“Reading is an exercise in empathy; an exercise in walking in someone else’s shoes for a while.”*…
Writer and teacher Drew Calvert on the benefits of reading, and more particularly, on the danger of turning fiction into self-help…
… My understanding has always been that people fall in love with books and only become professors or critics in order to spend more time with them. In college, I felt closest to the scholars who shared this basically affective view of literature: Iris Murdoch, Stanley Cavell, Martha Nussbaum, and Richard Rorty. These teachers treated literature as a higher form of therapy: a training ground for emotions, a study in human virtue. I recall being perhaps inappropriately moved by Cavell’s essay “The Avoidance of Love,” a commentary on King Lear that helped me think differently about my own relationships. Ditto Murdoch’s “Against Dryness,” in which she argues that novels help us countenance reality and reject “consolation.” Adam Phillips, the writer and psychoanalyst, was helpful, too, first because he expressed himself in a literary register, and also because he was friendly toward the human imagination—a legacy of his intellectual forebear Donald Winnicott, who claimed that art was a site of healing, a place where one prepares, as Olivia Laing puts it in her book The Lonely City, for “the dangerous, lovely business of intimacy.” It’s a nice idea. And it resonates with Aristotle’s theory of tragedy (that it purifies the soul) as much as Freud’s idea of transference (that all of our relationships are at least in part fantastical).
Fiction has power, in other words, because, for better or worse, we are all each other’s surrogates and will therefore find compelling archetypes in vivid characters. In a more expansive mood, I might even claim, as Marilynne Robinson does in “Imagination & Community,” that fiction exercises our capacity to love, or that novels contribute to social hope (as Richard Rorty puts it, in a more secular register) or that characters are important sites of readerly compassion, as Zadie Smith argues in her own recent defense of the genre, “Fascinated to Presume.”
My English major was useless, of course. After college, I went to work and learned that nobody reads Iris Murdoch anymore. Instead, they all read self-help and gauzy genre fiction. I worked with intelligent people. They were consultants, psychologists, engineers, economists, and policy wonks. They spoke fondly of charismatic humanities professors, and they often watched videos from The School of Life or other sources of lifelong learning. Wellness apps and podcasts were more popular than novels. One had to be a sport about this cultural defeat, but the odor of cliché was at times overpowering. A book my colleagues couldn’t seem to stop recommending to me was Jonathan Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis, which promised “modern truth” and “ancient wisdom.” Happiness was big in the aughts and early 2010s; the positive psychology movement had learned how to market the work of Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, and Martin Seligman. Harvard and Yale both hired happiness professors. In 2011, happiness was a topic of discussion at the UN General Assembly, and in 2012, the first World Happiness Report came out.
The problem with books like Haidt’s, at least from my point of view, is that they were almost always addressed not to Aristotle’s suffering crowds or Winnicott’s social organisms or Rorty’s hopeful citizens or Robinson’s noble souls but to optimizing meritocrats angling for leverage. In early press interviews, Haidt recommended Benjamin Franklin’s self-improvement regime, which I took to be a bad sign, for I had come to think of myself as a budding Emersonian. My colleagues, of course, were Franklinites, even the ones who had taken Interpersonal Dynamics, the “touchy-feely” class offered at Stanford and other business schools. Their reasons for wanting to cultivate emotional intelligence had little to do with virtue or love; the point was simply to outperform one’s peers in the boardroom. This atomizing tendency manifests today in a certain brand of Stoicism—what the scholar Beth Blum calls “apathy prestige.”…
[Calvert reviews the history of the tension between literature and self-help…]
… It’s hard to keep up with all the overlapping crises. There’s the crisis of democracy, and the mental-health crisis, and the crisis of the humanities, and the death of the English major, and the spread of AI tools through the education system and the publishing industry. My sense is that these crises have an element in common: the refusal of experience. Ideology is one way to refuse it. Social-media use is another. (Haidt, to his credit, calls Instagram an “experience blocker.”) Formulaic self-help and fantasy might qualify, too, since those books fail to engage the moral imagination, relying instead on stereotypes and clichés to build a fan base. One has to be suspicious when a genre attracts pundits. David and Arthur Brooks are both riding the self-help gravy train, and Ross Douthat is serializing a fantasy novel on Substack. None of them seems to have read much literary fiction. Ditto our tech overlords, whose lists of favorites always include the Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, both of which they misread fairly catastrophically.
