foolosophy

Don’t Ask Me Why, It’s Just the Nature of My Grooves

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She concludes that writing on the internet, particularly in spaces where it’s simple to charge money for it, tends to push writers toward the confessional, the self-helpy, and the soothing.

…But in the new writer economy a “desperation for attention” is practically “an industry command,” Brouillette writes. The platform may not save journalism as a whole, but it certainly helps prolong the careers of those willing to play the “game,” as McKenzie put it, of cultivating their personal brands.

— Kyle Chayka, “Did Substack Fix the Internet?”

****

My purpose is to make people think – and make myself think too, – about things we didn’t think about, because they were too close or too constantly present, – i.e. because of their very importance. Normally speaking, our thought is naturally drawn towards the things that aren’t immediately resolved or that require a response specially adapted to the circumstance. We pay no attention to the even ground we walk upon, and the walking itself allows us to think of other things. Thus the incidence and the natural role / movement / of thought is seemingly opposed to the natural course of this walking. Both pursue separately their trains of substitutions etc. But when the terrain becomes difficult, this freedom is doubly renounced. Either the walking has to ally itself to the thinking, or the thinking stops the walking, and either the shock of the thought, or else that of the accidents of terrain cause a change of pace.

— Paul Valéry, Cahiers / Notebooks 3

****

The ‘crowd’ is really what I have made my polemical target, and it was Socrates who taught me. I want to make people aware so that they don’t waste their lives and fritter them away. The aristocrats take for granted that a vast number will always go to waste; but they keep quiet about it and lead sheltered lives pretending that all these multitudes of people simply do not exist. That is the ungodly aspect of the aristocrats’ superiority – not even making people aware, just so that they can have a good time themselves.

That’s not what I want. I want to call the crowd’s attention to their own ruin. And if they don’t want the good, I will compel them with the use of evil. One understands me or one doesn’t.

— Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals: A Selection

Whose Problem Is That?

By in foolosophy, the geist of the zeit No Comments

When the Lady of the House was a teenager in the hinterlands, she and her friend Britney drove to a “nearby” town to see a movie. On the way home, Britney spotted her ex-boyfriend’s truck pulled over by the police. As one does in a small town, she pulled up alongside to see what was happening and everyone chatted amiably.

When the Lady arrived home, her mother greeted her at the door: “So, I heard you talked to the cops!”

Furthermore, the family chiropractor had apparently been at the movie theater and reported that she’d walked right past him without saying hello. All this intelligence had reached headquarters before the Lady had even returned from her outing. The Stasi could have learned a few things from rural prairie life.

The Lady’s mother also used to make something of a sport out of spotting people around town. “I saw you at Costco, but you didn’t wave!” There was a harrowing competitive element to this social vigilance. Failure to reciprocate would get you roasted at best, shunned at worst. I wouldn’t want to live under that sort of surveillance — I don’t even enjoy visiting it — but at a safe distance, I can respect the culture that produced it. In a sparsely populated agricultural region, knowing your neighbors and maintaining good relations with them wasn’t merely a pleasant social custom. When blizzards, farming accidents, and vehicle breakdowns miles from town were among the ordinary hazards of life, your social network was part of your survival equipment. You helped people because someday you might need them to help you. The custom had become a duty, and the duty had become a habit.

She has carried those habits into the digital age. On my birthday, I received her customary text greeting, bearing the signature “(sent with Echo).” At some point in the past, she arranged for her electronic assistant to send me a birthday message at the appropriate time. It doesn’t matter to me whether she made that arrangement the day before or six months ago. She thought of it at some point, decided it was important, and made sure it happened. Given the likelihood of being somewhere out of cellular service on the day itself, she may have been especially prudent. I don’t take it as a sign of inauthenticity that she didn’t hand-craft those characters in a fit of affection mere moments before they appeared on my end.

I mention this because I’ve recently read two essays about the supposed difficulties of maintaining friendships in the technological age. In UnHerd, Matthew Gasda worries that AI assistants will rob friendship of its essential friction. In the Atlantic, Julie Beck confesses to being a chronically bad texter. She describes setting a daily reminder to answer her accumulated messages, which helps, but makes her uneasy about treating her loved ones as though they were a productivity problem rather than a source of joy. I agree with Gasda’s skepticism of Silicon Valley’s perennial promise that removing obstacles to communication will somehow produce better relationships. Short of implanting chips in our brains that allow us to transmit messages as soon as we think of them, I don’t see how communication could possibly become much easier. And yet people still neglect to communicate. Beck’s complaint, by contrast, strikes me as more evidence of the self-absorption that inevitably accompanies the therapeutic concern with personal feelings over obligations to others. I can easily imagine the Lady’s mother listening to this elaborate account of emotional ambivalence with mounting impatience.

“Well, make up your mind! If you can’t remember to send the message on your own, then use the automation! But if you don’t like automating it, remember it yourself! Nobody’s making you use the damn thing!”

“But it makes me feel—”

“Well, whose problem is that?”

Pace Virginia Woolf, on or about 2011, human character changed. The smartphone had arrived, and with it a new incapacity to remember birthdays, answer messages, or arrange meetings. Armed with devices capable of performing nearly every clerical function formerly entrusted to a secretary, we apparently became less able to fulfill our social obligations. According to some demographics, at least. The younger people I know are quick to offer therapeutic explanations. They have ADHD, depression, anxiety, insufficient emotional bandwidth, or some other impediment to remembering that the rest of us exist. I couldn’t help but notice that many of my younger friends, despite living with smartphones grafted onto their palms, forgot to text on my birthday. I can’t help but think that rehearsing a steady narrative about your inability to perform the normal functions of “adulting” becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The older generation, to which the Lady’s mother belongs, was taught to regard such difficulties as problems to be managed, not as permissions to disappoint other people. If you couldn’t remember something, you wrote it down. If you weren’t in the mood, you did it anyway. Your feelings didn’t automatically settle the question of what you owed somebody else. One advantage of cultivating discipline is that you don’t have to consult your feelings every time an obligation presents itself. You have already decided what matters and developed habits accordingly. Why should today’s mood automatically overrule yesterday’s considered judgment that a particular relationship is worth preserving?

