Faith, hope, gratitude, decency: James Earl Carter, 1924-2024

Has there been a more admirable, estimable, and under-valued public figure in our time than Jimmy Carter? Every semester, I talk about him in class as the anti-Machiavelli (and obviously the anti-Trump).

"A strong nation, like a strong person, can afford to be gentle, firm, thoughtful, and restrained. It can to extend a helping hand to others. It is a weak nation, like a weak person, that must behave with bluster and boasting and rashness and other signs of insecurity." [HCR]

If this decency and quiet strength came from his enduring faith, a Jamesian pragmatic pluralist must applaud its value for living. Fruits, not roots. “I found I was absolutely, completely at ease about death. I’m going to live again… Faith in something is an inducement not to dormancy but to action.”

And yet, I have to say I’m even more impressed by those whose decency flows not from belief in everlasting life but from recognition of its finitude. That’s the value, to me, of a humanistic sensibility. 

My form of faith, I’ve been told. 

I’m not sure faith is the right word, though. I prefer hope. And gratitude. “What a precious privilege, to be alive…”

We are, as Dawkins said, lucky to get to die. We got to live. The great challenge is to live well. Jimmy did.

I think he had plenty of hope and gratitude too. Whatever the deepest roots of his exemplary life, its fruits will continue to inspire. We need to hold that example before us in the years just ahead. We're going to need it.

The fragment novel

"...William Gass complained about the effects of the American penchant for simplicity on the country’s writing, so often reduced to the meat and potatoes of straightforward storytelling. In the contemporary fragment novel, the inverse has occurred. What a plainly narrated adventure was to Gass’s pioneers, a performance of profundity is to the fragment novelist. Oracularities, the more muddled and gently elegiac the better, are offered as evidence of sophistication. “Can you think of writing as a gaze?” the narrator of Drifts asks her students. “Maybe writing was about being visible when I felt invisible,” she reflects later. “Or maybe writing was about becoming invisible again after having become too visible. Maybe it was both. I wasn’t sure anymore.” Zambreno comes close to clarifying that her method hinges on her resistance to clarity—though of course the method itself rebuffs clarification. “One of the notes I take that spring: ‘vagueness.’ Another: ‘signs,’” she writes. Maybe what this means is that vagueness is a sign of poignance, but then it is not altogether clear what it means. After all, why think when you can mimic thinking? And why write a novel when you can meditate on the difficulty of writing a novel? Fragment novels are in effect reflections on novels that, by their own admission, their authors never end up finishing: “What prevents me from writing the book?” asks the protagonist of Drifts. “The heat, the dog, the day, air-conditioning, desiring to exist in the present tense,” and so on and on. It is less a novel than a gesture at a novel. At first glance, the fragment novel’s structural equivocations about how its pieces hang together and substantive equivocations about all its internal architecture appear antithetical to two of the declutterer’s foremost tics: her allergy to euphemism and her request that everything be stashed in its proper place. But in fact the novel’s studied evasiveness is the product of its commitment to tabling wants and honoring needs, in accordance with the minimalist’s most cherished directive. There is no plot, no food, no friends, and very little dialogue. Perhaps the fragment novel is not in fact constructed by way of removal, but it might as well be, for it is no more than an accumulation of negations."

"All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess": https://a.co/caQ5YMc

Mediation 2.0: “the User Experience”

Still finding enough non-toxicity on Threads to exclude my current feed from the general "social media"-bashing that's become fashionable lately. Deleting "X" was therapeutic. But this has my attention (it would have John Lachs's attention too):

"…Much of what passes for authentic experience today is vicarious and virtual. 

There was no deliberate effort to incentivize this way of living, although many individuals and companies have profited from our growing enthusiasm for ever more mediated experiences. It is one of the unintended consequences of the bargain we struck in embracing the Internet, a consequence few wanted to contend with at the beginning because it seemed unduly pessimistic. Besides, the new online world was fun. It still is. 

