My beloved! Taken on a trail overlooking Grasmere, 2011. Today we celebrate our 43rd wedding anniversary.
This is a fact we often miss about our Constitution. It works by setting competing interests and powers against each other, which critics sometimes caricature as substituting an almost mechanical proceduralism for morally substantive civic formation. But that is precisely wrong. This approach actually begins from the insight that, in order to be properly formative, our politics must always be in motion—that moral formation is a matter of establishing habits, and that civic habits are built up by civic action more than by a proper arrangement of rules. The different interests, priorities, and power centers set against each other in our system do not rest against each other, like interlocking beams holding up a roof. Rather, they push, pull, and tug at each other and unceasingly compete for position. They are living political actors, not inanimate structural supports. And none can achieve anything without dealing with the others, who are always in their way. The result is a peculiar style of politics, which feels frustrating and acrimonious at almost any given instant, but can be remarkably dynamic in the long run.
A brilliant essay.
Greenwich Observatory, by Eric Ravilious (1937)
ignore strenuously
I want to under score it here: where the internet is concerned, we are in a crisis of discovery. Anyone with inter esting new work to share — their own or someone else’s — rummages in the tool shed, looking for a seed spreader or a slingshot, and emerges with an egg beater and a single unmatched glove. Is this all we’ve got??
Every now and then I realize that there’s something going on, somewhere on a random corner of the internet, that I have unaccountable and lamentably missed. Doesn’t happen often, but often enough to keep the flame of hope flickering. And curiously enough, the only site associated with the Big Tech firms where this happens is YouTube. (Make of that what you will; I’m not sure what to make of it.)
Robin continues: “The strategy is the same as it always was: cultivate small, sturdy networks of affinity and interest. Connect them to each other. Keep them lit.” When I find something, I make a point of sharing it, usually on my newsletter — but I bet I could do a better job of that.
And at the end of Robin’s post, this vital word, which I’ve been preaching for a long long time:
I would add: there is power and leverage in not being interested in the stuff everybody else is interested in — the stuff other people insist is urgent.
Map the regions of your own affinity and interest, across all relevant dimensions: intellectual, aesthetic, moral. The rest, you can ignore freely. Ignore strenuously!
I want to add that to my small hoard of encouraging declarations: Practice Hypomone! Read at whim! Festina Lente! (That’s one of Robin’s faves also.) Ignore strenuously!
Encyclopedia Babylonica 4: System
The Bob Marley and the Wailers album Survival (1979) is one of Marley's most politically militant recordings. The imagery of the album cover, which with one exception features the flags of African nations, suggests its theme — the need for Pan-African political unity — and the songs on the album say that that unity is to be rooted in emancipation from the dominance of a global political and economic system, a system which is largely controlled by white people. (The Wikipedia page linked to above explains the flags and the image hiding behind the album’s title.)
One of the most constant and powerful images of Rastafarianism is that of the Babylonian captivity. You may get a brief summary of this theme by reading this essay by David W. Stowe, and then, perhaps, go deeper by reading Stowe’s remarkable book Song of Exile: The Enduring Mystery of Psalm 137. Stowe has a lot to say about the version of Psalm 137 with which I prefaced my previous post, “Rivers of Babylon” by The Melodians. I don't suppose there's any song that more fully captures the tone and mood of Rastafari — and the best song on Survival is a kind of extension of it, as though “Rivers of Babylon” were rewritten by a critical race theorist. That song is called “Babylon System," and I'm invoking it here because I think it suggests a different approach to living in Babylon than the two we have already considered: infiltrating the halls of power and praying for deliverance.
But before I go any further, I need to clarify some things. It’s pretty obvious what I’m suggesting in these posts: that living in Technopoly is best figured as a kind of Babylonian captivity. But do I really mean to compare my situation — as a comfortable, economically secure white person in one of the world’s richest countries — to those who have been uprooted from their homes and sold into slavery, subjected to endless bigotry and oppression both overt and covert? And my answer is: Yes, I mean to compare — but not to equate.
