Freddie deBoer:

Years back, Douglas Hofstadter (of Godel, Escher, Bach fame) worked with his research assistants at Indiana University, training a program to solve jumble puzzles like a human. By jumble puzzles I mean the game where you’re given a set of letters and asked to arrange those letters into all of the possible word combinations that you can find. This is trivially easy for even a primitive computer – the computer just tries every possible combination of letters and then compares them to a dictionary database to find matches. This is a very efficient way to go about doing things; indeed, it’s so efficient as to be inhuman. Hofstadter’s group instead tried to train a program to solve jumbles the way a human might, with trial and error. The program was vastly slower than the typical digital way, and sometimes did not find potential matches. And these flaws made it more human than the other way, not less. The same challenge presents itself to the AI maximalists out there: the more you boast of immensely efficient and accurate results, the more you’re describing an engineered solution, not one that’s similar to human thought. We know an immense amount about the silicon chips that we produce in big fabs; we know preciously little about our brains. This should make us far more cautious about what we think we know about AI.

Freddie deBoer:

I’m sure you can fit this all into a culture war frame if you’d like to. Over time, an attitude has congealed that suggests that my perspective, the insistence that some things in the world are just broken and need to be understood in those terms, is inherently conservative. But I think it’s horseshit, personally. The left has never stood for pleasant fantasy or cheap idealism that occludes basic apprehension of the world as it actually exists. The socialist mantra is that a better world is possible, not that a perfect world is possible. And as time goes on my weariness with all of the various pleasant-and-false visions of our affairs grows and grows. I have no time for it anymore, no patience. The world is broken. We are obligated to cobble together the best life we can for everyone. Make material security wherever you can and comfort from there if you’re able. If you want to insist that saying there are limits to the possible is conservative, enjoy your dream world, but leave it out of my politics. The question is pre-political.

A friend recently linked to a Matthew Parris article that included perhaps the most horrifying use of Jesus saying, “The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me.” To summarize Parris’s use: “Stick with me, and forget about the poor and their disgusting self-pity. I’m your hero.” This, Parris insists, is the Jesus he prefers. In short, Parris sees bullshit martyrdom and would like to see it replaced with what can only be described as bullshit heroism. How he manages to squeeze in this line from Jesus with a straight face is beyond me. As I told my friend, some forms of stupidity deserve to be left alone.

While I can’t say exactly what Jesus meant, I can say that what deBoer is describing above is almost exactly what I imagine every time I hear or read that saying. I’m not claiming any strict adherence to any informed hermeneutics. I’m just saying that, experientially, whenever I think of genuine (i.e., difficult and rooted) forms of social justice, this line from Jesus pops into my head: “The poor you will always have with you.”

In C.S. Lewis’s essay “Why I Am Not a Pacifist,” he describes a certain “mode of thought” that “consists in assuming that the great permanent miseries in human life must be curable if only we can find the right cure; and it then proceeds by elimination and concludes that whatever is left, however unlikely to prove a cure, must nevertheless do so.” Nowadays, it seems like, rather than finding cures, most of us are content to label the disease that we think is causing all our problems. But, like deBoer, Lewis is skeptical of the “purity” and effectiveness of these broad brushes:

But I have received no assurance that anything we can do will eradicate suffering. I think the best results are obtained by people who work quietly away at limited objectives, such as the abolition of the slave trade, or prison reform, or factory acts, or tuberculosis, not by those who think they can achieve universal justice, or health, or peace. I think the art of life consists in tackling each immediate evil as well as we can. To avert or postpone one particular war by wise policy, or to render one particular campaign shorter by strength and skill or less terrible by mercy to the conquered and the civilians is more useful than all the proposals for universal peace that have ever been made; just as the dentist who can stop one toothache has deserved better of humanity than all the men who think they have some scheme for producing a perfectly healthy race.

As neither defeatists nor purists, “the art of life consists in tackling each immediate evil as well as we can.” That is not a copout, not some way to avoid real change. You don’t have to look very hard to find a hero who sets a very high bar for that phrase “as well as we can.” It includes everything from the smallest act of kindness to the biggest act of Congress to the ultimate act of sacrifice. It’s the project of every human being qua human being—because the poor, the troubled, the sick, the lonely, the grieving, the dying, the ever-broken you will always have with you.

It’s worth noting that deBoer places at the heart of MacFarquhar’s article “a profound, obviously-motivated incuriosity.” I think that “incuriosity” is a nearly perfect word for the problem he’s describing. It is a lack of any real desire to know. And you know what I think the opposite of incuriosity is? Incarnation:

The Coming

And God held in his hand
A small globe. Look he said.
The son looked. Far off,
As through water, he saw
A scorched land of fierce
Colour. The light burned
There; crusted buildings
Cast their shadows: a bright
Serpent, A river
Uncoiled itself, radiant
With slime.
On a bare
Hill a bare tree saddened
The sky. many People
Held out their thin arms
To it, as though waiting
For a vanished April
To return to its crossed
Boughs. The son watched
Them. Let me go there, he said.

