Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 7

two quotations on the brief dream of the human intellect

Neal Stephenson, today:

Speaking of the effects of technology on individuals and society as a whole, Marshall McLuhan wrote that every augmentation is also an amputation. I first heard that quote twenty years ago from a computer scientist at Stanford who was addressing a room full of colleagues—all highly educated, technically proficient, motivated experts who well understood the import of McLuhan’s warning and who probably thought about it often, as I have done, whenever they subsequently adopted some new labor-saving technology. Today, quite suddenly, billions of people have access to AI systems that provide augmentations, and inflict amputations, far more substantial than anything McLuhan could have imagined. This is the main thing I worry about currently as far as AI is concerned. I follow conversations among professional educators who all report the same phenomenon, which is that their students use ChatGPT for everything, and in consequence learn nothing. We may end up with at least one generation of people who are like the Eloi in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, in that they are mental weaklings utterly dependent on technologies that they don’t understand and that they could never rebuild from scratch were they to break down…. 

To me this seems like a downside of AI that is easy to understand, easy to measure, with immediate effects, that could be counteracted tomorrow through simple interventions such as requiring students to take examinations in supervised classrooms, writing answers out by hand on blank paper. We know this is possible because it’s how all examinations used to be taken. No new technology is required, nothing stands in the way of implementation other than institutional inertia, and, I’m afraid, the unwillingness of parents to see their children seriously challenged. In the scenario I mentioned before, where humans become part of a stable but competitive ecosystem populated by intelligences of various kinds, one thing we humans must do is become fit competitors ourselves. And when the competition is in the realm of intelligence, that means preserving and advancing our own intelligence by holding at arms length seductive augmentations in order to avoid suffering the amputations that are their price. 

H. G. Wells, from The Time Machine, 1895: 

I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had committed suicide. It had set itself steadfastly towards comfort and ease, a balanced society with security and permanency as its watchword, it had attained its hopes — to come to this at last. Once, life and property must have reached almost absolute safety. The rich had been assured of his wealth and comfort, the toiler assured of his life and work. No doubt in that perfect world there had been no unemployed problem, no social question left unsolved. And a great quiet had followed.

It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers.

yes it is a wonderful world

Since reading Ian Leslie’s John and Paul, I’ve been listening to the Beatles and thinking Beatly thoughts. Whenever I listen to them I always stumble across songs that are unprominent in their catalogue but still terrific — songs that we’d all remember more vividly if they had been recorded by anyone other than the Beatles, whose masterpieces tend to dominate our attention. The one for this week is “Yes It Is,” a little gem by John that features some lovely doo-wopish harmonizing. 

The experience of music can be a peculiar thing. Here’s an example: 

On a walk I was singing “Yes It Is” to myself, but as the middle-eight was coming … Do any of you do this? Sing or play a song and simultaneously think about and almost hear in your head what’s coming next? I suppose people who read music well and play from written music have this experience all the time, but I am a poor reader of music — I often say that I read music the way I read Greek, reasonably accurately but far too slowly and painstakingly to be good for much — and thus almost never sing or play anything from the page. 

Anyway, I was singing “Yes It Is” to myself and realizing that I didn’t remember the middle-eight. But when I’m singing a song and think I don’t know what’s next I usually discover, when the moment arrives, that I do. I figured that the first word and note of the middle-eight would come to me when I needed it. It didn’t — but something else did: the bridge of “What a Wonderful World,” the part that begins “The colors of the rainbow” (right at the 1-minute mark in that video). I somehow found myself at that moment leaving one song and entering another — and then, when the bridge was over, I went right back to the next verse of “Yes It Is.” 

The two songs aren’t in the same key — “Yes It Is” is in E, “Wonderful World” in F, but maybe, since the tonic notes are only a half-step apart, that’s close enough for someone with as poor an ear as I have to make a connection. The harmonic sequences are also similar. And probably someone with a better background in music theory than I have could tell me something about cadences that would help to explain it. But in any event it was a funny experience … and now, I suspect, for the rest of my life I’ll be unable to recall the actual middle-eight of “Yes It Is” and will find myself singing “The colors of the rainbow….” 

