One of the reasons why many historical cycles seem to recur every hundred years, more or less, is that the people who learned the lessons of this mostly forgotten past are dead and gone. We can’t hear their warnings, or benefit from their experience. So we are doomed to repeat their mistakes.
That’s why I’m always fascinated by things that happened almost exactly a century ago. They typically represent a comparable point in the cycle as the one we are currently living through. Yet those earlier events exist just beyond the horizon of our living memory — and thus tell us painful truths that we can only learn from history books.
How will encouraging students to use AI when writing papers in political theory, philosophy, literature, or history deepen learning? I have taught in UChicago’s social sciences core sequence, I have studied the linguistic and analytic capacities of LLMs, and I can say with confidence that there is no use of AI that can “deepen” students’ learning of Plato, Machiavelli, Nietzsche, Marx, and Du Bois over and above an unmediated engagement with the original works. If one wants to deepen students’ understanding of human beings’ most difficult, elevated and important intellectual and artistic achievements, one needs to give instructors the means of demanding that students spend time with the works, alone. Allow professors to require students to spend the time they are nominally already required to dedicate to the course outside the classroom in tech-free reading rooms; shut down the WiFi; scramble the cell signal; send them to weeklong retreats in the deep, dark woods. Whatever.
Failure to do so will mean giving up on mastery in the humanities and humanistic social sciences, and with it, the liberal-arts model of college education itself.
It really is that straightforward. And almost everyone in the American academy has already waved the white flag.
Today in my Christian Renaissance of the Twentieth Century class, we’ll be discussing Jacques Maritain on sacred art. Students will come to class having read that lecture, and when we gather I will show them these images. Then I’ll give them this quiz:
AS = Albert Servaes
SS = Art in the Saint-Suplice style
If you were Pope, would you want to (a) celebrate SS and ban AS, (b) ban SS and celebrate AS, (c) celebrate both, or (d) ban both? Remember your responsibilities as the Vicar of Christ! Explain your answer in a few sentences.
Speaking only as yourself, which works of art would you rather see in your church? In your home? Again, explain your answer in a few sentences.
Every young academic needs to study Kieran Healy’s Research Workflow chart.
As Horbatsch notes in the catalogue, only a small fraction of 15th-century drawings, the earliest works in the show, survive and all extant examples were made as functional objects in the studio. Drawings were valuable workshop material, handed down from master to disciple. The sole surviving drawing by van der Weyden’s own hand, a silverpoint portrait of a young woman (c.1440), is thought to be a free copy after a lost portrait by Jan van Eyck, and it reveals not only van der Weyden’s practice of copying works by his most famous predecessor but also his subtle use of line and keen observation of texture and facial expression.
Man, it feels great to be doing all my online writing at micro.blog. What a fantastic service @manton has built — and is still building!
Saying goodbye to WordPress. I won’t stop writing longer posts, I’ll just be writing them here and at Cosmos Malick and at a new blog that I am calling, unimaginatively I suppose, Personal History. I’ve begun it by re-posting a few autobiographical pieces from the old WordPress blog, and I will be adding to those over time — largely for my own sake, as I’m trying to make sense of some of the odder things about my life. But since most of my readers are unlikely to be interested in all that, I’ll keep it siloed in its own blog.
It’s all part of the Ayjay Empire, though. As far as I can tell, most of my readers find out what I’m writing through the weekly newsletter/digest and don’t really care to what URL the links go. Nothing will change for you, if you’re one of those people, and little will change for anyone else.
One friend in particular reached out to express his shock that I was (at least rhetorically) siding with young earth creationists against Christians who believe in an old universe. I replied that I didn’t even know what he was talking about! He pointed to the article. I cocked my head. Why would anyone think that? I asked. At which point he reminded me of the creationist debate among evangelicals and, against that backdrop, explained why a title and argument like mine would look and feel a certain way even if its substance wasn’t about that at all.
People absorbed in a certain Discourse always find it difficult to realize that many others neither know nor care about that Discourse’s disputes; everything gets put through the filter of their own obsessions. I can’t tell you how often people have written to me assuming that some post of mine is a covert commentary on some argument they’e invested in, and simply don’t believe me when I tell them that I’ve never heard of, or anyway have never thought about, that controversy.
Matthew Butterick says that a key argument of the Big AI companies is
That Big AI companies are the only ones who can protect us from the risks that their products create. But this narrative isn’t believable unless the threat is believable. So Big AI has an incentive to talk up the risks their products create, but no incentive to invest in security practices commensurate with those risks.
A new video by my one-and-only guitar hero Martin Simpson: a cover of “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright.” Let’s just say ol’ Martin hasn’t lost his fastball.