foolosophy

Prima Facie

By in foolosophy

Orwell supposedly said that by fifty every man has the face he deserves. Well, I can only say that my face has often deserved a better lawyer. It has been accused of rudeness, anger, stupidity, muteness, and God knows what else, when mostly it was just idling in neutral while I thought about something unrelated. One friend from high school later told me he had been afraid of me before we knew each other because I looked mean. A woman in the warehouse once said that she initially thought I didn’t like her — “or anybody, really” — before deciding that I was actually really funny. This is the problem with faces. The impressions they give are halfway around the room before our personalities even make an introduction.

Zen asks you to show your “original face,” the one you had before your parents were born. I have never known what to do with that koan, but I thought of it the other day when Melissa came up to me at the gym and said, “I just wanted to tell you, your face looks like my face.” For a moment, this was bewildering, and I had no idea where the conversation was going. A black woman, a white man: in what possible sense? “Is it the beard?” I asked, then immediately wondered whether I had accidentally implied that she looked masculine, or, God forbid, a little hirsute. But she laughed. “No, you look very serious, but I bet you’re lowkey funny.” I agreed that this was so. She said she’s the same way: she also looks very aloof and reserved, and often gets accused of looking stuck-up, though I knew from experience that she’s very friendly, just quiet.

That may be as good as it gets: not seeing my original face before I was born, but having someone else see my face before the assumptions build around it.

Write Supremacy

By in books, foolosophy, history

This prejudice about the authority of written stories soon extended to cultures that could write them. Humanity’s story of itself was rent in two at the moment of writing’s invention. Time was divided into “history,” after writing, and “prehistory,” before writing. Places were divided into “civilized,” with writing, and “uncivilized,” without writing. The word illiterate became a pejorative, and people who could write wrote to aggrandize the importance of writing. Writing became a form of supremacy. We know a lot about the achievements of written cultures because they were written, and little about the achievements of oral cultures because they were not. History may or may not be written by victors, but it is certainly written by those who can write.

— Kevin Ashton, The Story of Stories: The Million-Year History of a Uniquely Human Art

Much of what we call history is only the well-lit portion of the scene. Documents serve as the streetlight underneath which we search for the keys to the past, even if we dropped them somewhere else. This isn’t foolish; one can only use the sources that exist. But it should make us more modest. The dead did not all have equal access to posterity. Some left inscriptions, contracts, chronicles, and confessions. Others left tools, bones, songs, habits, and descendants. We know real things, but not evenly, not innocently, and not without distortion. Whole lives disappear because nobody wrote them down.

Try to render one ordinary day of your own life into prose while doing justice to it. Not the linear summary version — “I went to work, answered emails, ate lunch, came home” — but the day as it was actually lived: the stale taste in your mouth when you woke, the quality of the light on the kitchen counter, the half-formed worry that dissolved before you could name it, the happiness you felt over a passing memory, the song fragment that repeated itself for no reason, the smell of dust and cardboard, the precise texture of fatigue at 3:40 in the afternoon. Try to preserve not only what happened, but how it happened: the simultaneity, the pre-verbal awareness, the moods that overlapped without resolving into themes. Even Proust would need hundreds of pages and would still be falsifying by arrangement. Language does not record experience; it embalms selected portions of it.

Then consider the cheerful confidence with which we say things like “the Middle Ages believed,” “the Greeks thought,” “Victorian society was,” or “humanity before writing.” We cannot adequately narrate one day in our own life, but we will summarize five centuries over coffee. Of course we must generalize. Thought would be impossible without compression. But every such sentence should carry a small skull-and-crossbones label: contents under extreme pressure. The archive is partial, the witnesses are peculiar, the survivors are self-selecting, and the writers have already arranged the scenery before we entered. It is comic once you see it. We cannot fit one afternoon into language without losing most of it, but we confidently pour millennia through a funnel and call the residue history.

Memento Nescire

By in books, foolosophy, media/propaganda, nietzsche, psychology

Being a member of the species of stories increases this complication of signaling by several orders of magnitude. There was a time, many tens of thousands of years ago, when every individual discovered a great deal of what they knew, perhaps even most of what they knew, directly, using their own senses. But as we evolved into the species of stories, the proportion of knowledge we gained by being told, that came via the hearsay of the senses and perceptions of others, increased and kept increasing with every new storytelling technology, so that today almost everything we know comes indirectly from other people’s stories, and almost nothing we know comes directly from our senses.