John and Paul

Imagine a man who has another man in his life with whom he is deeply intimate and has been for a number of years, a person who understands him as no one else understands him — and he understands the other in the same way and to the same degree. One just looks at the other and knows what he is thinking. Moreover, these two men have a creative partnership, and their intimate friendship feeds creative partnership, and vice versa.

Now, imagine further that these two men are not lovers, but rather friends — and, moreover, friends in a society which has no real vocabulary for describing such intimate friendship, and sees no reason why such intimacy should ever happen, much less be encouraged and nurtured.

Imagine also that these two men are sexual beings, and however intense their friendship is, they still want sex with women, companionship with women, maybe even marriage with women. Imagine further that their pursuit of women, coupled with certain other (largely economic) circumstances, tends to limit the amount of time that they can spend with each other. Each of them also develops a distinctive set of artistic and intellectual interests not usually shared with the other, so that over time the intimacy which has sustained them emotionally, and has sustained their creative partnership, is diminished.

And now, finally, imagine that all of these forces that diminish the friendship eventually become strong enough to bring the partnership to an end. Inevitably, the friendship itself will then be damaged, perhaps beyond repair. It’s a kind of vicious circle in which the circumstances that weaken the partnership weaken the friendship also, which in turn makes the partnership even less plausible. The two men never cease to be connected, but the connection becomes less predictable, and is often interrupted. It never again will be what it once was, and both of them realize it, and oscillate among regret and acceptance and anger. They think: It didn’t have to be this way, it didn’t have to end and It ended and it’s your fault and … many other things.  

That’s John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs, by Ian Leslie. People will read it because they love the music of the Beatles — I read it because I love the music of the Beatles — but it’s really a sobering and moving meditation on the possibilities and impossibilities of male friendship in the culture we inhabit. It’s an outstanding book, and an immensely sad one. I’ll keep it on my shelf next to the best book about the band’s music, Ian MacDonald’s Revolution in the Head. 

news that stays news

Spencer Kornhaber:

What’s so jarring about these declarations of malaise is that we should, logically, be in a renaissance. The internet has caused a Cambrian explosion of creative expression by allowing artists to execute and distribute their visions with unprecedented ease. More than 500 scripted TV shows get made every year; streaming services reportedly add about 100,000 songs every day. We have podcasts that cater to every niche passion and video games of novelistic sophistication. Technology companies like to say that they’ve democratized the arts, enabling exciting collisions of ideas from unlikely talents. Yet no one seems very happy about the results. 

The argument here seems to be that, “logically,” quantity of production should translate to excellence. But what if the ceaseless and overwhelming flow of “content” is an impediment to excellence, not the facilitator of it? See my thoughts from a couple of years back on the virtues of resistance. 

But I do wonder whether we spend too much time worrying about whether this moment is one characterized by creativity or stagnation. It is not as though the New is all that matters. One of the things that’s great about being the kind of teacher I am is that you spend your life introducing new people to old things: when my students fall in love with Bonhoeffer or Simone Weil or John Donne or Pascal — things that happened this very term — it’s all new to them. Thus Ezra Pound: 

After talking with Ted Gioia — who is, for what it’s worth, probably right when he argues that our algorithmic media ecosystem is enforcing creative stagnation — Kornhaber is slightly “stung” when he realizes that “The Police broke up before I was born, yet I’ve been humming their songs my whole life.” But why be stung? The Police made some great songs. It’s cool when someone born in 2005 discovers the Beatles, just as it’s cool when they discover Dante or George Eliot. 

The proper worry, I think, is this: What if we’re making generations of people who can’t genuinely discover the Beatles or Dante? If they can’t read anything longer than a tweet, if they can’t grok music that doesn’t start with its chorus and last 90 seconds max? If we can form young people in such a way that they’re capable of apprehending the non-algorithmic, non-digital world of art and culture, then the problem of stagnation will eventually resolve itself. But if we can’t … well, then, we can focus on helping those adults who come to doubt the wisdom and good will of their algorithmic overlords. There will be plenty such; never a majority, of course, but plenty. As Larkin says, “someone will forever be surprising / A hunger in himself to be more serious.” 

