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Christopher Beha, from Why I Am Not an Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer :
I could tell that my foundation was sound. I just wanted to know what was underfoot. So I told myself, Suppose you start with love. That was the one clear and certain thing in my life. What would it mean to start there? To begin with the certain reality of that love and build whatever could be built on top of it? If I took this for true, what else would have to be true with it?
To believe in love — not as a physical sensation, a neurochemical process in the brain, an adaptive strategy blindly hit upon by the genes in control of us survival machines, but as a foundational reality — means abandoning strict materialism, for the kind of love I’m talking about simply can’t be reduced to physical processes. It also means abandoning the idealism that says that the world we experience is entirely or even largely our own creation, that we project upon the raw facts whatever meaning and value and order we find there. From this perspective, love is a “mood,” part of the subjective apparatus with which we take in the objects of experience. But to really feel love is to be certain that it is not simply a projection, just as to stand in the warmth and the light of the sun is to be certain that the sun exists outside ourselves.
This reminds me of Auden:
One bubble-brained creature said—
“I am loved, therefore I am” — :
And well by now might the lion
Be lying down with the kid,
Had he stuck to that logic.
Kevin D. Williamson: “Negative partisanship is the third-strongest force in American politics, coming in behind only inertia and stupidity.”
A few years ago I had the honor of writing a little blurb for a wonderful book called Talking About Race: Gospel Hope for Hard Conversations, by Isaac Adams, the pastor of Iron City Church in my home town of Birmingham, Alabama. In the photo above Isaac is right in the middle, surrounded by other pastors in Birmingham who are part of an endeavor called United We Pray. Christians always say that want the unity Jesus promised to them — well, do they gather to pray for it? These folks do. I can’t be there for the gathering on March 15, but how I wish I could. I will pray from a distance but there’s no substitute for praying hand in hand. A meeting like this is a great sign of hope in a dark time; “For I will pour water on the thirsty land, and streams on the dry ground” (Isaiah 44:3).
Then last year something shifted. I kept seeing people express a longing for the old web. Before social media turned every thought into content and every person into a brand. Before the timeline replaced blogs. I felt it too. I started working on an open-source microblogging tool inspired by Jottit, but at some point I thought: why don't I just build Jottit instead?
Ah yes, I remember it well!
WSJ:
Your turn, ChatGPT. According to the OpenAI app, Claude is “an earnest grade student who will not take a position. If you ask Claude, ‘Is this policy good,’ it replies: ‘It can be understood as operating within a broader ethical framework that may, depending on one’s normative commitment.’ By the time Claude finishes clearing its throat, the Roman Empire has fallen again.”
Gemini doesn’t get off any easier. ChatGPT calls it a “corporate intern with a search bar. It doesn’t write essays. It produces deliverables. If Claude is anxious to be ethical, Gemini is anxious to be useful to a product manager.”
Sneering at other writers? Can’t get any more human than that.
Listening to Peter Gregson ♫
People still do read, make music, watch films, and visit art museums. There is a culture, high and middle and low, even if it’s under attack. There’s an awareness, too, of the cultural and spiritual sickness of anti-humans. The AI revolution is not very popular. None of its progenitors are celebrated in a way Steve Jobs might have been, when Americans still had great faith in their tech innovators. Writers endure and readers endure. Print book sales are not in decline. Neither is live music. The imagination has an audience and a market. The question will be whether, in the next half century, it can keep both. We have to believe it will. That belief will come with friction; the stakes will grow ever higher. Much is on the line for the AI oligarchs. If enough of us do not take to their creations and make them economically viable, they will be out many billions, maybe begging for federal bailouts. They’ll battle to avoid that outcome as much as they possibly can. This next decade will be pivotal, for both the anti-humanists asserting their market position and the humanists trying to lay claim to what is sacred—and what has driven the progress of human civilization for thousands of years. We will have to preserve our right to imagine.
Terry Godier on his new RSS app:
When a source floods your feed with eighteen posts in a day, a quiet card appears between articles: “The Verge posted 18 items today.” With options to rate-limit or quiet the source. When you've skipped ten straight articles from the same source, Current notices: “You've skipped 10 from TechCrunch. Quiet or remove?” When you keep reading everything from a particular source: “You keep reading Craig Mod. Pin to the top?” When you keep reading about the same topic across different sources: “You keep reading design. Want a design Current?”
To which I want to say: I’m reading my RSS feeds, I’m not taking questions right now. This seems far more intrusive than having an Unread count on your app’s icon (and I have that disabled in NetNewsWire anyway).
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.
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.
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.”
I’m pleased to say that I will be editing another volume in the Auden Critical Editions series: the 1951 collection Nones.
Mary Elizabeth Groom’s engravings from the 1937 Golden Cockerel Press edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost:
States struggled to work out their role in these rapidly changing systems. Private mail presented different problems: should couriers working for state-funded postal services be allowed to carry post on behalf of paying customers? For the states that underwrote postal systems, this was risky – it increased the risk of robbery since private mail often included money and valuables – yet attractive: an efficient postal service subsidised by private clients would be less of a drain on state resources. Controlling the carriers of private mail also made surveillance simpler. As time went on, the price of sending a private letter fell, so that more ordinary people were involved in the flow of mail and news: ‘What had started as a state privilege had become a preferred public service.’ Crucially, by the second half of the 17th century, the postal stagecoach had become the essential vehicle of European travel, carrying passengers at the same speed as it delivered the mail. The machinery of the post – its itineraries and printed guides, inns as relay stations, couriers with local knowledge – adapted seamlessly to facilitate a new era of tourism and would form the backbone of the Grand Tour. The infrastructure of posts and couriers that served states and merchants laid the foundations for a revolution in communications.