— Kevin Ashton, The Story of Stories: The Million-Year History of a Uniquely Human Art

Most of what we call being informed is only knowing which strangers we currently trust. That isn’t shameful; it’s the condition of living in a complex civilization. But it is a poor foundation for the daily manufacture of righteous fury. If pressed hard enough — “How do you know? Did you see it? Did you measure it? Did you read the primary documents? Do you understand the institutional incentives?” — most certainties quickly reduce themselves to a more modest stance: someone I trust said so, and for now I believe him. Perfectly reasonable as a working rule. Thin gruel, however, for a casus belli.

That’s the absurdity of political news as middle-class recreational combat. The average participant is not a statesman, intelligence analyst, economist, epidemiologist, military planner, or local official. He is a person on a couch with a glowing rectangle, absorbing accounts of events he did not witness, in places he will not visit, involving institutions he cannot influence, interpreted by people whose incentives he barely understands. Then he turns around and treats this tissue of hearsay as grounds for moral aggression against neighbors, relatives, strangers, and former friends.

This is probably why so many political arguments become so feral so quickly. It is not because the combatants know so much, but because, somewhere below the performance, they suspect how little they know. The dissenter reminds us that our knowledge is secondhand, provisional, tribal, leased rather than owned. So we answer not with proportion but with force. We beat down the external opponent to quiet the internal skeptic.

One reason we never learn from experience is because most of the things we are wrong about do not kill us, bankrupt us, or even greatly inconvenience us. They merely embarrass us. Luckily, we are talented custodians of our own reputation. We forget our pratfalls, sand down their edges, or build them into a new legend of ourselves: yes, I was wrong, but only because I was too trusting, too generous, too open-minded; and in any case, my willingness to admit error now proves the very integrity that my error seemed to call into question. As Nietzsche said in Beyond Good and Evil, ““I have done that,” says my memory. “I cannot have done that,” says my pride, and remains implacable. Eventually memory gives in.”

The Refuge of Books

By in books, foolosophy, montaigne

Montaigne has not had another real friend since La Boétie’s death, and in the chapter “Upon Some Verses of Virgil” he laments the decline of his sex drive. These two kinds of contact undoubtedly give rise to more feverish displays of feeling, more intense sensations, because they involve interaction with other people—but they are also more fleeting and unpredictable, and more prone to interruption. Reading, however, offers the twin advantages of patience and permanence.

This parallel between love, friendship, and reading, which compose a sort of gradation, might seem shocking. We might think Montaigne is telling us that reading, which requires solitude, is superior to any relationship involving another person, which are merely diversions that take us away from ourselves. Books, then, would make better friends or lovers than real people. But before we jump to this conclusion, we should remember that Montaigne never sees life as anything but a dialectic between the self and others. Though the rarity of friendship and the fleeting nature of love may drive us to favor the refuge of books, reading will inevitably lead us toward other people.

— Antoine Compagnon, A Summer with Montaigne: On the Art of Living Well

One of the minor twists of the bookish life is discovering how much of one’s sociability has been outsourced to the dead. Books are, in some ways, surrogate friendships. They allow us to extract the interesting thought, the beautiful image, the memorable turn of phrase, without having to submit to the inconveniences of the human source: moods, obligations, misunderstandings, demands upon time. The author never calls at the wrong hour. The essayist never sulks because you have neglected him. Montaigne, unlike most friends, is always exactly where I left him.

And yet reading does not leave us sealed inside ourselves. The private pleasure almost immediately becomes a social impulse. A line wants to be quoted. A thought wants to be voiced. A discovery wants to be proselytized. The book gives us something friendship once gave more freely: matter for conversation, the feeling of another mind moving in sync with our own. Reading is solitude that keeps trying to become company.

My personal Platonic ideal of friendship probably existed for only a few months, from April to July of 1991. My friend Erin and I had been classmates since 1989; by then I had graduated, while she was still a sophomore. She could not drive yet. The internet, for us, did not exist. So we talked on the phone every two or three days, often for hours. There were no awkward attempts at romance. We were simply content to talk about everything under the sun, in the way that only kids can do. That was the whole arrangement, and its perfection lay partly in its innocence.

Adulthood rarely grants friendship such open pasture. Spouses, children, and work take the lion’s share of our time, and multiple friends are forced to divvy up whatever crumbs of attention remain. So books become faithful companions not because they are better than people, but because they are more available than people. They wait without grievance. They resume without complaint. They give us, in a diminished but reliable form, the old pleasure of a voice on the line and nowhere else to be.