Can literary fiction solve the polycrisis? Probably not. But it might not be a bad idea to preserve its place in the culture, even at the risk of sounding cringe or lame or snobbish…
… The comedy of self-improvement has fueled the novel ever since the origins of the genre, whether one traces it back to Don Quixote or Confessions. George Eliot’s characters are always seeking virtue in their hearts and in their communities. Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers and Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet follow amateur scientists who embark on absurd but ultimately moving quests for how to live. “Who does science belong to?” these novels seem to ask. “Who, if not the Church, will be the authority to guide our lives?” I read these books in 2015, at the height of the so-called “replication crisis” in social science, and I can’t help but think of Bouvard and Pécuchet as podcast bros “doing their own research.” Their experiments in gardening, husbandry, chemistry, and spiritualism are silly and disastrous. (At one point, they use the gastric juice of a duck to “produce digestion artificially.”) If the novel had been written today, its wayward bourgeois characters might have tried shakes and supplements, like the narrator of Jordan Castro’s recent novel Muscle Man, a disillusioned English professor who copes with the absurdities of the modern university (“People wanted clear-cut moral lines, like cocaine on a mirror”) through a strict regime of powerlifting.
Given how obnoxiously reductive self-help can be, it’s tempting for the discerning reader to mock the whole industry and even, at times, the impulse. In The Triumph of the Therapeutic, published in 1966, Philip Rieff does so on behalf of moral order. Douthat, drawing on Rieff, bemoans what he calls the “Oprahfication” of Christianity. In Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book, Walker Percy, addressing himself to the “post-religious technological society” of 1983, satirizes the genre with deranged glee; each chapter ends with a silly quiz or thought experiment.
But the industry is one thing, and the impulse is another. A management consultant once told me she was reading How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton. Why not read Proust himself? Because that would be an experience, and what my colleague wanted was a few key takeaways. I, too, have browsed the shelves in search of key takeaways. Last year, when my daughter was born, I did so rather desperately. Yet the books that meant the most to me were still novels and memoirs: Nicholson Baker’s Room Temperature; Rivka Galchen’s Little Labors; and Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work, a story of early motherhood that quotes Proust and Edith Wharton between descriptions of sleep training and horrifying play dates. This memoir taught me nothing, but I highly recommended it. There was something about the experience.
In May, during an audience at the Vatican, Pope Leo connected the practice of serious reading to the “culture of encounter.” I find this phrase useful for explaining what I value about the transfer of consciousness between an author and a reader or the deep sense of compassion one can feel for a fictional character. The problem with self-help is that in offering solutions, diagnoses, boundaries, and methods, it protects suffering readers from a genuine encounter. Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn calls that tendency in therapeutic culture “gnostic escapism.” In Ars Vitae, a book that attempts to wrest philosophy back from the corporate festival crowd and YouTube intellectuals, she makes a persuasive argument against that ancient heresy, which claims to offer access to a secret knowledge beyond the “hurly burly” of human experience. Gnosticism, or “knowingness” (the red pill, the life hack, the silver-bullet insight) “destroys revelation, and revelation is the necessary ingredient to transform the constitution of a self to a soul.” For Lasch-Quinn, the antidote is Neoplatonism. In particular, the work of Plotinus, who accused the Gnostics of arrogantly treating life as a puzzle they could solve instead of the mystery it is. The same accusation could be leveled against the authors of many popular psychology books.
Can a novel really offer the kind of revelation that transforms a self into a soul? A version of this question came up recently on an episode of the podcast Know Your Enemy. At the end of a conversation about religion and politics, cohost Sam Adler-Bell admits that he would be worried “to a theological degree” about the humanity of someone who’s incapable of reading a novel. Half in jest, his cohost Matt Sitman recommends the Bible. “Well, let’s start with Tolstoy,” answers Sam (Matt is a practicing Catholic and a former editor at Commonweal; Sam is a secular Mets fan with a serious interest in Freud). The episode ends with a quote from Marilynne Robinson, a shared touchstone. What occurred to me in the moment (I was jogging on the treadmill) was that Robinson, in her latest book, Reading Genesis, invites us to consider the fact that Tolstoy and the Bible offer similar spiritual benefits.
The Old Testament, in Robinson’s view, is a kind of realist novel featuring complex characters, high stakes, a narrative arc, comedic tension, and carefully chosen imagery. “The remarkable realism,” she writes, “is a product of the interest in the human that has no parallel in ancient literature.” Of course, there are genre elements—trickster tales, flood narratives, threats of human sacrifice—but ultimately, the Bible has a deep concern for the psychological nuances of life. In this sense, it achieves a higher literary quality than the tales and myths from which it emerged, just as Flaubert, in Madame Bovary, turned tabloid gossip into art through the force of his authorial attention, or as Dostoevsky used the popular structure of a trial in The Brothers Karamazov. 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. It also helps us pass the time between loads of laundry.