That’s what this blog is about, in large part, and when I retire from teaching college students it will become my chief mission. Thus good old Wordsworth: “What we have loved, others will love, and we will teach them how.” 

sadness

Clay Shirky:

I am an administrator at New York University, responsible for helping faculty adapt to digital tools. Since the arrival of generative AI, I have spent much of the last two years talking with professors and students to try to understand what is going on in their classrooms. In those conversations, faculty have been variously vexed, curious, angry, or excited about AI, but as last year was winding down, for the first time one of the frequently expressed emotions was sadness. This came from faculty who were, by their account, adopting the strategies my colleagues and I have recommended: emphasizing the connection between effort and learning, responding to AI-generated work by offering a second chance rather than simply grading down, and so on. Those faculty were telling us our recommended strategies were not working as well as we’d hoped, and they were saying it with real distress. 

“Sadness” is the correct term — and, as Shirky shows later in his essay, students are feeling it too. 

See also Phil Christman’s recent essay, which touches on themes I’ve written about also, for instance here and here. 

tone

Electric guitar guys spend a lot of time talking about tone: Who’s got the best tone, how does he get that tone, tone is in the hands, man. Tone tone tone, all day and all of the night … and dude, how did Dave Davies get that tone on that song? (He got it on “You Really Got Me” by slicing up the speaker of his amp.) 

But I think these conversations tend to miss the most important point, which is that excellence of tone is contextual. What matters is not primarily whether a particular tone sounds cool or not, but rather whether it suits the song. And in that regard it has long seemed to me that the all-time masters of tone-in-context are the Beatles. Their guitars have a remarkable range of tones and they’re always just right. Consider the diversity of 

“Ticket to Ride” “And Your Bird Can Sing” “Revolution” “I’ve Got a Feeling” (John’s little riff, used as an intro and then played through the whole song) “Octopus’s Garden” (I’m serious)

I’m limiting myself to five, but the list could go on. Clapton’s tone on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” is great, but it’s basically the same sound he used all the time in those days (before he switched from a Les Paul to a Strat). The Beatles had an uncannily perfect sense of what sound they needed from their instruments for any given song. People rarely say this, it seems to me, but they’re one of the great guitar bands. 

More about the Beatles coming — I’m reading this, in the moments between meetings, emails from students, and exam grading. 

William A. and the future

Let’s think about the story of , who graduated from high school in Tennessee with a 3.4 GPA, despite being illiterate. How did this happen?

Apart from his dyslexia itself, William’s most salient “circumstance” for our purposes was that — with proper instruction — he can learn to read. See L.H., 900 F.3d at 795–96. The school has not even tried to prove that finding wrong; yet William graduated from high school without being able to read or even to spell his own name. That was because, per the terms of his IEPs, he relied on a host of accommodations that masked his inability to read. To write a paper, for example — as the ALJ described — William would first dictate his topic into a document using speech-to-text software. He then would paste the written words into an AI software like ChatGPT. Next, the AI software would generate a paper on that topic, which William would paste back into his own document. Finally, William would run that paper through another software program like Grammarly, so that it reflected an appropriate writing style. Not all these workarounds were specifically listed in his IEP, but all were enabled by an accommodation that was: 24 extra hours to complete all assignments, which allowed William to complete his assignments at home, using whatever technology tools he could find.

First of all, we should admire William A.’s ingenuity in finding ways to do his assignments without having been taught to read and write. That said, he must have had some level of literacy to use ChatGPT and Grammarly, unless he enlisted people to help him: perhaps William benefited from work with a dyslexia specialist hired by his parents, something his school deemed unnecessary.

