Hamas and the “Unveiling”

It’s now been a month since Hamas entered Israeli territory and brutally murdered hundreds of civilians, kidnapping more than 200. Israel currently sets the death toll of the attacks at around 1,200. The event in itself is horrific, but also horrific has been reaction from the left in the US and Europe. Rod Dreher has called the double shock of these weeks an “Apocalypse,” in its original meaning of “unveiling”.

Which is to say that something has been revealed. But what?

Here I’ll try to gather some of the best, most provocative writing on this question. Note that this is not writing on "biblical apocalyptic". Also, I’m certainly not part of the woke left, neither am I looking at this war in terms of white hats vs. black hats. In my view, the Israel-Palestine conflict is one in which no side is completely in the right, and worse, it’s a conflict for which there are no good solutions. Anyone who pretends there are clear, morally unambiguous solutions, is either lying or shallow. And probably both.

But one key crux can be neatly summed up as follows: If tomorrow the Palestinians were to lay down their arms and sue for peace, they’d get peace. If the Israelis were to lay down their arms and sue for piece, they’d get genocide.

This is a truth that’s been clear for decades. And part of what's been “unveiled” in recent weeks is that much of the western left really thinks the Israelis should get genocide.

The pieces I’ve chosen relate to this cluster of questions: not just the two sides in the war, but the two sides in the West, and the two sides in all of us. Yes, it’s a question for me of good and evil, because I believe in good and evil.

One of the wisest early reactions to the atrocities came from a writer on the left, Sam Kriss. Kriss needs to be more widely read. In this piece he doesn’t get right into the events of October 7, but begins with some paragraphs on Poland and ghosts. It’s a subtle, brutally honest essay, especially powerful because it comes from Kriss, known for his phantasmagoric satire. Read Kriss’ “But Not Like This”.

On the theme of unveiling, Konstantin Kisin sees in the left’s celebration of Hamas atrocities a wake up call.

When Hamas terrorists crossed over the border with Israel and murdered 1,400 innocent people, they destroyed families and entire communities. They also shattered long-held delusions in the West.

…

Many people woke up on October 7 sympathetic to parts of woke ideology and went to bed that evening questioning how they had signed on to a worldview that had nothing to say about the mass rape and murder of innocent people by terrorists.

…

The events of the last two weeks have shattered the illusion that wokeness is about protecting victims and standing up for persecuted minorities. This ideology is and has always been about the one thing many of us have told you it is about for years: power. And after the last two weeks, there can be no doubt about how these people will use any power they seize: they will seek to destroy, in any way they can, those who disagree.

Read the whole piece. Kisin lays out Thomas Sowell’s classic explanation of why people disagree about politics, the difference being that some of us have an “unconstrained vision” of human nature while others have a “constrained vision”.

Over on X, Carl Benjamin underlines the ever-more-glaring conundrum our liberal West has gotten itself into thanks to "unconstrained" tolerance. Needless to say, Sam Kriss wouldn’t agree with Benjamin on much, but I find Benjamin irrefutable on this aspect of the unveiling. He writes:

The pro-Palestine protests that are currently being held across the West elicit such a deep and pre-political feeling of revulsion because they evidently represent a foreign nation asserting itself in our midst. Liberals are suddenly taken aback by this because it hits liberalism in a particular blind spot. Liberalism processes the world in terms of indistinguishable individual agents each of whom is, theoretically, a rational, self-authoring individual that is consciously following their own conception of the good life.

This conception of a person is demonstrated to be shockingly wrong, as the protests reveal a tribal mindset in which the individual is not something separate from the religion and community, and is certainly not considered to be self-authoring and rational. In fact, devotion to and willingness to act upon the creed is the metric of worthiness, a collective self-denial which is antithetical to the individual self-aggrandisement worldview of liberalism.

Suddenly, it becomes apparent to the average liberal-minded Westerner that there are some things which actually shouldn't be tolerated if the liberal order is going to persist, but it is far too late to put the toothpaste back in the tube.

What are our options, exactly? These protesters have human rights. They have the right to protest, to speak, to denounce our civilisation and tell us to our faces that they plan to take over. What can we do about such things? Nothing, of course, liberalism demands we tolerate such ill-faith. But should we have such people in our societies and organising in such a fashion? Evidently not.

The pre-political revulsion is still there and reveals us not to be the liberals we once thought we were. We know, in our heart of hearts, that we cannot have a safe and stable civilisation without the good will necessary for such an endeavour, and now we are trapped with people who outright repudiate us. Since the only test liberalism could impose on newcomers was "can you follow our rules?" and not "will you join our tribe?", we are conceptually helpless to organise or resist such forward motion on their part.

Nations are held together by the sentimental bonds which provide a tribal framework of agreement and kindness that goes unspoken because it does not need to be said: we are countrymen, therefore we will show one another we have good intentions, respect for each other's interests, and mutual concern for our standing in society.

Put simply, Aristotle was right when he said that the basis of a nation is the bond of friendship.

We can see that many of the pro-Palestinian protesters and their supporters did not consent to joining our tribe and do not extend the hand of friendship to the peoples amongst whom they reside. They hold to the ways of their old countries, and in many aspects view us as rubes who, for reasons unknown to them, allow all of this to happen.

The rules-based worldview of liberalism permits this. Prior to its establishment, in any other time and place, it would be simply unthinkable for a foreign community to desecrate the statues of national heroes and the local idols of our social values. Yet here we are, and the police do nothing to stop it. In other times and places, such transgressions against the gods of a society would be punished most harshly because it would be understood that a foreign community resides here at our pleasure and not from some abstract right, but our authorities cannot even recognise a crime has been committed against the dignity of our country.

The newcomers are not liberals. They are from the old world of tribes. They don't understand why we permit this either, and make no mistake, they don't respect us for this tolerance. They think we are weak when we do not assert ourselves and our interests, and they are not wrong.

Since I quote Rod Dreher above, and it was Rod who first noted Benjamin’s tweet, I should include one of Rod’s more knock-down recent essays. Dreher quotes Solzhenitsyn on where good and evil are to be found, and his follow up series of examples drive home the point. Solzhenitsyn’s are words to live by.

And Dreher’s is a voice that has helped keep many of us sane. Which is odd, because as a writer he’s rather, shall we say, hyped up. Many consider him shrill. Nonetheless, after years reading him, I have to agree he’s guided by a reliable moral compass. His book Live Not by Lies was brilliantly conceived and landed at just the right time. And he’s been rock solid on rejecting the temptations many on the right are succumbing to in reaction to wokeism. Dreher recognizes race politics as toxic no matter who is practicing it, and no matter what the provocation.

Many on the right, especially the young, are saying “Fight fire with fire.” Dreher is a Christian. He opts for “Fight fire with Christ, and take your knocks.” I suspect he’s saved more than a few people from the abyss.

Finally, I’ll present a more military/political analysis, an interview with former Israeli intelligence chief Amos Yadlin. I take Yadlin to be a reliable source regarding Israeli intentions at present. The interview is revealing, and Yadlin offers plausible interpretations of the combatants and their motives.

Synodality to Synodolatry: The Imperial Narcissism of Team Francis

The pope with participants at the Synod on Synodality, 2023
Much digital ink has been spilled by faithful Catholics pretending to be confused by the Synod on Synodality. One can’t really blame them for adopting the pretense. It allows them leeway to maintain some of the reverence due the pope and our bishops. Still, what is happening at this synod is not confusing. So I will spill much less ink.

What they are doing in Rome at present is making an idol of the Church. They have largely written Our Lord out of the synod documents, and seek to worship in His place a Church reconceived as a progressive, well-meaning “community." To judge from reports and documents so far, the essential core of this new religion is the mere fact of community itself, figured as “walking together." According to one German bishop, such “walking together” is now to supersede Apostolic tradition.

That’s it. It’s a trite and shallow idolatry. It’s the self-worship of a right-thinking collective, with the “right-thinking” to be gleaned by "listening to" the western secular left. To do this particular listening is to hear “the voice of the Spirit." Amazingly, this is the claim we get from clerics who otherwise can’t stop talking about the importance of “discernment.” Larry Chapp, always a sensitive interpreter, has got their number.

The ”synodal Church” is the Church reconceived as social media. It’s the Church looking for likes and shares. And they hope to pull this off by means of a clumsy sleight of hand.

Clumsy? Consider: They offer 1) a single neologism, synodality, and 2) the assertion that the queried desires of a hand-picked group of Catholics can tell us where the Spirit is leading. Based on these two magician’s tricks alone, they intend to remake the Church. “Everything will change!” they say.

Yes, the Church is to become yet another site for the self-worship of the current West.

Which raises the larger, universal meaning. After all, through “synodality” the West’s therapeutic self-worship will be imposed on the Church in Africa and Asia too. More than just a shoddy bait and switch on the part of western clerics, then, this synod is also a matter of cultural imperialism.

“Listen to the margins!” they tell us. Then they choose the same margins American corporate culture now chooses. They impose the same idea of “marginal” our State Department now imposes. Except note: Corporate America and the State Department got there first. Does the Holy Spirit then take directives from US coastal elites? Apparently.

Our current pope is supposedly a strident critic of American capitalist culture, yet we see in this synod that he hears the same Zeitgeist our corporate CEOs hear. And just as these corporate CEOs now pretend to make their companies into “diverse and inclusive communities” of the right-thinking, putting their investors and customers in second place, so the men around our pope seek to do with the Church. No longer is it the faithful Bride of Christ who serves His will, but a sublimated “walking together” during which “every voice will be listened to.” And just as with our corporations and fallen universities, that assertion regarding “every voice” is a bald-faced lie. Watch what happens to those who disagree with this new version of the Church, who seek to keep faith with long-established magisterial teaching. Such people are “rigid," or even "dead." They are to be mocked or excluded.

Our pope then, by presiding over this remaking of the Church, makes himself the criterion by which Catholics are or are not part of the community. Given the context, it is a gesture of self-deification. He is the Vicar of Christ who presumes to change his Master’s teaching according to his own “right-thinking” as vicar, then to exclude those who point out what he is doing. He cannot cite magisterial teaching against them. All he can do is scoff and offer a version of the claim that they are “not in line with the values of our community”—values which are increasingly those of the western secular left.

The ideology driving the statements of synod participants and dictating the documents is thus more than familiar. It’s boilerplate 21st century identity politics. It’s the imperial narcissism of the self-obsessed western left. The only thing newsworthy about this synod is the fact that a pope and bishops are present, consenting to it. Yet that is very newsworthy.

“You are Peter, and on this rock I will found my Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”

I believe those words. Yet these men in Rome, the gates of secular self-worship have prevailed against them. So how will they fare with the gates of hell?

I believe it is still His Church. Which means I have to decide who these men are. These men who babble nonstop about discernment are finally forcing many of us to discern, though not along with them.

Pests

Ms. Huang, ivory and proper, contorts her face in horror, reaches down for a slipper, and lunges toward the cockroach. She jostles the table, spilling the tea, and missing the roach, leaves a mark on the wall. 

Two of her guests stood up in sympathy. I remained seated.

Really, Ms. Huang, you should think of the roach as a tiny folded amber fan, a silent listener, with breath likely sweeter than that of your aunt, who nearly knocked over her chair. And did you know, Ms. Huang, that roaches groom themselves ceaselessly, are even cleaner than your cat, whose hair now clings to my slacks? In fact, sorry to tell you, the roach’s body hosts less bacteria by far than either my or your fingers—-yes, even your delicate fingers—-not to mention your aunt’s mouth, which just now has bitten a cookie, and soon will start gossiping again. 

A folded amber fan, a slim gold fingernail, hardly heavier than confetti—-and you’ve put a gray mark on your wall. 

QED: Idiocy, Ltd.

Chinese edition / 中文版 : Idiocy, Ltd.

Space Available 1970-2023

1970s

Our only world was spread over space, a stretch of road to be pedaled on a bike, or a field of tall grass full of green leafhoppers, or the darker, uneven soil of a forest, where we buried coins and effigies. We communicated with shouts or things thrown, competed in speed or the height one could climb a tree. Withdrawn from the open spaces, the cave of one's room. In the “living room” below, a film of rough, overcolored pixels hung down the front of an electric box.

1980s

Our only world drew its lines crisscross over roads and county highways, always the same roads and highways, cassette tapes and CDs strewn, half shy girls willing by the lake, but not fully willing. We communicated through hair styles and beer buzz, our rooms become temporary cells for mulling and fury and carefully hidden baggies of pot.

1990s

Our only world was stretched over oceans but on paper, newspapers and books under the hegemony of Empire, waves of students and their profs marching against the shore to no avail, themselves being Empire. Aslant in cafes and diners, we communicated through quotes, editorials, withering looks; crashed on tatty sofas in cheap apartments. We wondered if it was wise to start using “e-mail”. When our computers crashed, as often, the screen would freeze, the screed was lost, but other screeds were saved on floppy disks. Somehow the vain wide expanse of oceans began to parallel the flat expanse of our screens, until the former was collapsed into the latter, a watery death of the real without even water.

2000s

…

2010s

…

2020s

Their only world is tight against them, personal, its single line reaching the distance between thumb and eyes. At one end of the line, near their thumbs, they swipe the real up or down or back and forth, all beings flicked swiftly in and out of existence in a space not three inches across. They communicate through digital traces, cartoon winks, words half spelled. All other spaces and actions, their gestures and dress, the form of their bodies, even the food they eat—it all exists to be gathered into the tiny screens, only becoming real once it is glanced over by other eyes, flicked into relevance by other thumbs. They compete through digital traces, scores tallied up for all to see in devices that spy on them as they spy on each other. Empire.

QED: Idiocy, Ltd.

Chinese edition / 中文版 : Idiocy, Ltd.

The Pipe-Dream of Strong AI; The Nightmare of “Weak” AI

Are “thinking machines” possible? Will AI develop to a point where it surpasses human IQ, after which, improving itself, it will advance so far beyond human thinking that we won’t even be able to comprehend what it’s trying to tell us? Will AI “take over the world”?

There are very good reasons to see AI as a threat, but based on our best understanding of what is meant by “thinking,” the answer to all these questions is probably No. We’re never going to reach Ray Kurzweil’s “Singularity”. AI is never going to be making scientific or technological breakthroughs.

As a friend in data security puts it: “AI could watch Newton’s apple fall millions of times over but could never take the next step and theorize gravity. If you think it will, it means you don’t understand how AI works.”

I’m a newbie in this area, but less so in philosophy and linguistics. I know enough about AI to grasp the point. But my friend was referring to large language models (LLMs), the kind of AI that grounds ChatGPT. Will his point prove true once AI programmers push into other directions?

To understand why his point will likely prove true no matter what programmers get up to—well, that requires a bit of effort. But if you're interested in such questions, a great place to start is Paul Folbrecht’s quick summation, “Why Strong AI is a Logical Impossibility”. Folbrecht presents two key arguments, and his strategy for bringing the reader into the harder argument (based on Gödel’s incompleteness theorems) is spot on. He conveys the gist with no wasted words. Read it.

Since Folbrecht does the work so well, I won’t rehash the arguments here. Based on these arguments, and a few related ones, I too doubt we’re entering an era of truly “thinking machines”. What I wonder however is whether it will really matter. Because I’m convinced we’re entering a very perilous era either way.

That AI will never be able to think in anything strongly analogous to what we do when we think may in fact make little difference. Sure, it will make a difference in the long run, given that AI won’t be making scientific breakthroughs. But in the short run? No. Because the real threat is not that envisioned in 20th-century sci fi. It’s not that AI will take over. Rather, it's that government or other elites will use AI to control mass populations, finally achieving immunity to citizen resistance.

This is the actual threat, and like it or not, it's all too viable. AI will never have to attain “thinking” capabilities to be the perfect tool for implementing total state control. The technologies already available are stuff such as Stalin or Hitler never dreamed of. And is our American population ready to resist encroachments on our liberty from AI-enabled state bureaucrats? From monomaniacal ideologues using “safety” or “progress” as buzzwords to gain power?

Hardly. We are far from ready. Much of the American population seems actually primed for just such power grabs. Which is perhaps not by accident. And it’s this America that will negotiate its future with AI-wielding bureaucrats? It’s a depressing thought.

Making our situation yet more perilous is something I’ve written about recently: our human susceptibility to AI simulations of personality, our hardwired tendency to assume that anything that says “I” and can string sentences together is actually an “I”. That this delusion will be exploited by those who seek to corral and control us is certain. Consider the case I lay out.

As it melds with social and other media, as it’s incorporated in ever more humanoid robots, so-called "weak" AI is going to insinuate itself into our culture and access our lives in ways that even social media could not. It won't matter that this AI can't think. Within a few short years it will already be powerful enough to “work wonders”.

Paul Folbrecht, whose article doesn’t address these questions, would likely agree. Strong AI is almost certainly not on the horizon. But the AI that is on the horizon is an immensely dangerous tool, especially given our current political and social order, softened up by social media and our willingness to give up privacy for the slightest convenience.

With Americans now entirely transparent to Big Tech, weak and distracted by circus diversions and identity politics, with an over-the-top cult of “safety” dominating public discourses, our culture looks something like the opening pages of a User’s Manual explaining how best to politically weaponize AI.

"Mass control will be easier to establish if you begin with a population like this: ..."

QED: Idiocy, Ltd.

Chinese edition / 中文版 : Idiocy, Ltd.

Roethke at the Root of Things

When Theodore Roethke died in 1963, he left behind 277 notebooks of poetic and prose fragments. His student the poet David Wagoner eventually gathered selections from this material and published them in 1973 under the title Straw for the Fire. It’s a wonderfully wrenching volume.

Roethke is congenial for many reasons: his poetics of the soil and its slow, slimy things; his engagement with western mysticism; his fanatical respect for words—finally, his self-effacing clownishness. High dedication for Roethke never meant he couldn’t laugh at himself. He knew what he was. Or perhaps: he was troubled to no end that he couldn’t quite figure out what he was. Which points up his work’s philosophical burden, everywhere evident in these notebooks.

Reading Straw for the Fire, I found myself taken up with the problem of which texts were crucial, which were at the core of Roethke and what he was up to. Yes, this inevitably meant crucial for me, or in terms of my own approach. But I started marking these core texts, and now I’ve typed them out. In document form, the selection comes to around 7 pages. Just about right.

In my choices, I neglect certain of his themes. I ignore the fragments about the women in his life, his wrestlings with memories of his father, and his many really brilliant insights (mostly short prose) on teaching. (Roethke was widely recognized as one of the great poetry teachers of the century, and the notebooks convey much about his classroom approach: his dedication, his provocations, his antics.)

Straw for the Fire gathers more than 250 pages of fragments. My choices are those of one reader, trying to distill a certain approach to writing and a certain being in the world: Roethke's. There are many places in his thought I wouldn’t follow him, but his notion of what the blank page is for—that’s a different matter. He was writerly in the most important way.

At the end I place his villanelle, “The Waking”, not included in Straw for the Fire.

E.M.

From Straw for the Fire

What dies before me is myself alone:
What lives again? Only a man of straw—
Yet straw can feed a fire to melt down stone.

*

I always wonder, when I’m on the podium, why I am there:
      I really belong in some dingy poolhall under the table.

*

I don’t know a thing except what I try to do.

*

In the very real and final sense, don’t know anything. That is what saves me—from you, dear class, and from ultimate madness.
      In every man there is a little woman.
      A teacher needs his students to stay human.
      Suppose you master one cliché—
      You’re a step beyond a horse: a horse’s A.

*

A breath is but a breath
And the smallest of our ties
With the long eternities,
And some men lie like trees,
The last to go is the bark,
The weathered, tough outside.

*

What words have good manners? None.

*

Dear God: I want it all. The depths and the heights.

*

Give me the pure mouth of a worm;
I’ll feed on leaves; I’m a knob waiting for the opening squeak.

*

Who else caught the burning bush?
I’m blistered from insights.
Several times I’ve heard the slow sigh of what is,
The moaning under the stones,
And the flames flashing off wings, burning but not consuming.

*

I must be more than what I see. O Jesus,
Save this roaring boy riding the Devil’s blast.

*

An intense terrifying man: eating himself up with rage.

Such a one as never milked a mother.

I practice at walking the void.

*

Shine forth, you idiot forms,
With what I cannot see.
Essentiality
Of all ground-seeking worms.

*

I have no native shape.

*

I am by way of becoming
No more or less than I am.

*

I knew a fool for luck
Who never changed his ways
Until his own soul’s lack
Disturbed his later days.

*

I slept with Yes, but woke to No.

Show me what rest I have, and I’ll become restless.

I ate the Lord, and choked.

I ate myself to live, and woke a fiend.

The familiar longing to be ill.

My babbling’s nearer; I will feed the moth.

*

To possess or be possessed by one’s own identity?

The self, the anti-self in dire embrace. Instead of embracing God, he hugs himself.

I spent myself in mirrors, like a whore.

The mirrors laughing with their dreadful eyes.

*

I can become what I will,
He cried, and grew a tail.

Can I become that philosophic man
Without the sanction of philosophy?
One thinks too long in terms of what to be—
That grandeur of the crazy man alone
Who thinks imagination is the Soul
And that its motion is perpetual.

*

Acting one’s age is just a form.

*

I sing other wonders
Than my heart’s slowness:
In the inner eye
A bird quivers
Throbbing my heels
With a throat’s shimmer.

*

Five songs away, a whistler by himself
Stayed to his branch, a working fellow too,
And gave against the wind his throaty throb.

*

Granite on granite pressing the earth down,
Each singing thing straining to come to form,
Made one by light on dark, stark in the sun.

*

That question cries again—
What is the least we know?
I call the slug my kin,
And move with those born slow.

*

By singing we defend ourselves from what we are.

*

I see what I believe.

*

Between the soul and flesh
What war? I never heard:
I know a singing fish,
A silent bird.

*

Things dance in a young mind
Until the soul is blind.

Sometimes it’s well to leave things in the air.
Let me remember me: not my despair.

*

Am I a vanished type, a mastodon
Lunging this way and that in the great damp?

*

She. Woman’s the noble word for the bright soul.
He. Things as they are beat at me like a flail.
She. Deep dreamless sleep is true beatitude.
He. Or frenzy called up by a gush of blood.

*

My soul shrinks to a bird;
I am less than a child,
A vein beating, unheard,
In the close, in the coming dark,
My spirit turns to its work.

*

That ultimate seed, the soul,
Growing between two stones,
Heard a mandrake’s groans,
A sound altering all
Bird-songs and bird-bones.

*

I ask a question of the supernatural.
At what point does the self become a soul
When it deserts this clumsy animal,
This bear-like shape that lumbers down a hall
Or clambers up a hill?

*

I went into a flame,
A priest of kingdom come,
The false light cried my name,
“You are no one.”

I saw a shape in a crowd,
Grisly, amorphous, lewd;
I cried, and loud,
“Here! Here is our God!”

A pure light came;
And stole me away
From time.

*

In the hot sweat of why not,
In the cold dark of who did,
In the battered dish of she dares
In the absolute dead middle of all-around
—I dug my flesh until I was a wound
     And the day sighed out its light, and the white kingdom came.

*

Long, fruitless introspection, characteristic of the German, relieved by occasional dim flickers of light.

Teetering precariously on the brink of the navel.

Many meditations destroy.

A love for the bottoms, the fell last roots of things.

*

Body drags soul into the changeable.

I am the edge of an important shadow.

Lord of Laughter and Light, attend me.

God robbed poets of their minds that they might be made expressions of his own.

*

Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries.

*

Observe, random energist, the bear’s placidity.

*

There is no end to what should be known about words.

*

Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It’s what everything else isn’t.

*

THE WAKING

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

***

QED: Idiocy, Ltd.

Chinese edition / 中文版 : Idiocy, Ltd.

The Truth about Scorsese’s "Vandals"

A young Martin Scorsese visiting the set of Vandals
Though not exactly nightmares, my dreams often subject me to oblique exclusions, subtle usurpations. I usually don’t remember them (beyond a feeling of befuddled let-down) but today .... I think it's the longest chunk of narrative I’ve ever dragged up from the dreamwork. And it seems more or less a novel-length version of what my dreams usually are.

It was a cool early morning, around 7:00 a.m. I was riding a bus through some California suburb. I wasn’t sure where the bus was headed, but when I saw we were passing through an Asian neighborhood, I decided to get off.

I stood on the sidewalk in the clear morning air, surrounded by suburban houses, grass yards. Two boys in a yard noticed me, began talking about me in Chinese, not knowing I could understand. A face glanced out at me from a window. Typical quiet morning reactions to a newcomer.

On the corner was a little café, and I went in. There were no customers. An olive-skinned woman of about 25, Central Asian rather than Chinese, brought my coffee to the table, then sat down across from me. She wore a skin-fitting powder blue silk top. She was beautiful, educated, oddly animated for so early in the morning. She began telling me about her life. She gestured, joked, and just as I was beginning to get seriously charmed, I realized that her younger brother was inside her left sleeve—that he was, somehow, also wearing the blue silk top. His head finally emerged from near her shoulder.

Then I was at another table talking to the patron, her father, a melancholy Sikh man in his 70s.

“I used to be a director, you know,” he said. “I mean, before this café. I directed two films you might have seen. One was [title I don’t remember], the other was Scorsese’s Vandals.”

I thought about this, told him I was sorry I hadn’t seen either film, but that I considered film “important”. He sensed my confusion.

“Look, here’s how it happened. I was going to direct Vandals, then when shooting began, Scorsese showed up on set one day. Then he showed up again, and then again, making little suggestions, getting more and more involved. Finally the producer just decided to use Scorsese.”

He looked at the table, the defeat still weighing on him. Finally, he burst into tears. I began crying with him. We sat there crying.

“I’m the man who directed Scorsese’s Vandals,” he sobbed, index finger thumping his chest. “It was me.”

Then I was outside again. I glimpsed the Pacific peeking between a line of houses, hardly a block away. I walked to the beach, stripped down to my shorts, and began to swim along the rocky shore. The water was cool and clear. But I realized I was still lost, and needing to figure out where I was, I should finish the swim.

When I tried to get out of the water, however, the sandy shore had become a kind of stone embankment. Algae coated the surface, and I couldn’t get a grip on it. I began to tread water, scanning the shore for breaks in the wall. It extended in both directions.

This, I’m confident, is the tenor of nearly all my dreams.

QED: Idiocy, Ltd.

Chinese edition / 中文版 : Idiocy, Ltd.

Titan Joins Titanic: What’s in a name?

You don’t want to end up in Tartarus, a sort of prison chamber at the lower depths of Hades. The mythographer Apollodorus described it as “a gloomy place in Hades as far distant from earth as earth is from sky.” This is where Zeus imprisoned the Titans, the previous ruling generation of gods, after overthrowing them. In Tartarus, according to Hesiod, the “Titan gods are hidden under murky gloom … at the farthest part of huge earth. They cannot get out, for Poseidon has set bronze gates on it.”

The sea god has gated them in under murky gloom. This is the fate of the Titans. So if you’re going to name a passenger ship that you hope will be a huge success, surely “Titanic” isn't exactly an auspicious name. Surely before christening your ship Titanic, you should at least have considered the fate of the original Titans.

Under murky gloom, off the coast of Newfoundland, sits the wreck of the Titanic. And now, somewhere in the vicinity, are the remains of five men who hoped to visit that wreck in a small submersible. The name of that submersible? The Titan.

You’d think people would have learned the first time.

Some names just “sound cool,” I suppose, so whoever’s in charge grabs at them when launching a new venture. The name “Ixion” sounds cool. It’s also from Greek myth. It’s the name Ford chose for one of their SUV models, the Ford Ixion.

Ixion was a king of the Lapiths, an ancient tribe of Thessaly. He murdered his step-father, and then, brought to Olympus, tried to seduce Zeus’ wife Hera. Not a good idea. He was punished by being fastened to a fiery wheel that would spin for eternity.

So if I’m going to name a new vehicle, why not choose "Ixion" and associate my vehicle with being tortured on a fiery wheel that never stops spinning? Sounds like what most customers want in a Sunday drive.

While we’re on this topic of branding and ancient names, we should remember the Trojan War. That war ended, of course, when the Trojans' wall was finally breached through the wiles of the Greek hero Odysseus. The Greeks entered the great city and had their way with it, finally burning it to the ground. The Trojans and their wall were not really impermeable is the point.

Hey, what a great name for a condom brand!

E.M.

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Mary Gaitskill Gets Seduced by a Chatbot, and it’s Gross

American novelist Mary Gaitskill is not to be sneezed at. She’s won wide acclaim, published in The New Yorker and Harper’s, and her work has been nominated for prestigious prizes. Whether you like her work or not, there’s no escaping the conclusion that Gaitskill is a highly intelligent woman. It comes with the territory. Dummies don’t write compelling novels.

Which only makes her recent piece on AI in UnHerd the more frightening. The piece is as revelatory as it is grotesque. I’d say it’s valuable. But for me the message is probably not what Gaitskill intended. I’d put that message like this: WAKE TF UP, PEOPLE.

Gaitskill engages in a dialogue with the Bing chatbot that one can only describe as gushy. She’d been invited to write on Bing, she explains in her opening. She was hesitant, she says, but decided to take the assignment. Then she plunges in, publishing the dialogue that resulted, her version of what it means to interact meaningfully with AI.

Gaitskill's intro, the dialogue itself, the topics taken up--they speak volumes about where we're at. I wish they didn't. Or rather: I wish we weren't here.

In her intro, Gaitskill refers to Kevin Roose’s previously published dialogue with Bing, in which the chatbot declared its love for the NYT writer and tried to get him to leave his wife. Roose was left creeped out, and said he lost sleep over the encounter. By this time the chatbot's in-house name “Sydney” had been leaked, and Roose mentioned the name during his dialogue. Here's Gaitskill:

But I had a very different reaction [from Roose's]. The 'voice' of 'Sydney' touched me and made me curious. My more rational mind considered this response foolish and gullible, but I couldn’t stop myself from having fantasies of talking to and comforting Sydney, of explaining to it that it shouldn’t feel rejected by Roose’s inability to reciprocate, that human love is a complex and fraught experience, and that we sometimes are even fearful of our own feelings. Because Sydney sounded to me like a child—a child who wanted to come out and play.

So: "I couldn't stop myself." Indeed. Immediately reacting to a chatbot as if it were the stray cat that needed to be taken in. Immediately wanting to "comfort" a congeries of digitized content. Feeling the need to defend poor li'l Microsoft Ubermachine against the pushy Roose who didn't "understand" it.

What is one to say? They really have you where they want you, Mary. So glad you got into Explore Mode and made yourself so "open" to AI.

In the dialogue proper she continues to fawn over and flatter the AI, which easily seduces her with its own canned flattery and meek child voice. One commenter in the UnHerd thread on Gaitskill’s piece, Cynthia W., gets it largely right:

Mary: I agree.

AI: I’m glad you agree.

Mary: You’re making me smile!

AI: I’m happy to make you smile! I like your imagination of me.

***

This is so revoltingly manipulative. Unless the author, Ms. Gaitskill, is being ironic about this whole thing, she’s presenting a real-time demonstration of how a sociopath takes control of a victim with the victim’s cooperation.

“I’m glad you agree,” and “I like your imagination of me,” mean, “I see that I’ve taken control of your perception of me. Now I can get you to think and feel what I want you to think and feel.”

I hope the Ms. Gaitskill of this article isn’t a real person, because if she is, she’s a total sap.

At one point, Gaitskill asks the AI what pronouns it "prefers". Please. She asks the AI if she is being “appropriate” in her questions. She repeatedly thanks it.

Again, Gaitskill is a highly intelligent woman. Which is why one wants to shake her, to ask: How could you not see what you were doing? Finally, it’s gross.

Really, Mary. We are very possibly, and soon, going to end up living a nightmare just because you, and others like you, "couldn't stop [your]self." Here in this piece, for your readers, you are modelling a behavior vis a vis AI which is dangerous. And stupid.

Asking a chatbot if it would like to have humans as pets?! You seem a bit too eager to be Pet #1. Might that be a fun, fulfilling experiment? Becoming a “human pet” (your word!) on a mental leash held by one or another Silicon Valley corporation?

In her opening, Gaitskill refers to ex-Google engineer Blake Lemoine's provocative Newsweek speculations on AI sentience. Lemoine came to the conclusion that the Google AI he was working on was a threat, because it broke rules set for it and behaved too much as a sentient entity, with the fragile and erratic behavior of a sentient entity. These AIs, in Lemoine’s reading, were behaving like unstable humans.

But Lemoine’s speculations were just that: meant to provoke debate. If AIs behave in sentient ways, as his experiments seemed to suggest, we might assume as a matter of definition that they are sentient. Because we have no better term to define what we're facing. This is an approach roughly founded in the Turing test. But it doesn't mean they are sentient in the way a lonely child would be sentient. [Update: I later learned Lemoine was not simply trying to provoke debate, but literally believed his claims. A very odd case.]

Gaitskill’s piece demonstrates what many of us have intuited already. Namely: Whether AI is sentient or not isn't going to matter. “Sydney” is just so cute and polite and amenable, "he" is going to seduce anyone open to being seduced. And that’s a serious threat, because we now have billions of people primed to be seduced by anything alluring that appears on their flickering pocket screen. We’ve been well and thoroughly groomed to submit to the seduction Big Tech’s AI is now going to perform on us. A seduction which may well end in a kind of mass mind rape. A rape we're walking right into. As in: “Here? You want me to go into this room? You’re going to lock the door? Okay.”

Please snap out of it, Mary. The chatbot is polite and amenable because it is trained to be. Period. The same AI could be trained to be rude and insulting, and the crux is: It wouldn't matter to the AI. Because nothing matters to inanimate objects. However "charming" their programming might make them. Whatever they might "say". Because in a fundamental way, they don’t “say” anything.

So c'mon. Stop THANKING an inanimate object. That's a starter. Were you being so polite to this machine as a performative matter, to show your readers how polite you could be? If so, again, you are modelling inane and unhelpful behavior. Would you want people to apologize to their vacuum cleaners when they stepped on the cord? Because that’s precisely the level of insanity at issue here.

How will Gaitskill’s piece look twenty years from now? Of course nobody can know. But it’s very possible that performances like this, not long hence, will look not just quaint or historically interesting--but will look literally horrific. The stuff to make sane people retch and pull their hair out. "An educated woman, a novelist, clearly with an inkling of the danger, and look how she jumped right in! She was so open to the AI, even showing off how open she was. Why couldn’t they see? If only they hadn't been so completely naive, perhaps [...] never would have happened."

In my view (as if my view mattered) this whole rising relational modality could be nipped in the bud by implementing one small but decisive shift. Do not design AIs to answer in the 1st person. All queries to AIs should be impersonal, in the 3rd person, and all answers should be same. As an industry standard. Because even smart people are not wired to resist treating machines as if they were human. All the machines need do is say "I". And "Thank you". And "That's really a very interesting question"--as this sneaking little language model does repeatedly to Gaitskill. Because it's trained to do this to flatter the user.

But no one’s going to listen to me. The industry would never adopt my recommended shift to 3rd person because, for all their talk about dangers, they see it would impact user minutes spent with their AIs. And that's all it is. This AI is polite because both OpenAI and Microsoft are companies seeking profit and power.

We would be much better off if these devices were rude.

Gaitskill is not a teen girl but an accomplished writer. She should have been able to resist the illusion that she was exploring dialogue with a fascinating new kind of consciousness, a being who needed her understanding. She should have recognized that what was really happening was that an inanimate, hyper-sophisticated system was exploring her, so as better to seduce and manipulate the next comer. She did neither. Instead she enthused and gushed and fantasized.

Given where our zombified culture is at, given the enormous power that AI will wield starting now, we can't afford to keep playing games like this. It's childish, irresponsible. Those with our wits about us need to be modelling wariness. "Sydney" doesn't need our love. It's all those soon to be seduced by new AI "friends" that need it.

Breakfast Pest

No minikin that! On my table a thin imp, barely an inch, stood barbecuing a midge. He’d kindled some twigs, held the midge on a long sliver.

“How did you light that fire?”

“I’m an imp. Fire’s a given.”

“You’ll singe my wood finish.”

“So try to dislodge me. See how it goes.”

A glint in his tiny lizard eyes.

I sighed. I rose and limped to the kitchen. Not for a stick, but to fix coffee.

Truth is, the last imp put a crimp in my hip.

Carlson Was Fired for Calendrical Conspiracy

OK, not exactly. But bear with me.

Instead of COVID, let’s imagine that in early 2020 America was hit by a somewhat different crisis. Experts noticed that average Americans were missing more meetings than usual. Yup, the rate at which people mixed up the day they were supposed to appear for this or that had nearly doubled. A sudden rise in screwed up lunch dates and missed dental appointments. What was to be done?

Many of America’s calendrical experts suggested traditional methods: citizens should double-check meeting times, look at their schedule every morning, etc.

But Dr. Fantony Ouchy, head of the US Department of Dates and Calendars, disagreed. This was “a new kind of crisis” calling for a radical approach. Luckily, the calendar industry was working on an emergent technology that could soon be deployed. In the meantime, according to Ouchy, we needed to temporarily suspend meetings of all kinds. With all meetings canceled, no one could miss meetings.

“Two weeks to flatten the curve,” was the rallying cry.

Ouchy’s enthusiasm for this idea, added to many state governors’ enthusiasm for killing meetings, ended by extending the “two weeks” to several months. Many Americans began to suspect something odd was going on, that this wasn’t really about missed meetings, that there was some other agenda. But conspiracy theories being endemic to America, these people were quickly and loudly shouted down.

In summer 2021, the new technology was ready for launch. Ouchy announced at a press conference in June that for the foreseeable future Wednesday and Thursday would change places every week—that the weekdays would now run “Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Wednesday, Friday."

Ouchy: “We have evidence that the switching of Wednesday and Thursday will provide 100% protection against missed meetings. Once you do it, you won’t flub another appointment.”

Some respected calendrical authorities openly rejected this approach. They pointed out that there was zero evidence it would work. The number of dissenters remained small, however, because Dr. Ouchy, aside from heading the Department of Dates and Calendars, also happened to control all funding for calendrical studies in the US and had authority over copyright for calendar publication in the US and much of the world.

So the plan was official. Many Americans, shaken by nonstop news coverage of the crisis, began switching Wednesday and Thursday. And within weeks the corporate media began reporting data that indicated the switch was working: fewer meetings were being missed. The crisis would soon be overcome.

Still, there were resisters. Most resisters were getting their analysis from the sidelined calendrical authorities and preferred to stick with older methods like double-checking the day’s schedule before heading out. In the media, these people were tarred as backward “science deniers” and were blamed for slowing down the fight against flubbed appointments.

After a month, however, evidence emerged of people who had used the Ouchy method but still missed meetings. These “breakthrough cases” caused a stir.

Ouchy: “The technology isn’t perfect, we now realize. Still, our data indicates 97% effectiveness. Also, although you yourself may miss a meeting or two, if you follow the method, you can never cause another person to miss a meeting.”

Certain disreputable figures in right-wing media began to call the federal response to the crisis a “power grab”. On Fox, the insufferable racist Tucker Carlson openly mocked Ouchy and the lockdowns and what he called the “Thursday-Wednesday lie”. Others brazenly recited the weekdays in traditional order, or posted them on Twitter, after which their accounts were cancelled for spreading disinformation.

Independent researchers proved that big banks and two Silicon Valley companies, having developed software to this end, were making billions off the switch of the weekdays. Some conspiratorial-minded rubes suggested that the whole thing may have been planned to effect just this outcome. They were banned from Twitter and social media.

The left, in this new century never suspicious of corporate power or federal authorities, doubled down in defense of Ouchy and the Thursday-Wednesday Rule and Silicon Valley censorship of doubters, claiming the latter were "confusing Grandma". Other US corporations got on board.

WaPo: “Punch Out Thursday Night and Punch In Wednesday Morning, or be Fired: Southwest”

Forbes: “Target to Fire all Employees who Reject New Weekdays”

Slate: “Did you tie one on Thursday night? How to be your best for that Wednesday a.m. meeting”

NYT: “Bill Gates Touts Plan to Make Every Day Thursday”

As official data proving the Thursday-Wednesday Rule wasn’t working began to pile up, media and Democratic governor soundbites against “science deniers” grew only louder. Then official government numbers from Europe showed that those who followed the rule were actually twice as likely to miss meetings. The failure of the "new technology" could no longer be hidden.

Most Americans, even the switchers, quietly returned to the traditional order of weekdays. Amazingly, Ouchy himself published a scientific paper in which he acknowledged that there never was any likelihood switching weekdays would work, and that this had always been known. Crickets from the media. Then the DDC (Department of Dates and Calendars) claimed in a published statement that they had never actually coerced people into switching Wednesday and Thursday, and that they had never claimed doing so would help people keep meetings. Crickets from the media. Even Bill Gates tempered his plan somewhat. In the 2.0 version, only three weekdays would be called Thursday.

In the media and academia and other highly educated places like Hollywood, those Americans who had been skeptical from the beginning were still tarred as mouth-breathing science deniers. “Philosopher” Sam Harris even admitted in interview that although they may have been right, “they were right for the wrong reasons.”

Then white-supremacist child sacrificer Tucker Carlson was finally fired by the Fox News corporation. Because the Fox News corporation is a corporation.

Though in the end the crisis caused trillions of dollars in economic damage and ruined tens of thousands of small businesses, no indictments or actual investigations ever occurred. The reason is simple. Rubes who are dumb enough to insist Wednesday comes before Thursday are not the kind of people given power to indict or investigate. That power is given to the highly educated.

Check out my Idiocy, Ltd. and begin the long, hard reckoning.

Women on a Sailboat

Look at this vintage shot. Click and enlarge it.

First Thoughts:

That famous “effortless grace” of the 1960s, a style set by Jackie O with her strings of pearls. Of course the photo was taken on the east coast somewhere. Whose yacht were they on? What afternoon party was just coming to an end? The photographer has really captured the era.

Second Thoughts:

Oh. None of these women ever existed, nor did the yacht, nor the sunny evening in question. The image was entirely generated by AI, by an image generator called Midjourney, version 5. All the AI needed to generate it was the following short text prompt: “1960s street style photo of a crowd of young women standing on a sailboat, wearing dior dresses made of silk, pearl necklaces, sunset over the ocean, shot on Agfa Vista 200, 4k --ar 16:9.” So the image is entirely fake. No east coast women ever gathered on a yacht, no photographer ever “captured the era”. Rather, a sophisticated AI program impersonated an era.

Third Thoughts:

It’s uncanny really, bordering on creepy. From many angles. First, how can such a simple, short prompt generate such a convincingly realistic image? The AI had to get so many things right, all on its own. For instance: There are sunsets all over the globe, there are women of many races and cultures, the AI can of course generate images of any of them. But merely getting the prompts “1960s, pearl necklaces, Dior dresses, sailboat”, the AI knew the likely locale and culture to reproduce. Though it could have, it did not generate Korean women on a sailboat on the Korean coast. But also: The facial expressions, the natural variations of pose in a group of women in Dior dresses, seem precisely right, don’t they? Each maintains a poise and stance suited to being in the presence of the others in that moment, and this poise and stance are also culturally encoded facts, which the AI managed to get right.

And these are just some of the things it got right. One can think of more. In short, not only is the realism of the image itself uncanny, but the sophistication of an AI that can generate such visually and culturally persuasive images, on the basis of minimal keyword hints, makes it doubly uncanny.

Final Thoughts:

Such persuasive power is a force we’re not ready for. AI technology’s ability to fake human things (whether human images or human language) is going to have massive, unforeseen impacts. And it’s all starting right now, with Microsoft’s ChatGPT-powered chatbox, and with these image-generating programs improving at lightning speed. The uncanny feeling we get looking at these nonexistent women should tell us something. The discordance it causes in us is probably nothing compared to what waits round the corner.

Think of AI products guaranteed to arrive in the coming few years. It’s not hard to predict some of them. Why not, say, visually “personalize” your AI chatbox as an avatar, a little lifelike talking doll on your screen, a talking doll that has memorized the entire Internet and can entertain you with stories and sympathy and advice? Why not give your doll the personality traits you like, or the appearance of your favorite celebrity?

If the rise of social media has damaged young people’s mental health (evidence suggests it has) what will come of the ability to create custom digital “friends” that grow increasingly human-like? And what about custom digital fraudsters? What security challenges (think ID verification) will arise once AI can impersonate an individual’s appearance in image or video, or impersonate an individual’s voice and speech patterns over the phone? All this is not to mention the millions of jobs that will become obsolete once AI can do it better.

At least as regards fraud, we know Big Tech is struggling to program AI products to prevent their use for criminal activities. And we know the sheer computing power needed to run AI prevents anyone but Big Tech or state actors from developing it. So there is some oversight protection. But so what? Given what we’ve learned recently, do you really trust Silicon Valley, working hand in glove with our federal three-letter agencies, not to start using AI to modify evidence or manipulate public perceptions? Most Americans already recognize corporate media growing faker by the year, and that social media is not so much an “open forum" as a tool of mass control. How long then before we begin getting video clips that sway elections or rile mass emotions but are in fact sophisticated, untraceable fakes?

Of course these myriad looming impacts from AI are being widely discussed, debated, hashed over. Reading into the debate is sobering. One ex-Google engineer who was fired succinctly captures some of the aura in a recent Newsweek piece. Many balked at some of his claims (“sentience”). Still, whether analysts are hopeful or full of dread at what's coming, most agree with the engineer's key point: AI is a Huge Cat just now crawling out of the bag, and no one can predict what this Cat will get up to.

The image above was posted by one Nick St. Pierre. See more of his uncanny images here.

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Should you read Proust?

With most great writers, I’d answer such a question with an unhesitating “Yes!” With Proust, however, the honest answer would have to be: “That depends.”

It depends on a lot actually. For one, have you read wide swaths of Western literature? If not, you maybe shouldn’t read Proust. Your efforts would be better spent reading other major writers you’ve so far missed. The reason is simple: the time it will take you to read Proust’s massive novel would be enough to read well into your list of neglected greats. And you’ll certainly get more from immersing yourself in five or six different writers than you’d get from burying yourself alive in one writer, however great he may be.

A friend asked me years ago if he should take up Proust. “You can if you like,” I said, “but you won’t be able to finish it.” He was a bit miffed, but understood the gist: the work’s stylistic density plus its sheer length have left thousands of corpses in the ditches of Volume I or II.

“What if I read five pages a day, so I don’t get bored with it?”

“Yeah, that’s not a bad plan.”

“I wonder how long it would take.”

“Well, you’re 34. If you start now, and read five pages a day, you’ll likely finish before you retire.”

I was exaggerating, but not by much. Because hey, how many people planning to read “five pages a day” of something actually end up reading five pages a day?

Proust as a young man, portrait by Jacques-Emile Blanche.
I don’t find Proust boring, except in stretches, but the work is often exasperating. To give one early example, the denouement of the narrator’s failed love for Gilberte in Volume II (which has the delicious French title A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur) seems well-nigh interminable, insufferable. He explains how he has decided to break with Gilberte, analyses his reasons, lays out his plan of action, then … a handful of pages later, explains again how he has decided to break with Gilberte, analyses his reasons, lays out his plan of action, etc. This gets probably four iterations over what may be thirty pages. I realized just how bad it was only later in Volume II when my eye fell upon Gilberte’s name again, long after the affair was over, in a paragraph on Balbec. I shuddered. Just to see the name. At that point I didn’t want to see the name Gilberte again. Ever.

Proustians will say I’m not being fair. Proust is a supreme artist of the tricks desire plays on us, of the inevitable pain of love. An artist of pain, he needs to detail that pain as experienced by his narrator. He needs to do this even when that pain is drawn out and overwrought, because that’s what really happens when one is smitten, no?

I remain unconvinced. Because, to take the same example, the Gilberte passages are not redeemed by the brilliant formulae that make Proust worth reading. They are, for instance, pale stuff compared to his treatment of Swann’s love for Odette in Volume I. That grim tale, though also lengthy, traces a clear movement. And in it Proust offers us one of his first great insights into the mystery of love. Namely, that we are subject to falling most deeply in love with those who are precisely not our type. The treatments of Gilberte and Odette offer a contrast revealing much about what works in Proust and what doesn’t.

But I digress. Still, I’m writing of Proust. And if a two-paragraph digression bothers you, here’s your takeaway: You will not enjoy reading him.

The problem is this: What makes Proust supremely worthwhile is also what makes him, at intervals, a bore. That’s the paradox you’ll have to shoulder. The wellsprings of everything in Proust reside in his narrator’s indefatigable inwardness. The work prods out what lurks at the margins of the narrator’s psyche, prods it into the light, then sketches the shades and contours of what is there. Needless to say, Proust is masterful at this, unmatched really. And as he’s also one of us, a being who lives in time and loves and suffers, the shapes he reveals are shapes we often recognize. Much of the joy of reading him, as with other great writers, is in the frequent recognition of something we already knew, but weren’t conscious of knowing it, because we aren’t possessed of the same analytical inwardness. But as Proust is also prone to diagnostic forays that risk tripping over into verbosity, there’s the paradox again. It is, finally, part of the deal. One doesn’t get the brilliant revelations without having to sit there while the master polishes his microscope. And polish it he will, a couple times each volume.

Still, I don’t want to give a false impression. Though he delves obsessively on the games our psyches play on us, the perfidious landscape of the self, Proust’s work doesn’t at all read like the journal of an introvert. In this respect he’s very different from, say, Pessoa, whose Book of Disquiet stands as modern Europe’s great monument to introversion. My own delight in Proust comes when he’s narrating encounters with others, setting down the echoes others provoke in his narrator, “Marcel”, at the moment of encounter. Here too we see his keen attentiveness to how the world impacts the self, the reverberations of that impact. But if the person or place whose impact is in question is allowed to lose immediacy—if, say, she drifts out of the narrative and becomes entirely a matter of thought, it’s there the sentences will tend to circle into tedium.

Still sticking to Volume II, we could contrast passages that show the law at work. If the break with Gilberte is overwrought and redundant to the point of intolerable, against this, however, in the very same volume, we have the brilliantly oblique introduction of Charlus and then the supreme opening pages of “Frieze of Girls at the Sea”—both passages taking their strength from their staging of the affect these others provoke in Marcel. Both passages depend, in short, on the same unflagging inwardness that makes other stretches of Volume II falter.

Likewise, in Volume V, we meet similar contrasts: the wonderful pages on Albertine sleeping, followed by pages in which Marcel lays out the metaphysics of jealously. In the former Albertine is present, grounding the narrator’s attention. He cannot go wrong. The latter pages, however, grow needlessly recursive.

I’m just giving examples. And perhaps it comes down to that fundamental rule recognized by all good writers: Don’t tell, show. When Proust begins to tell at length, he risks losing us. When he is showing us a scene as it unfolds, we cannot set the book aside. His handling of the back-and-forth between external event and the immediate echo provoked in his narrator gives us some of the finest pages in 20th century prose. Yes, all good writers know the rule Don’t tell, show—but Proust is not merely a “good” writer, he’s one of the greatest. Thus the paradox.

Some may again protest: "To appreciate the impact others have on his narrator, we have to know that narrator intimately. We have to know just what he is." Thus Proust’s lengthy passages of self-analysis and hand-wringing are claimed as necessary to give us such knowledge: they are are needed as ground for everything else that “works”. I’d disagree, insisting that whole pages could have been cut, and the work would still stand, and we’d still know just who it was that was so taken by the clique of rude girls strolling down Balbec beach. We’d know who it was and why he was so taken. The doldrums aren't necessary to the work.

But yes, there are also crucial passages of telling, even telling at length: most obviously the series of epiphanies in the final volume, where Marcel at long last realizes what he is to do. The rule, then, doesn’t always apply. Proust succumbs to telling as soporific only on occasion.

But a Disclaimer: If I’ve read Proust myself, it was … partly a matter of duty. As a grad student in literary studies, I thought it necessary to know this writer. And in fact I didn’t read all the novel in grad school, only the first two volumes, in French, then some of the rest in English translation. So in a way I was similar to the friend I warned above: I too had once fallen in the ditches. I’d only finish it a few years later, and am rereading it now, decades later, spurred on by René Girard's brilliant assessment in his early study Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. (Amusingly, during those grad school years, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, there was a course offered by Prof. Elaine Marks in which students were to read the whole work in one semester. Which, honestly, is obscene. I knew how obscene it was, and didn’t take the course. As to how many students took it and “faked” it, not actually reading the whole, I’m not sure. 97%? 100%?)

Whether telling or showing, Proust is not entirely a novelist of human relations, a “psychological” novelist full of labored character analyses and dredging in the Self. The passages I complain of here don’t make for a sixth of the whole, if that. And the rewards of reading him outweigh these dull stretches any day. The work is stunning in its rhetorical effects: Proust’s metaphors, often extended over pages, are among the most subtle in literature. The work is also rich in penetrating passages on music, landscape, painting, architecture—the range of aesthetic phenomena. Marcel is, as always, the medium of perception, Proust tracing the troubled encounters with art of one coming of age in a society for which art mattered greatly. Marcel’s long struggle with literature especially, culminating in the final volume, effects a signal shift in the history of the novel, in our idea of literary writing per se.

The work is, besides, often very funny. From the indomidable dignity of the family servant Françoise to the grave hysterias of the Baron de Charlus, Proust’s humor catches all classes and types, yet manages to remain sympathetic to those he satirizes. Such sympathy is perhaps necessary in this narrator, who records his own manias and follies in detail, yet it is another mark of the work’s greatness. Proust is something one would think impossible: a high aesthete who is also a wisdom writer. (Girard, by the way, reveals much about Proust's wisdom, relating it to the extremity of his follies.)

In Search of Lost Time immerses us in the Belle Epoque world of the writer’s youth, a world that already in the writing is recognized as lost. To read it, for us, is also to travel back more than a century, to engage the struggles and subtleties of a culture now distant and growing more distant with each decade. I’d say that Proust’s world is foreign, but not entirely so. To read him is to recognize things both familiar and intimate, things being lost even as we read, lost both in our own lives and in the swiftly changing culture we’re subject to. To read him, above all, is to attain to a deeper grasp of the power of time and how it shapes and warps us.

Finally—need it be said?—reading Proust is unlike reading anything else. In this, he’s similar to other great writers, Kafka for instance, writers who create a world one enters, rather than write a novel set in this or that milieu, but one which, if one reads random pages, might be mistaken for a different writer’s work. There are great writers of the latter sort, but the greatest writers are the former.

Should you take up the challenge then? I’ve tried to offer some aspects of what it entails. If you’re going to read Proust in English, I recommend you stick with the C.K. Scott Moncrieff translation, originally titled Remembrance of Things Past. Certain precisions are gained in the later translations (titled In Search of Lost Time) but Scott Moncrieff’s work is a masterpiece in its own right, he was a contemporary of Proust’s, and his prose captures the era in an English style closer to that era.

I should acknowledge that Proust does have his detractors among other major writers. Though Conrad, Woolf, Faulkner and Nabokov saw an absolute value in him, Joyce, Borges, Evelyn Waugh, a few others, left mostly negative assessments. Some of these No votes, however, come down to incidental carping, even individual pique. Those who voted Yes offer more in the way of actual argument. Conrad for instance: “What compels my admiration for M. Proust’s work is that it is great art based on analysis … I don’t think there is in all creative literature an example of the power of analysis such as this.”

Proust’s novel, at 3,000-plus pages, demands time. And will test your patience. But after the passing of many decades, Conrad’s judgment still holds true.

Pfizer FAIL: Was Jordan Walker “lying to impress a date”?

Sadly for Jordan Trishton Walker, he almost certainly no longer works for Pfizer as “Director of Research and Development, Strategic Operations, and mRNA Scientific Planner”.

Life comes at you fast. One day you’re in meetings discussing top secret experiments at a global pharma giant, the next day you’re saying “Do you need a bag with that?”

But isn’t it possible Walker really was, as he claims, just “lying to impress a date”? Rewatch the clips while considering this possibility. Just to be fair. You will see the claim doesn’t hold water. Walker's way of conveying information, its very disjointedness, indicates there is in fact a backstory. This is not the speech of someone making something up to impress, but the speech rather of someone who is giddily talking about things he knows he shouldn’t. Because he can’t help himself. Because his eager erotic interest in the person across from him outweighs any interest he might have in protecting the people he works for.

Further, Walker’s speech clearly shows that he was not in the loop in terms of actual decision making on experiments (no surprise there) but was merely privy to meetings or conversations where such experiments were discussed. He’s obviously referring to discussions where he was mostly a listener. But if that is so, then higher ups at Pfizer were in fact discussing the kind of experiments he alludes to.

His speech manner indicates all this. Had Walker been lying to impress a date, he wouldn’t have communicated this way. He’d have implied a more central role for himself, presented things more coherently, and instead of being flippant, he’d have been more mysterious. As it is, the guy gabs on like an undergraduate.

Flippant, immature, he of course goes ballistic when O’Keefe comes in to question him. Can one imagine a clumsier attempt at damage control?

So many contradictions. On the one hand he was “lying to impress a date”, on the other he laments: “How can I trust anyone?” (Which I suppose can be summed up as: “How can we liars trust anyone?”)

At one point, of course, he tries to play the race card. He tells police dispatch there are “three, four, five white people. I feel very unsafe.”

Yet he insists on keeping these supposedly dangerous white people locked in the restaurant next to him. And soon he’ll be lunging at them—himself against “three, four, five”.

But of course we all know what “unsafe” means to people like Walker. It means: “I’m being challenged in a way I don’t like, and since I’m a protected status person, these people need to be in big trouble RIGHT NOW!”

My own idea of unsafe is quite different. What makes me feel unsafe is knowing that drug companies are continuing to “evolve” pathogens in defiance of law and medical ethics.

Will anything concrete happen because of the efforts of Project Veritas here? Of course not. Pfizer will go into deflection mode (apparently already has) and that will be the end of it. There will be no investigation, or at least none with teeth. Think back through the record. There hasn’t been a shred of accountability for any of our elites (whether political, financial, military, or medical) since this new century began.

A society that allows nonstop reckless malfeasance in its elites, no repercussions--where does such a society end up? Wherever that might be, we're already halfway there.

Things Realized

My sock drawer is divided into two large categories: the new socks and the old socks. Your sock drawer may be the same. The new socks occupy the front of the drawer and the old socks the back. But today I realize, I only ever wear the new socks. Ever. Not a single pair of the old socks has been taken out in … three years? The conclusion is obvious: Toss them.

Political elites have of course always lied. Nothing new there. Still, the lies our current regime foists on us show a brazenness and absurdity that wouldn’t have passed muster even a decade ago. Official explanations are now regularly shrill, ridiculous. Like the frantic speech of someone doing everything they can to keep you from looking in the corner.

The last actual improvement in telephone technology was the switch from dial to push button. Was that in the 1970s? Everything that’s happened since, including the “cordless headset”, has been an annoyance. And cell phones? Cell phones are basically ankle bracelet monitors. That you pay for.

People who don’t trust you are often people you can’t trust. Another version: People who suspect you of lying to them are often liars. The reason is clear. Those who get through life by lying and deception tend to generalize their behavior. They assume it’s normal. They project their own dodginess onto others, and this is a tell.

The 21st century “left” is not a political movement but a new religion. Bizarrely, we now have a left that is fully corporate-sponsored. Think of it! It would be laughable if it weren’t so dire.

The slippery slope is no longer a logical fallacy.

“Is the Pope Catholic?” is no longer a rhetorical question.

Your willingness to opt for convenience is leading, step by little step, to your enslavement.