Encouragingly, the self-help crowd, including the happiness warriors, are suggesting that we ditch our phones and pick up books instead. Haidt, in particular, has identified the loss of immersive reading as a problem as severe as teen depression. But Haidt is a social psychologist employed by a major business school. As much as I support his recent antitech crusade on behalf of young people, I would not want to entrust him with the power of recommending which books they should read when they turn off their devices. I imagine the list would include more formulaic guides to life than challenging modernist novels. I imagine they would be the kind of books that only help the self…
Eminently worth reading in full.
Turning fiction into self-help amounts to a refusal of experience: “Literature Is Not About You,” from @drwclvrt.bsky.social in @commonwealmagazine.org.
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As we read on, we might note that today is the final day of the 2026 Banned Books Week.
Banned Books Week was launched in 1982 in response to a sudden surge in the number of challenges to books in libraries, bookstores, and schools. Held in the last week of September or first week of October, the annual event highlights the value of free and open access to information and brings together the entire book community — librarians, educators, authors, publishers, booksellers, and readers of all types — in shared support of the freedom to seek and to express ideas.
By focusing on efforts across the country to remove or restrict access to books, Banned Books Week draws national attention to the harms of censorship. The ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) compiles lists of challenged books as reported in the media and submitted by librarians and teachers across the country. – source
Sadly, the problem seems to be growing. In a report timed to coincide with BBW, PEN International detailed nearly 12,000 instances of book banning affecting 7,370 unique titles across 114 U.S. school districts during the 2025–26 academic year, a record high since PEN began tracking literary censorship in American public schools in 2021. (And, of course, this is in addition to censorship in libraries, book stores, and elsewhere.) Texas (8,193 bans) vaulted past the prior “champion” Florida (3,212 bans), in part because schools in Texas have attempted to comply with SB13 (a censorial state law that applies to “broad categories” of books) by ham-fistedly asking chatbots which books they should ban. More on these bans here.
Lest we need a refresher on why this matters. the estimable Richard Ovenden reminds us that “there is no political power without power over the archive” (“Titles banned, data deleted, the nation’s librarians sacked without explanation – Donald Trump’s war on books is a threat to democracy across the world.”)
“If you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.”*…
Ah, but how best to resist?
In a short piece adapted from his recent book, On Resistance- A Manifesto, Curtis White offers a plain-spoken, almost playful– but at the same time provocative– prescription in the form of “seven theses on resistance”…
(1) Our politics are a binary melodrama: humanist against evangelical, Democrat against Republican, socialist against fascist, woke against racist, Kimmel against Trump, comedians against reality-show celebrities. By dominating the stage, these dramas exclude other ways of understanding who we are and what we want, in other words, what we lack.
(2) These melodramatic struggles distract us from the real question—what values shall we live by? Our true values are not to be found in what we think, or in what we say we believe, but in how we live.
(3) This contradicts the idea, common among us, that we are a free country rich in belief. “I believe X,” we are told, with the expectation that others will respect that belief, even if it makes no sense. It is as if belief has been reserved only for the unbelievable.
(4) The value we live through in the present moment is no different from the foundational value of ancient Greece and Rome: the “right of conquest.” This may sound hyperbolic, but the people of Gaza, Venezuela, and even Greenland understand it well. This value instructs friend and foe alike, “You can do whatever you want on the condition that you make your desires fit my ends, or else.” As Trump aide Stephen Miller acknowledged in a CNN interview in January 2026, “We live in a world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.” Vae victis, woe to the victims.
(5) The worst psychopathology of everyday life is to be treated unjustly and not to know it. This injustice inevitably concerns money, its inequities, and its specious allure. Buddhist philosopher David Loy writes, “Money is the flight from emptiness that makes life empty.” This is the truth, but it is also something that we don’t know.
(6) Rather than seeing emptiness as a mark of failure, can we see it as something to reclaim? Emptiness is a fundamental human joy if we feel free to respond to it. Freedom to play, to create, to live in our own strength. As Tibetan Buddhist Tarthang Tulku thought, “Life is the play of energy in the void.” Children are primed for life through play, but their play only prepares them for a world that doesn’t exist.
(7) Jesus was a heretic because he hated hypocrites, those whose “throats were open graves.” In Nietzsche’s estimation, this made him “the noblest of men.” Jesus made himself useless to the ways of the Temple and useless to the ways of Empire. He encouraged us to take back our emptiness from the ethical absolutes of the Mosaic Law and from the false gods of Rome. He began the very human remaking of his Father’s earthly kingdom without any ethical guidance beyond the primordial aspirations of love. As Saint Augustine taught, simply, “Love and do what you will.”
Make yourself useless! Take back your emptiness! Make something beautiful!
As universities rid themselves of the arts, humanities, and social sciences, they become glorified vocational schools for those seeking jobs in tech or business. One might object that there is no human interest in the skills developed in such schools, but at least the people are employed, we’re told, and they’re getting the “good jobs.”
