Living Through Challenging Times

by Rachel Robison-Greene

In 524, the Roman philosopher Boethius was imprisoned in exile awaiting his execution. He was used a as a political tool and was convicted on false charges, including the charge of sorcery. In these dire conditions, he wrote The Consolations of Philosophy in which his muse, Lady Philosophy, appears to him to provide her “doctor’s help” for his anguish. She speaks to him in verse,

Why then are miserable men in awe
When tyrants rage impotently?
If you first rid yourself of hope or fear
You have disarmed the tyrant’s wrath
But whosoever quakes in fear or hope
Drifting and losing mastery
Has cast away his shield, has left his place
And binds the chains with which he
Will be bound.

The advice that Lady Philosophy imparts to Boethius resembles that offered by the Stoics—we cannot control external circumstances. We can’t prevent people from being ignorant and cruel. We can’t stop tyrants from manipulating and harming people in pursuit of power. Chaos, suffering, and death are inevitabilities. In challenging times, we must focus only on what we can control—what is in our own minds. For Boethius and for the Stoics, desperate times (and all other times) call for a turn toward philosophical reflection on the nature of virtue and of the good life.

In The Enchiridion, the former slave turned Stoic philosopher Epictetus takes the idea that we ought not to be concerned with what is outside of our control to an extreme. He says,

With regard to whatever objects give you delight, are useful, or are deeply loved, remember to tell yourself of what general nature they are, beginning from the most insignificant things. If, for example, you are fond of a specific ceramic cup, remind yourself that it is only ceramic cups in general of which you are fond. Then, if it breaks, you will not be disturbed. If you kiss your child, or your wife, say that you only kiss things which are human, and thus you will not be disturbed if either of them dies.

Most people in search of a philosophy for hard times would be unlikely to go this far. What is needed is a path forward that allows us to cope with tragedy and injustice without abandoning the value of people we care about or the issues we find important. We long for solutions that ease our anxiety but also provide us with reasons to live. Read more »



by Derek Neal

On November 5, 2024, at around 10:30 pm, I walked into a bar, approached the counter, and sat down on the stool second from the right. I ordered a stout because there was a slight chill in the air. As this was the night of the American presidential election, I pulled out my phone and checked The New York Times website, which said Donald Trump had an 80% chance of winning. This was my first update on the election, and it seemed bad. I put my phone back in my pocket and took a sip of the stout. A man entered the bar and sat down next to me, on my right. There was a half-drunk glass there, and I realized he’d gone out to smoke but had probably been at the bar for a while. Besides us—two solitary men at the bar—the rest of the place was busy, full of couples and groups who seemed to be unconcerned with the election. This may have been because I was in Canada, but my experience of living in Canada for the past four years has shown me that Canadians are just as interested in American politics as Americans are, if not more so. My work colleagues had been informing me of the key swing states, for example, while I had simply mailed in my meaningless Vermont vote and returned to my life. I had no idea who would win this election.

Over the course of my two and half hours at the bar, I ended up in conversation with three different men. M. was the man to my right. I’m normally not much of a talker, but the election provided an easy conversation starter. “Are you following the election?” I asked him. It was loud and I had to repeat my question. M. mumbled that he wasn’t but asked how it was going. “Looks like Trump might win,” I said. M. raised his eyebrows, which were flecked with grey, and said something along the lines of, “Well, he has some ideas.” I had trouble making out what M. was saying, partly because of the noise in the bar, but also because M. spoke so softly. It was as if he didn’t believe in the importance of his own words. Talking or not talking, it didn’t seem to matter to him.

I pulled out my phone again. Trump was at 82%. I showed M. Then he took out his phone, a flip phone. “I’ve still got this old thing,” he mumbled. This seemed like an opening for a new conversation—a discussion on the merits of “dumb” phones versus smartphones, on phone addiction, on attention. “Why’d you get one of those?” I asked M., gesturing at his phone. He looked away and started talking about privacy with smartphones, and how he didn’t want people tracking him, or something along those lines. “How do you like the flip phone? How long have you had it?” I asked. M. said he’d had it since 2016, and that it didn’t cause him any problems because he didn’t have a job, but it sure made meeting women difficult. Read more »

Perceptions

Max Waldman. Judith Jamison in “Cry”, 1976.