We increasingly hear complaints about loneliness and the difficulty of maintaining adult friendships. Yet many of the supposedly antiquated conventions of social obligation existed to prevent precisely that difficulty. You acknowledged birthdays, returned invitations, checked on sick friends, and occasionally contacted people for no particular reason. These rituals kept relationships alive during periods when nobody was feeling especially inspired. If the human species were worth a damn, you might think we could use our vaunted powers of reflection and foresight to steer a middle course between the Scylla of stifling village life and the Charybdis of atomized isolation. Perhaps we could voluntarily choose to live up to challenging obligations out of a considered conviction that doing so avoids the worst of each extreme. Obviously this is too idealistic. We prefer to swing like a pendulum from one extreme to the other instead and complain either way.

Imagine a society in which everyone habitually asks, “How will the other person feel if I don’t?” Everyone who has friends will have people looking out for them, just as they look out for others. Now imagine one in which everyone defaults to asking, “How do I feel about doing this?” Everyone enjoys complete freedom to disengage whenever the inclination strikes, while wondering why nobody ever bothers to contact them. It’s almost a reversal of Adam Smith’s famous insight about self-interest. In a functioning marketplace, pursuing our individual interests can produce benefits for others. In this social marketplace, everyone pursuing their own emotional comfort can produce a general shortage of the very consideration everyone wants to receive. An invisible hand that leaves everyone sitting at home waiting for someone else to message.

Three Bouncing Dots

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Ian Bogost:

Though it is harder to find reason to crank (or dial, or strike, or pedal), nothing is stopping you from doing so. Perhaps it even makes sense to own supposedly outmoded apparatuses just because they exercise those muscles—a crankable pepper grinder, for when you can’t get your hands on a penny press. To feel your body carry out forgotten gestures anew is even more pleasurable than the gestures on their own. Rediscovering them proves that they are not bygone, but obscured by the changes that made them rare.

Bogost is nostalgic for the days of hand-cranked mechanisms — pencil sharpeners, manual car windows, and their relatives. Nothing inherently wrong with a little eccentric appreciation of life’s tiny details, of course, but just because something is evocative doesn’t make it intrinsically significant. He seems to me to be treating the objects of his attention as though they were the source of his appreciation, rather than asking what his own capacity for appreciation might discover elsewhere. By the time he’s lamenting the “sense of loss in my low-crank-lifestyle,” or finding romance in the act of rolling a car window down by hand to talk to a love interest, the words “crank-yanking” are starting to appear in my mind.

Bogost, are you yanking
My chain about society’s de-cranking?
It is the present you draw a blank for.
It is Bogost you crank for.

If he were just describing a scene of winding and unwinding himself in the telephone cord during a conversation, you might feel a little warm nostalgia about being reminded of a true-to-life detail that you knew well, once upon a time, but had forgotten. But he evidently wants you to find something profound in the physical act itself, and it just isn’t necessarily that deep. Were you so inclined, you could moon over the three little bouncing dots that show your friend is composing a text at this moment. It could be framed as a little drama: anticipation, impatience, uncertainty, perhaps even anxiety. Someone is composing a message. What are they going to say? Why have the dots disappeared? Have they changed their mind? Are they thinking? Deleting? You could invest all that with spiritual meaning, the poignant longing of wanting to know but having to wait. But that’s now, so it doesn’t have the sepia tint of times gone by. It will take a few decades before a future Bogost will be writing an article about “gestures of connection,” what we lost when the “so-and-so-is-typing” indicator went away, and future me will think, with a touch of exasperation, Why didn’t you appreciate that at the time you had it?

His recollection of winding himself in the telephone cord is charming precisely because it isolates one tiny physical detail from all the unremarkable business of an ordinary conversation. It doesn’t follow that the experience was especially charming while he was having it. He might have been bored, annoyed, preoccupied, or impatient to get off the telephone. Reflecting on this should lead you to the conclusion that “I’m probably ignoring something right now that I will only appreciate in hindsight. What is it?” But often, it seems the past receives contemplative attention; the present receives merely functional attention. That seems to me like someone sitting in a car, facing out the back window. “Ah! Look at that mountain disappearing into the distance! How poignant! How sublime! How…” And I think, “If you would just turn around, you could see all this coming, as it happens.” If you sincerely believe that the mundane experiences of your youth possessed a richness you failed to recognize, shouldn’t that discovery change the way you attend to mundane experiences now? Otherwise, you’re simply arranging to have the same revelation again twenty years hence, about a different set of vanished conveniences.

As we saw above, he suggests that readers might want to own outmoded apparatuses in order to “exercise those muscles,” to feel your body “carry out forgotten gestures anew.” There’s nostalgia, and then there’s locking yourself in a 1980s museum and refusing to come out. Seriously, if you make a personal ritual out of the mere act of dialing a rotary phone, or turning a pencil sharpener, this might suggest autism more than spiritual depths. Why are we looking for an excuse to crank our arms in a circle? Because it evokes a bygone age when there was a practical meaning to the gesture. Now, it’s just a form of Ghost Dancing, as if we’re going through the old motions and chants in hopes that the Great Spirit will roll up all the fiber-optic cables and wash all the smartphones into the sea. But even if that happened, we would just find ourselves back in the 1980s again. Where we already were once before, and just as restless and dissatisfied then.

The three bouncing dots aren’t made of brass or oak. They don’t have a satisfying mechanical resistance. Nobody’s grandmother operated them. Yet they can represent the thrilling possibility of communication from someone you love, or the suspense of a conversation whose outcome matters deeply to you. Someday they’ll be gone, too. And the poignancy will come rushing in, right on schedule. You don’t even have to wait until then. You only have to recognize that the particular conversation they’re announcing, with this particular person, on this particular day, will never happen again. Are we commemorating or cultivating the experience of being alive?

Do You Choose What I Choose? More Alternatives

By in ai, aphorisms, art, foolosophy No Comments

If only you could discern all the nonsense which, in a man’s mind, ends up by producing things of beauty, and all the things of beauty that have gone to the making of this or that piece of nonsense!

— Paul Valéry, The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, Vol. 14

Friedrich’s wanderer looks out upon an immense, mysterious world, inviting contemplation of something beyond himself. Gaskovski looks at the same painting and finds yet another occasion to contemplate AI. Ah, well. Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love, as George Eliot wrote.

“One advantage of familiarizing yourself with real art…” is, amusingly, the language of instrumental value, the very sort of language she’d presumably find objectionable if it appeared in an essay about leveraging literature to optimize cognitive performance. Imagine somebody recommending Shakespeare because he’ll make you better at identifying low-quality content. Wouldn’t we ask if that is what Shakespeare is for? Must even aesthetic contemplation be justified as another way of improving our filters for the information marketplace?