But even that logic is in doubt when so many students find that entry-level employment has been monopolized by AI, and, amid the West’s never-ending Industrial Revolution, by automation. This reality is leaving tens of thousands of people, heads filled with expensive skills that nobody wants or needs, living in their childhood bedrooms or their parents’ basement, gloomily doom-scrolling through the day, wondering how in the world their student loans will ever be repaid, and feeling just generally unneeded and unwanted. Not surprisingly, the consequences for mental health have been bad. According to a 2023 Gallup poll, 47 percent of Gen Z adults are anxious or depressed “often or always” because of social media, financial stress, and isolation.
But the numbers are, indeed, brow-raising: in late 2025, the unemployment rate among college graduates stood at nearly 6 percent, while the general unemployment rate was just over 4 percent. So, why go to college at all? Sure, apprentice to one of the trades. Go for construction, as if there were no downside to manual labor.
Techno-capitalism’s circle in hell is the hole (or parental basement) of the Empty Self. Imagine Dante walking in this hell, wondering about the devilish devices that the damned are staring into, fingers flying, and Virgil commenting, “They’re looking for themselves.”
Dante asks, “What are they seeing, master?”
Virgil replies, “Ghosts.”
“And what sin did they commit for this punishment?”
“Their sin was their lifelessness.”
Virgil has Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row” on heavy rotation.
Gen Z youth imagine that their future is dependent on studying subjects for which they have no living interest. They have only the failing assumption that writing code, analyzing data, programming, or engineering software will eventually lead to prosperous material lives—or just survival, no matter how dull the reality is.
This is made even more hellish by the fact that the people in it are alone. My generation had to disengage from television, but a life lived online is another level of insidious alienation and, worse yet, it is all on the inside, eroding inner life, leaving nothing for the soul, nothing for soul-work, everything for addictive pleasure and profit. As David Foster Wallace commented in a 1996 interview with David Lipsky for Rolling Stone, sounding out a now familiar doom:
At a certain point we’re going to have to build up some machinery inside our guts to help us deal with this. The technology is just going to get better and better. And it’s going to get easier and easier and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. If we don’t do that, then (a) as individuals, we’re going to die, and (b) the culture’s going to grind to a halt.
But Wallace didn’t mean to blame the young. The difference between Gen Z and earlier generations is that our young have to suffer the effects of techno-alienation much more intensely because the technology has indeed gotten “better and better.” They will be caught within it for a much longer time, and without the helpful memory of any sort of “time before tech.” Perhaps this is why Gen Z is currently experiencing a paradoxical nostalgia for the analogue world of the 1990s.
Well, then, what are we to do? How about, “Workers of the world, relax! Make yourselves useless, you have nothing to lose but your virtual chains!”
In On Tyranny, Timothy Snyder asks us to say no to rising fascism by preserving liberal democratic institutions. But he never imagines that there might be reasons to say no to those institutions, to our “managers of despair,” as well. He offers little understanding of the importance of a resistant culture, innately anarchic, opposing all that is anti-human. Resistant cultures seek to provide a place where we can become who we really are, a place where we are not mere functions of the world we happened to be born into, not diminished creatures whose being has been reduced to a marketable “skill set.”
Resistant cultures work through honesty, intelligence, and beauty. They ask of us what Buddha asked of his followers: listen, consider, and cultivate. Listen to what we have discovered; consider what you have heard; and if you like what you have heard and considered, if it speaks to you, then join with others in the sangha, the Buddhist community, where you can cultivate a path that others in their turn may follow. This is the ideal way to join any human group: not by thoughtlessly inhabiting its damaged forms and conditions, but by freely engaging, considering, choosing, and, with this freedom in place, making something beautiful. As Thich Nhat Hanh taught, “The next Buddha will be a sangha” [community].
I have written this manifesto in what Vladimir Nabokov called “a state of aesthetic bliss,” which he defined as: a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.
That’s the hill I intend to die on, for all the good intending will do me. Because that hill may already be gone. I have reclined in its grasses for so long—gazing down on moving water, assuming that all I had to do was turn and I’d be looking up toward the crest—that I may have missed the moment when the earthmovers came in, noisy though they are, and the mountaintop removal began. And then a guy in an orange vest and a hard hat comes up and explains to me that, “Son, you’re living in the world of yesterday.”
Stefan Zweig’s complaint in The World of Yesterday was exactly this: A form of moral beauty had disappeared beneath him and he was left suspended in air. As Goth Rock legend Robert Smith of the Cure sings in “Endsong,” the last song on their album Songs of a Lost World (2024): it’s gone, gone, “Nothing left of all I loved.”
