Enjoying the view from Limbo
The world may already have ended: I just noticed that Noam Chomsky of all people has publicly stated something aligned with what I myself was thinking during my morning walk today. Specifically, he commented about a year ago that AI systems such as ChatGPT are “basically high-tech plagiarism. It’s a system that…accesses an astronomical amount of data and finds regularities and strings them...
The other day, a serious student who is reading Brave New World wrote with some musings and questions inspired by the World Controller’s explanation, in one of the later chapters, of the World State’s reasons for prohibiting all access to the great art and thought of the past. I reproduce her main questions (in italics) and my replies, below, with only a few...
To treat what we moderns call “culture” as an absolute — as we do when we speak of multiculturalism or cultural appropriation — is to reduce humanity as a species to its social conventions and habits, which means to deny the existence of any underlying human nature, which nature may, under varying conditions, manifest itself in alternative conventions and habits. In other words,...
In this era of popular psychological pseudoscience, which systematically mistakes context for causality, it is common to hear laments about men who beat their wives “because” their fathers beat their mothers, or children with drug-addicted parents who “inevitably” succumb to the habit themselves. It is certainly true that context, particularly intimate human context, influences character development and the relative visibility of available options,...
You do not have to like or choose any of them. You can dislike, distrust, and reject them all. It is not your duty to choose. It is your duty to think. “Opinion is for the many, truth for the few. Therefore, the truth seeker has an obligation not to publicly corrupt or undermine the opinions on which society depends.” This principle or...
One of the great falsehoods of late modernity is that our political structures are so ingeniously self-renewing and self-correcting that the days of the just revolution are over. This position is not only untrue, but likely an indication of devious motives on the part of those who maintain and seek to perpetuate it. For political leaders to say, as President Biden and others...
Do not attempt to live in ordinary ways — to “carry on with your life as well as possible” — during times of crisis and decline. When oppression is ascendant, liberation naturally becomes, or ought to become, the central theme of practical life. If it does not, then you are living in detachment from your true situation, which is never advisable and may...
The philosopher eschews the crowd, knowing that neither will his lone, strange voice be heard above the crowd’s incessant and familiar din, nor will his pointed questions and logical complexities penetrate minds caked in the mire of the tribe’s roiling certainties. This has been axiomatic among thinkers from the earliest times: The crowd is the enemy of thought, and hence of conversation, and...
The true individual is not he who speaks with the voice of his generation, including his generation’s officially sanctioned “outsiders club,” but rather he who speaks against his generation, and especially against the officially sanctioned outsiders club. To stand with one’s group requires neither courage nor thought. To stand against one’s group requires substantial quantities of both. The true visionary is not he...
Every society, without exception, tends to harden its founding presuppositions and hopes into a set of stated and unstated rules for living. Gradually, the great character and thought needed to bring a society into being give way to the forced teaching and rote learning of the simplified and simplifying rules deemed necessary to preserve that society. And this in turn reduces maturation to...
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