R. S. Thomas

A (Short) Essay on Essays:

An essay may take the form of an army of arguments where polemical points are paraded out in force in order to capture the citadel of the unpersuaded (or otherwise persuaded) mind. While it is legitimate to refer to such a thing as an essay, it would be foolish to argue that is what an essay is. […]

So just what is an essay? An essay is that which argues or not, or tells a story or not, or describes or not, or something else or not. This is what we might call opaque clarity. Such is the problem with nouns. Nouns are nearly impossible to understand until theydo something. I can get a better grasp on the thing when it isn’t sitting still. So when I think of an “essay,” I think first about a verb.

When an essay gets up and walks around it becomes an attempt. To essay is to try. To essay is to venture, to risk. To essay is to endeavor. Thus, an essay is a venture, no, it is an adventure. An essay is that bit of words welded together by potentiality; it’s that pile of predications built upon the foundation of possibilities. Arguments are not essays, but essays may attempt arguments. Stories are not essays, but essays may strive to weave worlds together by spinning golden yarns. Descriptions are not essays, but an essay may seek to turn your eyes into traveling feet, or grasping hands, or savoring mouths, or well-tuned ears. In every case the essay does what essays do; it attempts, it strives, it seeks.

“It was just appealing to the worst levels of what you can conjure up in someone’s mind,” [Harry] Falber said. “And we’d been nurturing this.”

A Washington Post investigation found that the AR-15’s rise to dominance over the past two decades was sparked by a dramatic reversal in strategy by the country’s biggest gun companies to invest in a product that many in the industry saw as anathema to their culture and traditions.

The Post review — based on interviews with 16 current and former industry executives, some of them talking publicly in depth for the first time, along with internal documents and public filings that describe the changes in previously unknown detail — found that the U.S. firearms industry came to embrace the gun’s political and cultural significance as a marketing advantage as it grasped for new revenue.

The shift began after the 2004 expiration of a federal assault weapons ban that had blocked the sales of many semiautomatic rifles. A handful of manufacturers saw a chance to ride a post-9/11 surge in military glorification while also stoking a desire among new gun owners to personalize their weapons with tactical accessories.

“We made it look cool,” Luth said. “The same reason you buy a Corvette.”

Alan Jacobs:

The liberal arts, and the humanities, do not live only or even primarily in universities. They can, and they do, flourish elsewhere, among people who ain’t got time for academic bullshit.

I love this. And I hope it’s very true. But I don’t think it’s as true as I want it to be. I think there’s a circle that is just outside of “academic bullshit” but that still includes mostly “academics” talking to each other. People who are miles and miles from academia, the bullshit kind or otherwise, and who are thinking about the liberal arts and the humanities—where they is?

Unless, of course, what we’re talking about is the liberal arts and the humanities leaking out and bouncing around the culture but in a form not known or referred to as the liberal arts or the humanities.

I hope I’m not just being picky (or bullshitting) here. I really am interested in how “things” get passed around in their more subtle, even unnamed or nameless forms. In fact, these may be the most important forms they take, especially since, well, most people “ain’t got time for academic bullshit.”

In his essay “Self-Evident Truth and the Declaration of Independence,” Michael Zuckert makes the case that when Thomas Jefferson ultimately settled on the phrase “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” he and the signers of the Declaration knew perfectly well that the truths themselves are not, strictly speaking, self-evident.

Zuckert argues that, rather than being self-evident by strict definition, the “political or practical status” of the truths listed is more the intention that Jefferson and others had in view. In their minds, since not all citizens could be scientists and philosophers, it would be necessary for many to hold such truths as if they were self-evident: “…healthy political life requires that the results of the most advanced philosophic and scientific speculation be ‘held’ in order to be effective by a community which was not itself philosophic or scientific.” The “truths” of the Declaration were not to be presented here as the result of hours, years, centuries of political insight to which anyone might dedicate himself in study.

They are rather to be held as if self-evident within the political community dedicated to making them effective. . . . While they stand as the conclusion of some (unspecified) chain of philosophical or scientific reasoning, they must stand at the beginning of all chains of political reasoning.

The benefit of this may be at least twofold. On the one hand, the actual nature of the truths themselves encourages a value for education, particularly civic education. On the other hand, the fact that they would be held in practice as though they were self-evident means that such education and proliferation of information and reason, important as they are, will not become a sine qua non for the success of that society. This is especially valuable since, as we should know quite well by now, even the learning of truth itself does not necessitate its being “held.” The emphasis in the end is on the importance that these truths be held by all, regardless of how they were arrived at by the individual.