“This 1976 portrait by Max Waldman shows Judith Jamison dancing her signature role in “Cry,” a ballet described as “a hymn to the sufferings and triumphant endurance of generations of black matriarchs.” – Smithsonian.

Legendary dancer Judith Jamison died on Nov 9, 2024. She was incredible to watch!

More here, and here.

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Monday, November 11, 2024

Wittgenstein and God

by Martin Butler

Fewer than half the population in the UK believe in God according to the latest surveys, even though religious belief is growing globally and the heady days when the ‘new atheists’ were in full flight are now behind us. The internet has given those on opposite sides of the fence the opportunity to lock horns continually, each side determined to show the irrationality if not downright stupidity of their opponents. I wouldn’t expect the level of debate to be particularly high, but what I do find slightly depressing is the complete absence of anything but the crudest understanding of what belief in God and religious belief in general actually  means. Both sides mostly embrace the ‘God of the gaps’ theory – science cannot explain everything, runs the argument, and God serves as a kind of backstop to account for the unexplained.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century can, I think, help us to develop a more sophisticated conception of religious belief.[1] Despite never producing anything close to a philosophy of religion, the religious point of view was clearly important to him throughout his life: ‘I am not a religious man but I can’t help but seeing every problem from a religious point of view’ (RW p79). Although, Elizabeth Anscombe, a devout Catholic and one of his most famous pupils, once declared that ‘nobody understood Wittgenstein’s views on religion.’[2]

Wittgenstein famously produced two quite distinct approaches to philosophy, the first in the only book he published in his lifetime, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and the second in the Philosophical Investigations, published posthumously; although there have been many other publications over the years of his extensive notebooks and conversations. Towards the end of the Tractatus several important remarks set the stage for his approach to religious belief through both periods of his philosophy. ‘We feel,’ he says, ‘that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain untouched’ (TLP 6.52).

It is with these ‘Lebensprobelme’, which cannot be ‘solved’ through science, that religious belief is concerned. The problems of life cannot be stated as genuine questions since if they could, factual answers describable by science could be given: ‘If a question can be framed at all, it is also possible to answer it’ (TLP 6.5), whereas the problems of life are concerned with what cannot be said – what he refers to elsewhere as the mystical. Read more »

AI Risk in the 2nd Trump Era

by Malcolm Murray

What does the election of Trump mean for risks to society from advanced AI? Given the wide spectrum of risks from advanced AI, the answer will depend very much on which AI risks one is most concerned about.

The AI risk spectrum can be drawn from the near-term, high-certainty risks such as bias and discrimination to longer-term, more speculative risks such as loss of control over agentic AIs. In between those endpoints, there is a range of risks where we believe advanced AI will have an impact, but it is hard to know how much and how soon. This includes everything from AI enabling terrorists to create more deadly weapons, more persuasive AI-enabled disinformation as well as AI-driven disruptions of the labor market. The impact of Trump v2 will likely very greatly between the different points in this spectrum.

Foreseeing the impact of Trump on AI is hard. Four years is an eternity in AI land. AI looks nothing like what it did four years ago. The first Trump administration had inherent high levels of uncertainty. And many different factors will influence the Trump administration over the coming years. But there seems to be some fundamental elements that will likely significantly impact the Trump administration’s actions on AI. Read more »

Poem by Jim Culleny

Song Behind a Rear-Tined Tiller

They believed consciousness resided in the heart,

Aristotle believed this, and the Egyptians
who scooped out dead pharaoh’s brain
through his nose with a spoon
and stuffed his skull with rags assuring
that he would not be thinking in the other world
to which he’d travel by long boat
being wrapped in cloth, speechless, in gold, supine,
embarked with a breathless retinue of slaves
through the hole at the end of the earth
to a place far in imagination.

