Tag: thoreau

We Need the Liberal Arts to Keep Us from Being Tools of Our Tools

Posted on by Scott Samuelson

by Scott Samuelson

But lo! men have become the tools of their tools. —Henry David Thoreau

In a short article that sketches the kind of curriculum I have in mind, Helen Vendler (seen here with Seamus Heaney) says, “The natural ways into reading are reading aloud, listening, singing, dancing, reciting, memorizing, performing, retelling what one has read, conversing with others about what has been read, and reading silently.”

The other day I was talking to some university students, and I asked them to what extent AI could be used to do their required coursework. Would it be possible for ChatGPT to graduate from their university? One of them piped up, “I’m pretty sure ChatGPT has already graduated from our university!” All chuckled darkly in agreement. It was disturbing.

Workers experience anxiety about the extent to which AI will make their jobs yet more precarious. Because students are relentlessly conditioned by our culture to see their education as a pathway to a job, they’re suffering an acute case of this anxiety. Are they taking on debt for jobs that won’t even exist by the time they graduate? Even if their chosen profession does hold on, will the knowledge and skills they’ve been required to learn be the exact chunk of the job that gets offloaded onto AI? Are they being asked to do tasks that AI can do so that they can be replaced by AI?

This crisis presents an opportunity to defend and even advance liberal arts education. It’s increasingly obvious to those who give any thought to the matter that students need to learn to think for themselves, not just jump through hoops that AI can jump through faster and better than they can. The trick is convincing administrators, parents, and students that the best way of getting an education in independent and creative thinking is through the study of robust subjects like literature, math, science, history, and philosophy.

But if we really face up to the implications of this crisis, I think that we need to do more than advocate for the value of the liberal arts as they now stand. The liberal arts have traditionally been what help us to think for ourselves rather than be tools of the powerful. We need a refreshed conception of the liberal arts to keep us from being tools of our tools. (More precisely, we need an education that keeps us from being tools of the people who control our tools even as they too are controlled by the tools.) To put the matter positively, we need an education for ardor and empowerment in thinking, making, and doing. Read more »

Monday, April 3, 2017

Rebecca Solnit, Henry Thoreau, and Huckleberries

Posted on by Evan Edwards

by Evan Edwards

Huckleberry

In her article, “The Thoreau Problem,” Rebecca Solnit begins by drawing our attention to the mythical place that huckleberries play in Thoreau’s writing. In his two most famous texts — Walden and “Civil Disobedience” — Thoreau recounts the story of being taken by the authorities for not paying a tax that would go toward paying for the Mexican-American war. For Thoreau, this war was unjust not because it was an act of violence, as is commonly believed, but because he thought it was little more than a thinly veiled attempt on the part of the American government to take land that rightfully belonged to another nation. His resistance to the war was then similar to his resistance to slavery and to the genocide of native Americans: these things constituted an infringement on the right to self-determination, and further that this infringement was “the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool.” Thoreau writes, in both Walden and “Civil Disobedience,” that when he was released from jail, he went straight to the huckleberry field “to get [his] dinner…on Fair-Haven Hill.” Solnit calls our attention to this repeated story to pose the following question: why did Thoreau consider “the conjunction of prisons and berry parties, of the landscape of incarceration and of pastoral pleasure” significant?

This question seems to me to have two separate but interrelated parts. First, we might want to ask why Thoreau thought to go to the huckleberry field after a night of incarceration in the first place. If you have ever spent a night (or longer) in jail, you will know that such an experience is not pleasant, it is dehumanizing, terrifying, and demoralizing. After such an experience, we might more readily expect Thoreau to go home, take a shower, sleep, or seek out a friend. That he chooses to, almost nonchalantly, go to a huckleberry field should give us moment to pause and consider the significance of this decision. Second, we might want to ask why Thoreau thought to tell us that he went to the huckleberry field after being in jail. He is a deliberate writer—he went through seven full drafts in nearly ten years in the process of writing Walden, and each draft shows an increasing precision in his choice of words, concepts, and structure—and so the choice to include this detail in his account is significant. The fact that he does not end his account of incarceration with his release suggests that for him, there is something significant about placing the experience of being in jail alongside the experience of going “a’huckleberrying.”

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Monday, September 26, 2016

Frugality, simplicity, and environmentalism

Posted on by Emrys Westacott

by Emrys Westacott

Many people today are drawn toward the ideals, values, and lifestyles that fall under the broad concept of “simple living.” ImgresDownsizing, downshifting, embracing radical frugality, building and living in “tiny houses,” going back to the land, growing one's own food, choosing greater self-sufficiency over consumerism, and seeking to preserve or revive traditional crafts: these are all part of this trend. So, too, is the Slow movement, a general term for the various ways in which people seek to combat the frenetic pace of modern life. The movement includes Slow Food, Slow Cities, Slow Sex (all originating in Italy), the Sloth Club (Japan), the Society for the Deceleration of Time (Austria), and the Long Now Foundation.[1]

According to some, the millennial generation (roughly those born between 1980 and 2000) are helping to boost this trend Compared to their elders, they are less interested in home ownership, happy to share cars rather than buy them, and savvy at using technology to save money and keep things simple through using companies like Zipcar (transport) Airbnb (accommodation), and thredUP (clothes).

A lot of people live frugally out of necessity, of course. But there are also philosophical arguments in favor of simple living. In a venerable tradition stretching that goes back to ancient thinkers like the Buddha, Socrates, and Epicurus, two lines of argument have been especially prominent.

1. Simple living is associated with moral virtue. E.g. It keeps us physically and spiritually pure, fosters traits like resilience and independence, cultivates sound values, and is typically viewed as a sign of integrity (think Gandhi).

2. Simple living is the surest path to happiness. E.g. It helps us be content with what we have, enhances our enjoyment of simple pleasures, allows us more leisure time by enabling us to work less, keeps us closer to nature, and generally promotes peace of mind.

In recent times an additional reason for embracing simplicity has come to the fore: namely, the environmentalist argument.

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