But what began as a slow bleed of reality on the edges has now become a culture-wide destabilizing force. Reality has competition, from both augmented and alternative forms. The charm of Second Life, an early alternative online world, has given way to the vastly more ambitious, live-your-life-entirely-online ambitions of the Metaverse or the implant-the-Internet-in-your-brain proposals of Elon Musk's Neuralink. 

In these new worlds, we are Users, not individuals. We are meant to prefer these engineered User Experiences to human reality. This book argues that we arrived here by allowing valuable human experiences to wither or die, sometimes intentionally and sometimes unintentionally. Our continued unwillingness to account for what has been lost won't lead to a world of technology-enabled progress; rather, this inability to grapple with the extinction of fundamental human experiences creates a world where our sense of shared reality and purpose is further frayed, and where a growing distrust of human judgment will further polarize our culture and politics. Technological change of the sort we have experienced in the last twenty years has not ushered in either greater social stability or moral evolution. In fact, many of our sophisticated technological inventions and platforms have been engineered to bring out the worst of human nature. The guiding spirit of Instagram isn't Rumi. It's Hobbes. 

What kind of person is formed in an increasingly digitized, mediated, hyperconnected, surveilled, and algorithmically governed world? What do we gain and what do we lose when we no longer talk about the Human Condition, but rather the User Experience? 

The human condition is embodied, recognizes its fragility, frequently toggles between the mediated and unmediated, requires private spaces, and is finite. By contrast, the User Experience is disembodied and digital, it is trackable and databased and usually always mediated. It lacks privacy and promises no limits—even after death, when, as several new technologies promise, our digital remnants can be gathered and engineered into posthumous chatbots to comfort our grieving family members…"

— The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World by Christine Rosen
https://a.co/encs4XN

Defending experience against 'philosophy'

 

Feeling It Out

Alice Gregory’s article on the philosopher L. A. Paul and her circle of oddly amusing philosophers was itself amusing and instructive (“Note to Selves,” December 9th). A great deal of what passes for the pursuit of wisdom in academia these days is, indeed, esoteric, technical, and, finally, irrelevant. But it should be noted that Professor Paul is hardly a pioneer in asserting, however “hesitantly,” that “experience has a kind of value” and that philosophy ought to be less “detached from ordinary life.” William James and the pragmatists said it long ago. In 1900, James, immersed in preparing lectures that would become “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” described the “problem” he set himself as “to defend (against all the prejudices of my ‘class’) ‘experience’ against ‘philosophy’ as being the real backbone of the world’s religious life.”

Phil Oliver
Associate Professor
Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies
Middle Tennessee State University
Nashville, Tenn.

The New Yorker 

For the record, though, my own experience remains the backbone of my atheistic humanism.

He’d be 96 today

And the little guy's catching up.

James C. Oliver, 1928-2008

James P. Oliver, 1957-

The light will win

Though possibly not in the present.

This was a good and timely holiday read.

"What had Bruno said about the future? When we face our need to control it, we are better able to resist that need, and to live in the present.

I stopped reading news articles. I stopped watching videos. My new rule about drinking had been an attempt to rid myself of a crippling attachment. The internet was yet another crippling attachment, and so I banned it.

I walked for hours each afternoon on knobby paths along the cliffs above the sea. I walked to a lighthouse and watched its magnificent crystal flash and turn.

There’s that old myth about the humble lighthouse and the giant battleship. The ship has mistaken the lighthouse for a boat, a little pissant boat that better get out of its way. The captain of the battleship comes on the radio, to command the little boat to move, a boat that he doesn’t understand is a lighthouse on a rock. The captain believes he is in a power struggle with the thing in his path and that the more forceful and arrogant he is, the more likely it will yield. He is not wrong that he is engaged in a struggle for dominance. He’s only wrong that he’ll win." Creation Lake: A Novel by Rachel Kushner

What a way to go

"In the bedroom of his Parisian home, Bergson had been in a coma for twelve hours. Those who witnessed his agony sensed that the end was near when, all of a sudden, the illustrious philosopher began to speak. He gave a lecture, a philosophy lecture, for an hour. He pronounced the words very distinctly. His sentences were clear. His lucidity overwhelmed those who listened to him. And then he said, “Gentlemen, it is five o’clock. Class is over.” And he expired."

"Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People" by Emily Herring: https://a.co/gtbzIIx

a good lamp

"…Ours is a multifarious culture, peopled by many kinds of readers and many more kinds of non-readers, and that's exactly as it should be in a big, loud, messy democracy. Some of y'all are out there taking heart from cozy mysteries or Victorian novels or Mary Oliver's poems. Some of you are consoled by seed catalogs or travel brochures or Americana records or old Peanuts comic strips. Maybe you're one who needs them all, in endless combinations, just to get through these dark nights.

…if you have not yet found a source of solace that makes the long winter nights feel shorter, or at least not quite so dark, then turn off the machines and set your chair next to a good lamp…

Margaret Renkl

http://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/16/opinion/reading-novellas-short-novels.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Sleep on it: Khan on the unconscious and AI

Our brains may have more in common with large language models than we may want to believe.

"...Artificial intelligence is not human, no matter how much it approximates being human. Regardless of how well it conveys intelligence, personality, and creativity, it is not a sentient, perceiving being.

Yet it is important to appreciate that much of the work we credit to our brain isn’t really sentient or part of our perception. Most of our brain’s activity is subconscious, including what we would often consider creativity. Any artist will tell you they often feel a flash of insight that leads to the creative act.

Similarly, how many times have you been told to “sleep on the problem”? I myself am a master of this art. In college, when I faced seemingly intractable math problems, I would engage with them for a few minutes and then delegate them to my subconscious. I would tell my brain to essentially come up with the answers and tell “me” when it was done. Most of the time, I had the answers by the next morning without having to consciously struggle with them. I’m not alone in doing this. Many people find it a useful way to approach difficult problems.

I now do the same thing when I face a tough problem while leading Khan Academy. I have faith that my brain, or someone else’s, will come up with a creative solution by morning. What are our brains doing subconsciously while our consciousness waits for an answer? Clearly, when you “sleep on a problem,” some part of your brain continues to work even though “you” aren’t aware of it. Neurons activate, which then activate other neurons depending on the strength of the synapses between them. This happens trillions of times overnight, a process mechanically analogous to what happens in a large language model. When a plausible solution presents itself, the subconscious then surfaces it to the conscious as a flash of insight.

Meditation gives us direct experience with this. Close your eyes for a few minutes and observe your own thoughts. They really begin to feel very much like the output of a large language model—or several competing models—whose latest output gets fed as input for the next iteration of output. With a bit of practice, your conscious mind can temporarily disassociate itself from these thoughts until you experience stillness or “no thought.” You’ll begin to see your thoughts for what they are and aren’t. They aren’t you.

Think about a flow state that most experts in their craft can attain after the often-noted ten thousand hours of practice (which is analogous to pretraining for generative AI models). They will often say that their greatest creativity or actions occur when they do not allow themselves to be conscious of what they are doing. The best way to ruin their performance, or creativity, is to consciously think about what is happening. Great orators will tell you that it feels like their brain is doing the talking while their conscious selves are just there to observe the output. After making thousands of videos, I often feel this way when I press record. I won’t claim that what experts’ well-trained brains are doing when they create is identical to what large language models do, but it seems awfully similar."

"Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That's a Good Thing)" by Salman Khan: https://a.co/i8LPsmB

Against specialisation

Academic philosophers these days don't tend to think like young Bergson.

"The young Bergson's aversion to specialisation had started at some point in the late 1870s, when he discovered that, unlike other academic disciplines, philosophy was not limited to a specific object but opened up an infinity of theoretical avenues. It represented an opportunity to encompass all areas of knowledge, to look at the biggest, most important problems, to embrace every aspect of reality in one sweeping gesture. By choosing philosophy, he would not have to abandon any of his interests but could keep them all under investigation. Conceivably, Bergson had also realised in that moment that mathematical problems, though fascinating, were too narrow for his intellectual ambitions. By specialising as a mathematician, he would be willingly cutting himself off from whole areas of human knowledge, whereas, as a philosopher, the entirety of human knowledge would be his subject matter."

— Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People by Emily Herring

https://a.co/d5qCnO6

The unrestricted circle of humanity

Not many philosophers enter that circle anymore. 

There was indeed something special about the way the professor spoke. He held as a principle that “there is no philosophical idea, however profound or subtle, that cannot and should not be expressed in everyday language,” and that philosophers should “not write for a restricted circle of initiates; they write for humanity in general.” --Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People by Emily Herring: https://a.co/2HY2Lu3

Serious

"It is a serious thing just to be alive on this fresh morning in this broken world." —Mary Oliver, Invitation

English heritage

That ubiquitous internet attribution to Ben Franklin of the line that beer is proof that God loves us is surely apocryphal.

"His (London) colleagues nicknamed him the Water-American because he refused to partake in the ubiquitous beer drinking: a pint before breakfast, with breakfast, after breakfast, with the midday meal, at six, and a last one before bed. (Franklin preferred Madeira.) Franklin also prided himself on healthy habits…"

— The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore by Evan Friss

The point of trying

Meliorists know: the point is to try.

"…In the aftermath of an election that will return a climate denier to the White House and a climate-denying party to control of Congress, it sometimes seems impossible to keep going. Every effort feels Sisyphean. Any possible change for the better is about to be demolished by the outrageously unqualified industry toadies whom Donald Trump has named to run the agencies that protect our wilderness, our air, our water. Our future.

More and more I find it hard not to ask the question I have spent my adult life avoiding: What is the point of even trying?

Recently I read an old essay by the Kentucky author and farmer Wendell Berry, who has been writing for more than six decades about the need to heal the separation between human beings and the natural world. In his essay "A Poem of Difficult Hope," which appears in his book "What Are People For," Mr. Berry argues that the success of any protest should not be measured by whether it changes the world in the way we hope it will.

'Much protest is naïve; it expects quick, visible improvement and despairs and gives up when such improvement does not come," he wrote in 1990. "If protest depended on success, there would be little protest of any durability or significance. History simply affords too little evidence that anyone's individual protest is of any use. Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one's own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.'

At my lowest, I have never entirely given up my faith that good people working together can change the world for the better. When I have been downhearted in the past, I have always explained to myself that I am not alone in my efforts to cultivate change — by writing, by planting, by loving the living world in every way I can find to love it. Individual efforts gather momentum through the individual efforts of others.

Men in power did not wake up one morning and decide to give women the vote. White Southerners did not wake up one morning and decide to dismantle Jim Crow. Those things happened, if imperfectly and still incompletely, because hundreds of thousands of people worked together for years to make them happen.

But where preserving biodiversity is concerned, we don’t have years. Where stabilizing the climate is concerned, we don’t have years. Once a species becomes extinct, it remains extinct forever. Once the climate hits an irreversible tipping point, it will tip. In that context, the Republican takeover of Washington is a catastrophe that is hard to reconcile with a plan to plant more flowers and install more nest boxes.

So I am taking comfort from Wendell Berry, who has lived a life of ceaseless protest against the desecration of the earth and its creatures (most recently in an essay for The Christian Century called “Against Killing Children”). Even at 90, he is not asking himself what the point is...."

—Margaret Renkl, How to Keep Your Own Soul Safe in the Dark

Good mornings

Cutting back on social media, but not on sunrises and morning saunters...

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The Surprising Allure of Ignorance

"…Socrates maintained that there is no shame in being wrong, just in doing wrong. He was right. But it's not the way we initially feel, especially when someone else exposes our errors…"

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/02/opinion/ignorance-knowledge-critical-thinking.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Better times

Moving beyond the end…

"No wonder there is no lack of prophets who prophesy the early eclipse of our civilization. I am not one of these pessimists; I believe that better times are coming."

— The World As I See It (1934) by Albert Einstein
https://a.co/f9qt4Pe