They See Your Every Move

By in ai, foolosophy, prying eyes, revillaging, technology

I set it down as a fact that if all men knew what each said of the other, there would not be four friends in the world.

— Pascal, Pensées

Holmes is referring to the recent reporting on Anthropic’s Claude Mythos Preview, an AI model it says is unusually strong at cybersecurity tasks — i.e. it can hack into almost anything. Anthropic says it is limiting access for now rather than releasing it broadly, though I think we’ve all seen enough movies to guess how that’s gonna go. Anyway, her tweet is melodramatic, but everyone instantly understands the horror it suggests: search history, cloud photos, private messages, old usernames, medical records, bookmarks, drafts, forgotten accounts — all the digital sediment of a life suddenly dredged up and dragged into public view. We have already seen lesser versions of this often enough. A stray remark from years ago is dug up and treated as a character indictment. One offensive post becomes the loose thread that unravels a person’s name, job, location, hobbies, and history before a jeering crowd. Real life used to let most foolishness die where it was spoken. The internet stores it, indexes it, and waits.

A recent Substack post about a woman reading her boyfriend’s ChatGPT logs shows the same problem from the other side. There the threat was not some AI super-sleuth prying open the vault. It was plain old human suspicion. She went looking and found what she was never meant to read: not a record of prostitutes buried in the backyard, but his private ambivalence toward her. Many people in relationships have silently pondered the Kinks’ eternal question of whether to stay or to go. In this instance, his fatal mistake was to commit these doubts to digital text, rather than let them remain inchoate thoughts in the privacy of his own skull. Naturally, the relationship was ruined. This is what snooping does. It takes passing thoughts, bad moods, ugly drafts, and momentary resentments and preserves them like fossils. We talk as though the great danger is that machines may someday expose all our secrets against our will. But there is a demand side to this too. More and more, people want that power over others. They want to inspect first and trust later. They want reassurance by surveillance. And once you start down that road, nothing will ever be enough.

The old dystopias understood the point without any help from Silicon Valley. Bentham’s Panopticon and Orwell’s 1984 both take for granted that a world without privacy would be hellish. Human beings need locked doors, unsent letters, private notebooks, tact, silence, and the mercy of forgetting. They need room for thoughts that are not yet judgments, moods that pass, stupidity that can be outgrown. So yes, let’s be wary of building tools that can hang all of our dirty laundry in the public square. But let’s also be wary of the part of ourselves that longs to peek through the keyhole. Not everything that can be known should be known.

Obiter Scripta, no. 157

By in books, foolosophy, obiter scripta

The conquerors enslave the conquered, who in turn begin to shape and color the secret dreams and the culture of their masters. The diabolical prisoners’ cage is occupied first by the sadist who designed it. The Duke of Alva ends a career of legendary terror by being breast-fed. English colonels would stamp round India for years, snorting with contempt, and return home to join the Theosophical Society. In large American cities so many people are in a hurry and drive automobiles that traffic in the congested streets goes into slow motion. In England so many people want to live on the edge of the countryside that miles and miles of it disappear into the city. Both whole communities and individuals turn their back on some pitfall and hurry off to land in another, rather deeper. Just when Man thinks he can do everything, he finds himself helpless in the clutch of some unknown force. And in this ironic principle, which appears to govern so much of our lives, I find delight. Even when it comes close and hurts, the delight is still there. “The Old So-and-So!” I mutter admiringly, from that part of me which must be immortal and invulnerable.

— J.B. Priestley, Delight: Taking Pleasure in the Small Things in Life

Priestley calls it the ironic principle, but I prefer to think of it as the trickster god who loves us and wants us to be amused. Just when man is most convinced he has mastered events, secured his dignity, and arranged the world to his liking, he sits on a whoopee cushion or slips on a patch of black ice. One trap escaped, another entered; one boast uttered, one humiliation prepared. Reality will not let us remain pompous for long. Priestley’s genius is to greet this with delight instead of resentment. That may be as good a definition of wisdom as any: to feel the pain, but also to get the joke.

Reader’s Digestion

By in aphorisms, books, foolosophy

I forget most of what I have read, just as I do most of what I have eaten, but I know that both contribute no less to the conservation of my mind and my body on that account.