Presumably his parents did not themselves help William do his work, or not much, because they’re the ones who sued the school system for failing to provide the education promised him by the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act. That act requires schools to make accomodations for disabled students that provides an education equivalent to that received by non-disabled students. William’s parents felt that since he was dyslexic but able to learn to read, the school system had an obligation to teach him to read, through whatever alternative instruction is appropriate for people with dyslexia.

What interests me is the school system’s defense, which is that William A. obviously was given an adequate education: look at his GPA. That is, if he could pass his courses, then he had been given appropriate compensation for his disability. On this account, passing courses in the humanities is what matters, even if the requisite writing is done by ChatGPT and Grammarly, and even if the students cannot himself read or write at all. That is: Literacy is optional to education.

Reading Adam Roberts’s superb 2024 novel Lake of Darkness, set in a pretty-far future, one comes gradually to realize that most of the characters are not just monolingual — a person who knows a second language is considered a prodigy — but also illiterate. A historian specializing in the 20th century “of course” knows the novel Alas in Wonderland — she’s never seen the book’s title, only heard it, like everyone else. (The Alas books, written as we all know by Carol Louis, were published in 1865 and 1871, not the twentieth century, but close enough.) Similarly, people speculate about the first name of the astronaut Armstrong — was it perhaps Nile, in honor of the ancient Egyptians? Also, the writer of Voyage to the Center of the Earth was Julie Verne. Culture has become a game of Telephone: one generation whispers in the ear of the next.

‘Do you do the reading and writing thing? I know a lot of historians master that.’

‘Some do,’ she said, feeling absurdly exposed. ‘Not me. It’s a lot of really fiddly work, is the truth, and I wanted – I wanted to concentrate my mental energies on other things. I mean, I know people who spent many years mastering one antique script only to discover that their primary sources were all written in another. And anyway, after all, anyway, anyway, of course, we can always just get an AI to read texts aloud, any old texts, to read and translate them. I mean –‘ She could feel her gabbling running away from her. Why couldn’t she stop? ‘– I mean, it’s still pretty boring, to be honest, sitting there whilst some AI reads some interminable antique text. Why were they so long, that’s what I want to know? Even at double speed, and even when the AI notices you fidgeting and tries to leaven the experience by doing each different piece in different voices, it’s still –‘

Berd reached out and touched her shoulder with his right hand. His gaze was steady, and as blue as a methane flame. ‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘I understand. It’s hard.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes it is.’

‘There are other things to put your time and energy into.’

She grinned. ‘Exactly.’

sentences

Arjun Panickserry:

Sentence lengths have declined. The average sentence length was 49 for Chaucer (died 1400), 50 for Spenser (died 1599), 42 for Austen (died 1817), 20 for Dickens (died 1870), 21 for Emerson (died 1882), 14 for D.H. Lawrence (died 1930), and 18 for Steinbeck (died 1968). J.K Rowling averaged 12 words per sentence (wps) writing the Harry Potter books 25 years ago.

J. K. Rowling is the wrong comparison here, since the Harry Potter books were written first for children and then (in later volumes) for young adults. For recent writers, the proper comparisons to Austen, Dickens, and Emerson would be Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, and Joan Didion.

The bigger problem is the failure to recognize the developments in the punctuation of English prose over the centuries. Chaucer and Spenser wrote before the current roster of punctuation marks — in addition to periods and commas, we now have colons, semicolons, and dashes, which add often subtle variety of meaning, variety of clausal relations, without necessarily affecting comprehensibility. 

And consider this famous passage from Hemingway:

In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more. It was cold in the fall in Milan and the dark came very early. Then the electric lights would come on, and it was pleasant along the streets looking in the windows. There was much game hanging outside the shops, and the snow powdered in the fur of the foxes and the wind blew their tails. The deer hung stiff and heavy and empty, and small birds blew in the wind and the wind turned their feathers. It was a cold fall and the wind came down from the mountains.

