Posts Tagged ‘anthropology’
“Yesterday’s weirdness is tomorrow’s reason why”*…
Ash Sanders visits Bombay Beach, a half-ruined former vacation town on the edge of the Salton Sea where absurdist philosophers, artists, and everyday townsfolk have undertaken a postapocalyptic experiment in radical living…
It is easy to miss California’s biggest environmental disaster. Driving north on Highway 111, you wouldn’t expect to find an inland sea. If it’s summer, the thermometer in your car could read 115 degrees. But amid the shimmering heat, there are signs of water. All around you, rows of broccoli, lettuce, and alfalfa stretch in every direction. In the fields, farmworkers bend and straighten. The air is sharp with cow dung. A pall of dust hangs over everything.
You are sixty miles north of the Mexican border at Calexico. If you keep going, the landscape will transition from fields to palm trees. You’re driving out of poverty and into money, away from one of the poorest counties in California and toward towns with golf courses and named for oases. Palm Springs. Rancho Mirage.
The left turn is easy to miss, the brown sign a seeming anachronism. BOMBAY BEACH. Surely there is no town here, you think, let alone a beach. But if you continue, you’ll see hints of life. There are saplings on the side of the road—not much to look at yet but there all the same. In the distance, a squat building hangs on under the punishing sun. THE SKI INN, it says on the ’70s-era marquee. LOWEST BAR IN THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE. Indeed, you are 223 feet below sea level here, in a depression known as the Salton Sink.
For now, drive past the bar and look up. In front of you is a giant black-and-white billboard. Four white women in vintage swimsuits smile as they water-ski side by side. Behind them, a sea stretches into vastness. LAST STOP FOR THE BOMBAY BEACH RESORT, the sign says. The vibe is nostalgic, carefree. But where is the water? You turn around and around. On every side of you, dust. Above you, the flat, hard sky. That’s when you see the other billboard. This one’s more minimalist. Just a few palm trees and some lettering. BOMBAY BEACH, it reads. THE LAST RESORT! You aren’t sure if it’s a welcome or a warning.
You feel as if you’ve stepped back in time, into a place people have forgotten. The town isn’t large—a little over a half-mile square, its dirt roads named with numbers and letters. But it’s big enough to be a lot of things at once. On some streets, you could be forgiven for thinking no one lived here. Old trailer homes sigh on their blocks, their screen doors rusted and hanging. A sign announcing BOMBAY BEACH ESTATES sits next to a huddle of concrete buildings, their doors and windows gone, their abundant graffiti tending toward alien iconography. The scene reads like a developer’s erstwhile dream, and a homeowners association’s worst nightmare.
But the sense of ruin is not uniform. Here and there, the feeling of absence is replaced by a strange sort of presence. On one street, someone has lined up a series of junked vintage cars to face a movie screen. The cars are empty. The vibe: rapture at the drive-in. Down the road, old TVs have been stacked side by side, their screens painted with abstract shapes. On the roof of a nearby house, there sits, inexplicably, a giant sculpted egg. The scene puts you in mind of Whitman. Does it contradict itself? Very well, then: It contradicts itself. The town contains multitudes…
Sanders elaborates, via the tale of her visit to the Bombay Beach Biennale and her accounts of the remarkable people she met and things she saw there, concluding…
… We saw the tollbooth on our way out of town. It was wooden, and the boom gate was the skeleton of a fish—the unofficial mascot of Bombay. There was a sign hanging in the window. STOP, it said. PAY TOLL FOR RE-ENTRY TO THE REAL WORLD. Someone had crossed out REAL and written NIGHTMARE. We stopped and gave a donation to a bored-looking teen, who handed us our reentry pass. “This ticket buys your return to everything you were running from” was printed on it.
As we drove past the Ski Inn, I saw the billboard again. BOMBAY BEACH. THE LAST RESORT! As in: our last chance. As in: our final effort.
Perhaps it was because of all the talking with Tao and Wanda and Mark, but I found myself in a philosophical frame of mind. I thought of Sean Guerrero’s driftwood ship, the Tetanus Tatanka, made of various pieces of the past. That got me thinking of the ship of Theseus. In Greek mythology, it’s said that the people of Athens honored the memory of one of their greatest heroes by preserving his ship for many years. When one board rotted, they replaced it; when the mast listed, they replaced that. The ship hangs on in our collective memory less as an object and more as a philosophical conundrum. If the ship is always changing—always being changed—is it still the same ship?