Consider for instance the moment in “The Scouring of the Shire” when the returning hobbits see what has been done to Hobbiton:
‘This is worse than Mordor!’ said Sam. ‘Much worse in a way. It comes home to you, as they say; because it is home, and you remember it before it was all ruined.’
‘Yes, this is Mordor,’ said Frodo. ‘Just one of its works.’
By any rational reckoning, of course, Hobbiton is not “worse than Mordor” — as Sam of all people ought to know, having spent too much time in that blasted land. But you know what he means, you know where the feeling of revulsion comes from: his love of the Shire and his long-cherished hope to return to it, his unreflective expectation that upon his return it would be what he always knew it to be. But would he exchange his condition for that of a prisoner in one of Sauron’s towers, or an Orc soldier? Of course he wouldn’t. The Mordor System is darker and fouler at the center than at the periphery; but its logic is the same everywhere. And what has been learned about it near the center can be used near the periphery as well. That’s the theme of my essay on Albert Murray: white American Christians who think they’re suffering should take some lessons from their Black brothers and sisters, who know what real persecution is. If you feel threatened by the Beast, then maybe you should consult people who have spent generations in that Beast’s belly.
If I had to choose between (a) raising my child in an environment of material and social comfort but also with the constant preaching of the dark gospel of metaphysical capitalism, and (b) raising my child in an environment of economic hopelessness and racial bigotry, in which he or she must spend a lifetime constantly at tiptoe stance — well, I would certainly choose the former. The first situation has dystopian elements, but also hopeful possibilities and some degree of freedom; the second is dystopian to its core. Those in the first situation can at least learn from the miseries of those in the second.
Okay, back to Bob Marley. What does Babylon System do? It’s a vampire, sucking the blood of the sufferers; and it builds churches and universities for the express purpose of deceiving the people and keeping them enslaved. That is, to borrow the Marxist terms, it consists of an economic/political base and a cultural superstructure: As Louis Althusser said, it’s a model of political economy that sustains itself not simply by force, or the threat of force, but also through the work of ideological state apparatuses. Foucault borrowed this distinction when he coined the phrase “power-knowledge regime” — the hard power of the state-as-such and the soft power of its knowledge-disseminating apparatuses.
Not a bad description of life under surveillance capitalism. — at least, once you start thinking about it. If you manage not to think about the costs, life in Babylon can be kinda pleasant at times, and questioning the System can feel risky. But once you start thinking … well, for one thing, to do do all this unpaid labor for social media and AI companies is to tread the winepress, but thirst.
So what do we do? Do we strive to sneak our young men and women into the ruling cadre? Do we pray for deliverance? Or do we do what Bob Marley says we should do: rebel? If we’re drawn to the last, then we have to ask another question: What might successful rebellion look like?
A common experience for me:
- Someone tweets (or “X-es”?) about something I’ve written, maybe with a quotation, maybe with a summary;
- Someone else reads that tweet and on the basis of it alone decides what I must have argued …
- … and then writes me an angry email refuting the argument they’re sure I have made.
The situation reminds me of all those ancient writers we only know through the descriptions of their works by others. Those writers’ work is probably unrecoverable; but not so in this case. My emailers could have secure knowledge with a click but they prefer ignorance.
on technologies and trust
Recently, Baylor’s excellent Provost, Nancy Brickhouse, wrote to faculty with a twofold message. The first part:
How do we help our students work with artificial intelligence in ways that are both powerful and ethical? After all, I believe that the future our students face is likely to be profoundly shaped by artificial intelligence, and we have a responsibility to prepare our students for this future.
ChatGPT can be used as a research partner to help retrieve information and generate ideas, allowing students to delve deeply into a topic. It can be a good writing partner, helping students with grammar, vocabulary, and even style.
Faculty may find ChatGPT as a useful tool for lesson planning ideas. For those utilizing a flipped classroom approach, AI tools may be used to generate ideas and information outside the classroom for collaborative work inside the classroom.
