I take it to be obvious that we are living at a moment when all kinds of capacities that had once been shorthand for what’s human are being disconcerted and called into question. And while all digital boosters advertise this as a way for humanity to unlock its true potential—eliminating annoying frictions like working, feeling, and thinking—in order to devote ourselves to a delicious obsolescence sometimes labelled “creativity,” it is characteristic of this line of thought that it invariably defines what’s creative or authentic or human as that which digital agents cannot yet do. This is a winning strategy so long as we have no care to formulate human measure, place, or purpose in other terms. And it is a strategy that leads directly to dehumanization.
We are prone to imagining the threat of dehumanization as one in which murderbots enslave us. Our paradigm for “dehumanizing” speech is one that is coercive or humiliating. These are real threats about the end of human beings, but the gravest threat now is to the human end itself: I mean a situation in which we are so completely successful in mediating and optimizing our tasks into outside-in digital processes that we lose our grip on the question of what we are for from the inside out. The clearest picture of this dehumanization is not being caged or brutalized but spending one’s life in an airport lounge: a non-place in which we are completely safe and comfortable even as we are almost completely desocialized, decontextualized, deskilled, and living in a sort of highly controlled dead zone of meaning; a place in which opaque technologies have come to replace the work of culture itself, and in which each person is absorbed in a parenthesis of screened experience even as all are practically neutralized.
[…]
[W]e need the virtue of living language. According to the Turing test, a computer can be said to be intelligent if it can produce outputs that are indistinguishable from those of a human being. It is a bad test of actual intelligence for many reasons, but it is an excellent test of human beings’ eagerness to ascribe intelligence to machine outputs. The time is coming when the world may be divided into people who are willing to feel that LLMs speak to them and people who are not. Because this will be a matter of practical conviction rather than logical proof, it is only by acquiring the virtue of living language that one might resist.
… Language is realized only by being enacted, whereas the most pernicious feature of digital technology is that it unravels the contexts in which words carry weight. Just as you can know that other human beings are real only through practical conviction, you can know that words are alive only if you have lived them and if they have animated you. Human beings are worded creatures, creatures possessed of speech. But to live by words takes practice.
“like a soldier dismantling his rifle”
John Berger:
Sometimes, I’d like to write a book
A book all about time
About how it doesn’t exist,
How the past and the future
Are one continuous present.
I think that all people— those living,
those who have lived
And those who are still to live—are alive now.
I should like to take that subject to pieces,
Like a soldier dismantling his rifle.wrote Yevgeny Vinokurov.
ONCE IN A POEM
Poems, even when narrative, do not resemble stories. All stories are about battles, of one kind or another, which end in victory and defeat. Everything moves towards the end, when the outcome will be known.
Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. They bring a kind of peace.
Not by anaesthesia or easy reassurance, but by recognition and the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been. Yet the promise is not of a monument. (Who, still on a battlefield, wants monuments:) The promise is that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experience which demanded, which cried out.
Poems are nearer to prayers than to stories…. In all poetry words are a presence before they are a means of communication.
New Christian Nationalist Translation
Early in the book of Isaiah, the prophet encounters the Lord, “high and exalted, seated on a throne; and the train of his robe filled the temple.” Seraphim swirl about, singing, “Holy, holy, holy,” and Isaiah falls into despair: He is not holy, and he knows it.
“Woe to me!” he cries. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.”
But at this confession, a seraphim descends, touches Isaiah’s lips with a live coal, and declares his guilt removed. Then, in one of the best-known exchanges in the Bible, God speaks: “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?”
And Isaiah famously answers, “Here am I. Send me! I just can’t wait to bomb Iran.”
It is true that something remembered by tradition as “Origenism” was condemned by someone in the sixth century, and that Origen was maligned as a heretic in the process; and it is also true that for well more than a millennium both those decisions were associated with the Council of 553 by what was simply accepted as the official record. But, embarrassingly, we now know, and have known for quite some time, that the record was falsified. And this is a considerable problem not only for Orthodoxy, but for the Catholic Church as well, inasmuch as the authority of the ecumenical councils must in some way be intimately—if obscurely—bound to some notion of the indefectibility of the church’s transmission of the faith.
