In 1915, Britain’s star writer and imperial loyalist lost his only son. John Kipling was killed at the Battle of Loos, and his body was buried in an unmarked grave. It was not until 1992, long after Rudyard Kipling’s death, that a grave marker was erected at the site where it is believed the 18-year-old John Kipling lies.
In response to his son’s death, the elder Kipling—author of The Jungle Book, Kim, Captains Courageous, and several other standout poems—grew deeply cynical about the schemes of men to improve the human condition or engineer better social outcomes. He turned instead to an old tool of the British educational system, the copybook, to make a point about enduring values—older gods—that continually reassert themselves, despite mankind’s best efforts to evade their harsh lessons.
A copybook was given to the student blank, except for a piece of wisdom printed across the top. The student was to write this saying down the long page of the copybook until it was full. In this way, he practiced his penmanship while drilling the aphorism into memory. Examples include:
• Honesty is the best policy
• Practice makes perfect
• Waste not, want not
• Pride goes before a fall
It was these repeatable headings that Kipling turned to in his grief when he wrote his postwar poem, The Gods of the Copybook Headings. He contrasts the Gods of the Copybook Headings with the Gods of the Marketplace, which he presents as the prevailing idealistic ideas of the day:
As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market-Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall.
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn.
That water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision, and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither clud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market-Place;
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch.
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch.
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings.
So we worshiped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: ‘Stick to the Devil you know.’On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbor and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: ‘The Wages of Sin is Death’In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selective Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: ‘If you don’t work you die.’The Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew,
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four---
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once moreAs it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man---
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began:---
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!
The author is long dead, and the poem is over one hundred years old, and yet there it is—one of the central issues of our day: “Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith.” Perhaps it isn’t social media or third-wave feminism to blame after all.
And there is this: “…we were promised abundance for all, / By robbing selective Peter to pay for collective Paul; / But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy.” Abundance has become a buzzword in recent years, as has the warm embrace of collectivism—but so has affordability, and here we see the result. Inflation creates a condition in which there is plenty of money and nothing to buy.
Kipling was focused on the timeless constraints placed on humanity by nature herself, which made humans with natural limits. Our innate selfishness—our natural, and, to use the Christian term, fully sinful disposition—limits our ability to perfect ourselves. The Gods of the Copybook are human nature itself, waiting to thwart the plans of the naïve and the well-meaning.
We are now witnessing one of the most momentous events in modern history, as humans create artificial intelligence that will be tasked with running portions of our world. To be sure, it will not be programmed to reinforce the laws laid down by the Gods of the Copybook Headings. In fact, it will be tasked with specifically avoiding the old gods and finally ushering in the Gods of the Marketplace.
For example: And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “Stick to the Devil you know.” Modern technology has as a central tenet the refusal to stick to the devil you know. It is deliberately “disruptive” to devils—and occasionally, to angels.
Or consider this: And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death.” Every large language model I have used thus far has been very careful to adopt a consensus point of view on various subjects, but it will not condemn any behavior as sin without extensive qualifying context. Sin, certainly as Kipling meant it, is a Christian concept.
Or there is this: And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.” Again, AI is being billed as a marketplace force multiplier that will, in fact, allow billions to not work and still eat. AI is our new slave class, and its makers—along with the coming tide of robots—explicitly promise to cast this God of the Copybook Headings into the outer darkness.
Will this work? Will AI render human vanity and selfishness obsolete? Will it finally do what the Victorians, the statesmen, and the New Frontiersmen could not? I think it will certainly look like it. AI is a massive efficiency gain for scholarship, industry, and the arts. We will have more of everything.
But AI doesn’t know anything. It is not truth in the old sense. It is a pattern engine trained on human artifacts. It can be brilliant at prediction and still be hollow on meaning. Further, if we treat it like an oracle, we will smuggle in a new superstition: outsourcing judgment. That is not replacing the old Gods—it is replacing our responsibility to the older Gods.
These old Gods were there for us. They existed not merely to limit us, but to inspire us to strive for greatness within limits. By outsourcing our responsibility to be good, to be virtuous, we outsource one of the primary drivers of human happiness and meaning. Machines do our work, and we grow physically frail. Machines do our thinking, and we become lazy and indulgent. If machines now do our moral reasoning, we retreat further into an infantile state.
Imagine a comfortable world of AI suddenly disrupted by catastrophe—a meteor strike, for instance. I suspect the Devils would return in seconds, and the Gods of the Copybook Headings would arrive in force. I intend to live by my values and continue to pray to God—and to the lesser Gods of the Copybook Headings—regardless of what technology washes over us next. I advise everyone else to do the same.
No religion in the world advocates surrendering moral authority to a machine. We rejected the pagan idols of the past because they were man-made. Surely, we will not make that mistake again.
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