More interestingly, let’s imagine somebody who knows nothing about art. He sees the AI Friedrich without knowing who the painting is imitating. It speaks to him. He begins thinking about his own insignificance against the immensity of nature, perhaps even about mortality, solitude, or the sublime. Is the experience fraudulent? Is his contemplation tainted because the image wasn’t a digital reproduction of the very pigments that Friedrich himself daubed onto a canvas? And let’s not even entertain the vastly more complicated possibility of a master forger who spends years producing indistinguishable “lost Friedrichs.” When the fraud is exposed, the paintings become objects of contempt, though not a brushstroke has changed. Was the artistry fraudulent, or only the attribution? What if AI prose can say something profound to a reader? What if AI painting can inspire a viewer with a sense of beauty and contemplation?

Once provenance starts doing the work of aesthetic judgment, it’s tempting to imagine beauty as an inherited trait: beautiful intentions producing beautiful works, which in turn produce beautiful thoughts in the viewer. But Friedrich’s original might cause a viewer to think of something silly or low instead. Someone could look at it and think, “That fellow has a splendid coat!” Another might be reminded of an unpleasant hiking trip. Someone else might find the whole Romantic sensibility pompous and theatrical. The imitation, in turn, might inspire genuine contemplation. There is no guarantee that beauty begets beauty, generation after generation. Aesthetic eugenics might only produce aesthetic inbreeding.

But Valéry’s point isn’t merely that the aesthetic bloodline occasionally needs an infusion of lowborn nonsense to remain vigorous. He’s suggesting that there was never a pure bloodline to begin with. Beauty and nonsense have been consorting promiscuously all along, and nobody can reconstruct the family tree without discovering some embarrassing ancestors. Gaskovski might insist that familiarity with the Old Masters protects us from being taken in by nonsense. Valéry, an Old Master of sorts himself, seems to be warning us that familiarity with beautiful things offers no immunity whatsoever against producing nonsense of our own.

Human ingenuity can produce exquisite frauds; mechanical processes can produce unexpected beauty; masterpieces can inspire banalities; banalities can inspire masterpieces. The ancestry of a beautiful thing is not necessarily beautiful. Nor is its progeny. And personally, I find that to be a beauty worth contemplating. The world will always be a little stranger than our limited theories about it.

Nutshells and Infinite Space

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Venkatesh Rao:

Many people who appear stupid are not incapable of thought. They are simply not particularly motivated to think, given the poor returns available to them. Why expend significant cognitive effort when you lack the knowledge, tools, institutional access, or intellectual leverage to do anything interesting with the results?

Abundant AI changes that calculation. Someone who previously had little reason to think hard about a problem may suddenly discover that a modest investment of attention unlocks enormous possibilities. They can build something, investigate something, understand something, or pursue an ambition that was previously out of reach.

The returns on attention rise, and with them the incentive to pay attention.

The early capitalist worker voluntarily increased annual working days from 250 to 300 because a new universe of desirable goods had become accessible. The AI-enabled thinker may similarly increase the amount of voluntary cognitive effort they expend because a new universe of intellectual consumption has become accessible. This has certainly been the case with me. I’m suddenly willing to work significantly harder compared to even a year ago, because a lot more is suddenly within reach.

Every day, I see posts by the literati expressing identical opinions about how AI will mean the death of creativity, the death of thinking, the death of effort, the death of their own prestige. I thought I already had a low opinion of them, but it has somehow gone subterranean. It is impossible to retain respect for people who are satisfied to keep arrogantly talking out of their asses.

I’m pretty basic with my use of AI. I don’t do complex projects; I just use it for research, feedback, and thought provocation. And absolutely nothing in my experience matches these complaints. Every day, I’m amazed anew at how a conversation with ChatGPT can spark unexpected ideas into life, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. I don’t think of my brainstorming in terms of productivity, but it is true that my productivity has greatly increased over the last year. My mind may have always been a fertile field, but I now have heavy machinery to cultivate it with instead of an old horse.

Rao’s essay describes the anti-AI mindset as “cognitive mercantilism,” akin to the earlier economic version, which I find to be an illuminating analogy. But most of all, it’s simply enjoyable to read an intellectually adventurous essay. It gives me a new way to think about a current phenomenon, already interesting in its own right. Rao wonders what new forms of effort, curiosity, and ambition abundant AI might call forth. By contrast, so many anti-AI essays read like the reports of border guards anxiously cataloguing the latest incursion.

A mind animated by curiosity generates possibilities, analogies, and further questions. A mind animated by defensiveness tends to produce the same cramped grievances over and over. I keep noticing that those who speak most reverently of creativity and the inner life seem least interested in a phenomenon that is plainly changing how millions of people read, think, write, and imagine. One might expect such a development to awaken curiosity, even ambivalence. Instead, it produces the same carbon-copy denunciations from “humanists” who think most humans are humaning incorrectly. The literati who muse in an abstract fashion about the depths of the human soul seem content to let it become a stagnant puddle.

AI has opened up, if not infinite space, a vast, enticing horizon. The anti-AI literati evidently prefer to be kings of their nutshells with bad dreams of the future for company.

When the Power of Bookamania Runs Wild On You

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Henry Oliver:

What people like Ed really ought to care about, it seems to me, is whether children are made to memorize poems, how well the elites know their Shakespeare, that sort of thing. Worrying about democracy, culture, and attention spans seems quite speculative and too far down the chain. I recently spoke to a young waitress in a small town in Pennsylvania who listens to one book a month, spends a lot of time on TikTok, doesn’t know who Jane Austen was (seriously), and who gave the impression of being utterly smart and sensible. She is relatively apolitical but is taking an interest in the midterms so she can vote for the first time. Democracy is quite as safe with her as it was with my grandmother. I don’t think she lacks the ability to follow content at all. Naturally, I would love her to read Jane Austen, but we shouldn’t be too pessimistic about what will happen if she doesn’t. My grandparents never did, and it didn’t stop them contributing to the war effort and living as the sort of solid citizens Ed and James are worried we are now losing. Not everyone is a reader.

What pleases me here isn’t simply that I agree with Oliver. It’s that he’s actually replying to something. Ed West makes an argument; Oliver identifies a questionable inference, introduces a complication, and offers a challenge. West could respond in turn, perhaps with a refinement of his original claim. A conversation might actually go somewhere!