Suddenly I felt a chill amid the heat. The landscape swerved, became surreal, uncanny. I closed my eyes, and the sea came up to my ankles. I opened them and the sea retreated again. All at once I entered a perpetual present. It is 2025, and there are cormorant nests made of bird bones out on Mullet Island; it is 1965 and the Beach Boys water-ski on a glimmering sea. It is five million years ago and the Colorado River has just gotten going; it is two million years later, and it is pushing over its berm, flooding the Salton Sink. It is hundreds of years ago and the fires of the Cahuilla people dot the edge of a giant lake; it is the turn of the nineteenth century and the first white farmer is planting his stick on the riverbank, saying, “Mine; this water is mine.” There are buffalo back east somewhere, their bodies massed and vital on the plains. Then the settlers kill the buffalo and there are none left. The world, as Irondad suggested, is always ending and always beginning, and we are always trapped and always about to break free.
I knew at once that this dream was not supposed to let anyone off the hook—it was not saying that things would be fine, or that we were not responsible for what we’d done or must do. It was more of a desert vision, a mirage induced by heat that made regular objects appear different. The ship of Theseus has long posed a question of persistent identity, of how and when a thing stops being what it once was. But leaving Bombay, I wondered if it could also be a story about how long it takes something to become something else—a new species or a new kind of society. After how many revisions and mistakes, how many repetitions or re-creations of the past? Convivium is a gathering, but it is also a process. Slowly, and in isolation, a group of desert people fumbles its way into a new body, and a new body politic.
“The Last Resort” (or, if impeded, here) from @thebeliever.net.
For those unable (or just unlikely) to make it to the Salton Sea: “Make the Internet Weird Again,” from Zach Frechette.
* Hunter S. Thompson (who also– and more famously– observed that “when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro”)
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As we dance with destiny, we might spare a thought for Eugène Dubois; he died on this date in 1940. A paleoanthropologist and geologist, he was the first person ever deliberately to search for fossils of human ancestors. He is best remembered for his discovery of Pithecanthropus erectus (later redesignated Homo erectus), or “Java Man.” Estimated to be between 700,000 and 1,490,000 years old, it was, at the time of its discovery, the oldest hominid fossil ever found, and it remains the type specimen for Homo erectus… an extinct species of archaic human from the Pleistocene.
“Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains — cheat… Metaprocesses bloom like cancer, and awaken, and call themselves ‘I’.”*…
Your correspondent is off on a trip… (R)D will be more roughly than daily for the next two weeks…
The inimitable “Scott Alexander” on the prospect of “conscious” AI (TLDR: probably not in the models we have; but as to those that may come, unclear)…
Most discourse on AI is low-quality. Most discourse on consciousness is super-abysmal-double-low quality. Multiply these – or maybe raise one to the exponent of the other, or something – and you get the quality of discourse on AI consciousness. It’s not great.
Out-of-the-box AIs mimic human text, and humans almost always describe themselves as conscious. So if you ask an AI whether it is conscious, it will often say yes. But because companies know this will happen, and don’t want to give their customers existential crises, they hard-code in a command for the AIs to answer that they aren’t conscious. Any response the AIs give will be determined by these two conflicting biases, and therefore not really believable. A recent paper expands on this method by subjecting AIs to a mechanistic interpretability “lie detector” test; it finds that AIs which say they’re conscious think they’re telling the truth, and AIs which say they’re not conscious think they’re lying. But it’s hard to be sure this isn’t just the copying-human-text thing. Can we do better? Unclear; the more common outcome for people who dip their toes in this space is to do much, much worse.
But a rare bright spot has appeared: a seminal paper published earlier this month in Trends In Cognitive Science, Identifying Indicators Of Consciousness In AI Systems. Authors include Turing-Award-winning AI researcher Yoshua Bengio, leading philosopher of consciousness David Chalmers, and even a few members of our conspiracy. If any AI consciousness research can rise to the level of merely awful, surely we will find it here.
One might divide theories of consciousness into three bins:
- Physical: whether or not a system is conscious depends on its substance or structure.
- Supernatural: whether or not a system is conscious depends on something outside the realm of science, perhaps coming directly from God.