One could re-punctuate it thus:

In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more. It was cold in the fall in Milan and the dark came very early; then the electric lights would come on, and it was pleasant along the streets looking in the windows: there was much game hanging outside the shops, and the snow powdered in the fur of the foxes and the wind blew their tails, the deer hung stiff and heavy and empty, and small birds blew in the wind and the wind turned their feathers — it was a cold fall and the wind came down from the mountains.

That would make the sentences longer, but it wouldn’t make them more sophisticated or challenging. It would just make them a bit worse.

first notes on consumption

There are two Ways, and a third practice that is not a Way:

ActionContemplationConsumption

A practice is a Way if it has a goal, a telos, such as growth in virtue or grace or skill, the love of God, the love of one’s neighbor.

All of the arts depend on a fusion of Contemplation and Action: one prepares oneself, through training and reflection and perhaps even prayer, before acting. (Even in flower arranging contemplation rightly precedes action.)

The most important works of art — the ones most necessary for our flourishing — fuse contemplation and action in order to encourage either contemplation or action. (Cf. Terrence Malick’s comments about seeing certain movies and feeling “strengthened” — ready to be a better person.)

Minor works of art promote neither contemplation nor action, but rather are consumed — consumed completely: nothing is left over, not even a residue. They disappear like cotton candy in the mouth.

The consumption of art is often a good thing, as is art made to be consumed. Everyone needs a period of mental and emotional rest, a hiatus from busyness — and even, sometimes, a hiatus from contemplation and action.

But when one only consumes one is never fortified for a Way. One is never prepared, “strengthened,” for anything.

As tuberculosis consumes the body — that’s why it used to be called “consumption” — so also the soul may be eaten up by unbroken exposure to consumptive media. Eventually and, as Gibbon would say, insensibly one may become indifferent to the need for a Way and even hostile to the very notion.

Art that promotes action or contemplation is not the province of high art alone; popular art is not inevitably (perhaps not even typically) meant only for consumption.

The need to consume is one we share with other living things, all of whom must (by one means or another) consume in order to live. This is not intrisically ignoble!

Evidence: the way that Tom Bombadil and Goldberry in The Lord of the Rings eat — which is, not incidentally, virtually identical to the way that Beorn in The Hobbit eats — is healthy and reverent consumption. They cook almost nothing but rather tend and gather. Tom:

I see yellow cream and honeycomb, and white bread, and butter; milk, cheese, and green herbs and ripe berries gathered.

In Beorn’s house people also eat “butter and honey and clotted cream.”Some of these (herbs, berries, milk) are eaten in their raw state, others (cheese, butter) by the encouraging of natural processes. After all, in the right circumstances cheese makes itself. The use of bread is the outlier, since it has to be assembled from ingredients processed to a degree: grain must be milled into flour, and then baked.

Tom and Goldberry and Beorn gratefully receive; it is the Elves who make, who are the great artists and craftspeople of Middle Earth:

The Elves next unwrapped and gave to each of the Company the clothes they had brought. For each they had provided a hood and cloak, made according to his size, of the light but warm silken stuff that the Galadhrim wove. It was hard to say of what colour they were: grey with the hue of twilight under the trees they seemed to be; and yet if they were moved, or set in another light, they were green as shadowed leaves, or brown as fallow fields by night, dusk-silver as water under the stars. Each cloak was fastened about the neck with a brooch like a green leaf veined with silver.

’Are these magic cloaks?’ asked Pippin, looking at them with wonder.

’I do not know what you mean by that, answered the leader of the Elves. ‘They are fair garments, and the web is good, for it was made in this land. They are Elvish robes certainly, if that is what you mean. Leaf and branch, water and stone: they have the hue and beauty of all these things under the twilight of Lórien that we love; for we put the thought of all that we love into all that we make. Yet they are garments, not armour, and they will not turn shaft or blade. But they should serve you well: they are light to wear, and warm enough or cool enough at need. And you will find them a great aid in keeping out of the sight of unfriendly eyes, whether you walk among the stones or the trees. You are indeed high in the favour of the Lady! For she herself and her maidens wove this stuff; and never before have we clad strangers in the garb of our own people.’