You may have noticed that I like using “kayfabe” as a metaphor far beyond its home territory of professional wrestling. I use it to describe a situation in which the conventions of a discussion have become stale, but somehow more important than the ostensible subject of the discussion. “The decline of literacy” is a perfect example. (Strangely, there seems to be a perennial audience for books about how no one reads books anymore.) We know all the conventions of the discourse. The same insular media world produces the same predictable thinkpieces which lead to the same book deals which lead to the same promotional podcast appearances which feed the new batch of thinkpieces. There’s no difference between the preachers and the choir. People who write on Substack, or for the Chronicle of Higher Education, or the Atlantic, or etc. are going through a call-and-response with their readers every bit as recognizable as the ones you can see on Monday Night Raw! No one expects a real fight to break out on a WWE program, and nobody expects anything about the world to change just because another journalist published Better Read Than Dead: How We Fell Out of Love With Reading and What It Means for Our Minds, Our Souls, and Our Democracy. It’s just another form of comfortable entertainment for the NPR crowd.

The thing is, I’m not saying that anyone in the literati is consciously faking a role. I’m saying that they have settled into a comfortable outlook and role as easily as relaxing into a recliner. I’m saying that for all the fuss and feathers about ostensibly-intellectual topics, there is very little thought or insight on offer in their lamentations. The whole spectacle might as well be scripted and choreographed. And then here comes Oliver with an impertinent question about a waitress in Pennsylvania who seems intelligent and civic-minded enough despite not being a reader — how does she fit into all your flatulent theorizing about the end of literacy and democracy? Not only that, he lays down a challenge: be the change you want to see in the world! Talk about what you’ve read, rather than endlessly discussing what other people aren’t reading and what that supposedly says about civilization!

Oliver’s brief reply reminds me of what the old blogosphere used to be good at: stimulating conversation. Two people talking, and with any luck, clarifying their understanding of the world together. They may come to agreement; they may continue to disagree; someone’s mind might even change as a result. Any of those would be more interesting than another round of solemn agreement about the impending death of civilization. At least someone has interrupted the choreography. The work has become a shoot.

Quis Me Sustinebit?

By in aphorisms, books, foolosophy No Comments

Unhappy is he who has nothing to give. But a thousand times unhappier is he who has no one with whom to share what he has. Quis me sustinebit? — Quis me audiet? My fountain dries up and its water becomes bitter if the dove with its thirst does not visit. Abundance then becomes the intolerable pain. The water that springs from the mind and the soul falls back on itself and turns into a poisonous sludge. Unhappy he who would give, who was made to be obtained, and share out his substance.

— Paul Valéry, Cahiers / Notebooks 2

I sympathize with Lauren, but I fear this often turns out to be one of those “monkey’s paw” type of wishes. You wish for someone to discuss books or philosophy with, and she turns out to be a humanities professor rather than an autodidact. You find someone who is happy to talk about his thoughts, and he tells you about his third wife and George Biden in the “other” White House. You find someone curious about things, and those things turn out to be Edgar Cayce, political conspiracies, and astrology. It’s safer to stay here, talking to myself. Safer for everyone, in fact. For who is to say that I wouldn’t be an importunate bore to anyone I captured? Every blog post represents a conversation that somebody, somewhere, was mercifully spared. My archives are a monument to the Unknown Interlocutors, a testimony to the forbearance of people who never had to exercise it. All those quotations, stemwinders, analogies, and strained jokes that would otherwise have tested the patience of friends and acquaintances have been safely deposited online, where nobody is obliged to read them. The fountain trickles; the anonymous doves visit at their leisure; all is for the best.

As It Will Be

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Optimism makes us perpetual enemies of those future moments that do not meet our expectations, which means all future moments. It is when we expect nothing from the future that we are free to experience it as it will be, rather than as a disappointment.

— Joshua Foa Dienstag, Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit

Lincoln Michel:

Well, that’s an uncomfortable question. Accepting that people have more access to enriching material—not just books but great cinema, enlightening lectures, beautiful art, and everything else—and actively choose to ignore it in favor of various shades of slop is… depressing. If you have any kind of populist leaning, left or right, you don’t want to blame the public for their tastes. It’s more psychologically comforting to deny the masses all agency. “The phones” is a harder villain to grapple with because we choose to use them. We elect to doomscroll, brainrot, ragebait, and slopwallow. We create social media content. We are the problem with phones.

This is certainly an improvement on the usual denial of agency, but the question remains: why should it be depressing that people have access to the finest achievements of human civilization and nevertheless spend much of their leisure time enjoying frivolous entertainment? It would be depressing if you began with the assumption that people possessed some latent desire for intellectual and aesthetic refinement that only needed the right circumstances to flourish. But what reason did we ever have to expect that? Mankind has been failing to live up to its idealized potential for as long as idealists have been documenting it in print, and that predictability is a comfort in itself. The greatest luxury of being an amateur observer of human behavior, rather than a reformer, is that you can find the same spectacle fascinating that the reformer finds intolerable.

There’s a difference between expecting little of people and resenting them for failing to meet your expectations. The former can coexist comfortably with affection, tolerance, and even admiration. The latter is a recipe for perpetual indignation. Much of what popularly gets called “pessimism” is actually curdled idealism — essentially, a disappointed demand upon humanity. The misanthrope of this sort hasn’t stopped believing in an idealized humanity. He’s furious that the actual specimens refuse to conform to it. His contempt is proportional to the extravagance of his original expectations. The true pessimist, who expects ordinary people to be ordinary, can be much more generous toward them than the supposed humanitarian who professes to love mankind but cannot forgive individual human beings for their limitations. Some of the people most loudly lamenting humanity’s shortcomings might actually like their fellow human beings better if they thought less highly of humanity.

I, too, am disappointed at what amounts to countless missed opportunities. If my friends liked to read more interesting books, or think about foolosophical questions, imagine how many more fun conversations we could have! But that personal disappointment is no excuse for leveling a broad condemnation of humanity, or existence itself, for failing to live up to an idealized version. And even in my disappointment, I can recognize that I, too, am often a bad judge of what life would actually be like if I got my way. There is always the possibility that a world of more readers just like me would be unpleasant in some way that I can’t envision from my limited perspective. So rather than daydream about an idealized state of affairs, it’s best to do what little I can to interest this person in this book or this idea, here, today, and let that be good enough.

Behold, All Was Vanity and Vexation of Spirit

By in foolosophy, fresh hell, niemand among the substackers

And Niemand descended from his mountain and came to the marketplace, where he found a great multitude of lonely men and women.

“Behold my terrible burden!” cried one. “I question what others blindly accept! My thoughts are dangerous! I am unwelcome at parties and unbearable in group chats! Such is the price of thinking clearly!”

And seven thousand people applauded him.

Then another stood forth and cried, “Woe is me! For I have read many books, and ordinary conversation has become intolerable to me! Everywhere I encounter ignorance, incuriosity, and a want of empathy! How it saddens me to dwell among such people!”

