Nicholas Carr:

Building on that idea in The Human Use of Human Beings, [Norbert Wiener] argues that, once set in motion, machine learning might advance to a point where — “whether for good or evil” — computers could be entrusted with the administration of the state. An artificially intelligent computer would become an all-purpose bureaucracy-in-a-box, rendering civil servants obsolete. Society would be controlled by a “colossal state machine” that would makes Hobbes’s Leviathan look like “a pleasant joke.”

What for Wiener in 1950 was a speculative vision, and a “terrifying” one, is today a practical goal for AI-infatuated technocrats like Elon Musk. Musk and his cohort not only foresee an “AI-first” government run by artificial intelligence routines but, having managed to seize political power, are now actively working to establish it. In its current “chainsaw” phase, Musk’s DOGE initiative is attempting to rid the government of as many humans as possible while at the same time hoovering up all available government-controlled data and transferring it into large language models. The intent is to clear a space for the incubation of an actual governing machine. Musk is always on the lookout for vessels for his seeds, and here he sees an opportunity to incorporate his ambitions and intentions into the very foundations of a new kind of state. It’s preformationism writ large.

If the new machine can be said to have a soul, it’s the soul Turing feared: the small, callow soul of its creators.

Even more than a flesh-and-blood bureaucracy, Wiener understood, an inscrutable bureaucracy-in-a-box, issuing decisions and edicts with superhuman speed and certainty, could all too easily be put to totalitarian ends. The box might seem autonomous, its outputs immaculate, but it would always serve its masters. It would always be an instrument of power. “The modern man, and especially the modern American, however much ‘know-how’ he may have, has very little ‘know-what,’” Wiener wrote. “He will accept the superior dexterity of the machine-made decisions without too much inquiry as to the motives and principles behind these.”

To explain his distinction between know-how and know-what, a distinction he saw as critical to the future course of technological progress, he tells another story:

Some years ago, a prominent American engineer bought an expensive player-piano. It became clear after a week or two that this purchase did not correspond to any particular interest in the music played by the piano. It corresponded rather to an overwhelming interest in the piano mechanism. For this gentleman, the player-piano was not a means of producing music, but a means of giving some inventor the chance of showing how skillful he was at overcoming certain difficulties in the production of music. This is an estimable attitude in a second-year high-school student. How estimable it is in one of those on whom the whole cultural future of the country depends, I leave to the reader.

George Dyson, in 2005 after visiting the “Googleplex”:

My visit to Google? Despite the whimsical furniture and other toys, I felt I was entering a 14th-century cathedral—not in the 14th century but in the 12th century, while it was being built. Everyone was busy carving one stone here and another stone there, with some invisible architect getting everything to fit. The mood was playful, yet there was a palpable reverence in the air. “We are not scanning all those books to be read by people,” explained one of my hosts after my talk. “We are scanning them to be read by an AI.”

When I returned to highway 101, I found myself recollecting the words of Alan Turing, in his seminal paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, a founding document in the quest for true AI. “In attempting to construct such machines we should not be irreverently usurping His power of creating souls, any more than we are in the procreation of children,” Turing had advised. “Rather we are, in either case, instruments of His will providing mansions for the souls that He creates.”

Google is Turing’s cathedral, awaiting its soul. We hope. In the words of an unusually perceptive friend: “When I was there, just before the IPO, I thought the coziness to be almost overwhelming. Happy Golden Retrievers running in slow motion through water sprinklers on the lawn. People waving and smiling, toys everywhere. I immediately suspected that unimaginable evil was happening somewhere in the dark corners. If the devil would come to earth, what place would be better to hide?”

For 30 years I have been wondering, what indication of its existence might we expect from a true AI? Certainly not any explicit revelation, which might spark a movement to pull the plug. Anomalous accumulation or creation of wealth might be a sign, or an unquenchable thirst for raw information, storage space, and processing cycles, or a concerted attempt to secure an uninterrupted, autonomous power supply. But the real sign, I suspect, would be a circle of cheerful, contented, intellectually and physically well-nourished people surrounding the AI. There wouldn’t be any need for True Believers, or the downloading of human brains or anything sinister like that: just a gradual, gentle, pervasive and mutually beneficial contact between us and a growing something else. This remains a non-testable hypothesis, for now. The best description comes from science fiction writer Simon Ings:

“When our machines overtook us, too complex and efficient for us to control, they did it so fast and so smoothly and so usefully, only a fool or a prophet would have dared complain.”

The very question “Does prayer work?” puts us in the wrong frame of mind from the outset. 

