Re: this post, I wrote to another friend: “I spent decades teaching students to write critical essays. I talked and wrote a great deal about what makes a good thesis, what makes good evidence, how to avoid the mechanistic formulae students were taught in high school, etc. And here at the end of my career I have stopped doing all that, because, thanks to chatbots, almost no university students will ever again write their own critical essays. This change feels like a liberation and an abdication at the same time.”
Psychedelics are remarkably helpful in coming to see what an utter farce human institutions are: academia, celebrity, media, elections, prize committees, social distinction of any sort, nations, wars—vanity of vanities! “It is all ridiculous, when you think of death,” the atheist writer Thomas Bernhard said upon being given some distinction or other. He was right, of course, but he could not detect a certain significant corollary that only becomes clear when you look beyond death: that a life spent working in full knowledge of our true nature, as mortal sinners offered the infinite gift of redemption, can be a pretty wonderful thing, even if, incidentally, some prizes and distinctions happen to come our way in the course of it.
Lionel Trilling in 1974, prophesying:
This desire to fashion, to shape, a self and a life has all but gone from a contemporary culture whose emphasis, paradoxically enough, is so much on self. If we ask why this has come about, the answer of course involves us in a giant labor of social history. But there is one reason which can be readily isolated and which, I think, explains much. It is this: if you set yourself to shaping a self, a life, you limit yourself to that self and that life. You preclude any other kind of selfhood remaining available to you. You close out other options, other possibilities which might have been yours. Such limitation, once acceptable, now goes against the cultural grain — it is almost as if the fluidity of the contemporary world demands an analogous limitlessness in our personal perspective. Any doctrine, that of the family, religion, the school, that does not sustain this increasingly felt need for a multiplicity of options and instead offers an ideal of a shaped self, a formed life, has the sign on it of a retrograde and depriving authority, which, it is felt, must be resisted.
For anyone concerned with contemporary education at whatever level, the assimilation that contemporary culture has made between social idealism, even political liberalism, and personal fluidity — a self without the old confinements — is as momentous as it is recalcitrant to correction. Among the factors in the contemporary world which militate against the formulation of an educational ideal related to the humanistic traditions of the past, this seems to me to be the most decisive.
Currently reading: Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner, ed. Edward M. Burns. Two volumes, nearly 2000 pages. Lots of academic and literary gossip punctuated by extended passages of intellectual fireworks. When it’s good it’s great. It will take me a long time to read it; I have made a pledge to myself to be patient. Burns made the decision to annotate everything — there must be 250 pages of notes here — but he still manages to leave out some things that need to be explained, and fails to correct many misspellings while also “correcting” spellings that were right. Moreover, from time to time he will add a note referring the reader to a letter that isn’t here, or is misdated and therefore unfindable. I can’t blame him: the task was immense and he made it immenser than it needed to be, so the opportunities for error number in the thousands. I’m sure I would’ve done worse. Still, one must come to this prepared to be often confused, or brought up short by editorial mistakes. Posts will be forthcoming. 📚
Robin Sloan: “In the late 2020s, I think a lot of people are going to discover that their job has become: ‘Translate your work into code. Translate yourself, while you’re at it.’”
TIL that the great literary critic Hugh Kenner once contemplated writing a novel about a Texas philanthropist named George Oilwell.
I wrote a while back about the A.I. business model — which is basically the big machine-learning companies telling that they’ll sell us the antidote to the poison they have administered — but this post gives a twist to the whole situation: When businesses start to realize that they’re paying vast amounts to get LLMs to do tasks that could be accomplished by a old-school coder writing a regex script … “I do think we’re about to see a lot of companies realize that a thinking model connected to an MCP server is way more expensive than just paying someone to write a bash script. Starting now, you’ll be able to make a career out of un-LLM-ifying applications.”
The Prince of This World’s tools will never dismantle the Prince of This World’s house.
Charlie Warzel and Matteo Wong:
What’s undeniable is that we’re all living in a world where the whims and desires of wealthy and powerful men create uncertain, unstable conditions for everyone else. Although no other major chatbot has gone ballistic in the same ways as Grok, any one of them could be subtly tweaked to promote a given viewpoint over another, or to quietly manipulate users toward whatever purpose. Likewise, any major creator of AI models unwittingly [AJ: or wittingly] instills biases in its chatbots that are then difficult to expunge. Every user of mainstream AI or social media is subject to a calculus that they have no control over.
So maybe don’t use mainstream AI or social media?
I’m still adding to my anarchist notebook — and will, I hope, be doing so for the next 20 years or so. Make that 30.
Six years ago, after watching my circle of friends surrender one too many evenings to insurance wrangling and doctor portals and DMV confusion, I emailed them a proposal: Come over next Tuesday. Grab a six pack. And bring your bills, your credit-card statements, your school forms, the streaming services you need to unsubscribe from, the airline miles you need to manage, the expenses app you need to figure out. I’d be throwing the lamest party ever.
At the heart of this party was a truth that has gone under-acknowledged in recent years: We’re all sinking. We’re sinking into a quicksand of tiny, dumb administrative tasks. It is the most tedious quicksand imaginable.
So true. Too true to be good.
My son pointed me to this, and said that it’s the definitive version of this song — one of the most vital rock ‘n’ roll songs. He’s right. And essential to the greatness here is the incomparable Roy Bittan. ♫
Here’s another point-and-shoot shot, from two years later, at Cheakamus Lake. One of the most beautiful places I’ve ever visited, and not widely known outside of B.C.
Nothing special about this picture, which was taken with a Sony Cybershot in November 2004 — but I remember the circumstances very well: This was taken on Mount Seymour. Less than half-an-hour before taking this picture I was in downtown Vancouver, where the temperature was 55º. When I got out of my car and started walking around in the ice and snow I felt that I had been teleported to a different region.
I have no evangelical trauma story. While I am genuinely sorry for those who do have trauma stories, I come up short when scanning my own experience in evangelicalism for cults of personality, charismatic grifters, or spiritual abuse. I am keenly aware such things happen, because the algorithms that deliberately amplify such occasions won’t let them escape anyone’s notice. But my lived reality of “evangelicalism” (I’ll explain what I mean by this below) was in practice not flashy unfaithfulness but unflashy faithfulness. This is not the stuff from which bestsellers are wrought.
I wrote about a curious phrase in The Brothers Karamazov.