And three thousand people applauded her.

Niemand was astonished.

“Truly,” he said, “I have never seen so many lonely people gathered in one place! Tell me, brothers and sisters, what dreadful truths have you discovered that have made you strangers to your fellow men?”

And the first replied, “That most men do not think for themselves!”

“And how did you discover this?”

“I read it on the internet!”

“And you?” Niemand asked the second. “What have your books taught you?”

“That ordinary people are narrow-minded, incurious, and incapable of seeing the world through another’s eyes!”

“And have you tried seeing the world through theirs?”

But the woman was busy ridding herself of “the ick.”

Then Niemand spoke again.

“Beware, my brothers and sisters, lest you mistake your contempt for insight, and your vanity for independence! Perhaps the man who finds you tiresome is not an enemy of thought. Perhaps he merely wishes to finish his dinner. Perhaps the woman who avoids you at parties is not afraid of your dangerous ideas. Perhaps she has heard them all before.

“And perhaps your great loneliness is not the price you pay for possessing extraordinary wisdom, but the story you tell yourselves to make ordinary rejection seem extraordinary.”

At this the multitude grew angry.

“Who is this insolent fellow?” they cried. “Does he not know how difficult it is to be different? Has he no sympathy for independent thinkers? Does he not respect our courage?”

And they cast Niemand from the marketplace.

But before departing, he turned and addressed them one last time.

“Of all the thoughts you call uncomfortable, my brothers, there is one you have not yet dared to think: What if I am not exceptional?”

And no one applauded him. No one let that sink in.

Thus spoke Niemand.

Keeping Clarity Just Out of Reach

By in foolosophy, fresh hell, language, writing

“It’s not a competition” says the man selectively tallying encomiums as if it’s a competition.

I realize it’s overkill to seriously analyze a post like this. It’s like using a howitzer to swat a housefly. But I still think it’s instructive to notice at times just how thoughtless much of our speech is. I hold myself to this same standard. If I can help it, I prefer to err on the side of silence rather than blurt out something inane.

For starters, here we are, back at the same stupid “gossip” problem again. Hens clucking about what all the other hens are or are not clucking about. “No one is talking about how great Annie Dillard was (the ones who are don’t count).” “Annie Dillard was just as important as Wendell Berry, but y’all aren’t ready for that conversation.” If you want to praise Annie Dillard, THEN PRAISE ANNIE DILLARD. What exactly is stopping you from getting the Annie Dillard Appreciation Party started? Why is your first instinct to waste time bitching about all the people who aren’t appreciating her loudly enough? What are you, the Discourse Supervisor? You don’t do any useful work, you just look around to see what needs doing and then nag other people to do it?

Dillard got full-scale obituaries from both the New York Times and the Washington Post on September 16, the day after she died. The Times called Pilgrim at Tinker Creek a “modern classic”; the Post described her as a Pulitzer-winning writer hailed as a twentieth-century Thoreau. Good thing “it’s not a competition,” or we’d already have some awkward questions to answer. Does an NYT obituary count more than twelve Substack posts? Does a long appreciation count more than a brief RIP? What’s the crying-emoji-to-word-count exchange rate? What about people who praised Dillard extensively while she was alive and didn’t feel compelled to write an obituary? Are we counting readership, number of pieces, word count, emotional intensity? Surely this can’t all be based on some reflexive “vibe” you got from your highly-selective social media feed, because that would be embarrassingly dumb.

You could imagine asking him directly, “Okay. What, in your view, would count as ‘enough’ or ‘the proper amount’ of recognition and tributes?” And you know full well he wouldn’t have an answer, because it’s not an empirical question. It’s an impulse, based entirely on the fact that the two writers died a couple weeks apart, and on the competition that he himself invented even as he decries it!

The post says only a few sentences, but to make those sentences cohere, a whole set of unstated propositions has to be doing work underneath them. You can infer those propositions because the visible claim depends on them. They’re like the wiring behind the wall of the post that makes the lights come on at all. So let’s label some of those wires:

  • My feed is representative of public attention.
  • The volume of public response two days after Dillard’s death can be meaningfully compared with the accumulated response more than two weeks after Berry’s.
  • Unequal attention implies an injustice or distortion.
  • I can recognize “insufficient” recognition without specifying what sufficient recognition would be.
  • Other people’s praise (or the lack thereof) is more interesting than offering praise myself.
  • My irritation at the distribution of attention tells me something about the culture rather than about my feed, my follows, or my expectations.

None of this is made explicit, but we all intuitively understand it’s there. Even in his comments, some people are noticing the implied competition he denies implying, while others are happily taking the cue to treat it as a competition and argue about whether they liked Berry or Dillard better. I’ve often felt, when watching some kerfuffle or another, that the problem is that there are multiple assumptions packed into the explicit statement, they aren’t being made clear, different people are noticing different assumptions and reacting to them in particular, and everyone is talking all at once without being careful to delineate. This is why any public discussion involving more than, say, three people is intolerable. I have no hope it could ever be otherwise, especially when you account for the likelihood that every fourth person is too stupid to usefully contribute even to a clear conversation. But we as individuals can at least aim to think more carefully about what we say, and if in doubt, err on the side of silence.

Genuine Encounters of the Curated Kind

By in aphorisms, books, foolosophy, lin yutang

I see men in such a way that the best novels seem to me to be peopled with cardboard cut-outs — and it could not be otherwise.

— Paul Valéry, Cahiers / Notebooks 2

Drew Calvert:

Whereas self-help offers insight and fantasy offers what Iris Murdoch calls “consolation,” a good novel requires us to transcend our atomized, alienated condition and allows us to perceive the world precisely and humanely.

I agree that it is a good thing to attempt to transcend our limited, self-absorbed perspectives, and that reading is a good way to do this. Personally, most fiction fails to interest me. The fault may be mine, though I don’t really see it as a failure deserving of blame in any case. Valéry’s line, if taken at face value, could seem arrogant and status-oriented — “I’m so deep and thoughtful that even Great Novels seem like potboilers to me.” I don’t think that’s how he meant it, and it’s not how I mean it, but the fact remains: most fictional stories go down like raw vegetables for me, even when prepared by Michelin-starred chefs like Tolstoy and Chekhov.

