Perhaps humans have always felt ambivalent toward their tools. Especially when new, technological change often has carried with it a sense of the magical and given to those holding the tools a special connection to unknown powers and supernatural forces. Imagine the feelings of those first confronting an enemy who knows how to carry fire or able, through sling, bow or powder, to hurl injury or death across great distance. In many cultures, a priesthood knew the calendar and by special state were able to proclaim and enforce the order of things. To most people, all these were things to be thankful for when benevolent, honored and propitiated as needed and mostly feared, or at least needing a wary eye.

Today, for most people, our computers, cars, medicines, telephones, movies–so much of all that makes up our day to day–are black boxes. We have no clue as to how they do what they do. We give a special status to certain people as masters of the machine–our doctors, engineers, experts and politicians, but we mix a desire to trust with unease. There exists a persistent sense of posturing and hug-a-boo about the suits and lab coats; as if we know that the forces at work are larger than the individuals, and Gods, Devils or Chance actually pull the switches. Perhaps in the end Marx was right, and humans, thinking they control the ship, all unknowingly ride a wave of historical necessity. Perhaps the end is near. Perhaps all our tools are merely the extensions of desire. We wanted the fruit and grabbed the stick to reach it, and all our global corporations, our smart arsenals, our digital webs serve to amplify ancient, human greed and lusts. Perhaps our machines are nothing but mirrors. If we do not recognize ourselves in them, and if we fear what they do or where they take us, it is only because we do not know who we are.

We live in an age of faith and can’t move without it, but faith isn’t some wild assertion about the nature of things without regard to evidence. Faith is walking in the dark. It is how you move when you do not know. The great heroes of faith are not those loudly proclaiming their mishmash of doctrines and theories, but those who quietly find a way to act with love and grace in a world so often lacking in the ways and means to either end. What we can know is limited, provisional and utilitarian. The essential human fact is ignorance, and all of our knowledge rests upon that foundation.

“This is apple pie.”; but, perhaps it is a concoction of chemicals soaked in paper created by some corporation as a cheap, non-nutritive sensation for mass consumption, perhaps it is an electrode stimulating some region of the brain, perhaps it is a dream. We cannot know, but we can know that there is an experience that causes us to say, “This is apple pie”. All words, ideas, conclusions that we attach to the experience are at best tentative, but we can know that, “These are words, ideas, conclusions”. We can use words to help us find our way, but the words we use are only a part of our knowing a thing. The whole of what we have of knowing precedes and encompasses them. I believe that this wholeness of knowing is moral, deliberative and decisive. It includes reasons and words, but is not limited by them. The conclusions we reach may extend beyond the rational and yet be true. So, for example, we can know when an action has crossed the line, become immoral, even when all our dogma and rationalizations declare it right, and there is a human thing that dies within those that allow their dogma and preconceptions to cut off the awareness of this deeper knowing.

When I am working on a canvas, it is not unusual for me to sit before it for long periods of time without actually painting. If asked, I say I’m thinking. But, the kind of thinking I’m doing is complex. It can involve rationality and words, but it also includes a feeling for what is occurring on the canvas–the play between colors, lines and volumes. It involves an imagination of how this will change with the introduction of another brush stroke. There is a certain sense of just waiting, with the antenna up, like a hunter in the field alert for some movement. When I pick up the brush, I don’t want to think about what I’m doing. I don’t want my action to be tentative. I want to be like a dancer who has caught the rhythm. I want an uncluttered awareness of what is happening as the brush touches the surface. When I paint, it is important to me that I have some idea about where I’m going, but equally important, perhaps more, is my alertness to what I don’t know–the unexpected and that which I don’t consciously intend. I am walking in the dark. It is an act of faith.

It is for this reason that I consider my work spiritual, and by spiritual I mean a process that involves my entire being, including that part of me open to the prompts that extend from beyond the boundaries I can know to be myself.

I suppose I am accustomed to think of a thought as something that can be put into words and undergo the tests of rationality. Historically, my culture has stated that reason is what separates me from animals and is that part of myself created in the image of God. But, I have seen the most craven urges put on a cloak of reason, and I have come to doubt that there is any human thought that is pure reason, and even the most abstract activity includes within it desire, emotion and dream. In fact, it is the separation of the wholeness of human thought into just a single aspect that we fear. Unbridled emotion curdles the blood, and the coldly calculated crime that lacks any sensitivity for the victim is heinous. This is, I suspect, what we fear in machine intelligence. It possesses great power, but only mimics one aspect of human thought. It is an unbalanced mind.

So, I think it is the balanced mind that includes all the diverse potentials of human thought that is needed today. It is a curious, even poetic, piece of cosmic justice that the qualities of the traditional, intellectual worker–the ability to order facts, make logical deductions from available data and remember things–are the very abilities most adaptable to machine intelligence, while those abilities which read and know how to sound the secret pathways of the human heart–the expertise of the seducer, the flim-flam man and the artist–are those furthest from the machine. So, for example, medical doctors who pride themselves on their reason and pronounce prognoses and prescriptions from scans of tests and their knowledge of recent studies, may already be better replaced by a computer; while those practiced in arts of healing and, along with the computer, have learned the ways of intuition and empathy can perform what the machine alone is incapable of doing. I would call art this balancing of the totality of the human, and the 21st century will demand a generation of artists.

In this sense, art is not only the activity of a special class of people involved in a particular profession; rather, it is any human activity that brings to it the entire self. There is an art of raising a child, an art of living, an art of love. This artistic thought, this thinking from the whole, is not the mere arrangement of data into different forms and combinations. It deals with psychic forces. These forces can be organized, evaluated and modified, but the resulting expression may or may not include logical consistency. Its measure is not whether it is correct as in some sort of test question with a right answer, but whether it is true. An idea is not only a collection of words. It is a form of energy.