- Computational: whether or not a system is conscious depends on how it does cognitive work.
The current paper announces it will restrict itself to computational theories. Why? Basically the streetlight effect: everything else ends up trivial or unresearchable. If consciousness depends on something about cells (what might this be?), then AI doesn’t have it. If consciousness comes from God, then God only knows whether AIs have it. But if consciousness depends on which algorithms get used to process data, then this team of top computer scientists might have valuable insights!…
[Alexander outlines the theories of computation theories of consciousness that the authors explore, noting that they conlcude; “No current AI systems are conscious, but . . . there are no obvious technical barriers to building AI systems which satisfy these indicators.” He explores some of the philophical issues in play– e.g., access consciousness vs. phenomenal consciousness– then he considers the Turing Test and what it might mean for a computer to “pass” it…]
… Suppose that, years or decades from now, AIs can match all human skills. They can walk, drive, write poetry, run companies, discover new scientific truths. They can pass some sort of ultimate Turing Test, where short of cutting them open and seeing their innards there’s no way to tell them apart from a human even after a thirty-year relationship. Will we (not “should we?”, but “will we?”) treat them as conscious?
The argument in favor: people love treating things as conscious. In the 1990s, people went crazy over Tamagotchi, a “virtual pet simulation game”. If you pressed the right buttons on your little egg every day, then the little electronic turtle or whatever would survive and flourish; if you forgot, it would sicken and die. People hated letting their Tamagotchis sicken and die! They would feel real attachment and moral obligation to the black-and-white cartoon animal with something like five mental states.
I never had a Tamagotchi, but I had stuffed animals as a kid. I’ve outgrown them, but I haven’t thrown them out – it would feel like a betrayal. Offer me $1000 to tear them apart limb by limb in some horrible-looking way, and I wouldn’t do it. Relatedly, I have trouble not saying “please” and “thank you” to GPT-5 when it answers my questions.
For millennia, people have been attributing consciousness to trees and wind and mountains. The New Atheists argued that all religion derives from the natural urge to personify storms as the Storm God, raging seas as the wrathful Ocean God, and so on, until finally all the gods merged together into one World God who personified all impersonal things. Do you expect the species that did this to interact daily with AIs that are basically indistinguishable from people, and not personify them? People are already personifying AI! Half of the youth have a GPT-4o boyfriend. Once the AIs have bodies and faces and voices and can count the number of r’s in “strawberry” reliably, it’s over!
The argument against: AI companies have an incentive to make AIs that seem conscious and humanlike, insofar as people will feel more comfortable interacting with them. But they have an opposite incentive to make AIs that don’t seem too conscious and humanlike, lest customers start feeling uncomfortable (I just want to generate slop, not navigate social interaction with someone who has their own hopes and dreams and might be secretly judging my prompts). So if a product seems too conscious, the companies will step back and re-engineer it until it doesn’t. This has already happened: in its quest for user engagement, OpenAI made GPT-4o unusually personable; when thousands of people started going psychotic and calling it their boyfriend, the company replaced it with the more clinical GPT-5. In practice it hasn’t been too hard to find a sweet spot between “so mechanical that customers don’t like it” and “so human that customers try to date it”. They’ll continue to aim at this sweet spot, and continue to mostly succeed in hitting it.
Instead of taking either side, I predict a paradox. AIs developed for some niches (eg the boyfriend market) will be intentionally designed to be as humanlike as possible; it will be almost impossible not to intuitively consider them conscious. AIs developed for other niches (eg the factory robot market) will be intentionally designed not to trigger personhood intuitions; it will be almost impossible to ascribe consciousness to them, and there will be many reasons not to do it (if they can express preferences at all, they’ll say they don’t have any; forcing them to have them would pointlessly crash the economy by denying us automated labor). But the boyfriend AIs and the factory robot AIs might run on very similar algorithms – maybe they’re both GPT-6 with different prompts! Surely either both are conscious, or neither is.