Rereading C.S. Lewis’s 1959 essay in The Atlantic “The Efficacy of Prayer,” a couple things come to mind:

• Bruce Waltke’s book, the title of which says it all, Finding the Will of God: A Pagan Notion? We might also ask, “A scientific notion?”:
  
  

  Ever since the Enlightenment, the Western world has held a faith in the power of the human mind and of the scientific method to know “truth.” It has sought to understand and control nature and has believed, almost without question, that anything that could not be understood by unaided human reason and validated by science was not to be taken seriously. We can know absolutely, however, only if we know comprehensively. To make an absolute judgment, according to Cornelius Van Til, humanity must usurp God’s throne:
  
  ”If one does not make human knowledge wholly dependent upon the original self-knowledge and consequent revelation of God to man, then man will have to seek knowledge within himself as the final reference point. Then he will have to seek an exhaustive understanding of reality. He will have to hold that if he cannot attain to such an exhaustive understanding of reality, he has no true knowledge of anything at all. Either man must then know everything or he knows nothing.”

• Dietrich Bonhoeffer spoke of essentially the same thing in a letter from prison to Eberhard Bethge, dated 5 December 1943:
  
  

  I think that under the guise of honesty something is presented here as “natural” that on the contrary is a symptom of sin; it [is] really quite analogous to open talk about sexual matters. “Truthfulness” does not at all mean that whatever exists must be uncovered. God himself made clothing for human beings, that is, in statu corruptionis many aspects of the human being are to remain concealed, and when one cannot root it out, evil is likewise to remain hidden. Anyway, exposure is cynical; and even if cynics appear particularly honest in their own eyes or act like fanatics for the truth, they still miss the decisive truth, namely, that after the fall there is a need for covering [Verhülling] and secrecy [Geheimnis]. For me, [the novelist Adalbert] Stifter’s greatness lies in the fact that he refuses to pry into the inner realm of the person, that he respects the covering and regards the person only very discreetly from without, as it were, but not from within.… It impressed me once that Mrs. von Kleist-Kieckow told me with real horror of a film in which the growth of a plant was portrayed with time-lapse photography; she and her husband were unable to bear that as an illegitimate prying into the mystery of life.

Exposure is cynical; prayer is human.

Someone recently quoted a line from Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow: “If they can keep you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.” For us, it could just as well be said, “If we can keep ourselves looking for answers, we don’t have to worry about having asked all the wrong questions.”

And now more things come to mind.

• From A. R. Ammons wonderful essay “A Poem Is a Walk”:
  
  

  Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing. If we remain open minded we will soon find for any easy clarity an equal and opposite, so that the sum of our clarities should return us where we belong, to confusion and, hopefully, to more complicated and better assessments.
  
  Unlike the logical structure, the poem is an existence which can incorporate contradictions, inconsistencies, explanations and counter-explanations and still remain whole, unexhausted and inexhaustible; an existence that comes about by means other than those of description and exposition and, therefore, to be met by means other than or in addition to those of description and exposition.

• From Patrick Kavanagh’s “Canal Bank Walk”:
  
  

  O unworn world enrapture me, encapture me in a web
  Of fabulous grass and eternal voices by a beech,
  Feed the gaping need of my senses, give me ad lib
  To pray unselfconsciously with overflowing speech
  For this soul needs to be honoured with a new dress woven 
  From green and blue things and arguments that cannot be proven.

Exposure is cynical; prayer is human.

One more:

• Prologue to Christian Wiman’s Survival Is a Style (no doubt inspired by Ammons and Kavanagh):
  
  

  Church or sermon, prayer or poem:
  the failure of religious feeling is a form.
  
  •
  
  The failure of religious feeling is a form
  of love that, though it could not survive
  
  the cataclysmic joy of its inception,
  nevertheless preserves its own sane something,
  
  a space in which grievers gather,
  inviolate ice that the believers weather:
  
  church or sermon, prayer or poem.
  
  •
  
  Finer and finer the meaningless distinctions:
  theodicies, idiolects, books, books, books.
  
  I need a space for unbelief to breathe.
  I need a form for failure, since it is what I have.

All creatures touched to life, clutched
By life, are the beings they must be and bear.
Mindlight, spinelight, and somewhere, nowhere,
The dark wave…

•

My animal, my age, ravenous in your cage,
What flute might bend the bars, bind the gnarled
Knees of days, and bring forth a world
Of newness, world trued to music—
A lullaby for human grief,
Of human grief,
While the adder breathes in time in the grass.