— Lichtenberg, The Waste Books

There is something reassuring about this comparison. No one keeps a journal of every sandwich he has ever eaten, nor feels like a fraud because he cannot produce, on demand, a vivid summary of his lunch from seventeen Tuesdays ago. The proof of those meals is not in recollection but in result: in one’s frame, one’s energy, one’s general ability to keep moving through the world without keeling over. Books, however, flatter our vanity in a different way. Since they are made of words, and words seem as though they ought to remain neatly available for quotation, we feel a vague shame when they sink below the level of conscious recall. We imagine that a properly educated man should carry thousands of volumes around in his head like a sort of ambulatory Library of Congress.

But that would be less a cultivated mind than a case of intellectual constipation. One does not want one’s books sitting there undigested, bloating the system. Better that they be broken down and metabolized into taste, judgment, instinct, a sharpened nose for the profound and the fraudulent. And for the minority of books whose exact contents one really does want at hand, there are always sticky tabs and the useful dim memory that “Lichtenberg had something good on this; I should go pull that down again.” Alfred North Whitehead said that “Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.” The protein you consume doesn’t need to be monitored; its effects appear once you’re under a heavy squat bar. I have around 2,000 books on my shelves, and for at least 1,950 of them, I probably couldn’t tell you anything more informative than what you could read on the back cover. But I’ve metabolized them in some form or another; their effects appear once I sit down to write on a particular topic. Suddenly, it turns out that I remember more than I knew.

How Could I Endure Not to Be a God?

By in foolosophy, technology

A specter is haunting the world. No, that is not quite right. Specter suggests something that was once a living human, but what concerns us today is the presence of something nonhuman—or even antihuman—that threatens to replace or dominate us. There is no single technology or movement responsible for this insidiously hostile takeover, but we are confronted with new evidence of it almost every day

— David Polansky

This was a great read. One of the essay’s best ideas is that many apparently-opposite projects are secretly twins: longevity cults and euthanasia expansion, enhancement and optimization, safetyism and transcendence. All are trying to get out from under the burden of finitude. He sees that a world obsessed with removing suffering can become deeply anti-human, not because suffering is good in itself, but because some forms of struggle, dependence, decay, ambiguity, and mortality are constitutive rather than accidental. Remove all of that and you do not get purified humanity, you get something…different. Worse, perhaps, or even alien.

I might argue that he sometimes treats “humanist intuition” as though it were more unified and reliable than it really is. Our intuitions are real, but they are not self-interpreting. Plenty of people have perfectly sincere intuitions in favor of IVF, cosmetic enhancement, antidepressants, testosterone, Ozempic, neural prosthetics, hearing aids, fertility treatment, and so on. Once you admit that some technological mediation is compatible with human flourishing, the hard part is drawing the line. And that is where the essay is strongest rhetorically but weakest analytically. It is very good at making you feel the creepiness of embryo selection, Neuralink-for-children, AGI worship, or longevity monomania. It is less precise about what principle separates acceptable aid from deforming redesign.

That kind of goes with the territory. The contemplative mind is good at seeing complexity, ambiguity, tragic tradeoffs, the mixed character of human goods. But that very depth of vision often makes it politically and institutionally weak. It hesitates. It qualifies. It wallows in epochē and aporia. Erasmus loses to Luther; Montaigne loses to the manager; the essayist loses to the product team. The people with the strongest feel for the mystery of the human are often the least equipped to legislate for it. Meanwhile the engineers, administrators, investors, activists, and clinicians do not need a complete account of “the human.” They only need a local problem and a locally persuasive solution. How do we reduce suffering here? increase choice here? improve outcomes here? enhance capacity here? lower risk here? And so the world gets remade not by philosopher-kings but by a thousand practical people making narrow decisions inside systems that reward intervention.

That, to me, is the bleakest implication here: the anti-human outcome may not come from anyone explicitly hating humanity. It may come from a civilization of partial problem-solvers, each acting reasonably within his capacity, while the cumulative effect is to dissolve the background conditions that made human life intelligible in the older sense. Nobody has to say, “Let us abolish the human.” It is enough that nobody feels authorized to defend any limit that cannot be justified in procedural, therapeutic, or economic terms.