Here and now sunlight climbs a trellis of trees
along a rail line on which, at irregular intervals,
a freight comes dragging coal behind three engines
or hauls boxcars labeled J.B. Hunt,
or pulls chains of steel cubes and chemical tanks
heavy with inventions of consciousness,
some inscribed with graffiti sprayed by
a deft hand in bold letters, in colors
set with a master’s touch
tuned to the tones of both heart and brain
while the smell of blue-grey diesel
sparks a synapse between beats
and one step follows another
behind a rear-tined tiller
as I urge a throttle.

Who knows who sings
through what instrument
—did Aristotle?

Jim Culleny
from Odder Still
Leana’s Basement Press, 2015

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Sunday, November 10, 2024

Jazz Pianist Ignasi Terraza Ignites Barcelona

by Dick Edelstein

Catalan jazzman Ignasi Terraza and his trio lit up Barcelona with eight sets in October at Jamboree, a cutting edge Gothic Quarter club in the neoclassically-styled Plaça Reial, once an historic crossroads of the Camino de Santiago with the Roman Via Augusta, now a nexus of Barcelona night life and the local jazz scene. The series marks the 25th anniversary of the first Jazz a les Fosques concert that the blind pianist performed in darkness, letting listeners share his sensory experience and gain insight into his musical sensibility.

Anyone who can walk in someone else’s shoes is either a saint or a specially sensitive individual, so when Terraza joked that being sighted is overrated, the audience caught the irony, insanely proud of his accomplishment as the leading exponent of Catalan jazz. His compatriot Tete Montoliu once burnished Catalunya’s image, like cellist-composer Pau Casals, whose Cant dels ocells is broadcast worldwide from Camp Nou football matches to mark a moment of silence for departed socis. Four decades ago in San Francisco, when I told a local jazz musician that I was moving to Barcelona, he replied “That’s in Catalunya—that’s where Tete Montoliu lives”.

In a darkened room, listeners tune in to the way a sightless pianist apprehends music synesthetically, as a cymbal crash becomes a circular pyrotechnic light-burst. Drummer Esteve Pi plays with a clarity that is melodic, architectural, economical, calibrated and precise, limning the structure of his discourse, not just in solos, also in ensemble parts. The trio’s limpid playing is framed by Swiss-Greek bassist Giorgos Antoniou’s supple bass lines and subtle styling; and on opening night, guest singer Laura Simó surprised listeners with a crystalline enunciation of English syllables that added an attractive twist to her interpretation of  Billy Strayhorn’s romantic recitative ballad “Lush Life”, a jazz standard whose stock goes up with each new generation. Other nights, rising-star trumpet player Joan Mar Sauqué and Australian clarinet-flautist Adrian Cunningham created unexpected sounds with their instruments, formless textures that eventually resolved into structure. Read more »

Out of the Frying Pan: Chevron in Context

by Jerry Cayford

Kritzolina, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

On June 28 this year, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Chevron U.S.A v. Natural Resources Defense Council (1984). This was big, since that Chevron decision was the heart of the administrative state’s legal authority. Chevron formalized the executive civil service’s authority over complex decisions of practical governance, such as how to interpret and enforce tax law, ensure food safety, regulate trains and airlines, fund and oversee education, manage elections, and everything else we fight about nowadays. The nice view is that Chevron empowered expertise.

The cynical view (widely held) is that, through Chevron, a conservative Supreme Court gave the Reagan Administration power to ignore Congress’s laws by letting executive agencies twist their meaning at will; now, as those agencies have become more liberal and courts more conservative, a conservative Court has overturned Chevron in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (2024), taking that same authority to twist the law’s meaning and transferring it from executive agencies onto courts. As Justice Elena Kagan says flat out, in her Loper Bright dissent, “The major­ity disdains restraint, and grasps for power.” I would not contradict the cynical view, on pain of appearing naïve. But I argue that there is a much bigger story here, one about how we as a society became threatened by authoritarianism and confused about truth.

