[.article__paragraph--cap][.small-caps]I must confess[.small-caps] to a shameful lack of interest in the possible existence of aliens. Stories about aliens can certainly hold my attention – The X-Files is a favorite – but as soon as people start speculating about the reality behind such stories, I feel an urge to change the subject. Spielberg’s Disclosure Day looks like a lot of fun. But the movie is obviously timed to take advantage of a cultural moment that has elevated alien-talk to surprising new levels of respectability. Even former President Obama has said publicly that “aliens are real” (though he later clarified his comment), and Congress has held multiple hearings on UFOs. If Agent Fox Mulder were working today, he would probably have a nicer office.[.article__paragraph--cap]

It’s not that I’m an unbeliever. Aliens may well be real, and it doesn’t bother me to say so. The best posture toward something like this is an open mind that doesn’t get carried away, and I don’t begrudge people who pursue the question in a spirit of simple curiosity. Creation is a strange place, and it is good to explore. The problem, I think, is that simple curiosity is not the spirit that is guiding the new zeitgeist.

The interest in aliens is clearly of a piece with a broader inclination toward “re-enchantment.” Not only aliens but fairies and angels and demons are now thought by many people to be more than metaphors. In some ways this is a good thing. The desire for re-enchantment shows a healthy discontent with the reductive materialism that has long been de rigeur for “serious” people. If re-enchantment means recovering the knowledge that “all things are full of gods” (the title of David Bentley Hart’s brilliant book), that the material world itself is meaningful because it is pervaded by transcendent meaning, then it is to be welcomed. As Hart put it in an earlier essay: “It is only some degree of prior enchantment that allows the eye to see, and to seek to see yet more . . . a belief in fairies will always be in some sense far more rational than the absolute conviction that such things are sheer nonsense, and that the cosmos consists in nothing but brute material events in haphazard combinations.”

But there is also a sense in which belief in fairies, though “far more rational” than dogmatic materialism, can sometimes serve as an accomplice to materialism’s crime against humanity, which is the relentless transformation of persons who can and must be respected into things that can (and eventually must) be manipulated. This is not the intention of re-enchantment-promoters like Rod Dreher, who now writes regularly about aliens on his Substack. Dreher offers re-enchantment as an antidote to dehumanization. But the effect of his kind of re-enchantment may be very different, and not just because it might open us up to occult influence, a danger to which Dreher is sensitive. The whole point of re-enchantment is to redirect our attention from the mundane and quotidian to the sexy and exciting. Dreher wants us to “live in wonder,” and for him, what is wonderful is what is out of the ordinary, out of step with the everyday. He wants us to live in a world where the stories are true, where an actual disclosure day may soon arrive. But what is more ordinary, and less cinematic, than the presence of other persons? What is less enchanted than the face of the man on the street, the woman at the bank, the strangers on the screen, the friend you see every day, the people who live in your house? Ho-hum stuff. When you are living in wonder, Aunt Mabel can get a little boring – a little more object-like.

This is something like Carl Trueman’s critique of the re-enchantment project. In his book The Desecration of Man, Trueman argues that re-enchantment can only take us so far toward its goal, and may be a distraction from it. “Reading Tolkien, talking about beauty, and respecting nature may all be good and worthy things. But they do not consecrate us . . . Only a renovation of the heart, redirecting it toward God, is able to do that.” If we conflate the will to believe in elves with a will that aims at love for God and neighbor, we make a serious mistake. Openness to the weird does not necessarily open us up to the sheer astonishment we ought to feel in the presence of another human being, and it may have the opposite effect. It takes no effort, and requires no gift, to feel amazed at the prospect of little green men, and if they showed up in Times Square, nobody would fail to respond appropriately. Aliens are spectacular whether or not they are real. But spectacle often undermines true attention, and persons do not reveal their real glory to any but the most attentive. One thinks of Thomas Merton, standing on a street corner in Louisville, “suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. . . . And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”

To Trueman’s critique, and Merton’s testimony, I want to add something more speculative. Merton’s experience is rare, even for him; that is his point. It is a sudden gift, and it comes as a kind of enchantment, though it is better described as the breaking of a spell (he says it was “like waking from a dream”). We do not typically walk around seeing our neighbors shining like the sun. C. S. Lewis said that if we did, we would be tempted to worship them, so it is probably better this way. But most of us do walk around convinced that the people we see are people; that they are more than things. We see them this way regardless of whatever theories we entertain or defend, whatever vocabularies we use or reject. Many like to argue that consciousness is an illusion, that we are all automatons. But only a psychopath actually sees others as automatons and treats them accordingly. In practice we take it for granted that the persons around us are real. It feels natural; indeed, one of the most important (and most incoherent) claims of reductive materialism is that we need theory to free us from our instinctive belief in something like a “soul,” which imposes inconvenient moral limits on our conduct.