Finally, and most importantly, faculty have the opportunity to engage students in critical ethical conversations about the uses of AI. They need to learn how to assess and use the information ethically.
And the second part:
I am interested in how YOU are already using artificial intelligence. I am thinking now about how we might collectively address the opportunities afforded by AI. I would appreciate hearing from you.
So I’ve been thinking about what to say — though of course I’ve already said some relevant things: see this post on “technoteachers” and my new post over at the Hog Blog on the Elon Effect. But let me try to be more straightforward.
Imagine a culinary school that teaches its students how to use HelloFresh: “Sure, we could teach you how to cook from scratch the way we used to — how to shop for ingredients, how to combine them, how to prepare them, how to present them — but let’s be serious, resources like HelloFresh aren’t going away, so you just need to learn to use them properly.” The proper response from students would be: “Why should we pay you for that? We can do that on our own.”
If I decided to teach my students how to use ChatGPT appropriately, and one of them asked me why they should pay me for that, I don’t think I would have a good answer. But if they asked me why I insist that they not use ChatGPT in reading and writing for me, I do have a response: I want you to learn how to read carefully, to sift and consider what you’ve read, to formulate and then give structure your ideas, to discern whom to think with, and finally to present your thoughts in a clear and cogent way. And I want you to learn to do all these things because they make you more free — the arts we study are liberal, that is to say liberating, arts.
If you take up this challenge you will learn not to “think for yourself” but to think in the company of well-chosen companions, and not to have your thoughts dictated to you by the transnational entity some call surveillance capitalism, which sees you as a resource to exploit and could care less if your personal integrity and independence are destroyed. The technocratic world to which I would be handing you over, if I were to encourage the use of ChatGPT, is driven by the “occupational psychosis” of sociopathy. And I don’t want you to be owned and operated by those Powers.
The Powers don’t care about the true, the good, and the beautiful — they don’t know what any of those are. As Benedict Evans writes in a useful essay, the lawyers who ask ChatGPT for legal precedents in relation to a particular case don’t realize that what ChatGPT actually searches for is something that looks like a precedent. What it returns is often what it simply invents, because it’s a pattern-matching device, not a database. It is not possible for lawyers — or people in many other fields — to use ChatGPT to do their research for them: after all, if you have to research to check the validity of ChatGPT’s “research,” then what’s the point of using ChatGPT?
Think back to that culinary school where you only learn how to use HelloFresh. That might work out just fine for a while; it might not occur to you that you have no idea how to create your own recipes, or even adapt those of other cooks — at least, not until HelloFresh doubles its prices and you discover that you can’t afford the increase. That’s the moment when you see that HelloFresh wasn’t liberating you from drudgery but rather was enslaving you to its recipes and techniques. At that point you begin to scramble to figure how to shop for your own food, how to select and prepare and combine — basically, all the things you should have learned in culinary school but didn’t.
Likewise, I don’t want you to look back on your time studying with me and wonder why I didn’t at least try to provide you with the resources to navigate your intellectual world without the assistance of an LLM. After all, somewhere down the line ChatGPT might demand more from you than just money. And you – perhaps faced with personal conditions in which you simply don’t have time to pursue genuine learning, the kind of time you had but were not encouraged to use when you were in college — may find that you have no choice but to acquiesce. As Evgeny Morozov points out, “After so many Uber- and Theranos-like traumas, we already know what to expect of an A.G.I. [Artificial General Intelligence] rollout. It will consist of two phases. First, the charm offensive of heavily subsidized services. Then the ugly retrenchment, with the overdependent users and agencies shouldering the costs of making them profitable.” Welcome to the Machine.
That’s the story I would tell, the case I would make.