There is also a latent theological problem in the essay, and he seems aware of it. If you really want a strong argument that the human is inviolable and not merely improvable material, secular humanism often does look a bit under-armed. Polansky has clearly been thinking along those lines elsewhere, where he suggests religion may become “the last bastion of humanism” because it can underwrite limits that secular materialism struggles to justify. But as always, I’m suspicious of these mostly-secular attempts to reverse-engineer a facsimile of genuine faith into existence. It is never clear what, exactly, is being proposed. A political alliance of convenience between secular humanists and believers based on the common enemy of hubristic techno-optimizers? An exhortation to nonbelievers to go through the old religious motions in the hope that habit will ripen into conviction? A private discipline undertaken for one’s own salvation, or a public performance meant to influence peers and steady society? And if religion is only admitted to be “directionally correct,” what is to stop the modern analytical mind from taking it apart, trimming it down, and adapting it to its own preferences?

I find myself thinking of James Madison, and not merely because I almost picked up a biography of him at a library sale yesterday. Any solution to this dilemma will probably be Madisonian in design — it would assume that the Promethean impulse to mastery, redesign, optimization, and transgression is permanent, and then ask how to divide it, slow it, and force it to collide with rival impulses before it can remake the world unopposed. If I knew what that would specifically look like, I suppose I’d be someone important and not a lowly blogger.

Petit Bonheur

By in books, foolosophy

Well, the way things are going in the world — the way, one might say, that they have always gone — it might be well to settle for the small happiness, the little joy. I think Montaigne would have been on my side, and Epicurus and Ecclesiastes — the last-named because he was quite despairing of any long or large felicity. The French have always specialized in the petit bonheur: the small omelette, the little wine, the intimate foyer of enjoyment. The English have celebrated it, too. Austin Dobson was one of the prophets of this moderate aspiration:

Here in this sequestered close
Bloom the hyacinth and rose.

Rupert Brooke, homesick for Grantchester, the tranquil village near Cambridge, asked:

Stands the church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?

And the small pleasures that make a tempered happiness persisted in an older Germany, long after that unhappy land had gone in for bigness and empire.

Is it sour grapes to settle for the little happiness: to aim to make happiness out of the most modest ingredients: little things lovingly collected, simple meals in modest surroundings with unpretentious friends, discoursing, perhaps, on not too grand ideas? Is the little happiness cherishable only because, as one grows older, neither private ecstasy nor public utopias seem any longer feasible? Do we tell ourselves the unspectacular moments satisfy only because all moments are threatened, because even gentle goods — like honey for tea in England — cannot be taken for granted any longer? How many millions in the world would now compound for the petit bonheur! Included among those millions, no doubt, the readers of this meditation — and its author.

— Irwin Edman, Under Whatever Sky

Via Isaac Waisberg, I’ve been enjoying Edman’s book recently. It’s a perfect example of a beloved genre I think of as “mid-century middlebrow.” Intelligent, reflective writing, free of academic longueurs or social-science frameworks. There is something deeply civilized in the old middlebrow manner at its best: the easy traffic with books, the unforced assumption that Montaigne or Ecclesiastes or Rupert Brooke might simply turn up in the course of reflection, as naturally as a remembered conversation. Not scholarship as display, but reading as seasoning. One feels that these writers had lived with their books long enough for them to become part of the furniture of the mind. The effect is not pedantry but a kind of cultivated naturalness — the sense that thought has been enriched by literature without becoming clogged by it.

The Spirit Is Anti-AI, But the Flesh Uses Claude

By in ai, conspicuous crusading, foolosophy, technology

When Paul Kingsnorth launched his Writers Against AI campaign, Alan Jacobs’s response was glib: “I would rather call it Writers for Writing, but sure, sign me up.” The pledge itself was not vague. It asked writers for three things: to promise that they would not use AI in their work as writers, would not support writers who did, and would support only entirely human-made work. A bright line, in other words — until Jacobs noticed that his own use might place a toe on the wrong side of it.

His is not some trivial edge case. Running dictation through Claude to punctuate and clean it is part of the writing process. Uploading six years of idea journals to Claude for thematic analysis, triage, and recovery of unwritten projects is part of the writing process. In plain English, he is using AI as a low-level editorial and developmental assistant. You can easily argue that’s legitimate. I certainly think so. I think many sane people would say it is. But if so, then the campaign he endorsed was foolishly fundamentalist from the start.

He writes, after acknowledging that he does not meet the pledge “by the letter,” “I’m okay with that.” Of course he is. The problem is not that he changed his mind; we should always encourage that. The problem is that he helped advertise a standard of suspicion first, and only afterwards granted himself the interpretive charity it denied to others. Moral severity for thee, exemptions for me: that is how these things always go.

