We know that the best, most effective users of AI platforms are people with highly developed skills and domain knowledge that they acquired independently of any AI use. So if we want our young people, who will become adults in an AI-dominated world, to navigate that world wisely and skillfully, we need to teach and train them as though AI does not exist. Only then can they use AI rather than be ruled by it.
This story about a universally despised, utterly useless, and yet widely deployed e-learning app should remind us of a key truth: American schools at all levels will buy and mandate the use of anything that promises them cost savings. (And “cost savings” = “employing fewer humans.”)
The liberal tends to hold that once we’re allowed to be free, our better natures will flourish; the conservative believes that only by the strict application of order and discipline can anything morally valuable be squeezed out of our selfish, indolent make-up. Christianity is both a great deal more pessimistic than the liberal and considerably more optimistic than the conservative. The doctrine of the Fall, which has nothing to do with a divinely prohibited apple, suggests that we’re in a sorry mess, as a quick glance around the globe might confirm; but the Christian Gospel also holds that we have a capacity for self-transformation, and that if only we can let go of the present there’s a glorious future in store for us. It isn’t, however, attainable without passing through loss, deprivation, suffering and death, if only in symbolic terms.
What Eagleton defines as Christianity is in fact the opposite of Christianity. If we have “a capacity for self-transformation,” then we have no need for a Christ, and are culpable before God for any failure to transform ourselves. What Eagleton calls the Gospel (good news) would if true be very bad news indeed. Also: Jesus didn’t pass through suffering and death “in symbolic terms,” nor did and do the martyrs.
This is not to say that the unremittingly bleak view of human nature seen in Lord of the Flies, which is the subject of Eagleton’s post, is correct. But that’s a subject for another post.
Yesterday we began discussing The Lord of the Rings (Book I) and the first question was: “Can you explain Tom Bombadil?” So we plunged in to a discussion of old Tom, who in fact is a key to the whole novel. At one point G, sitting next to her dear friend A, raised her hand.
G: There was a time when A’s greatest wish was to marry Tom Bombadil.
A (covering her face in her hands): I was twelve!
The one I need to paste on myself is “DON’T CRUSH.”
The predicted disasters never arrive. Adolescent aggression continued after comic book restrictions – because comics weren’t the cause. Novels didn’t trigger mass elopements. Radio didn’t destroy children’s capacity for thought. Each panic uses identical rhetoric: addiction metaphors, moral corruption, passive victimhood, apocalyptic predictions. Each time, the research eventually shows complex effects mediated by content, context and individual differences. And, each time, when the disaster fails to materialise, attention simply shifts to the next technology.
These publications and technologies existed alongside serious thought. The penny dreadfuls didn’t prevent Charles Dickens, John Stuart Mill or Charles Darwin from flourishing. What’s different now isn’t the existence of shallow content, which has always been abundant. What’s different is the existence of delivery mechanisms actively engineered to prevent the kind of attention that serious thought requires. The penny dreadfuls didn’t follow you into your bedroom at midnight, vibrating with notifications.
This distinction matters because it changes everything about the available responses. If the problem is screens inherently, then we need cultural revival, a return to books, perhaps even a neo-Luddite retreat from technology. But if the problem is design, then we need design activism and regulatory intervention. The same screens that fragment attention can support it. The same technologies that extract human attention can cultivate it. The question is who designs them, for what purposes, and under what constraints.
An extremely thoughtful, and thought-provoking, essay — though perhaps a little too sanguine about some things. The idea that people who can’t read books are able to sit attentively through long movies is probably incorrect.
Set in Turkey and filmed on location in Germany with no attempt to hide the artifice, the trenchantly honest and terrifically acted new film from The Teachers’ Lounge director Ilker Çatak might be the most important film yet made about Donald Trump’s America. Though it obviously has more specific ties to Turkey’s authoritarian President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Yellow Letters has plenty to share with western audiences about the role of art in political protest and the myriad forms that cancel culture can take.
So many of my fellow Americans think everything is about us — and also, apparently, that anything that’s not about us isn’t worth paying attention to.
The Terlingua Tardis
A decade ago Robert Macfarlane published a wonderful book called Landmarks — I reviewed it here — which argues for the preservation and extension of the accurate description of our natural environments. The book collects, from a range of British places, local words for local things, and Macfarlane calls that collection his Counter-Desecration Phrasebook. It occurs to me that we need many Counter-Desecration Phrasebooks to help us protect and preserve what Gandalf calls “all worthy things that are in peril as the world now stands.”
I’ve been trying to tutor Angus in the need for a sober and reflective Lent, but I don’t think he’s getting the concept.
The current POTUS issues a great many insults, but his linguistic capabilities are extremely limited, so he simply recirculates the same handful of vague descriptors: “loser,” “weak,” “traitor.” How dull. Let’s remember that American politicians used to have some skill in the art of invective. For instance, here, from 115 years ago, is Hiram Johnson, the Governor of California, on the publisher of the Los Angeles Times:
In the city of San Francisco we have drunk to the very dregs of infamy. We have had vile officials, we have had rotten newspapers. But we have had nothing so vile, nothing so low, nothing so debased, nothing so infamous in San Francisco as Harrison Gray Otis. He sits there in senile dementia with gangrene heart and rotting brain, grimacing at every reform, chattering impotently at all the things that are decent, frothing, fuming, violently gibbering, going down to his grave in snarling infamy. This man Otis is the one blot on the banner of southern California; he is the bar sinister on your escutcheon. My friends, he is the one thing that all Californians look at when, in looking at southern California, they see anything that is disgraceful, depraved, corrupt, crooked, and putrescent — that, that is Harrison Gray Otis!
In church yesterday we began the service with the Great Litany. As the choir repeatedly circled the congregation, with our music minister chanting the versicles and all of us responding to them, I felt myself part of a much larger phenomenon, the penitential procession of the whole Church as we enter Lent. Good Lord, deliver us … We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord … Son of God, we beseech thee to hear us.
I can’t remember whether my review of a collection of poems by Czeslaw Miłosz has previously been liberated from its paywall, but it’s free to read now.
It’s a weird time, to say the very least, to be putting out a book about curiosity and wonder and freedom and fun and humor and imperfection and magic. But it’s also a time when, I think, we could desperately use those things in our lives. Watching my kids draw and make music and come alive to the world unlocked something in me that I’ve been trying to get into book form for over 10 years.
I keep hearing AI advocates say that the universal deployment of AI will create a “productivity explosion” and “unprecedented wealth creation” and will “end poverty.” All I want to know is: How? How will the money made by the big AI companies end up in the pockets of the poor? I’m not even asking for a plausible scenario — I’d be happy to see any scenario at all, anything more than “THEN A MIRACLE OCCURS.”
By me: Blow-Up: A Parable
I’m pleased to say that I will be editing another volume in the Auden Critical Editions series: the 1951 collection Nones.
So pleased to see Philip Hensher’s rave review of Francis Spufford’s Nonesuch. I had the privilege of reading Nonesuch during the process of composition, and let me tell you, it’s everything Hensher says it is. What a book.
See also Andrew Motion’s review in the TLS: “These themes converge on a similar point. They all concern the possibility of transfiguration – the likelihood that apparently stable forms, stable feelings and stable concepts, including everything from love to money to time itself, are less predictable than people like to think. Is this Francis Spufford’s way of arguing the merits of unprovable faith in non-human interventions (he has written a book about his own Christianity) while also entertaining his readers with a jolly romp? Possibly. In all events, the distinction of his book is that it conveys by all manner of means the pleasures of finding the unexpected within the predictable.”