But what if it is not natural? What if we do not automatically recognize others as persons? It seems more plausible that this is a capacity which must be cultivated, and that our instinct is rather to see another person’s face as the cynical materialist wants (but hopefully fails) to see it: as a random configuration of cells which might just as well be arranged differently, perhaps even by a bullet to the head, if it suits my interests. We of course understand infants as innocents, though it takes time for a baby to become aware that his mother is more than a machine for satisfying desires. Rather, the baby must be inculcated into a practice of what philosophers call “recognition” – by the mother herself (and by the father, and by many others), who treats her child as more than a machine for making demands, and by treating him thus, transforms the baby into more than a machine. That this is so can be seen most clearly in what happens when recognition – also known as “love” – is withheld. 

To be sure, a human infant is always and already more than a machine. What is recognized is something that is already there. What philosophers of recognition emphasize is that “what is there” for us is shaped by recognition or misrecognition, by being seen for what it is or mistaken for what it is not. What we recognize is the humanity of the other person, but they need our recognition to grow into that humanity, and their humanity suffers when recognition is withheld. You don’t need to read Hegel to understand this. We all know what it is like when we start to become what other people think we are, even when we know that this is not who we are. Everybody is born worthy of love and remains worthy of love. But people starved of love often become “unlovable,” and this is no accident. It’s how recognition works. We’re born human, but we have to be loved into our humanity. And what philosophers of recognition emphasize is that this kind of love is not an instinct, but a practice. It is “socially constructed.”

If it’s socially constructed (in the sense that it depends on practice, not in the sense that the practice is meaningless), then we might ask where the practice of recognition came from, how it got started. And we might consider that it can be lost. Imagine long centuries in which every encounter with another human being felt no different than an encounter with a rock: something potentially useful, something potentially dangerous, something that is probably in my way. Imagine that this was just how it always was, until something – or Someone – happened, and love transformed the encounter from I–it to I–Thou, to use Martin Buber’s language. Or imagine that this is not how it always was (“In the beginning was the Word,” after all), but that it got that way at certain times and in certain places, after years of diminishing effort, and that the people of that time and place actually forgot how to see even the ho-hum truth that others are not machines, let alone the mystical truth that they are “gods and goddesses,” as Lewis rather boldly put it, and as Merton saw for that brief instant on his own “disclosure day” in Louisville. In such a time and place, what we now take for granted might sound as crazy as the idea that aliens are real, because “alien” is exactly what other human beings would be to us. As alien as a rock. Or a ‘thinking’ computer.

Imagine that. I don’t think it’s too bold to suggest that our own time and place bears some resemblance to this picture of decline. Materialism may be on the back foot as an influence on the popular imagination. But if the popular imagination is more open to the possibility of non-human intelligences, it also seems quite susceptible to dramatic claims that the non-human “intelligence” of a large language model must denote ChatGPT’s personhood – or will, just as soon as the code gets good enough. And one does not have to intellectually assent to these claims for AI to have its dehumanizing effect. As Anton Barba-Kay emphasizes in A Web of Our Own Making, when we start treating machines like people, we will start treating people like machines, whether or not we believe that they are literally equivalent, and we can expect that as a consequence we will all become more machine-like. We enchant AI every time we treat it like it’s a person, and those interactions are bound to shape how we treat other persons, who will seem less and less enchanted to us as the chatbots get better and better at mimicking them. If a machine can sound like a person, a person may no longer seem like such a distinctive thing. Forget seeing them shine like the sun; we may soon struggle to see our neighbors with the kind of everyday attention that until yesterday was within the capacities of the average person, no monk-training required.

It seems wiser to respond to such a threat by working to re-enchant our earthly relationships than by investing our imaginations in outer space. I do not mean to set up a false dichotomy. Friendships can be forged by shared curiosities, or even by the sparks of conflict between skeptics and believers. No doubt Agents Scully and Mulder [of The X-Files] love each other. It’s more a question of priority. The chatbots attract us in no small part because they come as a relief to a culture in which convenience has become so important that to many people even the minor frictions of everyday small talk feel like an unnecessary burden. Chatbots offer interactions that require no spiritual effort, not even the small effort of looking someone in the eye, and they set no moral limits on our fantasies. Stories about aliens, and about how aliens might be more than stories, can attract us for similar reasons. In these stories, the truth is out there – not right here in front of me – and come disclosure day it will arrive, spectacularly, like a missive from a data center, no “renovation of the heart” required.

This is exactly backward. The renovation comes first. All signs suggest that the important work now is to revitalize everyday social life, in all its embodied messiness. The important work is to learn how to see, ever more clearly, that the face of my neighbor is not a thing but a face, a disclosure of truth. Without this work of seeing, faces really can turn into things. And (to quote Lewis once more) “how can [the gods] meet us face to face until we have faces?” Let’s save the aliens until we have faces again.