Actually, let me revise that. I don’t think he changed his mind, because I don’t think he thought much about it in the first place. His earlier endorsement was a knee-jerk impulse; once he finally considered it carefully, he realized it was more complicated. He did not first weigh the structure of the campaign, its incentives, its likely abuses, its presumption of suspicion, and then revise his view. He seems to have begun with the gratifying emotional impulse — Down with AI — and only afterwards noticed the practical difficulties. It is a small but exquisite irony that the author of How to Think apparently endorsed a public anti-AI pledge before thinking through whether he himself could satisfy it.

Personally, I couldn’t care less if, or how, writers use AI. I just think that if you’re going to lend your voice to a public shaming/cancellation ritual, you owe it to the likely victims to spend a few minutes thinking about exactly what it is you’re supporting. The problems with this sort of campaign were obvious from the start, even to an idiot like me. A public pledge with no cost to entry is tailor-made for empty grandstanding and virtue-signaling. That is exactly the kind of thing a seasoned academic, especially one old enough to have watched a dozen waves of performative moralism sweep through institutions, ought to recognize on sight. The status incentives were obvious. The temptation to furtive noncompliance was obvious. The drift toward bot-hunting and guilt-by-aesthetic-association was obvious. None of this required prophetic powers. It just required a functioning sense of how public righteousness works.

You do expect this sort of thoughtless moral enthusiasm from excitable young people who still imagine that public declarations are the same thing as judgment. From a sixty-something Christian humanist, you expect some tragic sense — some awareness that campaigns of purity do not stay pure, that standards weaponized against bad people are soon applied promiscuously, and that people are often least reliable precisely when they are enjoying the sensation of being obviously right.

It Is Enough

By in books, bricolage, foolosophy, lin yutang, santutthi

Let each of us examine his thoughts; he will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light it throws on our plans for the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means, the future alone our end. Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.

— Pascal, Pensées

****

What does man want in life? Does he want to change the universe? Time flows for ever; the past cannot be recaptured and the future is uncertain; only the day, the present hour, is a solid good. Perhaps the best way to thank God for the gift of living is to appreciate the present hour, to sit quietly and hear your own breathing and look out on the universe and be content. One can see time flow sometimes; one does not have to do something to pass the time; time can pass by itself. And there is infinite pleasure in watching the color of the day change from hour to hour and being able to say to oneself, “I have passed a perfectly leisurely afternoon.” Such perfect afternoons are entirely possible. There is no intrusion upon one’s solitude — not one telephone call, no television — one sees from the window only a child falling and bruising her leg, nothing serious, and young lovers and middle-aged couples sitting quietly on benches under trees. The world goes by. It is enough.

— Lin Yutang, On the Wisdom of America

Choose Your Illusion

By in books, bricolage, foolosophy, lin yutang

Illusions are necessary to human life. They are what make life endurable. Strip the world of illusions, and we have nothing to live for….Without illusions, there would be no love, no art, no religion.

— Lin Yutang, Looking Beyond

****

Illusions cannot be condemned, despised, and persecuted save by those who are deluded and by those who believe that this world is or truly can be something, and something beautiful.  An utterly crucial illusion, and so the half-philosopher combats illusions precisely because he is deluded; the true philosopher loves them and proclaims them because he is not deluded, and combating illusions in general is the surest sign of very imperfect and insufficient wisdom, and notable illusion.

— Leopardi, Zibaldone

****

That is why this man, who lost his only son a few months ago and was so troubled and oppressed this morning by lawsuits and quarrels, is not thinking about it any more. Do not be surprised; he is concentrating all his attention on which way the boar will go that his dogs have been pursuing for the past six hours. That is all he needs. However sad a man may be, if you can persuade him to take up some diversion he will be happy while it lasts, and however happy a man may be, if he lacks diversion and has no absorbing passion or entertainment to keep boredom away, he will soon be depressed and unhappy. Without diversion there is no joy, with diversion there is no sadness.

— Pascal, Pensées

That Mocking Pitiless Temper

By in books, bricolage, foolosophy

When men impartially compare the arguments of opposing sects, and give their allegiance to none, they seem to rise, in a fashion, superior to all parties. But ask these independent philosophers to choose a creed, or to establish some truths of their own, you will observe that they are as much in trouble as all the rest. The world is full of frigid minds, which, while incapable of discovering anything of their own, console themselves by rejecting all the discoveries of others, and, by a display of contempt for many things, think to add to their reputation.