I guess I’m saying this: I don’t agree that we have a responsibility to teach our students how to use ChatGPT and other AI tools. Rather, we have a responsibility to teach them how to thrive without such tools, how to avoid being sacrificed to Technopoly’s idols. And this is especially true right now, when even people closely connected with the AI industry, like Alexander Carp of Palantir, are pleading with our feckless government to impose legal guardrails, while thousands of others are pleading with the industry itself to hit the pause button.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think that AI will destroy the world. As Freddie DeBoer has noted, the epideictic language on this topic has been extraordinarily extreme:
Talk of AI has developed in two superficially opposed but deeply complementary directions: utopianism and apocalypticism. AI will speed us to a world without hunger, want, and loneliness; AI will take control of the machines and (for some reason) order them to massacre its creators. Here I can trot out the old cliché that love and hate are not opposites but kissing cousins, that the true opposite of each is indifference. So too with AI debates: the war is not between those predicting deliverance and those predicting doom, but between both of those and the rest of us who would like to see developments in predictive text and image generation as interesting and powerful but ultimately ordinary technologies. Not ordinary as in unimportant or incapable of prompting serious economic change. But ordinary as in remaining within the category of human tool, like the smartphone, like the washing machine, like the broom. Not a technology that transcends other technology and declares definitively that now is over.
So, no to both sides: AI will neither save not destroy the world. I just think that for teachers like me it’s a distraction from what I’m called to do.
If I were to speak in this way to my students — and when classes resume I just might do so — would they listen? Some will; most won’t. After all, the university leadership is telling a very different story than the one I tell, and doing things my way would involve harder work, which is never an easy sell. As I said in my “Elon Effect” essay, the really central questions here involve not technological choices but rather communal integrity and wholeness. Will my students trust me when I tell them that they are faced with the choice of moving towards liberation or towards enslavement? In most cases, no. Should they trust me? That’s not for me to decide. But it’s the key question, and one that should be on the mind of every single student: Where, in this community of learning, are the most trustworthy guides?
Here at Laity, I’m staying in a place called Lanier Apartment, which features interesting art by an interesting person.
Becca Rothfeld on “Sanctimony Literature”:
Sanctimony literature errs, then, not because it ventures into moral territory, but because it displays no genuine curiosity about what it really means to be good, and is blind to the distinction between morality and moralism, and exhibits no doubt about its own probity. Isn’t it funny that a good person, as envisioned by Lerner and Rooney, is exactly like Lerner and Rooney and all of their readers? And isn’t it striking that all these Lerner-clones and Rooney-clones are depicted as irreproachably upstanding, while all of their enemies are represented as one-dimensionally irredeemable? The heroes and heroines of sanctimony literature are so steeped in self-satisfaction that they provide an inadvertent moral lesson. It turns out that someone can have all the de rigueur political opinions without thereby achieving any measure of meaningful ethical success. A novel’s goodness is bound up with its beauty, but there is more to goodness than boilerplate leftist fervor.
Boredom is built into the [Spotify] platform, because they lose money if you get too excited about music — you’re like the person at the all-you-can-eat buffet who goes back for a third helping. They make the most money from indifferent, lukewarm fans, and they created their interface with them in mind. In other words, Spotify’s highest aspiration is to be the Applebee’s of music.
I wrote to my BMAC supporters explaining (a) why I’m writing about Babylon and (b) why I’m doing it on my blog. For some kinds of thinking and writing the blog is the best imaginable venue. Long live blogging!
Encyclopedia Babylonica 3: Daniel
As we have seen, D. W. Griffith gives us an image of an effete and dissolute Babylonian kingdom, destroyed by a combination of its own lassitude and the fierce warlike ambitions of the Persian King Cyrus. But this is not the picture of things that one would get from reading the Hebrew Bible. There we see the Babylonians as not just the conquerors of Israel, but also as the captors and enslavers of the Israelites.
And then — some time after they had been brought to the rivers of Babylon, where they sat and wept when they remembered Zion — a handful of Jews, the book of Daniel tells us, became key advisors to King Nebuchadnezzar. Now this is an interesting phenomenon in several respects. Let’s look at it more closely.