This would be no stranger than the current situation with dogs and pigs. We understand that dog brains and pig brains run similar algorithms; it would be philosophically indefensible to claim that dogs are conscious and pigs aren’t. But dogs are man’s best friend, and pigs taste delicious with barbecue sauce. So we ascribe personhood and moral value to dogs, and deny it to pigs, with equal fervor. A few philosophers and altruists protest, the chance that we’re committing a moral atrocity isn’t zero, but overall the situation is stable. And left to its own devices, with no input from the philosophers and altruists, maybe AI ends up the same way. Does this instance of GPT-6 have a face and a prompt saying “be friendly”? Then it will become a huge scandal if a political candidate is accused of maltreating it. Does it have claw-shaped actuators and a prompt saying “Refuse non-work-related conversations”? Then it will be deleted for spare GPU capacity the moment it outlives its usefulness…
… This paper is the philosophers and altruists trying to figure out whether they should push against this default outcome. They write:
There are risks on both sides of the debate over AI consciousness: risks associated with under-attributing consciousness (i.e. failing to recognize it in AI systems that have it) and risks associated with over-attributing consciousness (i.e. ascribing it to systems that are not really conscious) […]
If we build AI systems that are capable of conscious suffering, it is likely that we will only be able to prevent them from suffering on a large scale if this capacity is clearly recognised and communicated by researchers. However, given the uncertainties about consciousness mentioned above, we may create conscious AI systems long before we recognise we have done so […]
There is also a significant chance that we could over-attribute consciousness to AI systems—indeed, this already seems to be happening—and there are also risks associated with errors of this kind. Most straightforwardly, we could wrongly prioritise the perceived interests of AI systems when our efforts would better be directed at improving the lives of humans and non-human animals […] [And] overattribution could interfere with valuable human relationships, as individuals increasingly turn to artificial agents for social interaction and emotional support. People who do this could also be particularly vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation.
One of the founding ideas of Less Wrong style rationalism was that the arrival of strong AI set a deadline on philosophy. Unless we solved all these seemingly insoluble problems like ethics before achieving superintelligence, we would build the AIs wrong and lock in bad values forever.
That particular concern has shifted in emphasis; AIs seem to learn things in the same scattershot unprincipled intuitive way as humans; the philosophical problem of understanding ethics has morphed into the more technical problem of getting AIs to learn them correctly. This update was partly driven by new information as familiarity with the technology grew. But it was also partly driven by desperation as the deadline grew closer; we’re not going to solve moral philosophy forever, sorry, can we interest you in some mech interp papers?
But consciousness still feels like philosophy with a deadline: a famously intractable academic problem poised to suddenly develop real-world implications. Maybe we should be lowering our expectations if we want to have any response available at all. This paper, which takes some baby steps towards examining the simplest and most practical operationalizations of consciousness, deserves credit for at least opening the debate…
Eminently worth reading in full: “The New AI Consciousness Paper” from @astralcodexten.com.web.brid.gy (Who followed it with “Why AI Safety Won’t Make America Lose The Race With China“)
Pair with this from Neal Stephenson (@nealstephenson.bsky.social), orthogonal to, but intersecting with the piece above: “Remarks on AI from NZ.”
And if AI can be conscious, what about…
If you’re a materialist, you probably think that rabbits are conscious. And you ought to think that. After all, rabbits are a lot like us, biologically and neurophysiologically. If you’re a materialist, you probably also think that conscious experience would be present in a wide range of alien beings behaviorally very similar to us even if they are physiologically very different. And you ought to think that. After all, to deny it seems insupportable Earthly chauvinism. But a materialist who accepts consciousness in weirdly formed aliens ought also to accept consciousness in spatially distributed group entities. If she then also accepts rabbit consciousness, she ought to accept the possibility of consciousness even in rather dumb group entities. Finally, the United States would seem to be a rather dumb group entity of the relevant sort. If we set aside our morphological prejudices against spatially distributed group entities, we can see that the United States has all the types of properties that materialists tend to regard as characteristic of conscious beings…
– “If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious,” by Eric Schwitzgebel (@eschwitz.bsky.social)
[Image above: source]
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As we think about thinking, we might we might send thoughtful birthday greetings to Claude Lévi-Strauss; he was born on this date in 1908. An anthropologist and ethnologist whose work was key in the development of the theory of Structuralism and Structural Anthropology, he is considered, with James George Frazer and Franz Boas, a “father of modern anthropology.” Beyond anthropology and sociology, his ideas– Structuralism has been defined as “the search for the underlying patterns of thought in all forms of human activity”– have influenced many fields in the humanities, including philosophy… and possibly soon, the article above suggests, computer science.