But, really, it is the most shameful episode in the history of Christian doctrine. For one thing, to have declared any man a heretic three centuries after dying in the peace of the church, in respect of doctrinal determinations not reached during his life, was a gross violation of all legitimate canonical order; but in Origen’s case it was especially loathsome. After Paul, there is no single Christian figure to whom the whole tradition is more indebted. It was Origen who taught the church how to read scripture as a living mirror of Christ, who evolved the principles of later Trinitarian theology and Christology, who majestically set the standard for Christian apologetics, who produced the first and richest expositions of contemplative spirituality, and who—simply said—laid the foundation of the whole edifice of developed Christian thought. Moreover, he was not only a man of extraordinary personal holiness, piety, and charity, but a martyr as well: Brutally tortured during the Decian persecution at the age of 69, he never recovered, but slowly withered away over a period of three years. He was, in short, among the greatest of the church fathers and the most illustrious of the saints and yet, disgracefully, official church tradition—East and West—commemorates him as neither.
I cannot really say what irks me more, though: that it happened or that, in fact, it really never did. The oldest records of the council (which was convened to deal solely with certain Antiochian theologians) make it clear that those fifteen anathemas were never even discussed by the assembled bishops, let alone ratified, published, or promulgated. And since the late nineteenth century various scholars have convincingly established that neither Origen nor “Origenism” was ever the subject of any condemnation pronounced by the “holy fathers” in 553. The best modern critical edition of the Seven Councils—Norman Tanner’s—simply omits the anathemas as spurious interpolations.
As for where they came from, the evidence suggests they were prepared beforehand by the vicious and insidiously stupid Emperor Justinian, who liked to play theologian, who saw the church as a pillar of imperial unity, and who took implacable umbrage at dissident theologies. A decade earlier, he had sent ten similar anathemas of Origen (or what he imagined Origen to have taught) to Patriarch Menas; and on the council’s eve he apparently submitted the fifteen anathemas of 553 to a lesser synod of bishops, in hope of securing some kind of ecclesial approbation for them. Or they may instead have been proposed at a synod as much as nine years before. Whatever the case, it was only well after the Fifth Ecumenical Council’s close that they were attached to its canons, and Origen’s name inserted into its list of condemned heretics. In this way the anathemas “went on the books,” where they remain: imposingly peremptory, garbed in immemorial authority, and false as hell.
[…] Even if the anathemas had actually been approved by the council, they no more constitute a serious condemnation of Origen than they do a recipe for brioche.
[…] East or West, all Christians are burdened with the absurdities of Christian imperial history. But any conception of orthodoxy that obliges one to grant the title of “saint” to a murderous thug like Justinian while denying it to a man as holy as Origen is obviously—indeed ludicrously—self-refuting. And one does not defend tradition well by making it appear not only atrociously unjust, but utterly ridiculous.
the vicious cycle of wealth accumulation
Graphic by Iris Brlliant, via Lisa Sibbett, via somebody I forget who
everywhere millionaires
Ever since my wife and I entered the housing market in 2023, and had a shocking wakeup call, I have been a broken record. Here’s how I’ve described it before. There were at least three big problems for any normal person looking to buy a family home: 1) city-to-rural (or “ruraler”) moves after COVID; 2) airbnb purchases of multiple homes in places people don’t even live (there may be a housing shortage, but there’s no airbnb shortage); but 3) is a more mysterious problem I’ve had difficulty putting a finger on. The way I’ve put it is that there is an unknown, mysteriously high number of people running around the with wild amounts of f-you money in their pockets. An anesthesiologist in Bozeman, for example, who sold his ~$800,000 house for a cash offer. The account provided as proof of cash: $29 million.
I have not been under the impression that this is a rare occurrence. When we lost a bid for a house in southern Oregon to, of course, a cash offer, when we were still thinking of settling there, we asked if we could be listed as a backup. They said sure, we could be put down as a backup… after the other 5 cash offers on this home that also beat you out.
Well, the whole thing still stinks, but it’s nice to know I wasn’t wrong:
When Americans picture the ultrarich, they typically think of tech billionaires such as Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, whose wealth lies predominantly in shares of publicly traded companies. They might also think of Wall Street financiers and celebrities such as Taylor Swift. But far more typical are figures like Terry Taylor—which is to say, owners of successful privately held businesses. We are economists who have been studying taxation and inequality for more than a decade. By our calculations, about 1.7 million Americans have each built a net worth of at least $10 million by owning a private business. For every CEO of a public company, there are more than 1,000 private-business owners with a net worth of more than $25 million.
