Gianni Benvenuti, illustration from Winny-Puh (the Italian translation of Winnie-the-Pooh).
British footy announcers identifying a player from the U.S. when he does something impressive: “the Fulham left-back,” “the Juventus midfielder,” etc.
British footy announcers identifying the same player when he does something wrong: “The American.”
From an earlier essay by Elizabeth on the alternative to thinking of every social/cultural political situation as a pitched battle:
Warriors are right that this world is certainly full of problems, and sometimes battles must be fought. Nobody can shrug them off or pretend that they don’t exist. But losers don’t in fact shun the active life. Instead, they are engaged in activity that takes place in a much deeper stratum of consciousness than political and journalistic warfare. They invest energy in existentially permanent activities, like loving and caring for other people: children, students, family, neighbors, colleagues. They work as musicians, educators, physicians, priests, and artists. Beautiful losers renew and pass on the art, literature, and manners that constitute the best of our culture.
My friend and colleague Elizabeth Corey:
Certainly the professoriate leans leftward. But it turns out that people from right and left can agree on many things despite our differences: for example, what to read in our courses, pedagogical practices, and how to care for our students. In short, we live and work among people who differ from us in all sorts of ways, yet it’s possible and sometimes even delightful to become friends with those we thought initially we wouldn’t like. The friend/enemy dichotomy doesn’t make sense here. We must bridge all kinds of divides, not search and destroy. Only within the rarefied environment of the internet or within certain think tanks can we surround ourselves with people who agree with us and echo our opinions. And that would be boring, or so I think.
Elizabeth is being firebombed on Twitter by Christopher Rufo, to whom she’s responding here. She suggests a drink and a conversation, but I don’t think conversation is something Rufo does. He follows Carl Schmitt while Elizabeth follows Jesus.
I say this every couple of years, and it’s time: The next time someone tells you that René Girard is a great genius, before you decide you believe it please read this essay by Joshua Landy.
It can be hard to fully appreciate this kind of design for the astonishing, radical statement in its provision: that the babies of strangers carry the kind of dignity that is tantamount to those of close kin and tribe. It’s an idea that had to be invented, that goes against the self-preserving optimization of communities adapted for fitness. This kind of dignity makes claims on a collective, perhaps a polity. “Design for dignity” is easy to affirm at the high level of uncontroversial principles, but in practice it too often takes on the straightforward structure of unidirectional charity, as though dignity were a good or service extended from those who somehow “have” it to those who somehow lack it. A sharper term from theologian Helmut Thielicke might get us closer to what’s true: Dignity is not a possession to be more fairly meted out but a universally contingent relational force—a bracing state of human dependency on divine sustenance, a vitality on which each human life hangs every second. Thielicke called this an “alien dignity”: the shape of a reality utterly not of our own making. Our task is first to recognize it before wielding it—to recognize it in ourselves as in others, and perhaps to recognize its force in the designed DNA of the inherited built world, a form of material argumentation that so easily goes to sleep in our imagination. You don’t need to have a maximalist theory of the state—either for or against—to see the sense of possibility on offer.
The most telling thing about the LLM moment is what this technology is actually good at. LLMs write code, generate images, produce music, summarize documents, draft prose… which is to say, they have achieved mastery over the exact domains that were already, by any sane measure, overprovisioned. Was anyone saying that we didn’t have enough digital writing, images, videos, music, video games, or applications, a few years ago? The core triumph of technological growth is taking scarcity and creating abundance. Well, LLMs create an abundance, that’s for sure. But there was already an abundance of text, online, and an abundance of images, and there’s some insane stat like 24 hours of video gets uploaded to YouTube every second or whatever, and yes, there has been an abundance of code, of programs, of apps. And before we got these fancy new tools to produce more code, there wasn’t a lot of people saying “Gee, what we need is more apps, the app store is too empty.”