However, if “enlarging perspective” or “decentering yourself” is the goal, there are other methods, fortunately. History can do it. Philosophy can do it. Religion can do it. Biography, anthropology, science, travel, friendship, work, family obligation, even serious attention to another person can do it. So can encountering institutions, traditions, or ways of life that make your own assumptions look provincial. Lin Yutang wrote, regarding those who had taught him something important about life:

Some of my sources are: Mrs. Huang, an amah in my family who has all the ideas that go into the breeding of a good woman in China; a Soochow boat-woman with her profuse use of expletives; a Shanghai street car conductor; my cook’s wife; a lion cub in the zoo; a squirrel in Central Park in New York; a deck steward who made one good remark; that writer of a column on astronomy (dead for some ten years now); all news in boxes; and any writer who does not kill our sense of curiosity in life or who has not killed it in himself…how can I enumerate them all?

Curiosity directed outward would seem to be the important quality. Everyday life doesn’t require artistic mediation before it becomes material for reflection. Why read novels? Because they teach us to perceive the world precisely and humanely. How do we know novels do that? Because the good reader attends carefully to the lives represented in them. But careful attention is already the active ingredient. The novel is only one occasion for exercising it. Don’t wait for reality to be preselected, composed, and rendered significant by a novelist. Look around. The world is already full of material.

Which, amusingly enough, brings us back to Calvert’s essay; specifically, his very first paragraph:

In the summer of 2020, I was reading in a laundromat in Pomona, California, when a fellow patron raised her voice above the whirr and clink of the dryer to ask a surprising question: “Is it helping you?” I glanced up, and she gestured at the book in my hands, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh’s darkly comic novel about a college grad who tries to sleep for a whole year to avoid the pain of grief and loss. I realized the woman had guessed from the title that I was reading self-help. “Too early to tell,” I said, smiling, trying to be convivial, though in truth I hoped for a swift return to reader-friendly silence. We had a brief exchange touching on mindfulness, CBD oil, and the day’s pandemic numbers. She asked if I had ever considered psychedelic therapy; I answered in the negative. When her tossing garments fell still, she didn’t bother to fold them. She just carted them out like a lover’s corpse and heaved them into the trunk of her car. I was glad to be alone again, but her question lingered in the air. The novels I was reading—were they helping me? I had no idea.

Let us attend to this, because it is astonishing and hilarious. He encounters an actual person, in an actual public place, who initiates a conversation. She gives him exactly the sort of little rupture in routine that a novelist might use as an opening: a stranger, a strange question, a peculiar manner, a bit of social friction. Is this not exactly what all his reading has supposedly been preparing him for? Is he not the same person who, later in this very essay, muses about how fictional characters can be “important sites of readerly compassion”? Is this not a perfect opportunity to demonstrate how literary fiction has exercised his “capacity to love”? But no; his response is essentially: Good heavens, the unedited public has intruded upon my mediated encounter with humanity through literature, which teaches me to transcend my atomized condition. Even the gratuitous details — she didn’t fold her clothes; she carried them “like a lover’s corpse” (?) and “heaved” them into her trunk — seem designed to make her seem inattentive and careless. They invite us to experience her as mildly grotesque before she has said much of anything. She becomes a comic specimen whose chief narrative function is to exemplify the shallow self-help mentality that the cultured reader will transcend. Who needs a novel? No fictional parody of the self-important Serious Reader with his head wedged up among his intestines could possibly improve on this. Calvert has unwittingly presented himself exactly like Jerome K. Jerome’s narrator in Three Men in a Boat, except that Jerome’s narrator failed the moral test for comic effect. Calvert seems unaware there even was a test.

We don’t know what Laundromat Woman is really like. She may very well be flighty and tiresome to know. But what we do know is she attempted to be friendly to a stranger during a trying time, the pandemic. He, in return, gives the impression of peering at her over his monocle like she was a bug who crawled across his page. Many paragraphs later, he ruminates on Pope Leo talking about serious reading being part of a “culture of encounter.” He likes this phrase because it captures what he values about the sense of compassion one can feel for a fictional character. Self-help, by contrast, by keeping the focus strictly on the immediate self, protects readers from “a genuine encounter.” Thus the comedy:

The universe: It’s genuine encounters you want? Here is another human being.

Calvert: Eww, gross, not like that. Do you have anything by Henry James?

Ivan Karamazov, though himself fictional, understood this. Real people are hard to love, because they smell bad, they have stupid faces, they step on your foot, and they prattle on about CBD oil and mindfulness. But if the point is genuinely to “perceive the world precisely and humanely,” that is the meaningful challenge. It is easy enough to grant sustained attention to a human being after Chekhov has performed all the editorial labor necessary to make her interesting. Laundromat Woman arrives without arrangement. She may be tedious, intrusive, foolish, warmhearted, perceptive, lonely, and probably some untidy combination. Nobody has selected the significant details for you. You don’t even know whether the experience is going to prove worthwhile. There is no guarantee that she will turn out to be profound rather than irritating. A fictional character, on the other hand, cannot interrupt you, misunderstand you, or bore you beyond endurance. The “encounter” may be emotionally powerful, but it is also perfectly safe. You can close the book whenever you like.

What Calvert seems to value is not encounter as such, but a very particular species of encounter: mediated, chosen, aesthetically prepared, and entered on his own terms. Not so different from those shallow self-help readers after all, it appears.

Sharey Pie

By in ai, extraordinary popular delusions, foolosophy

The surrounding context of this post isn’t important here. What I’m focusing on is how Rao articulates the inaptitude of the “fixed pie” mentality with regards to AI. Here’s a more-straightforward example:

There are a couple of obvious problems with this right away. First, maybe you should simply check in with your friends more often as a rule, not just when you need something from them. But also, there’s another possible, less heartwarming outcome to making that phone call: you may find yourself the subject of a passive-aggressive Facebook post about “friends” who feel entitled to someone’s “emotional labor” (and not only that, they call instead of texting, like we’re living in the freaking twentieth century or something). Before AI, the withering stock response to impromptu questions was, “Here, let me Google that for you.” Maybe the digital etiquette has changed now, but as a male feminist and good ally, I certainly wouldn’t want to be accused of violating boundaries or failing to respect my friend’s time.

But, to return to our main topic, the comparison here is rigged by pitting ordinary AI use against the jackpot outcome of human contact. But once you make that the standard, almost any efficient technology looks spiritually impoverished. Why use online banking when you might walk into the branch and discover that the teller is grieving her mother? Why order hardware online when a trip to the store could lead to an unexpectedly moving conversation with the guy in plumbing?