— Vauvenargues, Reflections and Maxims: Complete Edition

****

How malign, infectious, and unwholesome is the eternal smile of that indifferent criticism, that attitude of ironical contemplation, which corrodes and demolishes everything, that mocking pitiless temper, which holds itself aloof from every personal duty and every vulnerable affection, and cares only to understand without committing itself to action! Criticism become a habit, a fashion, and a system, means the destruction of moral energy, of faith, and of all spiritual force.

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel, Journal Intime

****

Cynicism continues today, not just by accident but as a self-chosen identity. Modern cynics’ interpretations vary greatly, some fitting Diogenes’s ethos and some not. We can locate it in a widespread intellectual disposition, apparent in such phenomena as a notion of “radical honesty,” a “hermeneutics of suspicion,” radical relativism, a cult of transgression, and a general demeanor of debunking, unmasking, and bitter irony.

…The Cynic instead voyages without, in the external world, and in an everyday drama en plein air performs private acts, unmasking what he considers others’ hypocrisy and demonstrating his own moral superiority. Rather than experience the humility of being part of an external world, Cynics claim this superiority over others on the basis of their special insight that questions all human convention as unreasonable. Cynics’ conversion is only a halfway stop. The destination is the self, on display for all to see, an inward-facing externalism.

— Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Ars Vitae: The Fate of Inwardness and the Return of the Ancient Arts of Living

A Room With a View

By in aphorisms, books, foolosophy, montaigne

The man who has no refuge in himself, who lives, so to speak, in his front rooms, in the outer whirlwind of things and opinions, is not properly a personality at all; he is not distinct, free, original, a cause—in a word, some one.

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel, Journal Intime

Montaigne, by contrast, advises us to keep a room behind the shop: a private retreat, inward and unencumbered, where the self can learn not to cling too desperately to wife, children, possessions, or public station: “We should have wife, children, goods, and above all health, if we can; but we must not bind ourselves to them so strongly that our happiness depends on them. We must reserve a back shop all our own, entirely free, in which to establish our real liberty and our principal retreat and solitude. Here our ordinary conversation must be between us and ourselves, and so private that no outside association or communication can find a place; here we must talk and laugh without wife, without children, without possessions, without retinue and servants, so that, when the time comes to lose them, it will be nothing new to us to do without them.”

Both men are right. But there is also a danger in admiring extremes too theatrically. Not everyone who avoids the front room is a sage, and not everyone who keeps to the back room has achieved liberty. Some are merely hiding. One can become as affected in one’s solitude as another man is in his sociability.

The ideal is not the drawing room, where one is forever performing, nor the sealed Stoic bunker, where one practices losing wife, children, and health in advance like a philosophical fire drill. The ideal is some modest interior room where one remains available to reality without being swallowed by it. One hears the commotion in the front, knows there is a back room somewhere for emergencies, but ordinarily lives in a place fit for an ordinary human being: partly social, partly reflective, capable of company, capable of silence, and not entirely at the mercy of either. By nature, I tend to avoid extremes. Left to myself, I would gladly spend most of my time in a study, surrounded by books; but even there, the laptop on my desk gives me a window onto the world.

Postmodern Prometheus

By in ai, foolosophy, technology, unintended consequences

Julie Beck:

This is a major transformation, a sudden and dramatic shift in which millions of people are seeking companionship from machines that they formerly could have gotten only from other humans. Yet in some ways, AI companionship is a logical destination for the current direction of human friendship. Social chatbots provide the semblance of a kind of friendship that many people already want, or at least have gotten accustomed to: one that’s on demand, low effort, and completely personalized.

As societies grow wealthier, safer, and more mobile, human beings become freer from inherited limits. We are no longer bound in the same way to the religion of our fathers, the customs of our town, the loyalties of our neighborhood, the companionship of whoever happens to live within walking distance, or even, now, to other people as such. That freedom is real. No honest person wants to romanticize the old world too much. Pre-modern life was often narrow, coercive, parochial, and hard. Most of us would not truly choose to return to a village where our horizons were fixed by birth and where options could be counted on one hand. (Maybe Paul Kingsnorth would.)