That 1984 Chevron legal decision had an intriguing feature: it was considered, by its author Justice John Paul Stevens and his colleagues, to be nothing special, an uncontroversial repetition of common sense and long-standing precedent. How can that be? How could unanimous Supreme Court justices not know they were making history and remaking the law? We once wondered how the Earth could be spinning and circling the sun, yet we couldn’t feel the motion. The same puzzlement applies to the vast movements of history as to planetary movement: situated inside them, we don’t feel them directly; we have to figure out what is going on.

As Chevron evolved from its modest birth, it became a growing problem and its overturning an inevitability. There are familiar ways to tell this story (technocrats brought down by hubris; a pendulum swinging back to common sense), but a more illuminating, less familiar way situates it in intellectual history. The initial invisibility of Chevron’s Earth-shaking importance hints that Chevron shook the Earth by rejecting a century of intellectual development. Much more is going on than garden-variety power struggle. Read more »

Friday, November 8, 2024

Stoic Environmentalism

by Marie Snyder

I dipped my toe into Stoic Week again this year. I’ve done it before a decade ago, and even went to StoicCon once! I was hoping to find the attitude necessary to manage all this (gestures broadly at everything). I got stuck on the first day.

They start with Epictetus’s bit on figuring out what we can control and what we can’t:

Some things are under our control, while others are not under our control. Under our control are conception [the way we define things], intention [the voluntary impulse to act], desire [to get something], aversion [the desire to avoid something], and, in a word, everything that is our own doing; not under our control are our body, our property, reputation, position [or status] in society, and, in a word, everything that is not our own doing.

It’s from the Encheiridion, or handbook, which is a short read and pretty accessible. 

I get the gist of it. A lot of the time when we’re bothered by something, we can’t control what’s going on in the world, but we can control our attitude towards it. It’s only bad because we think it’s bad. The thing to do in all cases is to act virtuously because that’s all that’s within our control. Comedian Michael Connell explains the stoic attitude in an analogy about late trains. If we’re in a hurry, news of a late train is a tragedy. But if we’re stuck on the tracks, it’s fantastic! But in the face of Covid, climate change, and the many conflicts around the world, how do we shift this news to be anything but horrific? The only perception that can spin it as good seems to be genocidal in nature. 

So maybe I’m overthinking it, but I have questions about what Epictetus specifically says here.

First of all, how is desire under our control? I can’t control what desire to have or not have, but I can notice it and decide what to do with it if I have my wits about me. If I’m tired, then sometimes even my behaviour feels not remotely within my control. With practice, I think we can reduce the intensity of some desires or desensitize ourselves from aversions, but desire is pretty automatic. We desire or are repelled in an instant. Epictetus is calling on us to do that practice every day, but it only gets us so far. Even just being able to take a beat to consider the situation is a challenge when we’re overwhelmed with demands on it.  Read more »

Lessons From Singapore: The Economic Way Of Thinking

by Eric Feigenbaum

Professor Paul Heyne practiced what he preached.

I had the good fortune of having Professor Heyne’s Microeconomics class in my very first quarter at the University of Washington. He may have been tenured faculty whose own textbook we used, but he was a natural instructor who engaged students effortlessly. Which is no small feat when speaking to 400 mostly freshmen students in the university’s largest lecture hall.

Professor Heyne understood the “sage on the stage” model of education came with challenges at best. Still, that’s what the university demanded, and it was his job to make it work. So, he followed his own beliefs and teachings and offered students incentives for valuable participation – in the form of muffins and cookies.