You ask ChatGPT to explain a technical paper, and the comparison becomes, “You could have asked an expert.” But very often you wouldn’t have asked an expert, even if you knew one. You would have skimmed it badly, misunderstood it, or never read it in the first place. You talk something through with an LLM, and the comparison becomes, “You should have called a friend.” But very often you wouldn’t have called a friend. You would have thought about it alone, written in a notebook, Googled around, or simply dropped the thought. You use ChatGPT to generate some silly image of Willis Carrier doing battle with the forces of summertime heat and humidity, and the comparison becomes, “A graphic artist could have been paid to do that.” Possibly, but a lot of generated imagery is stuff that previously would never have existed because it wasn’t worth the money, time, coordination, embarrassment, or social obligation required to get another person involved.

AI doesn’t merely redistribute a fixed amount of reading, writing, explaining, coding, advising, and conversation. It lowers the activation energy so dramatically that people do things they previously would not have done at all. In fact, Rao’s technical-paper example is a good example of how AI can increase demand for the underlying human product. He read a paper he otherwise wouldn’t have read. The paper was written by humans; the AI makes it accessible to another reader. The machine has not displaced the author. It has manufactured a reader.

The fixed-pie mindset is a very old folk-economic intuition that seems to emerge under stress and uncertainty. We’re familiar with it in its literal economic form, such as the bipartisan populist obsession with billionaires:

Most of us — some of us — a few of us, I hope? — understand that much “wealth” consists of ownership claims on enterprises whose value changes with expectations about future production. A billionaire becoming twenty billion richer because the market capitalization of his company rises is not analogous to somebody wheeling twenty billion dollars’ worth of coins out of everybody else’s houses. No corresponding twenty billion necessarily disappeared from everybody else’s possession. The valuation changed. But growth, capitalization, and counterfactual creation is abstract. “That greedy bastard has my share” is concrete. It identifies an agent, supplies a causal story, and gives resentment somewhere to fester.

The AI critic’s corresponding picture is: “There is only so much reading, writing, teaching, conversation, illustration, coding, etc. AI is doing some of it. Therefore humans have lost that amount.” Same imaginary conservation law. And in both cases the missing concept is creation at the margin. New wealth can be produced. New markets can appear. New reading can happen. New writing can become worth producing. New conversations can take place because the cost of initiating them has collapsed. This has certainly been my experience. But under stress and uncertainty, even educated humanities majors can revert back to a modern-medieval peasant understanding of the world. “There is only so much stuff. He has too much stuff. Therefore he has my stuff.”

“The more we ask machines to care for us, the less we expect from – and give to – others.” The hydraulic model of human sociality. There is apparently a fixed quantity of caring in the system, and every unit directed toward a machine has been withdrawn from another human being. But there are non-zero-sum possibilities too: A person talks to a bot when no human conversation would otherwise have occurred. A bot helps someone think through something before talking to a spouse or friend. Someone who is lonely gets more conversational practice and becomes more willing to approach people. A person uses the bot for repetitive reassurance precisely so she doesn’t exhaust her friends with it. AI handles some low-value conversational labor and leaves humans with more time or patience for relationships they actually value.

Any of those could turn out to be common, rare, beneficial, harmful, or mixed. That’s an empirical question. But Turkle’s formulation has already answered it philosophically: attention given here must have been taken from there.

She is also proposing a kind of moral atrophy: being cared for cheaply will make us less caring. But there are equally plausible mechanisms in the opposite direction. Someone whose loneliness, anxiety, boredom, or need to vent has already been partially relieved may have more emotional surplus to offer other people. Parents understand this intuitively with almost every other kind of support: if Grandma watches the baby for two hours, we don’t say, “Terrible! Mom has outsourced maternal affection and will therefore love the child less.” We normally understand that burdens can be complementary.

The fixed-pie premise makes the argument almost unfalsifiable. If people use AI because they’re lonely, AI is exploiting their damaged relationships. If they enjoy AI, it is seducing them away from people. If they use it while maintaining good relationships, perhaps they are gradually lowering their expectations of humanity. If they say it has helped their human relationships, well, they’ve been convinced that “simulated empathy” is enough. There’s always a debit somewhere in the human column.

What would really upset this entire framework would be evidence that people can simply add another kind of relationship-like interaction to their lives without subtracting an equivalent quantity of human intimacy. Which, given everything we know about human beings accumulating books, pets, hobbies, parasocial attachments, correspondence, clubs, fictional characters, religious practices, diaries, therapists, online communities, and a thousand other supplementary forms of companionship, doesn’t strike me as an especially exotic possibility.

The Reason Which Set You Wandering Is Ever At Your Heels

By in foolosophy

In the 28th letter to Lucilius, Seneca tells him that travel won’t solve anything because you take yourself with you: what you need is “a change of soul rather than a change of climate.” He further admonishes him that Socrates already noted this centuries earlier. Individuals may grow a little wiser over the course of a lifetime, but humanity in the aggregate never learns anything. I suppose a modern twist is that we’ve converted our perennial ignorance into a fuel to pour into our economic motor — there will always be someone there to sell you a new experience or location that will supposedly make you into a different person. But there is nowhere else to go. You are already here, in an eternal moment with Lucilius, facing the same choice that will wait forever for you to stop fidgeting and look it in the eye. You can be “enchanted” almost anywhere, given the basics — shelter, supplies, security. You can feel “completely alive sitting on an iron seat under an ugly lamp-post at a third-rate watering place.” Conversely, someone may discover that even the ancient stone church, misty field, beeswax candles, and handmade oak table have become the irritating background against which he checks his phone.

Then I Said In My Heart, That This Also Is Vanity

By in books, foolosophy, identity, niemand among the substackers

And Niemand came among the readers and found them greatly pleased with themselves.

“We have read the old books,” they said. “The feed shall not have us.”

Then Niemand laughed.

“You fools! Have you learned nothing from your old books except how superior you are to those who have not read them? You have made a vanity of the cure for vanity. You have built yourselves a little temple from the bones of dead sages, and installed a mirror upon the altar.

“Read, then. Read deeply. Read against your age and against yourselves. But do not imagine that Homer has made you incorruptible, or Montaigne immune to folly, or Nietzsche proof against the herd. The first stupidity from which a reader must guard himself is the conviction that stupidity belongs to other people.

“Therefore keep watch. Doubt your enthusiasms. Distrust the applause of your friends. And whenever you hear yourself say, ‘People such as we cannot be taken in’ — know that the capture may already be complete.”