The old world imposed solidarity by necessity. The new world requires solidarity by principle. It’s one thing to help your neighbor because he is your neighbor and there is no alternative social universe to defect to. It’s another to help him when you have a thousand other options, all more pleasant, more convenient, and more tailored to your preferences. It’s one thing to remain loyal to a faith because family, custom, and community make defection costly. It’s another to remain loyal when belief has become a buffet, and one may freely take the consolations while discarding the commandments, sacrifices, and obligations that offend one’s convenience.

Choice exposes our weakness. Left free to arrange life around comfort, convenience, self-protection, and personalized reward, we often do exactly that. We evade difficult friends. We thin out our obligations. We “set boundaries” in ways that suspiciously resemble mere selfishness. We select from religion what soothes or flatters us and leave behind what commands us. And now, when the friction of actual friendship becomes too tiring, too slow, or too unpredictable, we can turn to a machine that asks nothing, needs nothing, and exists entirely on our terms.

AI companionship offers the dream of friendship drained of mutuality. It is the logical destination of a culture that increasingly asks of every bond, every institution, every loyalty: what is this doing for me? And yet nobody can live well for long in a world made entirely of that question.

This is the tragic dilemma of modern freedom. We have become so successful at escaping necessity that we now have to recreate, by conviction, the disciplines that necessity once imposed for free.

Bot, Are You the One Who Is Living Life?

By in foolosophy, fresh hell, poetry, technology

And yet, though we strain
against the deadening grip
of daily necessity,
I sense there is this mystery:

All life is being lived.

Who is living it, then?
Is it the things themselves,
or something waiting inside them,
like an unplayed melody in a flute?

Is it the winds blowing over the waters?
Is it the branches that signal to each other?

Is it flowers
interweaving their fragrances,
or streets, as they wind through time?

Is it animals, warmly moving,
or the birds, that suddenly rise up?

Who lives it, then? God, are you the one
who is living life?

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God (trans. Barrows and Macy)

At last, one more intolerable hardship of human existence has been lifted from our shoulders. Reading was already too much to ask of a modern person, of course — all those words, all that eye movement, the faint possibility of having to think. But apparently even watching a video is now an unreasonable demand. We have progressed from “help me understand this” to “please have the experience in my place and send me the synopsis.”

This is being sold as a way to “save time,” which raises the obvious question: save it for what? More summaries? More secondhand encounters with things you cannot be bothered to encounter? More efficient ways of avoiding contact with your own life? A video was already the shortcut. Now we want a shortcut around the shortcut. Soon the bots will attend our vacations, endure our sunsets, and perhaps even die on our behalf. The important thing is that we ourselves remain unburdened by the exhausting task of being present.

There’s a deeper problem, apart from the obvious comic squalor of it. Any intermediary decides what counts as relevant. If I ask for “the point” of Moby-Dick, I am really asking someone else to pre-sort the book for me — to tell me which parts were essential and which parts I may safely miss. But how do I know the supposedly “inessential” part is not the very thing that would have struck me most deeply? The odd image, the side remark, the tonal wobble, the long digression everyone else skips — those may be the real point for the person actually present to them. This is the telephone game elevated into a philosophy of life: more and more mediation, more and more compression, until people forget that the map is not the territory and the menu is not the meal.

Still, let us be generous and assume the dream is perfected. The bot watches the whole thing for me. It catches every nuance, every shift in tone, every expression, every implication. But then a small metaphysical difficulty appears. If the bot is having the full experience on my behalf, in what sense is that my experience at all? Is the bot me? If so, then what exactly am I — the management layer? The executive assistant to my own displaced consciousness? And if the bot is not me, then all it has really done is watch a video while I remained absent from it. In that case, what has been “saved” is not my time so much as my participation.

The whole thing begins to look less like efficiency than like a fanatical inability to tolerate unfilled attention. No moment may be silent, slow, or unrewarding; no stretch of time may simply be lived. Everything must be processed, condensed, accelerated, stripped to “the point.” But life is not an empty highway between you and the point. Life is the road, the weather, the delay, the scenery, the boredom, the sudden thought you did not schedule, the stray detail that lodges in the mind. A person can waste a staggering amount of time trying to avoid ever having to sit still long enough to notice that.

And so the grand irony: in the name of saving time, one adopts a whole philosophy of perpetual evasion — more tools, more summaries, more skipping, more fretful management of one’s own supposedly precious minutes — and ends by becoming the kind of person who cannot simply be anywhere at all.

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