And yet, I hope that this manifesto, in its playfulness, its nonlinear anarchy, expresses not a longing for the work of the past but energy for the future. Not illustrations for an ideology, but the pure energy of worldmaking. In a sense, we need to “forget the Beatles” and the countercultures they inspired. Presently, that culture lives only a gray half-life through Spotify playlists, Hollywood biopics about Dylan and the Doors (et tu, Led Zep?), and the blasphemous productions of corporate giants like Universal Music Group, selling us our own past. That music has been, in tech parlance, the victim of “enshittification,” the apotheosis of which will be that quickly approaching time when music’s “zone” is flooded with AI slop. As one AI music generator named “imoliver” commented, “I have no musical talent at all. I can’t sing, I can’t play instruments, and I have no musical background.” All this under the cover of “democratizing songmaking,” never mind that the mark of the best music has heretofore been its soulful heresies. What was once alive and full of the warmth of sharing is now only about creating a brand and making a buck in a world where anyone, anywhere, could make the next big hit.
You’ve heard of the Land of Cockaigne, that fanciful place where abundance reigns [see image at top, and here]. Well, welcome to the Land of Cliché, where AI rummages through all that has been said and sung and then throws it against the wall to see what sticks. Someone should be ashamed, but we’re all too excited about this brave new world to know it.
The arts need to de-shittify and return to peasant energies, ready to be changed, changed utterly, into something a new generation can live in and live through. In the Imagination, a new comedy will rise, because its loving playfulness, its caring embrace of others, is always with us, regardless of every inhuman distortion of the world as it stands. Hegel called this comedy the “World in Love.” Ultimately, that is what Nietzsche’s “transvaluation of all values” seeks, too: love not as an ethical command but as an artful metaphysic.
Suddenly it is at an end. THE WORLD IS NEW!”—William Carlos Williams, Spring and All
Seven theses on resistance: “Song of a Lost World,” from @laphamsquarterly.bsky.social.
Triangulate with: “Planetary Politics Now,” from Susan Buck-Morss (“The planet is indifferent to political discourses. It counts time in eons, not presidential tenures. Planetary-thinking forces awareness that the cognitive maps of modernity no longer make sense. Neither conservative nor liberal political positions are up to the task of the present.”)
… to all of which your correspondent would humbly add, yes and– VOTE.
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As we ponder positive possibilities, we might recall that on this date in 1635, in Massachusetts, the General Court of the then-Colony banished Roger Williams for speaking out for the separation of church and state and against the right of civil authorities to punish religious dissension and to confiscate Indian land. Williams moved out to edge of the Narragansett Bay, where with the assistance of the Narragansett tribe, he established a settlement at the junction of two rivers near Narragansett Bay, located in (what is now) Rhode Island. He declared the settlement open to all those seeking freedom of conscience and the removal of the church from civil matters– and many dissatisfied Puritans came. Taking the success of the venture as a sign from God, Williams named the community “Providence.”
Williams stayed close to the Narragansett Indians and continued to protect them from the land greed of European settlers. His respect for the Indians, his fair treatment of them, and his knowledge of their language enabled him to carry on peace negotiations between natives and Europeans, until the eventual outbreak of King Philip’s War in the 1670s. And although Williams preached to the Narragansett, he practiced his principle of religious freedom by refraining from attempts to convert them.
“I can think of no other edifice constructed by man as altruistic as a lighthouse. They were built only to serve.”*…
Aaron Becker‘s Mapped.Earth is an extraordinary resource…
mapped.earth is maps and geography as a way to see the planet — by Aaron Becker. The Earth rendered as data: winds, currents, terrain, borders, populations, the shapes underneath the numbers. The through-line is wonder plus clarity — here is a way of looking at the world you haven’t seen before, and here is what it means…
The living globe — a real-time 3D Earth: live winds and ocean currents from the latest forecast cycles, active fires, population as terrain, and a Time Machine that scrubs eight decades of climate history.
Map films — short, narrated films built from geographic data: unfamiliar projections, seasonal winds, shipping lanes, the way a country’s people are actually arranged on its land.
Field notes — writing that backs the maps: where the data comes from, why a projection was chosen, what the pattern means.
And now (as illustrated above), the lighthouses of the world: every charted maritime navigational light on the planet, sweeping to its actual reach, on its actual arc, and on its real cycle.
Via Jason Kottke, who recorded this short video sampler:
“Lighthouses of the World,” from @aaronjbecker.bsky.social (via @kottke.org)
* George Bernard Shaw
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As we illuminate, many will recall that this is the anniversary of the outbreak, on this date in 1871, of the Great Chicago Fire, famously blamed on Mrs. Kate O’Leary’s cow kicking over a lamp. (Though in 1997 the Chicago City Council looked into the evidence, both new and old, and passed a resolution exonerating Mrs. O’Leary and her cow.)