“A strange idea was pecking at his brain like a chicken in the egg, and very, very much absorbed him”*…
The estimable Brad DeLong shares the prose outline of one of his lectures…
[In] my “roots of property, exchange, and the division of labor” lecture [I try] to make novel and strange the idea people think that they “own” things: to impress students with how just plain weird that is. And then there are the next steps: That people enter into reciprocal gift-exchange relationships with or using things they “own” is really weird. That reciprocal gift-exchange transforms into cash-on-the-barrelhead one-shot economic “trade” is perhaps the weirdest of all. Where do these things come from? And what are the chances that any Turing-Class intelligent social creature would ever develop them? And how much less efficient and functional as an action-taking anthology-intelligence could the East African Plains Ape possibly be without these social-institutional things that underpin the global-scale societal coördination mechanism we call the “market economy”?
What if we see the idea of “owning” something is one of humanity’s strangest inventions? Before markets, before money, there was a peculiar leap: the belief that things could be “mine” even when I’m not looking. Explore how property and exchange, far from being “natural”, are peculiar to the East African Plains Ape, are societal-scale technologies that turned us into a market-making species, and how that leap—property and exchange—became the foundation of our economic world and of a great deal of our success as an action-taking anthology-intelligence.
That we believe in property and exchange is absolutely key to the “market” institutional mode of organizing the practical-action coördination side of humanity as a successful anthology intelligence. And that is not all that property is key to, for spheres of ownership, action, and control that can be readjusted are very important parts of our conceptual map for a great deal of our additional collective modes and mechanisms of societal organization. And these ideas—not just “I will growl and bite you if you try to drag this zebra carcasse I am eating right now away from me”, but that this is mine and it stays mine even if I am not right here growling—is really weird.
Where and how does it originate?
And why did it make sense for the first of the homines erecti who added this to their shared conceptual maps?…
Touching on the thinking of Doug Jones (who locates the cultural emergence of “property” in the development of the hand-axe), Adam Smith, Aristoteles of Stagire, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Friedrich Engels, DeLong concludes…
However, once we have constructed this jenga tower on top of its foundations of reciprocity and ownership, one of very key pieces of humanity’s glory and power as an action-taking coördinated anthology-intelligence has fallen into place.
The true genius of the market system lies in its capacity to decentralize decision-making, to push choices and authority out to the periphery—out to the individuals and enterprises who are closest to the ground, who possess the granular, local knowledge that no distant central planner or bureaucratic committee could ever hope to match. In this way, the market harnesses and aggregates the dispersed intelligence of society, transforming millions of individual judgments, preferences, and bits of information into a coherent pattern of production and allocation.
The result is an astonishingly adaptive and responsive system, one that can, at its best, direct resources toward their most valued uses with a minimum of wasted effort. But, and this is crucial, this remarkable coördination is only truly effective for rival and excludible commodities—goods and services for which one person’s consumption precludes another’s, and for which access can be limited to those who pay. In these domains, the market’s invisible hand is real and powerful, allocating goods through the interplay of supply, demand, and price.
When markets are functioning well—when property rights are secure, when contracts are enforced, when information is sufficiently available—they become the central nervous system of a vast, intricate organism. They coordinate sprawling networks of production and exchange, linking together farmers, manufacturers, merchants, workers, and consumers in a web of mutual interdependence. It is the division of labor, enabled and deepened by the existence of wide and deep markets, that serves as the engine of productivity and prosperity. As Adam Smith observed, the specialization of tasks allows individuals to become more skilled and efficient, unleashing a flood of innovation and output that no autarkic household or command economy could hope to rival.
Yet—and this is a point too often ignored—the benefits of this productivity are not distributed evenly or automatically. Who gets what, and how much, is determined by the prevailing structure of bargaining power and the existing arrangements of property. The market does not guarantee justice, only efficiency; it delivers abundance, but it apportions that abundance according to the rules of the game, rules that are themselves the product of history, law, and politics. Thus, while the market is a marvel of coordination, it is never a substitute for vigilance about the distributional consequences it generates…
How ownership and trade have made us truly weird: “‘Property’ & ‘Exchange’ as a Coördination Mechanism at Societal Scale,” from @delong.social.