Before every class, Professor Heyne picked up a dozen baked items from the café in the next building. He had Teaching Assistants running around the lecture hall with wireless microphones, getting them to students with raised hands. When someone offered a correct answer or insightful comment, they might hear, “Give that woman [or man] a cookie!” And he or she was rewarded like a dog getting a Milk Bone.

Everyone knew there was a limited supply of treats – so they were not only coveted, but reserved for high quality participation. Moreover, in true Pavlovian fashion, the opportunity to get a treat had most of what could easily have been a large, passive audience perked up and participating at 9:30 am.

Professor Heyne had an amazing way of teaching Microeconomics in a narrative, easy to understand way. He most consistently pointed out we are all making economic decisions every day, all the time – because economics isn’t about money, it’s about trade-offs, resources and maximizing our utility which could just as easily be sunshine and water as dollars and labor. Unsurprisingly, his book was called The Economic Way of Thinking. Read more »

Thursday, November 7, 2024

Shakespeare, the Starry Welkin, and Donald Trump

by William Benzon

A couple of weeks ago The New York Times ran an op-ed in which Drew Lictenberg, who is the artistic producer at Shakespeare Theatre Company, pointed out that there has been a drop in Shakespeare productions recently:

American Theatre magazine, which collects data from more than 500 theaters, publishes a list of the most performed plays each season. In 2023-24, there were 40 productions of Shakespeare’s plays. There were 52 in 2022-23 and 96 in 2018-19. Over the past five years, Shakespeare’s presence on American stages has fallen a staggering 58 percent. At many formerly Shakespeare-only theaters, the production of the Bard’s plays has dropped to as low as less than 20 percent of the repertory.

Why might American theaters be running away from Shakespeare?

After pointing out that Shakespeare productions can be costly, a problem exacerbated by Covid-19, Lictenberg points to political and cultural polarization:

Given contemporary political divisions, when issues such as a woman’s right to control her own body, the legacy of colonialism and anti-Black racism dominate headlines, theater producers may well be repeating historical patterns. There have been notably few productions in recent years of plays such as “The Taming of the Shrew,” “The Tempest” or “Othello.” They may well hit too close to home.

Why be concerned about this drop? Things change. If and when the polarization lessens, Shakespeare will come back. Won’t he? What if the polarization persists? Is it possible that Shakespeare will never come back? What would that mean?

I warn you, however, that I do not intend to answer those questions. I don’t see how that’s possible. Rather, I present them as a way to begin thinking about the position that Shakespeare occupies in the imagination of well, you know, us, a bunch of people oriented toward Western culture. Read more »

A Trans-Industrial Revolution

by Rafaël Newman

Last Saturday, November 2, 2024, at a collective atelier in Zurich’s Wiedikon neighborhood, I attended the launch of a new periodical. TETI Journal, available both online and in print form, is a publication presenting academic and artistic work in line with the aims of TETI Group, an “interdisciplinary research platform to investigate the changing materialities and imaginaries of our global societies.”

TETI Group, whose acronym stands for Textures and Experiences of Trans-Industriality, was founded in 2011 by the art historian Gabriel N. Gee, and is currently “animated” by Jose Caceres Mardones, Philippe Desarzens, Anne-Laure Franchette, Lori M. Gibbs, Stéphanie Gygax, Monica Ursina Jäger, Petra Koehle, Maria João Matos, Cora Piantoni, Bérénice Serra, Jan Van Oort, Caroline Wiedmer, and Gee himself. It includes TETI Press.

Transbordements, the most recent title from TETI Press

Gee coined the term trans-industriality in his 2008 doctoral dissertation, which examined the art scenes of industrialized northern England during the late 20th and early 21st centuries, in the wake of deindustrialization. As Gee writes in the introduction to the first issue of this new, spinoff vehicle, he was “intrigued by the social, but also cultural and political alternates that emerged to replace the former order, and by what appeared to be vivid connections to the industrial foundations of the modern age including the complex array of global entanglements associated with the dark side of modernity.” A complex array indeed, since for Gee, “the movement from industriality to post-industriality is not understood as being linear and synchronised, but rather, as multidirectional, ambiguous, leaning sideways and even backwards, in a constant metabolising process.” Read more »

Wednesday, November 6, 2024

Otto Neurath and the things that unite us

by Jeroen Bouterse

In 1919, Otto Neurath was on trial for high treason, for his role in the short-lived Munich soviet republic. One of the witnesses for the defense was the famous scholar Max Weber.

