All good things

The retreat was short and sweet.

https://bsky.app/profile/osopher.bsky.social/post/3lvxsnnkmy224

In retreat

My wife is hosting a health-oriented retreat this weekend, so the dogs and I are decamping to a remote retreat of our own: a cabin to the east aptly dubbed The Doghouse. (I've been in the proverbial doghouse before, but never this one... and never in the literal company of dogs.)

It's a good time to retreat and reflect, with the new school year looming and an important personal milestone just etched. Two years ago today I signed on to a site called This Naked Mind and posted this:

I've been a bourbon-and-a beer-a-day drinker for decades, though never to an extent I'd consider incapacitating or debilitating; and I've enjoyed the aesthetic experience (see Walker Percy's essay "Bourbon").

But lately I've had sleep issues and a curiosity about what drinking might have to do with that, and with my overall health and vitality. I just came across "The Alcohol Experiment" and "This Naked Mind," and Annie Grace seems to be speaking to me.

So I've been bourbon-free for a week, and today I'm letting go of beer. Looking forward to seeing where this takes me in the next month.

Two years ago I went 60+ days without alcohol, but only because my back surgeon ordered it. This time I'm hoping a shift of intention will make the total experience feel less like a deprivation and more like an experiment.

I have friends who swear by AA and its talk of submission to a "higher power"... but they also say "higher power" is open to interpretation. I'm choosing to interpret it as meaning a present and supportive community of peers eager to help one another face the challenge of living alcohol-free.

Good luck to us all!

Well, two years on I can report that my initial month's experiment in suspending that long, too-comfortable old habit has been a lasting success. I've replaced the old desire for what Percy called "the little explosion of Kentucky U.S.A. sunshine in the cavity of the nasopharynx and the hot bosky bite of Tennessee summertime" with the far better desire for optimal health, clarity, and self-possession. The habitual, un-reflective ingestion of a toxic substance does not conduce to those ends. I'm happier and better for the change. 

Retreating from a bad habit is forward movement. That's something to reflect on.

Against bullying

[On Substack]

TR meant something positive by "Bully!" Wouldn't it be nice to reclaim that sense of it? But we'll have to dispatch the other kind first.

I've participated as a faculty member on many MALA (Master of Liberal Arts) capstone project defenses at my school over the years, none so gratifying as yesterday's by the 70-something grad who collaborated with her son (illustrator) and grandson (trial audience) in producing a children's book about bullying. She'd experienced it her entire life, she said, from siblings to classmates (she was one of the first to integrate Murfreesboro's high school in the '60s) to coworkers and acquaintances. 

She showed us a video clip of her reading the manuscript to her four-year-old grandson. He got the message. How sad, that so many parents fail to take the time with their children to have that conversation and awaken that capacity for empathy.  How disappointing, that so many adults lately (not to mention Elon) speak of empathy as a thing to shun.*

The other elephant in the room, of course, was the Bully-in-Chief in Washington. Nobody had to mention him, his presence pervades this moment like a plague.

The good news, I think, is that kindness and fellow-feeling exists in posse in most young human hearts. Just as the South Pacific song said, you have to be carefully taught to hate... and to bully and demean others. Thus can it be un-taught, and replaced by the better lesson-the one reflecting our better angels, the one we learned of yesterday. 

Way to go, Shirley, I hope your book finds many receptive readers and listeners. Let's all be done with bullies.

Allure of the Mean Friend:This American Life... Teens Guilty of Bullying Could Lose Drivers’ Licenses Under Tennessee Law

*For the record: Paul Bloom repudiates the Muskian interpretation of "Against Empathy":

- Paul Bloom

Read on Substack

Wendell Berry

It's the birthday of Wendell Berry, born in Port Royal, Kentucky (1934). He grew up on farmland that had belonged to his family since 1803. All his great-grandparents and grandparents had lived and farmed in the area. As a boy, he was taught by his grandfather how to work a farm with nothing but a plow and a team of mules, no mechanized sprinkler systems or tractors.

Berry had an uncle he described as "an inspired tinkerer with broken gadgetry and furniture … and a teller of wonderful bedtime stories." His uncle kept a ramshackle cabin up in the woods, and Berry often went up there as a kid to get away from everything. It was in that cabin that he first read the work of Henry David Thoreau, and where he first fell in love with poetry.