Here’s the beginning of the book of Daniel:
In the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim king of Judah, Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came to Jerusalem and besieged it. And the Lord gave Jehoiakim king of Judah into his hand, with some of the vessels of the house of God. And he brought them to the land of Shinar, to the house of his god, and placed the vessels in the treasury of his god. Then the king commanded Ashpenaz, his chief eunuch, to bring some of the people of Israel, both of the royal family and of the nobility, youths without blemish, of good appearance and skillful in all wisdom, endowed with knowledge, understanding learning, and competent to stand in the king's palace, and to teach them the literature and language of the Chaldeans. The king assigned them a daily portion of the food that the king ate, and of the wine that he drank. They were to be educated for three years, and at the end of that time they were to stand before the king. Among these were Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah of the tribe of Judah. And the chief of the eunuchs gave them names: Daniel he called Belteshazzar, Hananiah he called Shadrach, Mishael he called Meshach, and Azariah he called Abednego.
This account raises many questions. For instance, it would be very interesting to know how many Israelite youths were recruited into this program; we only hear about four, but it seems likely that there were more. Did the rest wash out? Or are they not relevant to this story because — as Nebuchadnezzar surely hoped — they became assimilated into the Chaldean culture of Babylon, forgetting the ways of their ancestors and adopting those of their captors? As I wrote some years ago, it happens all the time.
In any event: through the rest of the book of Daniel we see Daniel serving as a counselor to the Babylonian kings, first Nebuchadnezzar and then Belshazzar. He performs his duties with grace and wisdom, and in so doing earns promotion for himself and king-mandated respect for the God of Israel. What makes his success surprising is simply that he always brings bad news: he repeatedly reads the kings’ dreams as foretellings of disaster, which they always prove to be. Is this the only time in recorded history when bearers of bad news got themselves promoted?
Things get strange right at the end of Daniel 5, when Belshazzar is killed and replaced by someone totally unknown to any other historian: Darius the Mede, who is the guy who drops Daniel into the lion’s den. By contrast, Herotodus — who is the primary source for Griffith’s Babylonian story in Intolerance, and even gets cited in a footnote on a title card, an honor granted to few other historians — tells us that the conqueror of Belshazzar’s Babylon is King Cyrus the Great of Persia, who finds a way to break into the great walled city and does so virtually unnoticed:
Now, if the Babylonians had only been given forewarning of what Cyrus was up to, or fathomed it for themselves, then they could have turned the entrance of the Persians into their city so completely to their own advantage as to have annihilated the invaders utterly. All they would have had to do was to secure the postern gates that open out onto the river and mount the low walls that run along its banks, and they would have had the Persians caught as if in a trap. As it was, however, the enemy was upon them before they knew what had hit them. Indeed, according to local tradition, such was the size of the city that those who lived in the centre of Babylon had no idea that the suburbs had fallen, for it was a time of festival, and all were dancing, and indulging themselves in pleasures; so that when they did finally get the news, it was very much the hard way. And that is the story of how, for the first time, Babylon fell.
But back to Daniel. After Daniel escapes unscathed from the lions, we’re told, "So this Daniel prospered during the reign of Darius and the reign of Cyrus the Persian” (6:28). But the rest of the book is devoted to describing a series of visions granted to Daniel: they are identified as happening in some particular year of some king’s reign, but they otherwise say nothing about what Daniel was doing.
Again, it would be nice to know more, especially given the portrayal of Daniel as an advocate for his people; because Cyrus is perhaps the first royal defender of religious freedom.
That's the Cyrus Cylinder, now in the British Museum, which contains a lengthy proclamation by Cyrus detailing his power, his glory, and his various achievements. Among these last are his repatriation of conquered peoples and his restoration of their temples and cultic sites. Some overly enthusiastic folks in recent years have called the Cylinder an ancient declaration of human rights, but it’s nothing of the kind: to Cyrus his subjects have no rights; he’s celebrating his own beneficence towards people to whom he owes nothing.
The Cylinder doesn’t mention the Jews, but surely Cyrus’s claims for himself strongly support the picture given in the book of Isaiah and elsewhere of Cyrus as the liberator — indeed the messiah, the anointed one — of Israel, though the Cylinder certainly does not say that Cyrus liberated anyone in response to a commandment from the Lord. We need one more chapter of the book of Daniel telling us that it was Daniel who convinced Cyrus to act so generously. Alas, we have no way to connect those dots.