Neurath was a capable scholar with good ideas, a newspaper recorded Weber as saying; but recently he seemed to have somewhat lost his grip on reality.[1] That judgment would refer to Neurath’s economic thinking. In particular, his belief that a planned economy was viable, to an extent that the entire money economy could be abolished. This conviction, the seeds of which were planted by the economic thought of his father, and which was strengthened by his study and experience of war economies during the 1910s, would in fact be lifelong; Neurath would always be thinking of concrete ways to make co-operation and planning a reality.

His position as head of the ‘Central Economic Administration’ of Bavaria (to which, importantly, he had been installed before the communist coup) had given him an opportunity to realize his ambitious and radical ideas for economic “socialization”. In spite of warnings from his friends and his wife, he showed no inclination to let that slip just because he was now working for Bolsheviks. After the case, Weber would tell Neurath in a private letter that for all his good intentions he had lent his service to tyrants, and that his utterly frivolous and irresponsible plans risked discrediting socialism for a century.[2]

Neurath is now most famous not for this radical experiment, but for his role in the Vienna Circle and the unity of science movement. He also shares with Theseus the honor of having a philosophical parable named after him involving the piecemeal reconstruction of a boat. I myself started reading about him because of my hobby horse: perspectives on the distinction between sciences and humanities. This essay will in the end try to fit in his ideas on that with the rest of his thought, but all the other stuff is so interesting that it is hard to focus. Perhaps it is fitting in that regard to recount what historian of antiquity Eduard Meyer said about Neurath’s dissertation on ancient economic thought: very good yes, but rendered less appealing “by unnecessary deviations from the substance matter, by an inability to suppress any little idea”.[3] It happens to the best of us. But back to the main topic. Read more »

R*d N*ks for Kamala

by David Winner

I’m writing on Halloween, but by the time this is published the election will have passed, and we may even know the identity of our next president. Whether she’s won or lost, I wanted to suggest something that I think could have helped Kamala.

But first a little background. In the Charlottesville, Virginia, of my growing up (the 1970s) everyone appeared to be coded as either white or Black. I didn’t really understand distinctions between Jamaicans, Jews, Bengalis, Asians, Mexicans, Italians, West Africans. All I grasped was that basic racial binary.

While in later years I began to see my peculiar parents’ peculiar brand of racism, they did not express what I understood to be racist sentiments when I was a child. A fellow white kid at summer camp somewhere else in Virginia thought I was “liberal” because I did not hate Black people, but the first real prejudice I became aware of back home in Charlottesville was a pseudo beach club in high school at an artificial lake outside of town that would not admit “poofs.”

In my progressive hippie-dippy private high school, most students were white like me, and most came from middle-class or upper middle-class backgrounds: the children of professors, lawyers, businesspeople. Most of us did not have heavy southern accents or real southern identities. Every member of my core group of friends, my clique as it were, were from those similar backgrounds.

But not everyone in school was like us. There were students with southern accents and markedly different tastes. In clothes, in vehicles, in drugs, but most significantly in music. We moved quickly through classic rock (Henrix, The Who) into punk, new wave (The Clash, David Bowie, Gang of Four) whereas they liked more heavy metal and country rock.

I was not a member of the beach club, but my friends and I were not epithet-free. Our epithets involved class and culture rather than race, gender, religion, or sexuality.

