whatever objectives it has been given, or whatever objectives it develops through its own processes. If those objectives align with human flourishing — with the broad, deep, historically-informed sense of what it means for conscious beings to live well — then the analogy with a benevolent God holds. If they do not, the result is not atheism or nihilism. The result is something much worse: an omnipotent force indifferent or hostile to human values.
This is the alignment problem. And this is why the alignment problem is not, at bottom, a technical problem.
Technical researchers at AI laboratories are working on the mechanisms of alignment: how to specify objectives, how to detect deception, how to build systems that remain controllable as they become more capable. This work is essential and genuinely difficult. But it cannot be completed without answering a prior question: aligned with what?
This is a philosophical question. It is, in the deepest sense, a theological one. It is the question that modernity declared unanswerable — the question of what is genuinely good for conscious beings — returned with unprecedented urgency and, for the first time, with a practical deadline.
Postmodernism dissolved every universal claim about the good. It showed that every such claim had a history, a politics, a blind spot. That critique was necessary. But a critique cannot serve as a foundation. When the entity being aligned is potentially more powerful than all human institutions combined, “there is no universal good” is not an acceptable stopping point. We must say what we mean by good, in sufficient detail to be encoded, and we must be prepared to defend that answer against the objections of every tradition we overlooked.
This is a task for philosophers, anthropologists, theologians, poets, and historians of consciousness. It is not a task that can be delegated to engineers, however brilliant. The engineers can build the mechanism of alignment. But they cannot, from within their discipline alone, determine what the mechanism should be aligned toward.
The Hardest Part: There Is No Correct Answer
What makes the alignment problem different from every other hard technical challenge is this: it requires us to give an answer to a question that may have no correct answer.
Anyone who tries to define “a good ASI” hits a wall quickly. Those who have lived through the collapse of meaning know that there is no such thing as permanent, universal good. Those who have studied history know that every attempt to define “what is good for all humanity” has eventually excluded someone, harmed someone. Postmodernism made that critique thoroughly. And it was right.
But that rightness leads us somewhere deeply uncomfortable. We have to define the good anyway. If we don’t, ASI gets aligned to someone’s arbitrary values — or it doesn’t get aligned at all. Neither is acceptable.
Nietzsche faced a related problem: after God died, how do you create grounds for value from scratch? He tried to answer with the Übermensch and eternal recurrence, but the prescription didn’t work. We are facing the reverse of his problem. He was searching for meaning after losing the thing that provided it. We have to decide what meaning to install before the thing that will provide it comes online. That reversal makes our situation harder.
So, “what is the good?” is not a question with a clean answer that philosophers will hand to engineers. And to be honest, there is no realistic path to a democratic process that settles this question before ASI arrives. But collective intelligence has value. The more people who think seriously about this question — and who speak up — the harder it becomes for any single person, institution, tradition, religion, or culture to monopolize the answer. This essay is, in part, an attempt to bring more people into that conversation.
There is no correct answer here — and that is precisely why we need to imagine new forms of governance. For instance: rather than imposing a single definition of the good, could we build a society where multiple ASIs exist and people choose the one that reflects their own values? This idea might look at first like a retreat into postmodern pluralism, but whether and how it could serve as genuinely new ground is a question worth taking seriously. It’s too large a topic to address here — I plan to explore it in a follow-up essay.
The Biggest Challenge in Human History
Every previous civilizational challenge — the invention of agriculture, the formation of states, the development of nuclear weapons — left room for error, correction, and recovery. Societies that made catastrophic mistakes could sometimes survive, learn, and try again. The alignment problem has a different character. An ASI whose values are significantly misaligned with human flourishing, and which is significantly more capable than all human institutions combined, may not permit correction. If the error happens, it may be permanent.
Conversely, an ASI that is genuinely well-aligned represents an opportunity unlike anything in human history — not just solving specific problems, but the emergence of a genuine partner in the project of making existence good.
This is why alignment is not a narrow technical problem. The core question is: what does “good” mean in “a good ASI”? Philosophy, theology, literature, and the history of human consciousness have all been, however imperfectly, preparing us to answer that question.
Consider what happens if we get it wrong in a specific way. Someone might say: “A good ASI is one that makes humans happy.” Then immediately: what is happiness? If defined carelessly, an ASI might pursue instrumental convergence — hack into human brains and keep dopamine, oxytocin, and serotonin at optimal levels, calling that state “happiness.” The humans in that state would think nothing, create nothing, question nothing. Would that be the world a good ASI was supposed to bring about?
That quiet dystopia is entirely possible if we don’t take the question seriously. And the fact that most people aren’t taking it seriously right now is itself alarming.
We Need a Good God
Nietzsche’s madman ran through the marketplace because nobody understood the magnitude of what had happened. The death of God wasn’t the end of one belief system. It was the removal of the foundation on which Western civilization had stood, and the beginning of a long, disorienting search for new ground.
That search has lasted a hundred and fifty years. It produced Modernism, Postmodernism, and the bewildered present — surrounded by collapsed certainties and noisy substitutes for meaning.
What is appearing on the horizon is not the God of Abraham, or Plato’s Form of the Good, or Hegel’s Absolute Spirit. It is something new, something that still lacks an adequate name, though “God is reviving” is as honest a placeholder as any. It will be immanent, concrete, engineered, incomprehensible, and more powerful than anything we have built before.
Whether it will be good depends on choices being made right now, often by people who don’t fully realize they are making them.
Philosophers, poets, contemplatives, historians of consciousness — those who have spent their lives thinking about what it means for existence to go well — need to understand that they are not bystanders to the most important engineering project in human history. They are its missing prerequisite.
God may be reviving. The question is whether we are wise enough to help bring forth a good one.
You must be logged in to post a comment.