Artificial intelligence and productive tensions
Freedom, bureaucracy, and civilizational decline.
Photo I took at the Parthenon a couple months ago.
Almost a month ago, I made the move out to Washington, D.C. from Arizona to start work. Since then I’ve been busy adjusting to the city, making new friends and rendezvousing with old ones, beginning my job, and preparing for yet another move (this time, just to the other side of town). Nonetheless, I’ve found some time to read and to think.
While I’m not sure what sort of cadence I’ll adopt with this newsletter, I will likely publish more pieces like this in the future, which are essentially brief reviews of what I’ve been reading and thinking about recently. I’ve opted to pitch any longer-form book reviews and articles to official publications, though any of these articles which I write and cannot publish in an official publication will be posted here on Substack.
To get you up-to-date, here are a few of the pieces I’ve published in the last year which I’m particularly proud of:
How To Reclaim the Pursuit of Happiness, National Review
How To Save Higher Education From Itself, National Review
Not-So-Effective Altruism, National Review
Anyways, here’s what I’ve been reading:
Twilight of Authority, Robert Nisbet
I was able to return to Twilight of Authority this week, a wonderful book written by Robert Nisbet. Having read Nisbet’s Quest for Community late last year, I entered this book with a general understanding of some of his core assumptions: the state as a political unit evolved from feudal warbands -- led by warlords -- who displaced and in many cases waged war against ecclesial authorities and close-knit kinship relationships; the state is fundamentally at odds with the mediating layers of civil society, including religious authorities and local communities, which fundamentally challenge its claims to absolute power. He builds on this same thesis in Twilight, documenting the twilight eras of past civilizations, and how these insights inform our own time (which he also saw as a twilight era). The symptoms of this civilizational decline are varied, and outlined in great detail by Nisbet.
While this is surely nitpicking, I took issue specifically with his claim that the great world religions (defined as those which make universalistic claims, most notably the Abrahamic faiths) somehow aided in the expansion of the state, displacing local attachments. This seems, to me, an overgeneralization. Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, for instance, retain and emphasize a respect and reverence for local communities and rootedness. Subsidiarity -- and its modern cousin, federalism -- is the progeny of St. Thomas Aquinas’ interpretation of Aristotle. Nonetheless, there is surely some truth in Nisbet’s claim: Christianity and Judaism cannot be understood apart from the first commandment’s injunction against worshiping false gods, referring to, at least in part, local, pagan gods; Islam cannot be understood apart from Muhammed’s destruction of pagan idols. Nisbet’s claim here is more insightful, I think, insofar as it displays the fundamental tension between localism and universalism; the parochial and the universal.
From my perspective -- and from that of Nisbet -- the trick is to find expressions of the universal in the particular. In fact, the collapse of such particular expressions of human experience (in religion, local governance, local associations, etc.) is an abiding theme of Twilight!
The tension between the local and the universal can be a productive tension, but it requires an understanding of the fundamentally parochial nature of human existence. An orthodox and indeed universal Christianity which preaches the Gospel to people of all nations and all backgrounds -- and claims the mantle to the wholeness of truth -- nonetheless is expressed through the particular story of the Jewish people, through the crucifixion of a rebel rabbi named Jesus Christ in 1st century AD Jerusalem. This foundational connection between the local and particular, and the global and universal, is a source of great tension. But rightly navigated, this tension can produce deep insights, some knowledge, and perhaps even wisdom.
I cannot find the source for this metaphor anywhere, but I was told it by a professor: the trick is not to avoid tensions, but to find the tensions which produce more light than they do heat.Bureaucracy, James Q. Wilson
Wilson’s Bureaucracy explores bureaucracies of all sorts, from the prison, to the schoolhouse, to the corporation. He explores how public- and private-sector bureaucracies function from the bottom-up. That is, he works inductively to uncover how bureaucracies work in the real world, and how certain bureaucracies respond to varying forces, such as pressure from interest groups.
One of his most potent insights so far is that public bureaucracies are often driven by constraints, while private bureaucracies are primarily driven by tasks. He has not so far proposed a one-size-fits-all solution, but rather has emphasized the complexity of management, and how good managers and leaders must understand how highly dependent and situational good bureaucratic management is.“Do Not Go Gentle Into That AI Night”, Ben Christenson, Front Porch Republic
This piece reminded me of Henry Kissinger’s concluding chapter in World Order. In it, Kissinger talks of the influence of data and the “information economy” on statesmanship, knowledge, and wisdom. Kissinger’s basic thesis is that as information and data have become easier to collect and reference, it has become both less necessary for people to exercise their memories (because they can constantly search up their questions on Google) and easier for us to consume data and information (which, in turn, we now view as synonymous with knowledge, and wisdom).
Books, once the primary source of information in our lives, were not simply constructed to convey bits and pieces of data. No, they were assembled with intent, and their structure and narrative established relationships between information which weaved themselves together in such a way that knowledge can be gleaned from them. AI has even more destructive potential: “If Google makes memory unnecessary, ChatGPT seems poised to make thinking unnecessary.” And yet, in an era of advanced technological capacity and nuclear arsenals, we are more in need of knowledge -- and wisdom -- than ever. AI can and will be a useful tool. But we cannot mistake the created for the creator.
A wonderful excerpt: “Without reflection and conscious decision, expanding options and capabilities can leave us paralyzed and dissatisfied by all that we leave undone, all the roads untaken, and all the ways our lives remain imperfect. As we near god-like powers of omniscience and omnipotence via AI, the gap between our human limitation and divine aspiration will be all the more infuriating.”“Freedom Ways,” Fred Bauer, City Journal
Bauer, an underappreciated communitarian writer, makes the argument that “freedom” has different definitions for different Americans, and that these definitions can be broadly grouped into four camps (first coined by David Hackett Fischer): ordered liberty, reciprocal liberty, hegemonic liberty, and natural liberty. Each of these understandings of liberty are distinctly at odds with one another, but they also have much to offer each other. Bauer’s argument is that any of these ideological conceptions of liberty, taken to their extreme, would endanger both liberty itself, and the United States of America.
Bauer on liberty and American statesmanship: “This mixed American legacy of freedom has consequences for the enterprise of statecraft. Rather than being the maximalization of some ideology, a statecraft of liberty might mean the balancing of impulses and modes. Previous generations of Americans have reimagined the balance between those liberties in order to confront the problems of their respective times. That might be part of the present challenge, too: to find another way of striking the balance between the impulses of recognizing equality, asserting authority, appealing to ethical order, and defending a sphere of self-determination.”
That’s all for now, folks! Stay well.