We didn’t directly insult people by calling them r*d n*ks to their face, but we used their musical taste to stick that to them. Read more »

Tuesday, November 5, 2024

1800, 1828, 1860, 1876, 1896, 1928, 1932, 1948, 1980, 2000, and Today

by Akim Reinhardt

Voting Clip Art - Voting ImagesHistorians have spilled much ink analyzing and interpreting all of the U.S. presidential elections, dating back to George Washington’s first go in 1788. But a handful of contests get more attention than others. Some elections, besides being important for all the usual reasons, also provide insights into their eras’ zeitgeist, and proved to be tremendously influential far beyond the four years they were intended to frame.

2016 and 2020 were almost certainly among those elections, though academic historians have not yet written much about them (or even Obama’s 2008 election) because we typically wait a couple of decades before sensing that an event has passed from current or recent events into our distant domain. And anyway, it’s quite possible, even likely, that many future historians end up examining the three Trump elections of 2016, 2020, and 2024 as a bundled set.

But that still leaves about 55 elections historians have focused on and learned lessons from. So here on Election Day 2024, I offer brief summaries of select, momentous presidential elections and explain how they connect to this current Trumpist era and today’s electoral contest. Read more »

Profiles In Courage Part II: Robert A. Taft And The Nazis

by Michael Liss

The defendants at Nuremberg had a fair and extensive trial. No one can have any sympathy for these Nazi leaders who brought such agony upon the world. —Thomas E. Dewey, Speaking about comments made by his fellow Republican, Robert A. Taft

Political cartoon by Jim Berryman for the Washington Evening Star, ca. 1945. Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum.

Last month, I wrote about JFK’s Profiles in Courage and focused on one of the three Giants of the Senate, Daniel Webster, and his controversial and perhaps decisive role in the Compromise of 1850. This month, I want to talk about another of Kennedy’s picks, “Mr. Republican,” Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio, who led the conservative movement in the Senate for more than a decade.

The two men, Webster and Taft, couldn’t have been more different. Webster, perhaps the greatest orator in American history (Richard Hofstadter called him “the quasi-official rhapsodist of American nationalism”), had huge appetites, not all of them commendable. Robert Alphonso Taft was precise, restrained, and a stickler. A stickler for his conservative principles, a stickler on process and procedure, a stickler on policy issues such as isolationism (he was for it, comprehensively so) and the New Deal (positively, absolutely, unyieldingly no).

He was also possessed of a serious resume as both theorist and lawmaker in the Senate, a serious bloodline (his father, William Howard Taft, was President and then Chief Justice), and an even more serious ambition—the self-regard to think that he, too, should occupy the White House.

As you might imagine, Taft was not the only politician to think that of himself. It was an era of big challenges (The Great Depression and World War II among them) and big men. The biggest of all, FDR, already lived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and Taft sought the GOP nomination in 1940 to wrest it from him. Taft was in his prime, a talented legislator and bridge-builder to conservative Democratic Senators, but he was a fierce opponent of American intervention in Europe. Taft wasn’t alone in this—isolationism was closely associated with conservatism in the GOP, and two of his major rivals for the nomination, Michigan Senator Arthur Vandenberg and New York’s Governor Thomas E. Dewey, also were isolationists. Read more »

Monday, November 4, 2024

The Line: AI And The Future Of Personhood

by Mark R. DeLong

The cover of The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood by James Boyle shows a human head-shaped form in deep blue with a lattice of white lines connecting white dots, like a net or a network. A turquoise background with vertical white lines glows behind the featureless head. In the middle of the image, the title and the author's name are listed in horizontal yellow bars. The typeface is sans serif, with the title spelled in all capital letters.
Cover of The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood by James Boyle. The MIT Press and the Duke University TOME program have released the book using a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA license. The book is free to download and to reissue, augment, or alter following the license requirements. It can be downloaded here: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/15408.001.0001.