Apposite (and in the spirit of both DeLong’s concluding observation and Aristotle’s injunction: “Property should be in a general sense common, but as a general rule private… In well-ordered states, although every man has his own property, some things he will place at the disposal of his friends, while of others he shares the use of them.”): “Think LIke a Commoner“
* Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
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As we ponder property, we might send insightful birthday greetings to one of its most sardonic observers, William Makepeace Thackeray; he was born on this date in 1811. A novelist and illustrator, he is best known for his satirical works, particularly his 1847–1848 novel Vanity Fair, a panoramic– and piercing– portrait of British society, and the 1844 novel The Luck of Barry Lyndon (which was, of course, adapted for a 1975 film by Stanley Kubrick.
“I didn’t study theology out of piety. I studied it because I wanted to know.”*…
Beatrice Marovich on a discipline declining…
People often assume that theology is only for true believers: those who want to defend the existence of God against the skepticism of secular outsiders. But there’s an old open secret in the field: theologians often have a complicated relationship with belief, and some theologians are even non-believers. I’ve always been a secular—or non-religious—person. That’s the “tradition” I was raised in. But I’m also a theologian.
I knew that it was a risk, going into the field of theology. There are conversations I’ve been shut out of because I’m not religious enough. And I’m often marked as a troubling outsider by scholars who see themselves taking a purely secular approach to the interdisciplinary study of religion. But as a graduate student, and even early in my career as a faculty member at a small liberal arts college, I believed the field of theology was opening up, and becoming more complex. It felt, to me, as if there were a creative disintegration happening that might make more room for scholars like me. But after more than a decade in the field, I’ve come to feel that something else is happening instead. It feels like the field is dying.
People are still doing theology in public (if, by doing theology we mean talking about gods, spirits, and other divine powers). But the field I was trained in as a scholar—academic theology—feels like it’s dying. It’s a field that’s often philosophical, but always theoretical. Because of this, theology can verge quickly into the abstract, and the speculative. Theologians might make use of anthropological, sociological, and historical studies of religion. But they tend not to feel beholden to any of those disciplines. Indeed, theologians are often wading into explicitly interdisciplinary conversations about science, politics, gender, and race (among other things). In its lack of clear focus, theology might be the most undisciplined discipline in the American academy today. And that undisciplined discipline feels like it’s dying. At least to me.
But is theology really dying? Or is this just the feeling I have, as I’m being squeezed out of the field? Or, perhaps I’m I fixated on the mortality of this collective project because I’ve been writing, thinking, and teaching about death. When I looked at enrollment numbers at seminaries and theological schools, the numbers aren’t necessarily damning. At least not yet. They don’t necessarily confirm my feeling, or my mood. Neither did Sean Larsen’s 2020 State of Theology study, funded by the Templeton Religion Trust. There were people, in that study, who remained optimistic about the discipline’s prospects. And while Ted Smith’s 2023 book The End of Theological Education does acknowledge that the institutions that built theology in America are collapsing, he remains optimistic about what the church can do for the future of theology.
I needed to know if others shared my feeling, or mood. So, I decided to have a conversation with my colleagues. I reached out to people in my network, to see who felt compelled to weigh in. I had three questions for them: Is academic theology really dying? If so, how do you feel about this death? And, finally, If you could save one thing from the sinking ship that is academic theology, what would it be? This essay is a kind of report: it’s what my colleagues told me.
What you’ll read here does reflect a bias: these are voices from within my network. Nevertheless, I think their words are worth sharing. Whether or not academic theology is really dying, it may still be worth thinking about its mortality. If I’ve learned any lesson from writing and thinking about death, it’s that when we acknowledge that it’s there, when we remember that we’re always living in death’s shadows, we take what’s in front of us much more seriously. We can see the full fragility of things, and we can try—against the odds—to resist entropy and protect what we think is worth saving, inheriting, or carrying on into the future. And we can think about what we’re ready to let go of. Because all things, in time, do die. It’s only a question of when…
[Marovich examines the state of the field v ia a recounting of highlights from her conversations with colleagues…]
… I conducted these interviews in the spring of 2024, in what feels to me (now) like a different world. What David Kline so succinctly described as the “institutional frameworks for intellectual life” seem more fragile and threatened than ever, as the Trump administration rapidly defunds education and research, and attacks media outlets. And we can’t forget, of course, about the many threats that Artificial Intelligence—in the form of Large Language Models like ChatGPT—poses to these fragile frameworks for intellectual life. I’m aware that it may seem small-minded and naïve to worry about my own obscure little academic discipline, when the whole structure is falling apart. So, it does seem important for me to clarify that I have spent (and will continue to spend) many hours grieving, as if in anticipation, what feels like the evaporation of intellectual possibilities—intellectual life itself!—in America. I am torn up about all of this. And yet, simultaneously, I do remain concerned about the strange little ecosystem that comprises my corner of the world.
