the abolition of man is upon us! November 2023 Essay Recommendations
And other less-important things like the profanation of everything, developing prudence, and artificial intelligence (again!)
Happy December! I’m welcoming this time of reflection on the year (and years past) and the future of ourselves and our society. Significant changes are measures by eras, decades, but those changes take place within the minutiae of the day and the habit-making or breaking practices we follow. And that’s what this collection of essays speaks to.
C.S. Lewis gets a new look
This past month marked the 60-year anniversary of the death of C.S. Lewis, a writer, professor, theologian, and thinker who doesn’t get nearly as much love today as he ought. In Lewis the prophet, his excellent piece in The Critic, Rhys Laverty observes that Lewis is eminently overshadowed by John F. Kennedy and Aldous Huxley, the two other luminaries with whom he shares a death-day. However, “Consulting his oracles in 2023, one finds that, far from being a sorry throwback, Clive Staples Lewis had a vision so profound in depth and incisive in detail that it outstripped that of Kennedy, Huxley, or indeed any of his contemporaries.”
And what hath the Seer C.S. to say to us today?
Lewis saw a future in which the rejection of transcendent values would allow a technologised elite to re-make nature as they saw fit, ultimately overthrowing human nature itself—a process made possible through the ideological capture of education.
Um, check. Lewis saw the beginnings of this in his day and warned against them in both The Abolition of Man and the Ransom Trilogy. He predicted a rejection of the tao—the good, or natural law—all different terms for
…the way things are and the way one therefore ought to feel and act: “It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.”
People really don’t like this idea nowadays: that some things are good and true beyond what we see and feel, beyond what happens in the day-to-day. This rejection of transcendent value is going to kill us all in the end.
To deny the existence of transcendent values which demand certain emotional responses, and to educate without or against them, would create “men without chests”—men unable to discern what truly merits love or hatred, directed only by ravenous appetite and calculating reason and unable to stop themselves indulging either.
Read this whole piece. And if you’ve ever wondered what in God’s good name is going on in The Ransom Trilogy and/or haven’t read The Abolition of Man, it’s an excellent primer on what Lewis is getting at in those works and how it relates to the here and now.
For more C.S. Lewis news, check out:
developing morality is mundane
My friend Tamar sent me this post by Tsh Oxenreider: The Queen of all Virtues. It’s the first in a series on how we can develop the Cardinal Virtues in our lives.
…the Four Cardinal Virtues are essentially “the habit of having righty-ordered loves so as to build a foundation for our entire morality.” It’s inarguably a lifelong pursuit for each of us.
Said virtues are: prudence, fortitude, temperance, justice. “Ultimately, prudence is listening to wisdom and holding a lifelong learner’s posture, developing a teachable spirit, and recognizing in humility how much we still have to learn,” Oxenrider says.
I’m particularly in love with the really, really simple things Oxenrider is doing to develop prudence—things like “reading something worthwhile,” “listening to solid podcasts from smart people,” “actively avoiding bad, untrue, or ugly art.” It’s all rather simple and a reminder that developing moral and spiritual disciplines is basic and unglamorous. I’m looking forward to the rest of this series.
no content for content’s sake, or the profanation of everything
One fear I have for the future of this substack is that, one day, I may run out of things to write about. That probably won’t happen any time soon. But if it were to happen, I’d just hang it all up, because I can’t write about stuff just for the sake of writing about stuff. Everything I write is rooted in personal experience, contemplation, or something I deem important enough to work through for myself.
Luke Burgis’ recent piece, Vibes Are Not Enough, is triggered by a different Current Cultural Event (one that I’ll circle around to in a near future post), but he makes the following necessary point:
It seems to me like many people are doubling-down on content creation; I believe we need to double-down on incarnational experiences that have the potential to generate newness.
I’m not saying that content doesn’t matter; I’m saying that content is always better, and more meaningful, if it flows out of genuine encounters and lived experiences—because new wine can’t be poured into old wine skins.
The trade-off is that now we live in a world where even the most intimate realities are mediated to us through the content strategies of others. As I read their essays—and as one who has been through several transformative, world-shifting experiences in my own life—I couldn’t help but think about how bone-chilling—how cold—it would feel had someone ever written so nonchalantly about my experience, imposing and projecting their own insecurities onto it. It would be profane.
I feel that. The profanation of everything (especially personal events) as mere fodder for another piece of content is something that should concern us.
“make nuance great again”
Newton’s third law: for every action in nature, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Well, in human nature, we’ve been a bit heavy on the equal and opposite reaction side of things lately. Hence, I’m recommending Faith Dwight’s piece which serves as a reminder to the anti-fundamentalist in me. We’re a bad joke, really.
Q: What’s the opposite of a fundamentalist?
A: A fundamentalist.
The joke cloaks a needed truth:
If I…counter my old certainty about my rightness with new certainty about my rightness; if I swing like a pendulum from militant conservative/Christian/pro-Life/complementarian_______ (fill in the blank) to militant progressive/exvangelical/pro-choice/egalitarian/_______ (fill in the blank), I haven’t moved forward or grown into something new. I’m the same thing, just backwards.
We’ve got to not be like that guy James wrote about who looked in the mirror, walked away, and forgot how he looked. If we go back to the mirror, if we look and look again, it’s funny how the person we find staring back at us is the people we’re running away from or the person we’re trying desperately not to be.
Could AI provoke better art?
Despite acknowledging that AI art is getting better at imitating human art, French illustrator David Revoy has very strong feelings against it. And in a recent blog post (My brushstrokes against AI-art), he writes about how “this soup of feelings” regarding AI art influences his approach to making new art.
…it challenges some deep underlying philosophical questions:
What is human in my work?
What is my signature?
What is “I”?
These are questions people in the creative arts will increasingly wrestle with as machine intelligence spits out more human-like music, art, and writing. “To be honest, I still don’t have a clear answer to these questions,” Revoy writes, “but my instincts are pushing me in one direction: to show more of my brushstrokes, my hand gestures, and to avoid smoothing things out.”
Hmm… as AI art seeks perfection, letting our imperfections lie in our art might just be a way to foil the seemingly inevitable march of the machine.
To the contrary though! Henry Oliver’s piece in The Critic, We must embrace the AI revolution, is also worth reading.
More to go around:
Giorgia Meloni is a huge Tolkieniesta and also the prime minister of Italy. When you’re both of those things, you can do whatever you want (basically) and Meloni opened a €250k Tolkien exhibit at Rome’s National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art. (She attended the opening dressed as Lady Galadriel—slay queen, etc.)
Of course, her political opponents (some of whom are also Tolkien nerds) are crying foul because: (a) they don’t think the Sub-Creator himself would like Meloni’s politics, and/or (b) that a love for Lord of the Rings is more befitting 15-year-old boys than a 40+ head of state. And then there are people who are like: But it’s just a story. Why are we making everything about politics?! And those people are wrong because it’s not just a story. Nothing is ever just a story. (As the fact that we’re even talking about this makes clear.)
The Washington Post has more coverage on this uproar. And while they’re arguing, I’m trying to book a trip to Rome.
Also, maybe the studios are finally waking up to the superhero fatigue that most sober fans of the genre have observed. Ted Gioia covers efforts by Disney, Warner Bros, and Pixar to cut and preempt losses on what should have been sure cash-ins at the box office. Warning: this story is a bit sad.
Happy Advent!
Happy Advent too!