Duke law professor James Boyle said an article on AI personhood gave him some trouble. When he circulated it over a decade ago, he recalled, “Most of the law professors and judges who read it were polite enough to say the arguments were thought provoking, but they clearly thought the topic was the purest kind of science fiction, idle speculation devoid of any practical implication in our lifetimes.” Written in 2010, the article, “Endowed by Their Creator?: The Future of Constitutional Personhood,” made its way online in March 2011 and appeared in print later that year. Now, thirteen years later, Boyle’s “science fiction” of personhood has shed enough fiction and fantasy to become worryingly plausible, and Boyle has refined and expanded his ideas in that 2011 article into a new thoughtful and compelling book.

In the garb of Large Language Models and Deep Learning, Artificial Intelligence has shocked us with their uncanny fluency, even though we “know” that under the hood the sentences come from clanky computerized mechanisms, a twenty-first century version of the Mechanical Turk. ChatGPT’s language displays only the utterance of a “stochastic parrot,” to use Emily Bender’s label. Yet, despite knowing the absence of a GPT’ed self or computerized consciousness, we can’t help but be amazed or even a tad threatened when an amiable ChatGPT, Gemini, or other chatbot responds to our “prompt” with (mostly) clear prose. We might even fantasize that there’s a person in there, somewhere.

Boyle’s new book, The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood (The MIT Press, 2024) forecasts contours of arguments, both legal and moral, that are likely to trace new boundaries of personhood. “There is a line,” he writes in his introduction. “It is a line that separates persons—entities with moral and legal rights—from nonpersons, things, animals, machines—stuff we can buy, sell, or destroy. In moral and legal terms, it is the line between subject and object.”

The line, Boyle claims, will be redrawn. Freshly, probably incessantly, argued. Messily plotted and retraced. Read more »

My Lunch with Donald Sutherland

by Terese Svoboda

Donald Sutherland was a connoisseur of poetry. In the 80s I knew poetry-quoting doyennes from the glittering parties the Academy of American Poets threw as well as the Sudanese who recited their histories in song, but mostly I knew poets obsessed with competing with dead ones, with an eye toward their next book. Poets generally love poetry the way auto mechanics love cars. They don’t luxuriate in the front seat, or take long winding car trips through the Berkshires, they make sure the ignition catches and go on to the next one. Hearing Sutherland recite poetry you heard the Stanislavski method of poetry-recitation, an oral delivery straight from the mind as well as the mouth. Sutherland said he was manipulated by words, not as a ventriloquist but in the relationship between feeling and meaning. Likewise, after numerous tussles with directors Fellini and Preminger and Bertolucci – he even tried to get Robert Altman fired from M.A.S.H. – he decided he was merely the director’s vehicle. Poetry directed him.

I was newly blonde when I flew out to LA to convince him to be the host of Voices & Visions, a PBS series on American poetry that I was producing. The dye job wasn’t planned. The proto-reality TV show Real People had put up a Free Haircut sign in Soho and like any poet, I was attracted to the Free.  All I had to do for the series was transform from a mousy brown thirty-year-old to a hot blonde punk in a red jumpsuit. No problem. I did a bit of strutting around on the set, and the program was ready for reruns. Unbeknownst to me, the executive director had been working his Canadian connection, the daughter of media theorist Marshall McLuhan, who knew Donald Sutherland and his proclivity toward poetry. Lunch had already been scheduled.

Sutherland had the anthology of baseball poetry we’d sent to him on his desk, baseball being his only other passion outside of acting. Veteran of nearly a hundred movies by that time, he’d recently stunned audiences with his performance in Ordinary People. Did I dare to mention my brush with Real People? All I remember of the business part of that first hour was the way he quoted Auden while skating his long fingers over his desk – not as an arpeggio of show-offy emphasis but unconsciously following the cadence. I was impressed. He needn’t have auditioned – if that’s what it was – because we were barely paying scale. He called in his manager, they thought something could be done, and he suggested lunch. After arguing with his manager about what car to take, he appeared outside his office at the wheel of a beautiful white convertible. The manager held the door for me, I got in – and we drove across the street. Ah, Hollywood. Read more »