What many fewer remember is that on that date 37 separate fires broke out in the Great Lakes region, three were massive: the Great Chicago fire killed 300; the Great Michigan fire, 300-500.
But the Wisconsin Peshtigo fire—history’s deadliest—killed least 1,200– though data gathered from mass graves, both those already exhumed and those still being discovered, suggest that the death toll of the blaze was most likely greater than that of the 1889 Johnstown flood death toll of 2,200 people or more. The fire razed 1.2 million acres– and destroyed the Peshtigo Lighthouse, a key navigational aid in the Great Lakes region.
“Unless you strip bodies of their corporeal nature and impart corporeal nature to incorporeal beings, nothing you expect will take place”*…
In 1965, Hubert Dreyfus wrote the first widely-considered critique of artificial intelligence, Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence, a report for RAND. He updated and expanded the work for broad publication in 1972 as What Computers Can’t Do (which was further updated and revised for two subsequent reissues) and a “sequel,” Mind Over Machine (in 1986). For a precis of Dreyfus’ views on AI, see here.
His invocation of alchemy resonates still, for example in the estimable Henry Farrell‘s consideration of Adam Becker‘s (great) recent book More Everything Forever…
Adam Becker’s “More Everything Forever” begins by describing the ideas of Eliezer Yudkowsky, an AI guru who Sam Altman thinks deserves a Nobel Prize. Yudkowsky’s ambitions for humanity include “[p]erfect health, immortality,” and a future in which “[i]f you imagine something that’s worse than mansions with robotic servants for everyone, you are not being ambitious enough.” According to Yudkowsky and his peers, a “glorious transhumanist future” awaits us if we get AI right, although we face extinction if we get it wrong.
“AI” and “transhumanist” are new terms for rather older ambitions. As the seedy occultist Dr. Trelawney remarks in Anthony Powell’s 1962 novel, “The Kindly Ones,” “[t]o be forever rich, forever young, never to die … Such was in every age the dream of the alchemist.” Renaissance alchemists won the support of monarchs like Rudolf II, the Holy Roman Emperor who squandered his realm’s money on a futile quest to discover the Philosopher’s Stone. Now, as Becker explains, AGI, or artificial general intelligence, has become the means through which philosophers might transubstantiate our mundane reality into a realm in which the apparently impossible becomes possible: living forever, raising the dead, and remaking the universe in the shape of humanity.
These ideas would be a curiosity, if they weren’t reshaping the world, and policymakers’ understanding of national security…
[Farrell explains, elaborating on the beliefs in play and explaining how they played in the Biden Administration (which, he argues, largely internalized them) and now in Trump’s…]
… The Biden administration’s policies rested on risky bets. AI may not be the universal solvent for vexing and complex technological problems promised by Altman, Amodei, and their peers. Some (including most members of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, as well as myself and colleagues) believe that current approaches will not lead to anything like self-improving AGI anytime soon. As DeepSeek’s success in building AI models suggests, semiconductors may not provide the chokehold on AI that American policymakers believed.
In any event, the Trump administration has seemingly opted for a different approach, replacing a grand plan for a global AI order with a loose approach based on the ever-shifting convergence between notions of American greatness and the particular interests of well-connected companies. This currently involves leveraging control of technology to maintain American domination, cutting deals with Gulf states, while trying to cut China out. When Trump toured the Gulf states with an entourage of tech CEOs, he offered access to top-end semiconductors in exchange for promises of massive investment, graciously accepting a jet plane, and a large-scale money transfer routed, with fees, through his family stablecoin.
This emerging blend of imperium, magical technology, and self-dealing too is reminiscent of the Renaissance. The English wizard John Dee, who claimed to have turned mercury into gold in the presence of Rudolf II, is also credited with coining the term “British Empire.” As a member of the court of Queen Elizabeth I, he combined alchemical experiment and indirect conversation with angels with more mundane plans to extend British power across the Atlantic and enrich himself.
The alchemists’ quest for immortality and universal transformation is again entangled with the struggle among empires. The dreams of perfect health, the conquest of death, and mansions with robot servants that Becker describes inspire visions of a radically transformed far future and a near present in which America can use advanced technologies to bolster its power. Such visions stem from an ideology of salvation that has indeed fueled important technological advances but may be quite wrong about where those advances will bring us.
