I’ve been reading the modern classic The Brothers K by American writer David James Duncan. Not to be confused with The Brothers Karamazov, this novel creatively riffs off of Dostoevsky’s iconic novel while retaining its own unique flavor. Set in Washington state during the crazy 1960s, The Brothers K is about the Chances, a family with a father beaten down after a failed shot at pro baseball, and the four brothers who each respond differently to the rapidly changing culture of the United States.

The Chances’ grandmother, who they affectionately call “Grandawma,” is a staunch Darwinist, while Mrs. Chance is a devout Seventh Day Adventist. The Chance children have to wade through the opposing worldviews they’re brought up in, and in one scene, Duncan gives us a fascinating quote from Charles Darwin himself that I couldn’t help but think sums up the materialistic worldview, and its technological consequences:

Up to age thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds…gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. I have also said that formerly pictures [paintings] gave me considerable, and music very great, delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry; I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also lost almost any taste for pictures or music…My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of fact, but why this have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive…The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect (p. 273, bold added).

It’s a tragic quote of a man who seems to be accidentally detailing the consequences of his own worldview. The part about generating “facts” without an appreciation for tastes in music or poetry sounds eerily like the “mind” of a chatbot; only, Darwin, because he was a man and not a machine, could feel the pang of loss when he realized he no longer had an appetite for transcendence.

Does a materialistic worldview lead us believe humans are simply advanced computing systems? Darwin’s vision of the world left him bereft of anything that might have made his life meaningful.

AI can “spit out” verbiage but it can’t understand the things it generates, and doesn’t share the human longing for beauty, story, and redemption. Even though Darwin lost the ability to see the glory, he knew what he was missing.