Niemand’s Wager

By in ai, foolosophy, the geist of the zeit

Is AI going to kill us all, or is this all just more political machinations? I’m agnostic and stoic, as usual. As a hardy survivor of Y2K, the 2012 Maya Long Count, and the repeal of net neutrality, I tend to be suspicious of apocalyptic doomsaying, seeing it as a perennial weird fetish hardwired into our retarded species. Granted, I could be wrong this time, but I don’t know enough to have a meaningful opinion, and there’s nothing I can do about it anyway, so if worse comes to worst, I may as well go out with dignity, not soiling my britches and wailing to an uncaring sky. If the catastrophe doesn’t occur, you’ve sacrificed real years to an imaginary future. If it does occur, having spent the preceding years frightened and distracted didn’t improve the outcome. Either way, obsessive rumination has a poor return.

However, there’s another way to look at this. Let’s assume you refuse to be pessimistic. In fact, let’s further assume that you remain excited about AI’s potential and expect it to be integrated into society without catastrophic disruption. If the worst happens, well, you won’t care about being wrong, because you’re dead. But if this all turns out to be a tempestuous teacup, you will get to LYAO at all the hysterical ninnies for the rest of your days. You will get to do the “told you so” dance as often as you could wish. It’s an easy choice when put that way. I think we can call this “Niemand’s Wager.”

You Could Do Other

By in alan watts, bricolage, foolosophy, psychology

Thinking things over…Is there anything in that so very different from the ancient (and modern) practice of consulting “spirits”? Waiting for a revelation from a tilting table, a deck of cards, an idol, or a tranced, groaning medium—or else from what one calls one’s Self?

— Paul Valéry, The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, Vol. 14

****

The purpose of horoscopes, and of divination in general, is simply to make a fellow look at his life in a different way. When your mind is a seething mass of deadlines, breadlines and overdrafts, the bland, vacuous recommendation that:

Neptune is the ascendant, so today is a good day to tell someone close to you how you really feel about them.

Could actually be the commandment that you required. It might make you run through all the people that are close to you and wonder which it is, and what it is that you should tell them. And that is a thought that, otherwise, might not have occurred to you all year.

Thus the contradictions at the beginning of this little essay are all cleared up. The stars are irrelevant; or, if they are relevant, it is only because they are random.

— Mark Forysth, “A Defence of Horoscopes” (From Somebody Who Doesn’t Believe in Them)

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Indeed, an exponent of the I Ching might give us quite a tough argument about the relative merits of our ways for making important decisions. We feel that we decide rationally because we base our decisions on collecting relevant data about the matter in hand. We do not depend upon such irrelevant trifles as the chance tossing of a coin, or the patterns of tea leaves or cracks in a shell. Yet he might ask whether we really know what information is relevant, since our plans are constantly upset by utterly unforeseen incidents. He might ask how we know when we have collected enough information upon which to decide. If we were rigorously “scientific” in collecting information for our decisions, it would take us so long to collect the data that the time for action would have passed long before the work had been completed. So how do we know when we have enough? Does the information itself tell us that it is enough? On the contrary, we go through the motions of gathering the necessary information in a rational way, and then, just gathering the necessary information in a rational way, and then, just because of a hunch, or because we are tired of thinking, or because the time has come to decide, we act. He would ask whether this is not depending just as much upon “irrelevant trifles” as if we had been casting the yarrow stalks.

In other words, the “rigorously scientific” method of predicting the future can be applied only in special cases–where prompt action is not urgent, where the factors involved are largely mechanical, or in circumstances so restricted as to be trivial. By far the greater part of our important decisions depend upon “hunch”– in other words, upon the “peripheral vision” of the mind. Thus the reliability of our decisions rests ultimately upon our ability to “feel” the situation, upon the degree to which this “peripheral vision” has been developed.

— Alan Watts, The Way of Zen

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The obvious counter-argument would be that rationality is a more targeted and efficient means of finding the relevant variables that weigh on your decision, whereas tarot, astrology, or the I Ching bring a lot of false positives or pure irrelevance into the decision-making process. As useful as a random prompt or provocation can be, you still have to make the choice to incorporate it or rule it out. But the rebuttal would then be that rationality is very good at examining variables you have identified. It is less effective at ensuring that you have identified all the variables worth examining. A lot of cognition seems to exist first as disposition, image, bodily unease, attraction, aversion, pattern-recognition, or half-formed analogy — something more like a shape than a proposition. The bulk of the “thought” remains underwater, like the body of an iceberg. Finding it would be like doing a text search for a keyword that never made it past being an image. We have blind spots, habitual framings, suppressed preferences, things we simply haven’t thought to ask. A random prompt can occasionally expose one. But as Watts says, time is the limiting factor. At some point, there is no more of it available for gathering evidence and weighing it. You must choose, now.

Another attraction can be that the oracle doesn’t merely generate possibilities; it can also redistribute responsibility. People generally find it easier to submit to necessity than to exercise naked preference. The burden of agency and all that.  “This is what must happen” relieves you of having to say, “This is what I choose.” An oracle introduces a third party, even when you know perfectly well that the third party is fictitious or random. The cards said this, the hexagram came up that way, Mercury is doing whatever Mercury does. This can feel like external authorization, and that may be psychologically valuable independently of whether you believe in the system. Imagine someone who already half-wants to leave a relationship but cannot quite permit himself to say, “I want to leave.” A tarot reading that produces some suggestive card may allow him to think “Apparently this is telling me it’s time to move on.” That sentence is less weighty than “I have decided that the reasons for leaving outweigh the reasons for staying.”

Damon Linker pointed to a version of the same paradox in Antonio García Martínez’s conversion to Judaism. Martínez was drawn, in part, to the possibility of escaping modernity’s endless menu of optional commitments by submitting himself to a thick moral tradition whose obligations would no longer be his to invent. But Linker’s point was that Martínez had first to choose the tradition to which he would submit: to survey the intellectual bazaar, stop at this stall, and say, in effect, Here. This is where I will stop choosing. There is something Buddhist about the difficulty — you desire to stop desiring; you choose to stop choosing. Watts, elsewhere, made a similar point: when you choose a therapist, guru, book, or system as an authority, you chose it. Saying “the Bible is the Word of God” doesn’t escape the problem, because it remains your judgment that the Bible, or the Church authenticating it, is trustworthy. You can subsequently describe that submission as compulsory — “the truth was undeniable; I had no choice” — but Watts’s reply would be: you still recognized that thing as undeniable rather than the rival claim sitting beside it. And however sincere the commitment, the original capacity remains. The modern convert knows that another choice was possible, and therefore knows, somewhere in the back of his mind, that another choice remains possible. You can bind yourself, but you cannot quite unknow that you tied the knot.

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