In the course of our research, we’ve come to call these people “everywhere millionaires” because they exist all around the country, in a huge range of industries. Perhaps not surprising, some of these millionaires have stakes in investment firms or medical, dental, or legal practices. But the ranks of everywhere millionaires also include a repo man from Henderson, Nevada; a car-wash owner from Milwaukee; a treated-lumber magnate from Alabama; a boat-cover maker from the Ozarks.
[…]
According to our analysis of the 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances, the 65,000 American households worth more than $100 million consisted almost entirely of business owners; fewer than half held graduate degrees.…
…Everywhere millionaires don’t get the same attention as eccentric tech titans, finance executives, or famous entertainers. But seeing them is the first step to understanding the economy and society as they really are.
NYT:
Major stock indexes have set record after record in recent years, fueled by seemingly boundless appetite among investors for anything connected to artificial intelligence. The total value of the U.S. stock market has more than doubled over the past decade to over $75 trillion, roughly two and a half times the annual output of the entire U.S. economy, itself a record ratio.
Much of that value exists only on paper, bets on future profits that may or may not materialize in the years ahead. But the boom is supporting real economic activity today, pumping trillions of dollars of investment into semiconductor factories, data centers, power plants and transmission lines. And the wealth it is creating is helping to drive consumer spending, particularly among affluent Americans, whose appreciating stock portfolios make them more willing to shell out for luxury vacations, pricey electronics and meals at high-end restaurants.
[…]
“The thing that has been holding everything up is the A.I. story,” said Torsten Slok, the chief economist at Apollo Global Management.
A.I. related stocks account for roughly half of the rise in the S&P 500 this year, said Adam Turnquist, the chief technical strategist for LPL Financial, adding that growth in the economy is also increasingly dependent on A.I. infrastructure spending.
“It’s becoming one big A.I. trade,” he said.
[…]
The other distinguishing factor of the current market is how concentrated it is in a handful of companies. The Magnificent Seven group of companies of Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Tesla, Nvidia and Microsoft account for roughly a quarter of the value of all publicly listed stocks in the United States.
Now ask yourself, What is the meaning of life?
divinely philanthropic
Stanley Hauerwas (2003):
Christians are not called to be heroes or shoppers. We are called to be holy. We do not think holiness is an individual achievement, but rather a set of practices to sustain a people who refuse to have their lives determined by the fear and denial of death. We believe by so living we offer our non-Christian brothers and sisters an alternative to all politics based on the denial of death. Christians are acutely aware that we seldom are faithful to the gifts God has given us, but we hope the confession of our sins is a sign of hope in a world without hope. This means pacifists do have a response to September 11, 2001. Our response is to continue living in a manner that witnesses to our belief that the world was not changed on September 11, 2001. The world was changed during the celebration of Passover in A.D. 33.
Mark and Louise Zwick, founders of the Houston Catholic Worker House of Hospitality, embody the life made possible by the death and resurrection of Jesus. They know, moreover, that Christian nonviolence cannot and must not be understood as a position that is no more than being “against violence.” If pacifism is no more than “not violence,” it betrays the form of life to which Christians believe they have been called by Christ. Drawing on Nicholas Berdyaev, the Zwicks rightly observe that “the split between the Gospel and our culture is the drama of our times,” but they also remind us that “one does not free persons by detaching them from the bonds that paralyze them: one frees persons by attaching them to their destiny.” Christian nonviolence is but another name for the friendship we believe God has made possible and constitutes the alternative to the violence that grips our lives.
Almost ye convince me. Well, not almost; he does convince me, but that conviction makes up the bulk of the 95% pacifist in me. As indicated before, to claim full commitment to pacifism or nonviolence would be to elevate a principle above the God-man Jesus, who conquered not through “nonviolence” — though it included that — but through his sacrificial, self-emptying philanthropia.
There is, in other words, a Christian nonviolence. But it is not the principle we serve. To my reading, this does not make Hauerwas’s argument any less true; it does submit it under the proper divine-humane authority.
From Thomas John Carlisle’s You! Jonah!:
