Gnosticism rears its head
As I delved into the world of psychology and the behavioral sciences, I encountered a hostility to the physical body that resembled that of the ancient Gnostics. Utopian ideas about technology often animate such hostility. One very common narrative says that our materiality represents a type of fall from which our machines can liberate us. The most obvious manifestation of this Gnostic-like hostility toward the body is the Silicon Valley futurists working on the next phase of human evolution, one in which machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, and in the process liberate us from the constraints of an embodied existence.
Robin Phillips and Stephen De Young, Rediscovering the Goodness of Creation: A Manual for Recovering Gnostics. Robin Phillips has been a gnosticism-hunter for rather a long time now, extending back to his pre-Orthodox days. He wasn’t and isn’t wrong.
My wife and I listened to That Hideous Strength on audiobook while traveling. It was a delight to hear an old favorite skillfully narrated.
The villains in That Hideous Strength think that humans have served their purpose by giving rise to intelligence, which they now intend to take and further develop, eventually phasing out human life. Meanwhile, subterfuge and gaslighting the masses are the orders of the day.
There’s no doubt in my mind that some, maybe most, of AI industry bigwigs have a similar attitude. Ray Kurzweil is their spiritual forebearer. Whether their hubristic fantasies so taint the whole project that I’m complicit in evil by typing instructions/questions into Claude (a pretty primitive AI use, further than which I may not go) is the question I’ve been chewing on.
The Master and His Emissary
I believe that Iain McGilchrist ranks among our half dozen most important living thinkers. His ability to bring together science, humanities, history, and philosophy at such a granular (but interconnected) level is impressive—and about a hundred steps ahead of the empty postures of all those pop technology books about macrotrends or life hacks.
McGilchrist grasps the risks to society from the left-brain obsession with calculating, controlling, and dehumanizing that pervades the dominant worldview. This book was filled with insights when it was published fifteen years ago, but it actually gets more important with each passing year.
His followup work The Matter with Things (2021) pushes his critique even further. It’s a massive undertaking—the bibliography alone is almost 200 pages! But McGilchrist has big goals—he is taking on an entire dysfunctional system. We do well to pay attention.
Ted Gioia, My Alternative Tech Canon: 26 Mind-Expanding Books
Sex-obsession
Religious conservatives today can seem obsessed with sex for the same reason that someone just poked in the eye can’t seem to change the subject: they are being attacked on a particular front and are struggling to defend themselves. They are not the ones who made sexuality the center of the culture wars. Social liberals have for the most part picked these fights because orthodox views about sexual morality (which insist on fundamental limits to the scope of personal choice) strike them as uniquely oppressive and backward, and they cannot abide their persistence.
Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic (2016)
One thing that has changed since Levin wrote this (I’ll leave it to others to argue Trump’s role should they wish) is that religious conservatives seem to me to have tacitly acknowledged that they’ve lost the sexuality wars. Maybe we can keep our kids relatively chaste (is that an oxymoron?), but apart from a few marginal uprisings (e.g., biological males competing against females in many sports), the issue has largely lost political salience.
Perhaps the madness will burn itself out, but for that I can only hope and pray (and I do). If you can think of a way to keep fighting that has religious integrity and some prospect of making things better, well you do you; I don’t want to dampen your ardour.
Solidarity against the petty tyrant
The TV press pool has said it will not turn its cameras back on until the White House allows CNN back into the pool ….
Kudos on the solidarity, press pool, which hits Trump where he hurts (denial of limelight). And good luck on the frivolous antitrust case the DoJ is now probably drafting.
Casualties
For every war America has fought for which we have data, we have sustained far more psychological casualties than physical casualties. … Gone now is the old notion that because a war is “just” it is somehow not going to hurt you. No serious person in the psychotherapeutic or American military community accepts that at this point.
Timothy Patisas, The Ethics of Beauty
This is why the Orthodox Church has from time immemorial taken steps to heal (not to punish) military veterans, especially those who have killed, and probably is why an Orthodox Navy Chaplain of my acquaintance came from the ranks of Navy Seals.
Why I remain politically homeless
It has long been clear that the rise of Donald J. Trump meant the end of the Republican Party as we once knew it.
It has belatedly become clear that his rise may have meant the end of the Democratic Party as we knew it as well.
Left/Right, value/values
A case could be made that the great historical difference between what we call the Left and the Right largely turns on the relation between “value” and “values.” The Left has always been about trying to collapse the gulf between the domain dominated by pure self-interest and the domain traditionally dominated by high-minded principles; the Right has always been about prising them even farther apart, and then claiming ownership of both. They stand for both greed and charity. Hence, the otherwise inexplicable alliance in the Republican Party between the free market libertarians and the “values voters” of the Christian Right. What this comes down to in practice has usually been the political equivalent of a strategy of good-cop-bad-cop: first unleash the chaos of the market to destabilize lives and all existing verities alike; then, offer yourself up as the last bastion of the authority of church and fatherhood against the barbarians they have themselves unleashed.
David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs
Shorts
- Burke, could he see our century, never would concede that a consumption-society, so near to suicide, is the end for which Providence has prepared man. If a conservative order is indeed to return, we ought to know the tradition which is attached to it, so that we may rebuild society; if it is not to be restored, still we ought to understand conservative ideas so that we may rake from the ashes what scorched fragments of civilization escape the conflagration of unchecked will and appetite. (Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind)
- Hegseth’s paradox: The more boorishly a man postures as Achilles, the more likely he is to be some more powerful man’s political concubine. (Nick Catoggio)
- Whenever an organization says “There is no place for XYZ in this organization” or “We have zero tolerance for XYZ” the proper translation is: “Making this statement is all we’re going to do about XYZ, and you’ll just have to deal with it.” (Alan Jacobs)
- I thought the land was going to change me, I mumbled. / Oh, honestly, she said. (Paul Kingsnorth, Savage Gods)
Elsewhere in Tipsyworld
Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”
I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.