And of course Fëanor, the great craftsman and maker of the Silmarils, is perhaps the central figure in The Silmarillion.

Here we might invoke the great passage from The Winter’s Tale IV.4:

PERDITA Sir, the year growing ancient,
Not yet on summer’s death nor on the birth
Of trembling winter, the fairest flowers o’ th’ season
Are our carnations and streaked gillyvors,
Which some call nature’s bastards. Of that kind
Our rustic garden’s barren, and I care not
To get slips of them.

POLIXENES Wherefore, gentle maiden,
Do you neglect them?

PERDITA For I have heard it said
There is an art which in their piedness shares
With great creating nature.

POLIXENES Say there be;
Yet nature is made better by no mean
But nature makes that mean. So, over that art
Which you say adds to nature is an art
That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry
A gentler scion to the wildest stock,
And make conceive a bark of baser kind
By bud of nobler race. This is an art
Which does mend nature, change it rather, but
The art itself is nature.

PERDITA So it is.

This is the art of the Elves in Tolkien’s legendarium. 

But even those who but receive, like Tom and Goldberry and Beorn, do so intelligently: they know the times and seasons, they know what beasts or environments produce what edibles, they know how to harvest non-destructively. Tom is only able to save the hobbits from Old Man Willow because he is making his final visit of the autumn to a pool where the water-lilies flower late: had the hobbits arrived in the Old Forest any later they would have found no help, because Tom knows everything in the Forest, knows when to seek this or that, when he can harvest this or that. This is what Goldberry means when she says that Tom does not own anything but is Master.

To consume intelligently and appropriately, to know the scope and bounds of consumption, is possible only to one who has Mastery.

Clark’s Enlightenment

This is a mere note about a fascinating book rather than a review or analysis. The book is  J.C.D. Clark’s The Enlightenment: An Idea and Its History, which makes a curious but in the end fairly compelling argument. You can get a sense of what Clark is up to from a passage near the end in which he summarizes a series of potential objections to his argument: 

First, that ‘the Enlightenment never happened’. On the contrary, this book has shown how ‘the Enlightenment’ was a concept that was widely adopted in the twentieth century in some countries and that persisted for several decades, influencing large numbers of people in the anglophone world and beyond to the point where the existence of an objective phenomenon to which the term appropriately corresponded seemed beyond question. 

Second, that ‘the Enlightenment happened but was unimportant’. On the contrary, this book has contended that, once conceptualized, the notion of ‘the Enlightenment’ was highly influential, and it has indicated how the term could be used (although with varying effectiveness) to promote a variety of causes both thematic and national. 

Third, that ‘the Enlightenment happened, was important, but was a bad thing’. On the contrary, this book has asserted the historian’s obligation to refrain from normative comment on the phenomena of the past, and has suggested how refraining in this way can better illuminate the normative forces that others have used to shape the development of knowledge, or supposed knowledge, in this field. 

For Clark, “the Enlightenment” definitely happened — but it happened in the 19th and 20th centuries as a scholarly concept, not in the 18th century as an intellectual movement. What happened was the retroactive bestowing by historians of a “badge of normative superiority” on a miscellaneous and heterogenous set of 18th century writers who were in point of fact constantly at odds with each other. (One of Clark’s services to scholarship here is noting points where translators have inserted the word “Enlightenment” into works where it does not in fact appear.) The best way to earn this badge was to be an enemy of religion, and almost any writer or thinker who could be described as such was conscripted into the thought-police force called “Enlightenment.” 

Once this badge was pinned onto writerly lapels, there were of course other scholars who, in various polemics against the depredations of “the Enlightenment,” deemed it a badge of shame. But this was to accept the description while inverting its valence. 

The most interesting questions Clark poses are these: Can we do without the concept of “Enlightenment”? Certainly not altogether, since it was used by some very famous 18th-century writers. But can it be de-centered? When it is used, can it be used in a way that escapes all these decades of “normative polemics”? Can other concepts with more explanatory power finally emerge? These are powerful questions indeed.