We are being ushered into a world where AI models offer new and useful means to summarize the information of the world and draw nonobvious connections across it, but can also weave new syncretic religious beliefs together from the myriad human sources that they summarize. In the early 20th century, Weber argued that rationalized Calvinism had led to the defeat of the old gods and the inexorable disenchantment of a world dominated by bureaucracy and organized capitalism. In the early 21st, just the opposite is happening as AI draws open the gate for the return of the fantastical. Yudkowsky’s eschatology is just one of the prophetic visions attendant on AI. The practical changes that AI will bring to bureaucracy and markets will go hand in hand with religious ecstasy and fervor, as some people come to believe that they can speak to God through the machine, while others use it to elaborate their own extended fantasies about politics. As Becker’s book shows, technology is not just an abstract force changing the world, but a mirror in which human beings see their dreams and ambitions made manifest. We’re starting to discover what that looks like at scale.
Eminently worth reading full: “What AI debates have to do with alchemy,” from @himself.bsky.social.
Then consider this, from Nicklas Lundblad, a senior exec at Deep Mind, Google, Stripe, and elsewhere, recently turned public policy Fellow. In a piece adapted from a lecture in a series of talks on the philosophy of artificial intelligence that he gave at Mid-Sweden University), he puts Dreyfus’s thought into context, tracing the history of arguments with/against it over the years, as both technology and thinking about technology advanced. He concludes…
… So, we may say, what is Dreyfus answer?… That he is obsessed with showing that machines are incapable of being human?
In fact, his conclusion, already in 1965 – and then repeated in the 1972 book – is much more interesting. Here is how Dreyfus concludes his critique:
If the alchemist had stopped poring over his retorts and pentagrams and had spent his time looking for the deeper structure of the problem, as primitive man took his eyes of the moon, came out of the trees, and discovered fire and the wheel, things would have been set moving in a more promising direction. After all, three hundred years after the alchemists we did get gold from lead (and we have landed on the moon), but only after we abandoned work on the alchemic level, and worked to understand the chemical level and the even deeper nuclear level instead.
Dreyfus’ answer is not to get stuck in the question of what computers can’t do – but to reject even that last piece of thick ontology and ask if we are making a fundamental conceptual mistake. He suggests that we find what is to intelligence as chemistry is to alchemy and look for another set of concepts, another language, to describe what we are doing.
We would, in Dreyfus view, be much better of trying to build alien intelligence or replicate animal intelligence or even jettisoning the idea of intelligence entirely in favour of a new concept – perhaps something like cognicity – that removes the Difference from the research program.
Dreyfus recommendations would imply that we should drop the benchmarks that distract us and instead focus on simpler, thinner ontologies around tasks and interactions. What we need, he would suggest, is a conceptual shift into that simpler ontology – at least if we want to make real progress.
The shift into modern machine learning seems to prove that when the thicker ontology was abandoned we did discovered things obscured by the idea of man as a symbolic animal.
What if we abandon both the idea of man and machine?…
Also worthy of a full review: “Reading Dreyfus,” from @nicklaslundblad.
* Zosimos of Panopolis, an alchemist (and Gnostic mystic)
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As we think about transmutation, we might recall that it was on this date in 1954 (only 11 years before Dreyfus wrote Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence) that IBM introduced the “IBM 608,” the first calculating machine to use only solid-state transistors instead of vacuum tubes (thus needing only about 5% of the power to perform the same operations). The machine was housed in several large cabinets and could be purchased for $83,210 (or rented for $1,760 per month)… that’s just over $1,000,000 on an inflation-adjusted basis (or about $22,000 per month). It used more than 3,000 germanium transistors and could store 40 nine-digit numbers and perform 4,500 additions per second, among other operations.
“Listening is like running down a mountain on a switchback trail, the sound of surprise generating its own momentum. There’s a punk glee inside the bluegrass craft– and a punk vehemence inside the bluegrass smile.”*…
On the heels of Hardy Strictly Bluegrass [and here], Warren Hellman‘s gift to San Francisco, the most recent annual installment of which was last weekend, a lovely piece by David Alm on a more traditional event…
I got off Interstate 81 to give my soul a break. The back roads of southwest Virginia wind, crest, and plunge through lush valleys of oak, poplar, birch, and maple trees. It’s easy to lose track of time and distance there. People drive slower. Cows graze in pastures. And there are no placards festooned with Motel 6 and Starbucks logos, flattening the American landscape into a homogeneous blur. Any signs you might see are low to the ground and handmade, protesting a data center, for instance, or thanking Jesus.
I’d gone to this rural pocket of the country for the 90th annual Old Fiddler’s Convention in Galax, an independent city of just under 7,000 near the North Carolina border whose population, for six days in early August, balloons to around four times that. They arrive in RVs and Casitas, camper vans and cars to stake out 20-by-35-foot plots in Felts Park, a 28-acre fairground in the heart of Galax, transforming it into a massive, muddy parking lot sprinkled with portable toilets and a cluster of food trucks, offering loaded potatoes, funnel cake, and blooming onions.