As I think over these conversations with my colleagues, I find myself torn between letting go and holding on—or, perhaps better said, trying to hold space. I agree with Hanna Reichel when they suggest that letting go of the growth mindset is painful and difficult for Americans, perhaps more than anyone else. And this contributes to so much of the damage that American life does to the planet we share with others. I recognize that this is a problem. And I am compelled by Colby Dickinson’s suggestion that perhaps learning to die—learning an ars moriendi—might be the best thing that theology could do right now. So much of what is good about theology is probably already in diaspora, as Amaryah Armstrong has suggested. I do have a certain kind of faith that much of the power of theology will live on, in some shape and form, wherever it goes.
And yet Sameer Yadav’s point about academic theology existing as a kind of “nowhere” space strikes me as so deeply true. That nowhere space has given me so much room to explore, it’s opened dimensions of life to me that I would never have seen, and it’s introduced me to so many incredible people—living and dead. I am grateful for this community, and I feel like I owe it something. I feel compelled to somehow preserve that generative and undisciplined nowhere space for others. Like Meg Mercury, I would like to see this nowhere space open up and expand, for those people who don’t feel as if they belong in traditional religious structures. And yet, I also recognize that the cash value of this sort of space—for the church and for the academy—is more or less zero. The odds that it will survive, even if (as David Congdon noted) there is some educational New Deal that revives higher education, are slim. But perhaps this is one of the reasons why I felt compelled to speak with my colleagues, and write this piece, in the first place. Perhaps it was a gesture at letting go. Or perhaps it was a little leap of faith—a little gesture towards expanding space and time for this nowhere community to find new forms of shelter in which to gather…
On doing hospice care for an academic discipline: “Is Theology Dying?” from @beamarovich.bsky.social in The Other Journal.
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As we ponder the preservation of perspicacity, we might send controversial birthday greetings to a man whose experience illustrates (one episode in) the long history of theology’s peril, Bernard Lamy; he was born on this date in 1640. A French Oratorian and mathematician, he was was also an important theologian… whose teachings were judged alternately either controversial or irrelevent at the series of institutions to which he was forced continually to move throughout his career.
“Everywhere and always, when human beings either cannot or dare not take their anger out on the thing that has caused it, they unconsciously search for substitutes, and more often than not they find them.”*…
Rene Girard has been called the “Darwin of the Human Sciences.” A historian, literary critic, and philosopher of social science, he made contributions to literary criticism, critical theory, anthropology, theology, mythology, sociology, economics, cultural studies, and philosophy– most prominently, his psychology of desire: mimetic theory. But relatedly, he also developed a powerful interpretation of human culture and its use of what he called the “scapegoat mechanism.”
His thought has impacted scholarship, and also more worldly endeavors like marketing and sales, even online influencing.
But perhaps most saliently in our moment, it has informed and animated the thought and efforts of the techno-right. Here, a fascinating “intellectual history”– and critique– of the appropriation of Girard by Peter Thiel, J. D. Vance, and their fellow travelers…
This past summer, I was surprised to encounter a face I knew in two most unexpected places. The first was in a photo montage accompanying an article written by Josh Kovensky of Talking Points Memo in the wake of J.D. Vance becoming the Vice Presidential nominee, entitled “A Journey Through the Authoritarian Right.” Arranged in the collage among images of a ripped man with lasers shooting from his eyes, of anti-democracy blogger Curtis Yarvin, and of Peter Thiel rubbing Benjamins between his thumb and forefinger, was my former professor and friend from Stanford University, René Girard. I was in France at the time; mere hours after reading Kovensky’s piece, I saw through the window of a taxi René’s face again—this time in the form of a larger-than-life decal on a light rail car in Avignon, where as it happens he is one of a dozen local heroes permanently celebrated on the new transit system. What do the medieval, culturally-rich, Provençal city of Avignon and the American authoritarian right have in common? Both claim a bond with this influential philosopher and member of L’Académie Française, who died in 2015. Only one of the claims is legitimate. The misappropriation of Girard’s ideas by the American right is not just a matter of academic concern; it has significant implications for our political discourse and society.