As Jefferson put it: “He who made us would have been a pitiful burgher, if he had made the rules of our moral conduct a matter of science. For one man of science there are thousands who are not.”

This brings to mind a famous quote from John Ruskin, perhaps one-upping the significance of widely held political truths with a version that we might apply to the liberal arts and the humanities:

Then, as touching the kind of work done by [painters and poets], the more I think of it I find this conclusion more impressed upon me,—that the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion,—all in one.

I hope that the “elsewhere flourishing” of the liberal arts and the humanities that Jacobs has in mind is something like this. That, far from the towers and the bowels of academia, there are thousands thinking for one who can see. That, miles from the Land of Universities, there is a simple universitas accessing “the best that has been thought and known.” That, whatever grand total of human knowledge and goodness we mean when we talk about the liberal arts and the humanities, any one of us anywhere might see and be a part of that goodness—no matter what name it goes by.

David French:

How do we fight past our partisanship to become truly curious about the truth? For me, the answer started with the first principle of my conservatism: Human beings possess incalculable worth. If that is true, and my neighbors and fellow citizens are crying out about injustice, I should hear their voices and carefully consider their claims.

My initial inability to see the truth is related to the second principle, that human beings are deeply flawed. I had no trouble applying that principle to my opponents. But it also applies to those I generally admire. It applies to police officers. It applies to me.

The lesson I’ve taken has been clear: Any time my tribe or my allies are under fire, before I yield to the temptation of a reflexive defense, I should apply my principles and carefully consider the most uncomfortable of thoughts: My opponents might be right, my allies might be wrong and justice may require that I change my mind. And it may, in all likelihood, require that I do this again and again.

Susan Cain:

[In Gregory Burns’s 2005 study on social conformity,] the conformists showed less brain activity in the frontal, decision-making regions and more in the areas of the brain association with perception. Peer pressure, in other words, is not only unpleasant, but can actually change your view of a problem.

…It’s not that you’re saying consciously, “Hmm, I’m not sure, but they all think the answer’s A, so I’ll go with that.” Nor are you saying, “I want them to like me, so I’ll just pretend that the answer’s A.” No, you are doing something much more unexpected—and dangerous. Most of Bern’s volunteers reported having gone along with the group because “they thought that they had arrived serendipitously at the same correct answer.” They were utterly blind, in other words, to how much their peers had influenced them.

Burns refers to this as “the pain of independence,” and it has serious implications. Many of our most important civic institutions, from elections to jury trials to the very idea of majority rule, depend on dissenting voices. But when the group is literally capable of changing our perceptions, and when to stand alone is to activate primitive, powerful, unconscious feelings of rejection, then the health of these institutions seems far more vulnerable than we think.

“The pain of independence” might be a suitable name for the purposes of Burns or Cain. But a better name, and one more fitting for what David French has in mind, might be something like “the pain of authenticity,” which does not require independence. Or “the pain of virtue.” Or, even better, “the pain of tzaddikim.”

It’s worth pointing out here that no film has ever done more justice to the pain and loneliness this crisis can bring than Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life.

B.D. McClay, on “The Phenomenology of Guns“:

A person who keeps guns around to go hunting knows why they’re there. And hunting itself isn’t simply spree-killing wild animals; when you can go hunting is carefully regulated, certain animals are off-limits, and obligations to the animal—like a clean death—are enforced. In imbuing guns with a clear purpose, hunting also gives them an ethical framework.

But the United States is full of guns—including not only those owned by private individuals, but also the police—that have no purpose at all except to be used, one day or another, on human beings. How or why or when they will be used is almost impossible to answer. When they are, the only ethical guide available to consult at that moment is the user’s fear. If you’re sufficiently afraid, you can shoot a woman through the door. If you’re sufficiently afraid, you can shoot a man at a traffic stop for no reason at all, or a child who is doing nothing but playing outside. […]

I didn’t buy a tool to defend myself because I knew it would make me afraid—not that it would admit fear, but that it would transform the world around me into a world of potential threats. And while in fact I’ve had my share of low-level ugly encounters walking around my neighborhood—from nasty comments to someone blocking my way across the street with his car—I never wished that I had a can of wasp spray sitting in my pocket. If I had to say what I wished, it would be for the people who made it their business to intimidate me to see me as a person, too.

But if I had come to meet them armed, I would not have seen them as people either. They would have been unreal targets of potential violence—mine. And all I really know is that price is too high to pay.

I have no idea what got me onto this topic, but a few weeks ago I opened my mobile Scrivener app and started jotting down bullet points on why I keep two separate blogs. This is the squished-together result.