The Old Fiddler’s Convention—or just Galax, as the diehards call it—is the oldest and largest fiddlers’ convention in the world, a place where banjo pickers, guitar players, and other maestros of old-time strings gather to see how they stack up. Founded in 1935, Galax has been canceled only twice since then: once during World War II, due to travel restrictions, and again in 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many Galaxers have been going every year for decades, some for as long as they’ve been alive.
There are scads of rules: If you play clawhammer-style banjo in the bluegrass band competition, you will get disqualified. Same if you play bluegrass-style banjo in the old-time competition. If you break a string while performing, you must stop immediately. Playing time during competition is limited to two minutes and 30 seconds. And, crucially, no electric instruments of any kind are allowed, either on stage or in the tightly packed fairgrounds, where self-described hillbillies, accountants, firefighters, and session musicians pick day and night in blistering, impromptu jams amid the RVs.
One does not merely attend Galax. It’s not a music festival. There are no headliners, and no full-set performances. There is a single stage, and over the course of six days, contestants take it one after another to play one song for a panel of judges and a smattering of spectators. There are more than a dozen categories, little changed in the past century: old-time fiddle, guitar, dulcimer, folk song. Cash prizes for individual players range from $35 to $285; a campsite and contestant pass together cost $175. “The prestige of being judged a ‘winner at Galax,’ and the respect for one’s musical talent that goes along with it, far outweighs any monetary award,” wrote Fred Burton in the March 1984 issue of Bluegrass Unlimited…
…
… An old-time jam goes something like this: Anywhere from two to umpteen musicians gather in a circle, knee-to-knee, and someone—usually the fiddler—calls a tune. Before you know it, you’re carried away by a cyclone of fiddles, mandolins, banjos, and guitars, all locked into a swirling rhythm that can, when it’s good, take you to church.
The tradition dates to the mid-1700s, when Scots-Irish immigrants first settled in Appalachia. Even then, coastal property was for the elite, forcing poorer immigrants inland and south, through the Shenandoah Valley to southwest Virginia, where land was plentiful and cheap. Their music quickly took root. “The Scots brought fiddles and liquor,” Ted McAllister, one of my neighbors in Felts Park, told me. “The Germans brought church music and beer.”
Over time, Scottish fiddle tunes evolved, as oral traditions do, and began to mix with the musical traditions of enslaved Africans, who had brought with them gourd instruments that would evolve into the American banjo, along with rhythms the Scots had never heard before. Old-time music, in other words, is the music of diasporas, fed into a blender and then worked into a froth. A lot of traditional folk songs came out of this period, too. One that I learned at Galax, “Going to the West,” tells the story of a young man who leaves the mountains of his birth, “where labor is in vain,” to seek the fertile plains out west. It’s the story of my own Scottish forebears, who settled in South Dakota before moving to what is now suburban Chicago, and later, Florida.
Bluegrass, by contrast, was born in the 1940s, when Bill Monroe and The Blue Grass Boys took those mountain sounds, combined them with Southern church music and blues, and tightened it all into something you might call an uncle of rock ’n’ roll. There’s a reason that Billy Strings plays to sold-out arenas and pickers from around the world can play classics like “Blue Ridge Cabin Home” at the drop of a one-chord.
Where bluegrass is punchy and clean, designed for the stage, old-time is ecstatic, designed for participation. Bluegrass jams attract spectators who marvel at the players’ pyrotechnics; old-time jams get people on their feet. At Galax, some folks drag big pieces of plywood around the fairgrounds looking for old-time jams, where they’ll lay the board down at the edge of the circle and dance. Flatfooters they’re called: the percussion section…
Eminently worth reading in full.
In a southwest Virginia fairground, thousands of musicians gather every August to keep a centuries-old tradition from flickering out: “A Place Among the Fiddlers,” from @longreads.com.
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As we pick, we might recall that it was on this date in 1939 that George D. “Judge” Hay, the creator and producer of The Grand Ole Opry, invited Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys to audition for a spot on the prestigious radio broadcast. The audition was a success, and Monroe chose “Muleskinner Blues” for their debut. According to observers, when the curtain went up, the audience and Opry regulars alike (including stars such as Roy Acuff, Uncle Dave Macon, and Pee Wee King) were awed by the furious tempo of the Blue Grass Boys. Band member Cleo Davis later observed that the audience “couldn’t think as fast as we played.”
Monroe quickly scored a recording contract, and switched personnel to establish the line-up that became famous, surrounding himself (on mandolin) with Lester Flatt (guitar), Earl Scruggs (banjo), Chubby Wise (fiddle), and Cedric Rainwater (bass). Together, they polished the traditional mountain music celebrated at Galax into a genre that took its name from their group. and Monroe is remembered as “the Father of Bluegrass.”
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