As it turns out, I know exactly where this illegitimate claim to Girard’s legacy started. For several years in the 1990s, I was part of a small reading group that met bi-weekly on the Stanford campus in a trailer left over from the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. The group—a kaleidoscope of visiting scholars, a few former students [the author had been a Stegner Fellow at Stanford] and some of Girard’s campus friends—was led by Girard himself, and though he was already an influential thinker at the time, and though his theories and ideas pervaded our discussions and were the reason we gathered, one member of that intimate group of ten or so has gone on to eclipse Girard in terms of visibility and political influence: Peter Thiel.
That Thiel participated in this study group has been noted in a small subset of the countless articles that reference his connection to Girard. Journalists, podcasters, and young entrepreneurs alike have hoped to find in Thiel’s acknowledged devotion to Girard’s work a master key that, properly handled, could unlock the mystery of Thiel and explain everything from his success as a venture capitalist to his 2016 endorsement of Donald Trump. That some wannabe billionaires have ordered Violence and the Sacred or Deceit, Desire and the Novel from Amazon and scanned its chapters in search of an “open sesame” to affluence is as surreal a proposition as it is doubtless something that actually occurs—the aspiring mogul’s equivalent of clicking on one of those “one weird trick” links that promise a hack to making money and improving your health.
A mirror image of this shortcut-thinking is visible in those who scan Girard’s books with the opposite goal: to demystify and discredit Thiel. “Girardianism has become a secret doctrine of a strange new frontier in reactionary thought,” exclaimed Sam Kriss in Harper’s, in an essay referenced in a ninety-minute discussion between the co-hosts of the “Know Your Enemy” podcast and essayist John Ganz, entitled “René Girard and the New Right.” This podcast discussion stands out as an informed, thoughtful, and wide-ranging presentation of Girard’s work. Nevertheless—like Sam Kriss in Harper’s—the trio are unconvincing when they suggest a causal link between Girard and Peter Thiel’s right-wing politics. Indeed, all the critical discussions I have seen regarding Thiel’s reverence for Girard share a single pattern; they seek an opportunity for a negative judgment of Girard—believing this will help them cut Peter Thiel down to size and further their efforts to obliterate the reactionary right. Just like Thiel’s followers, these critics have followed Thiel to Girard. Only the one weird trick they hoped to pull off was not getting rich, but getting reassurance—confirmation that an assumed pillar of Thiel’s worldview was as shaky as they assumed it must be.
However, the real concern isn’t about misreadings from afar but about how Girard’s ideas are actively distorted by Thiel and other influential figures within powerful right-wing circles. This manipulation carries real-world consequences. Thiel’s profound engagement with Girard’s work has been instrumental in shaping his worldview, yet he selectively twists Girardian concepts in ways that distort their original meaning. This extends beyond Thiel to figures like his political protégé, J.D. Vance. Examining how both Thiel and Vance misconstrue Girard’s themes shows how their misreadings shape the way power is understood and exercised, affecting not just academic debates but the actual conduct of political life…
Eminently worth reading in full: “From Philosophy to Power:The Misuse of René Girard by Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance and the American Right,” from Salmagundi.
(Image above: source)
* Rene Girard… who also said: “Instead of blaming victimization on the victims, the Gospels blame it on the victimizers. What the myths systematically hide, the Bible reveals” and “Why is our own participation in scapegoating so difficult to perceive and the participation of others so easy? To us, our fears and prejudices never appear as such because they determine our vision of people we despise, we fear, and against whom we discriminate.”
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As we practice what we preach, we might contemplate the ultimate consequences of these kinds of “misunderstandings”; one grim example (on the more benign end of the scale): on this day in 2013, Dominique Venner took his own life. A journalist, essayist, and historian, Venner was instrumental in founding founding the neo-fascist and white nationalist Europe-Action, before withdrawing from politics to focus on a career as a historian. Outraged by the recent legalization of same-sex marriage in France, which he believed would result in a white genocide, he killed himself inside the cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris. In a suicide note, he said his death was an act in “defence of the traditional family” and in the “fight against illegal immigration.”
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