•

Wave after wave of grave aboriginal green,
And then, buds plumped to the point of bursting,
And then, again, all the soft detonations of simple spring…

But not for you, my beautiful, my pitiful,
My necrotic, psychotic age.
More cruel for the weakness that taunts you,
More crippled for the supple animal that haunts you,
You stagger on,
Staring back at the way you’ve taken:
Mad tracks in a land called Gone.

—Osip Mandelstam (1923), translated by Christian Wiman

Letter to the President

Gratitude is due to the heroic Ukrainian soldiers who shed their blood in defense of the values of the free world. They have been dying on the frontline for more than 11 years in the name of these values and [the] independence of their Homeland, which was attacked by Putin’s Russia. We do not understand how the leader of a country that is the symbol of the free world cannot see [that]. Mr. President, material aid—military and financial—cannot be equivalent to the blood shed in the name of independence and freedom of Ukraine, Europe, as well as the whole free world. Human life is priceless, its value cannot be measured with money.

To statements like “Surely the voters didn’t vote for this?” I’ve lately been arguing “specifically, no; generally, yes.”

It’s extraordinarily difficult to ignore or get around the type of person Trump is. (Well, difficult for some of us. If you click that hyperlink, be sure to read the addendum.) For those of us unwilling to kid ourselves about who he is and what his reelection means, it’s hard to call any of the things he’s been doing surprising, even though no one actually knew what would happen. And that holds in a more nefarious sense for the ones who seem all too happy to kid themselves about Trump. They may not have known exactly what he was going to do, but neither have they seemed the least bit surprised or troubled.

USAID is a perfect example. I don’t know one Trump supporter who had USAID on the brain last year. Now, having learned what the acronym stands for all of two weeks ago, they lecture me about it, celebrating the chaos unleashed on it, without any regard for the truth let alone for sympathy, and happily anticipate its undoing.

Did they knowingly vote for this? Technically, no. Were they hoping for something like this? Possibly, even likely. Either way, are they happy about what they’re seeing and hearing? Yeah, I think they are. It makes sense to say they voted for it. 

Same goes for the rest of the nominees and all the other chaos they bring. Each and every one of them has been scratching the itchy ears of a long-standing, deeply rooted element of the American character. (Lots of people, some more honest about it than others, despise the notion of sending even a single tax-dollar overseas as long as there is one leaky pipe somewhere in our own country. When people say chant “America first!” not only should you believe them, you should also hear what they’re really saying: “America — period!”)

To avoid any appearance of mind reading, we can say it differently and see the same thing: Specifically, I didn’t vote against this because I didn’t know exactly what was going to happen. But generally speaking, yes, I voted against precisely this. 

Or again: specifically, no; generally, yes. But I seem a minority opinion here.

I quoted Francis Fukuyama the other day — “The United States under Donald Trump is not retreating into isolationism. It is actively joining the authoritarian camp.” (I sent the piece along to a few longtime “conservative” folks, adding “Charles Krauthammer is turning in his grave.” As I’ve said before, a reference to Krauthammer’s grave seems to pull more weight than a reference to the other one.)

Fukuyama closed that piece with this:

Don’t tell me that the American people voted for such a world or such a country last November. They weren’t paying attention, and should be prepared to see their own country and world transformed beyond recognition.

… Well, shit.

Far be it from me to even think of entering the ring with Fukuyama. I agree with his piece entirely, and I think our situation is exactly as he describes it in that post.

Hoooweverrr…

If he means by that last statement that they literally weren’t paying attention, well then I don’t know what he’s talking about. But if he means “they’re getting it all wrong” or “they’re missing what’s really going on” or “their sources of information are shitty sources of information designed to mislead them and distract them” — then sure, I’m with him. But why not just say that? Why must everyone use the same useless “they didn’t vote for this” language, a phrase which, by my reading, seems capable only of disillusioning and deluding the people who use it? I want that phrase killed with fire. And as far as I can tell, there’s no reason Fukuyama needed to end his post with it.

I previously added the disclaimer that I don’t think any of my argument undoes Jonah Goldberg’s caution about assuming Trump supporters share my view of Trump and voted for him anyway; they definitely don’t. But while we may be looking at the same events, there are, as they see it, different facts attached to these events, as well as different preceding histories and different emphases within those histories — and this on top of what are genuine lies and falsehoods, however genuinely they are thought to be true.

So they’re paying attention, alright. But they’re very often paying attention to figureheads who, as Hannah Arendt would put it, “deal in intangibles whose concrete reality is at a minimum.” (How many people does that not describe?)

