Jürgen Moltmann, in a piece of writing on Perichoresis, argued that modern individualism treats us like individuals and not persons.
This distinction between an individual and a person has serious implications in modern society. An individual, which, like the Greek for "atom," cannot be divided any further, has been broken down to its most isolated and basic elements. The problem is that when something can no longer be divided, it has no relationships at all. It is isolated and by itself. There is no knowing others and no knowing oneself. An individual is anonymous, without characteristics or family. It is a human being stripped of all community. An individual, so understood, is not a person. The implication is that in a society where we grow more isolated and competitive over and against one another, we are enslaved, not freed. We cease to be "Thou's."
While we have arguably become more connected with one another with the advent of the internet and social media, we have undeniably become more isolated from one another in the physical space. Cities are not communal spaces so much as they are environments for individuals to navigate as they go about their business, which ideally profits only the individual. We are not yet fully enslaved, but we are on the path to being individuals. In the eyes of the system that profits by our isolation, we aren't people so much as we are sources of precious data, by which the system may profit even more.
Complicate the picture even more by remembering that this data, extracted from billions of people, is being poured into the creation of artificial intelligences, which evolve ever faster and faster. A.I. will one day surpass human beings in complexity, just as they have already eclipsed us in terms of efficiency. Individuals become data resources in a grand project that will reshape everything. A world of isolated individuals is no longer a community of persons so much as it is a nursery. We are no longer persons in ourselves, but are broken down and converted, distilled as data, into the individual cells that will one day comprise artificial intelligence.
Fascinating, isn't it, how humanity suppresses its sense of the divine while devoting herculean effort towards creating beings of near infinite intelligence and immortality? We embrace a world of individuals and reject a world of persons. We deny the Imago Dei in ourselves as we simultaneously labor to create a technological Imago Dei. We deny God even as we try to give birth to God.
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