It started (I think) with this website, shortly after the pandemic started (I think), with texting a friend about taking the blog-plunge and about finding a unique name for a website that I could stick with. The purpose was to force myself to at least try a blog of some sort. A lot of people seem to be into the “commonplace blog,” so I just went for that. I looked at dozens of different themes, but this one (Independent Publisher) just fit perfectly, especially since it pretty much looks like an online notebook. No muss, little fuss.

As a commonplace blog, ninety percent of what gets posted here is quotes and links to articles and books I like. (It really helps to keep track of them. Sometimes I go back and read some of these posts and I have no memory of ever reading or posting them. And while I mainly post them as a way of keeping track of them, it’s also the best way I can find to share them. The thing is, I think that almost everything I read is worth reading, which means it’s worth sharing, and if I had it my way, I would be blowing up everyone’s phones all day long with links and quotes. No one wants this. A public place where anyone can read excerpts or follow links if they want is much better.) And sometimes, I try to write something that seems worth saying. Even these, however, aren’t usually attempts at public writing so much as exercises in discovery, either of the topic at hand or writing as a practice itself. The way I have put it before is this: Essentially, everything that I put online is for me. But it helps that it’s pubic—for family, friends, or anyone else—so that it at least can be for others. I also think that it does something for me (epistemologically?) to do personal thinking and writing in a public way.

The “micro blog” followed about a year later (I think). I have not had any sort of social media for years, and when I was leaving Maine to travel, many wanted a way to “follow along.” Micro.blog was the solution, mainly for those family and friends who have asked for some online “social” presence from me. (To be honest, I don’t think most of the people who asked actually follow it. In my experience, for most people, if it doesn’t automatically show up in their Facebook or Instagram feed, it’s too much work. And I have had zero success in getting anyone to transition away from the major social media platforms.) I would add, now, that it is also for whatever online community that may develop, and also just because I enjoy it.

Both of these spaces act, for me, as commonplace blogs. But they each have a different function. Generically speaking, one is for keeping quotes and for writing what little I do write. The other is more of a travel-, book-, and daily-life log.

There is, however, a deeper reason why I keep two blogs. I can’t say that it’s why it started, and I can’t say what got me thinking about it this way, but it certainly seems valid going forward. There’s a lot of talk about the damages of social media, and for a nearly infinite number of reasons. (Again, I don’t know what good knowing any of this, which we’ve known for at least a decade, does. I can think of only one person that I know who has gotten off the major platforms, and only one other who is straight-forward about it.) But one of the more prominent reasons for damage is the way that it paints—encourages us to paint—too rosy a picture of our lives.

I don’t talk much online about personal stuff. I don’t mention that, while I don’t think I’m depressed, I am “down” much of the time; that, while I’ve never really felt like I needed to give up on religion, I struggle deeply with faith; that, while I don’t imagine my own suicide, I constantly think about the ones that did do it; that, while I have a hard time imagining having lived life another way, I can’t help feeling that I’ve let my family and friends (and, frankly, the thing-that-is-my-life) down; that, while I want desperately to be a meaningful force for good, I feel less like a cog in the machine than an ant running around the cogs; that, on the whole, I feel stuck with more regrets than achievements. You aren’t likely to read about those thing here—but you are likely to catch intimations of them. That’s because the things that get posted on this blog are things that speak to that person.

On the other hand, life is full of simple and beautiful things. A while back, I was listening to a conversation between Kathryn Schulz and Andrew Sullivan on Schulz’s book Lost and Found. At some point in the interview, the two of them briefly lament the way that, in the wake of large numbers of trauma narratives, which are massively important, regular images of happy lives have in some ways become the “object of a lot of skepticism.” And as Schulz so simply put it, “I think that’s very sad.”

I was thinking about this on an early morning hike the other day. One of the reasons I like micro.blog is it’s built-in tendency to encourage authenticity over show. It may be the way the site is designed, or it may be that the design invites a certain kind of person and practice. The best way to explain it might be an example: In my experience, I am not likely to see someone post about “living their best life” at the beach; I am likely to see someone post a picture of a seashell they found and enjoyed seeing while they were at the beach. The difference between those two kinds of posts is, uh… night and day.

So I suppose the one blog is more likely to deal with the harder, deeper things—because life is hard and it has more depth than we ever know. The other is hopefully, simply about more hopeful, simple things—because life is good, and sometimes a nice picture of almost anything that someone cares about can remind you of this simple and hopeful goodness. Life is hard, painful, sometimes very shitty—but still good, still beautiful, still full of the most profound joys.

And so, for me, keeping two blogs helps to add to the dialectic, to “keep it real,” to stir up thoughtfulness and happiness. That’s the hope, anyway.