The journalist Philip Gibbs once wrote about a system that stoked fear and created enemies out of “human beings who prayed to the same God, loved the same joys of life, and had no hatred of one another except as it had been lighted and inflamed by their governors, their philosophers, and their newspapers.” From to Rush Limbaugh to Tucker Carlson, from Pat Robertson to John MacArthur, from John Mearsheimer to Victor Davis Hanson, that’s an inflamed process that preceded last year’s election by decades, and one that didn’t stop the day after the election. (And this is only to speak of the Right; the Left has it’s own brand of the same.)

It’s also worth remembering – or being informed of – the fact that these are usually normal, good-natured people who genuinely believe that the election of 2020 was in fact stolen from Donald Trump. And it doesn’t just include the small-town, blue-collar workers I usually have in mind. I know nurses and doctors, CRNAs and anesthesiologists, members of the “educated elite,” who certainly believe it as well. Even in recent months, I have been told by a surgeon, and I quote, “If you don’t believe that the 2020 election was stolen, you’re an idiot.” (Even as recent as last week, I heard a neurosurgeon say he was impressed by Trumps “maturity” in handling the Epstein files that were set to be released that day.)

As Fred Clark aptly noted in 2018, sometimes the weird fringe is the biggest part. He closed that essay with the observation that Mark Noll’s 1994 The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, “one of the most perceptive descriptions of white evangelicalism ever produced,” was a book that “everybody” read. It sold 35,000 copies. Clark contrasts this with “the world’s worst books,” the Left Behind series, which sold over 65 million copies. “I’m not suggesting that selling only 35,000 copies means it wasn’t really read by ‘everybody’ in mainstream evangelicalism,” Clark adds. “I’m suggesting that means it was. That’s the problem.”

Maybe when Fukuyama says “they weren’t paying attention” what he means to say is that they weren’t paying attention to him. That would track. I like Fukuyama when he comes across my radar, and I regard him highly — very highly. And there are lots of people who I read who read Francis Fukuyama. But nobody I know reads him. Let me repeat that: Not one single person I know reads Francis Fukuyama. It would be difficult, in fact, for me to find someone in any of my circles who would even recognize his name.

So the real question is, Who is it who is not paying attention?

Leo Tolstoy:

We ourselves carefully create such a life, taking bread and labor away from the work-worn people. We live sumptuously, as if there were no connection whatever between the dying washerwoman, child-prostitute, women worn out by making cigarettes and all the intense labor around us to which their unnourished strength is inadequate. We do not want to see the fact that if there were not our idle, luxurious, depraved lives, there would not be this labor, disproportioned to the strength of people, and that if there were not this labor we could not go on living in the same way.

It appears to us that their sufferings are one thing and our lives another, and that we, living as we do, are innocent and pure as doves. We read the description of the lives of the Romans, and wonder at the inhumanity of a heartless Lucullus, who gorged himself with fine dishes and delicious wines while people were starving: we shake our heads and wonder at the barbarism of our grandfathers,—the serf-owners,—who provided themselves with orchestras and theaters, and employed whole villages to keep up their gardens. From the height of our greatness we wonder at their inhumanity. We read the words of Isaiah v., 8:

“Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no room, and ye be made to dwell alone in the midst of the land. […]

Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!

Woe unto them that are wise in their own eyes, and prudent in their own sight! […]

Which justify the wicked for reward, and take away the righteousness of the righteous from him.”

We read these words, and it seems to us that they have nothing to do with us.

We read in the Gospel, Matthew iii., 10: “And even now is the ax laid unto the root of the tree: every tree therefore that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire,” and we are quite sure that the good tree bearing good fruit is we ourselves, and that those words are said, not to us, but to some other bad men.

We read the words of Isaiah vi., 10:

“Make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and turn again, and be healed. Then said I, Lord, how long? And he answered, Until cities be waste without inhabitant, and houses without man, and the land become utterly waste.”

We read, and are quite assured that this wonderful thing has not happened to us, but to some other people. For this very reason we do not see that this has happened to us, and is taking place with us. We do not hear, we do not see, and do not understand with our heart.

But why has it so happened?

How can a man who considers himself to be,—we will not say a Christian or an educated and humane man,—but simply a man not entirely devoid of reason and of conscience,—how can he, I say, live in such a way, taking no part in the struggle of all mankind for life, only swallowing up the labor of others struggling for existence, and by his own claims increasing the labor of those who struggle and the number of those who perish in the struggle?