He went to a military academy for high school and then on to college and to graduate school. He lived in California and Italy and New York City. But through all those years, he never stopped thinking about the place where he grew up, and he often went back to his uncle's old cabin. He finally decided to move back to the area permanently. Most of his city friends thought he was crazy, but he bought a small farm in his hometown, which still had a population of only a hundred or so people, and he began farming it the way his grandfather had taught him, without any machines.

He grew squash, corn, and tomatoes, and he got a flock of sheep, a milk cow, and some horses. And he wrote about his experiences as a farmer in more than 40 books of poetry, fiction, and essays. His collections of poetry include The Farm (1995) and A Timbered Choir (1998). But he's best known for his essays in books such as The Gift of Good Land (1981), What Are People For? (1990), and Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000).

https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio/the-writers-almanac-for-tuesday-august-5-2025/

A.I. Is Shedding Enlightenment Values

A historian sees the dangerous parallels between artificial intelligence and the Enlightenment.

...It is here, with this question of engagement, that the comparison between the Enlightenment and A.I.’s supposed “second Enlightenment” breaks down and reveals something important about the latter’s limits and dangers. When readers interact imaginatively with a book, they are still following the book’s lead, attempting to answer the book’s questions, responding to the book’s challenges and therefore putting their own convictions at risk.

When we interact with A.I., on the other hand, it is we who are driving the conversation. We formulate the questions, we drive the inquiry according to our own interests and we search, all too often, for answers that simply reinforce what we already think we know. In my own interactions with ChatGPT, it has often responded, with patently insincere flattery, “That’s a great question.” It has never responded, “That’s the wrong question.” It has never challenged my moral convictions or asked me to justify myself.

And why should it? It is, after all, a commercial internet product. And such products generate profit by giving users more of what they have already shown an appetite for, whether it is funny cat videos, instructions on how to fix small appliances or lectures on Enlightenment philosophy. If I wanted ChatGPT to challenge my convictions, I could of course ask it to do so — but I would have to ask. It follows my lead, not the reverse.

By its nature, A.I. responds to almost any query in a manner that is spookily lucid and easy to follow — one might say almost intellectually predigested. For most ordinary uses, this clarity is entirely welcome. But Enlightenment authors understood the importance of having readers grapple with a text. Many of their greatest works came in the form of enigmatic novels, dialogues presenting opposing points of view or philosophical parables abounding in puzzles and paradoxes. Unlike the velvety smooth syntheses provided by A.I., these works forced readers to develop their judgment and come to their own conclusions.

In short, A.I. can bring us useful information, instruction, assistance, entertainment and even comfort. What it cannot bring us is Enlightenment. In fact, it may help drive us further away from Enlightenment than ever.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/02/opinion/artificial-intelligence-enlightenment.html?unlocked_article_code=1.bk8.XmNh.Witef6iO7cfb∣=em-share

The general’s greatest conquest

Grant's battlefield heroism was matched by the courage to complete his memoirs, pain and pressure be damned, as cancer closed in and the light dimmed. When he finished writing,
he was done.

Equally impressive was his winning battle against alcohol. Twain understood:

"Mark Twain had struggled with similar cravings for alcohol and tobacco. When they discussed the subject, Grant mentioned that although doctors had urged him to sip whiskey or champagne, he could no longer abide the taste of liquor. Twain pondered this statement long and hard. "Had he made a conquest so complete that even the taste of liquor was become an offense?" he wondered. "Or was he so sore over what had been said about his habit that he wanted to persuade others & likewise himself that he hadn't ever even had any taste for it." 95 Similarly, when Grant told Twain that, at the doctors' behest, he had been restricted to one cigar daily, he claimed to have lost the desire to smoke it. "I could understand that feeling," Twain later proclaimed. "He had set out to conquer not the habit but the inclination—the desire. He had gone at the root, not the trunk." 96 Although Twain hated puritanical killjoys who robbed life of its small pleasurable vices, he respected abstinence based on an absence of desire."

— Grant by Ron Chernow
https://a.co/1C1oYrI