(FYI: I am reading and so far very much enjoying Matt Waters’s King of the World: The Life of Cyrus the Great. Spoiler alert: he doesn’t look much like a tolerant modern liberal.)
So, two pictures of the fall of Babylon: in the version given by Herodotus and endorsed by D. W. Griffith, the Babylonians (largely as a result of their inattentive decadence) fall to a mighty conqueror, a great man of war; in the version given in the Hebrew Bible, they fall because of their cruel domination of the children of Israel, and are replaced by a more generous sovereign who has been anointed by God to be the instrument of Israel’s liberation. But even in the book of Daniel the Babylonians are associated with gross luxury: their doom is announced, via the aboriginal “writing on the wall,” when “King Belshazzar made a great feast for a thousand of his lords and drank wine in front of the thousand” (5:1) — and then chose to drink wine from the sacral vessels stolen from the Temple in Jerusalem. Perhaps a step too far from YHWH to tolerate.
You and I, my friends — this is the theme and topic of these posts — live in Babylon. How do we thrive? By working our way into the halls of power, or by praying for deliverance? Or, perhaps, by some other means?
Other research has assessed relationships between the amount of time children have to direct their own activities and psychological characteristics predictive of future mental health. Such research has revealed significant positive correlations between the amount of self-structured time (largely involving free play) young children have and (1) scores on tests of executive functioning (ability to create and follow through on a plan to solve a set of problems); (2) indices of emotional control and social ability; and (3) scores, 2 years later, on a measure of self-regulation.
Moreover, two retrospective studies with adults have shown that those who recall more instances of independent play when they were children are, by various indices, happier and more successful in adulthood than those who recall less such independence. And research with college students reveals that those with over-controlling parents (as assessed with questionnaires) fare more poorly psychologically than those whose parents are less controlling. These and other correlational studies all point in the same direction. Opportunities to take more control of your own life when young predict better future well-being.
See also this essay by Gray: “Why Adult-Directed Sports Are No Substitute for Kid-Directed Play.” Sports, in our context, are very nearly the opposite of play.
abnegation
A brilliant, angry, nearly-despairing essay by Justin Smith-Ruiu, one that grows out of a reading of William Gaddis's brilliant, angry, almost-completely-despairing novel JR:
Is there any more vivid expression of the reduction of lived reality to two-dimensional catchphrases than the one conveyed in a sentence beginning with, “Speaking as an X …”? Our entire social reality is built up out of catchphrases now, and the people who really ought to be criticizing this nightmarish condition have instead abnegated their duty as intellectuals and have taken on the task of enforcing the repetition of certain catchphrases and of muffling other ones. And there is really no one left to perform that last doomed heroic gesture of [Edward] Bast’s, and to force us to hear something truly beautiful through all the noise, incessant and insane, of the Discourse. […]
In fact the sorry truth is that [mass entertainments] may well be the best thing on offer, simply because the forces that produced them have absolutely bulldozed the last surviving hopes for art as a sphere of autonomous creation. But if that’s the case, well, then at least we have an archive of how things used to be, of postmodern novels from the late twentieth century, for example, which we are still free, for now, to go back and consult at our leisure, in order to remind ourselves how irreducibly complicated, and ultimately insaisissable, artists and intellectuals once knew the world to be.
The “gesture” he refers to in the first paragraph quoted is the great moment when Bast, a failed or anyway failing composer, tries to make JR, an 11-year-old idiot savant of finance, pause in his manic quest for cash to take just a few moments to listen to Bach’s haunting and glorious cantata Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis. Smith-Ruiu is right to call Bast’s desperate buttonholing of JR a mere gesture, because it’s hopeless, impossible … but perhaps all the more beautiful for that.
For a moment I thought that, in the sentence I’ve highlighted, Smith-Ruiu meant to use the word “abdicated,” but on reflection decided that “abnegated” is indeed the right word.