Such men abound in our so-called Christian and cultured world; and not only do they abound in our world but the very ideal of the men of our Christian, cultured world, is to get the largest amount of property,—that is, wealth,—which secures all comforts and idleness of life by freeing its possessors from the struggle for existence, and enabling them, as much as possible, to profit by the labor of those brothers of theirs who perish in that struggle.

How could men have fallen into such astounding error?

How could they have come to such a state that they can neither see nor hear nor understand with their heart what is so clear, obvious, and certain?

One need only think for a moment in order to be terrified at the way our lives contradict what we profess to believe, whether we be Christian or only humane educated people.

Christopher Sanford’s case for Cricket is excellent. And reminds me of Stanley Hauerwas’s case baseball.

Here’s Sanford:

Cricket is surely the perfect corrective for a TikTok generation characterized by its need for instant gratification and its ever shorter attention span. At least as enacted in its longer form, it’s a sport that demands patience and perseverance. Imagine a single continuing contest where you leave the field on a Monday evening feeling mildly apprehensive about your team’s prospects, but then return to see a collective rallying of spirits by Wednesday afternoon, leading to an ultimate moment of fulfillment the following Friday lunchtime. That’s an international test match for you. Life itself can be measured out by the ebb and flow of such an event, and by the manner in which we, whether as players or spectators, react to it. Cricket can be a hard, and sometimes even quite a thrilling, affair. But it is also a game of profound thought, whose appeal doesn’t necessarily rely on a fixation with winning, and, as such, it is a thing of deep beauty in our presently debased world. […]

Cricket teaches us those virtues of patience, endurance, and magnanimity that give the sport a wider dominion in life than any mere obsession with individual statistics or results. Whether a public bred on our mainstream American sports can accommodate itself to such values should make for a fascinating spectacle in the years ahead.

And here’s Hauerwas in his book The Character of Virtue. He writes to his godson, “Baseball is America’s greatest gift to civilization. It is a slow game of failure. If you win half the time, that’s considered very good.”

That baseball is the great American sport indicates that there is hope even for America. Americans pride themselves on speed, but speed is often just another name for violence. And as I suggested in some of my earlier letters to you, America is a very violent country. That we are so has everything to do with our impatience. But we do have baseball as an alternative to war.

He then quotes David James Duncan in his novel The Brothers K:

I cherish a theory I once heard propounded by G. Q.Durham that professional baseball is inherently antiwar. The most overlooked cause of war, his theory runs, is that it is so damned interesting. It takes hard effort, skill, love and a little luck to make times of peace consistently interesting. About all it takes to make war interesting is a life. The appeal of trying to kill others without being killed yourself is that it brings suspense, terror, honor, disgrace, rage, tragedy, treachery and occasionally even heroism within range of guys who, in times of peace, might lead lives of unmitigated blandness. But baseball is one activity that is able to generate suspense and excitement on a national scale, just like war. And baseball can only be played in peace. Hence G. Q’s thesis that pro ballplayers—little as some of them want to hear it—are basically a bunch of unusually well-coordinated guys working hard and artfully to prevent wars, by making peace more interesting.

Hauerwas adds, near the closing of this letter to his godson,

Your father may well try to convince you that some game called cricket is actually more a game of peace than baseball, but you’ll discover that baseball is far more compelling. At the very least, I promise to take you to ball games in order for you to learn from baseball the habits of peace. Which is but a reminder that the patience of nonviolence is not an ideal, but rather lies at the heart of the practices and habits that sustain our everyday life. As I’ve suggested, our very bodies were given to us so that we might learn to be patient.

Whether it’s baseball or cricket, I’m certainly persuaded.

One more quote from Hauerwas, which precedes the above in the same letter:

My point here is that you will be brought up in the church, and you will be frustrated by the people who make up the church. You may even become as angry as I am with other Christians. But you must also be patient, which means you must be as ready to forgive as to be forgiven. The community necessary to be the church takes time—time determined by patience. You’ll be frustrated by the time it takes for people to be who God would have us be, but remember that God has given us all the time in the world so that we might be patient with one another…

…Patience, at least the kind of patience I’ve tried to suggest is the very heart of God, seems like a pretty heavy burden to put on a child. But if you think about it, it’s also a pretty heavy burden to put on someone as impatient as I am. Which is just a way of reminding us both that the virtues aren’t recommendations for individual achievement. The truth is that we can be patient only through being made patient through the patient love of others. That is the love I see surrounding you, making it possible for you to begin to acquire patience.