About The Odyssey

 

I’ve said before that the loudest voices in the room when it comes to the erosion of what might loosely be known as Western culture are those who never showed the slightest interest in celebrating it. The Daily Mail is a repeat offender, whining when universities cut Chaucer from the curriculum (how are those market forces looking now?) while offering a world view that holds the antics of Kim Kardashian to be far more significant than any kind of book.

And now we find that Elon Musk, in response to what he sees as casting infelicities in Christopher Nolan’s new adaptation of the Odyssey, will be using AI to concoct another version that is, in his words, “historically accurate”. I await his Laestrygonians with interest.

About the post-literate world

And I thought I was feeling a bit apocalyptic. By Will Self, via James Marriott: 

We began in a world with twice as much literacy as we have now. We’ve lost 50% of literacy in the last fifteen years. So, that epiphenomenon of writers like me being attacked and abandoned by our friends running scared of social media was part of the progression towards illiteracy and the fundamental inability to morally deliberate, which now characterises our society and which will propel us into authoritarianism, like America... Someone who can’t read a book cannot deliberate, cannot think and cannot conceptualise, and therefore is a threat – particularly humans who, instead of conceptualising in isolation and being able to think inside their own heads, only think through their engagement with others. That’s where fascism gets going, or social movements that depend on a kind of hysterical level of identification. What books and the ability to read books do is present a barrier that prevents you from being able to avoid moral deliberation at some point... We couldn’t have picked a worse time to become more stupid than when we needed more intelligence, which is when we were brokering the integration of different ethical systems into some kind of workable, decent country. Instead, we’ve abandoned reading books. We’ve abandoned deliberating.

About book bans

Nobody likes the idea of banning books, or restricting their circulation, but it’s never that straightforward, is it? I don’t think I’d be much perturbed if my local library chose not to make available volumes celebrating global jihad, or denying the Holocaust had ever happened; or if my nearest Waterstone’s refused to stock hagiographies of Stalin or Pol Pot or even Andrew Tate. And if the books in question are intended to be read by young people, it’s understandable that literary gatekeepers, well, keep those gates.

That said, there seems to be a tendency within school libraries in the UK in which, to put it charitably, the watchword is excess caution. See, for example, the case of a school in Greater Manchester, where the removal of a book about (not endorsing) incel culture spiralled into bans on, among others, The Da Vinci Code, The Time-Traveller’s Wife, White Teeth, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, The Girl Who Played With Fire, a graphic version of Nineteen Eighty-Four and works by Terry Pratchett, JK Rowling, Robert Ludlum, Margaret Atwood and, er, Britney Spears. What the hell was going on?

Well, two things. One, inevitably, was that the list of inappropriate texts was concocted with the help of AI. Effectively, whoever ultimately wielded the axe was too stupid and/or lazy to actually read the purportedly dangerous books. The other is that one of the criteria for removal was that a book was “not written for children”. Which (apart from the fact that it would exclude most texts on the GCSE syllabus) suggests that the school’s policy went beyond censorship to a form of infantilisation, protecting young minds from anything even remotely challenging to emotion or intellect. In an environment where only a third of people between 8 and 18 say they read for pleasure, that’s little short of cultural vandalism. Which does raise the question – what do these people think schools are ultimately for?

PS: In slightly more cheerful news, it seems that reading is cool again, even among the much-maligned Gen Z. Although, since this manifests in the form of £2,400 Dior tote bags emblazoned with the titles of French novels, I won’t pop the champagne just yet.

About CBS

Who remembers Andrew Keen? He was (still is, I guess) the tech entrepreneur who foresaw how widespread access to the tools of media production would lead to what he described as The Cult of the Amateur. And as he was doing this towards the end of the 2000s, it was blogging that really provoked his ire. I was a bit harsh on him at the time but finally I’m starting to think he may have had a point. As Sid Vicious pointed out, “I’ve met the man on the street and he’s a cunt.”

About online wrongness

The Oxford Word of the Year is “rage bait”, defined as: 

online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or social media content.

But I’m trying to be less consumed with rage these days, even if recent events feel designed to provoke it: analogue rage bait, if you like. What I do notice instead, among all the AI capybaras is stuff that appears engineered to induce a bit of mild eye-rolling, a sigh, an outburst of pedantry; that time when an exasperated parent loses patience and says, “never mind, let me do it.” It’s a variant of Cunningham’s Law, which holds that “the best way to get the right answer is not to ask a question; it’s to post the wrong answer”. Except that nobody cares about getting the right answer as long as they get those eyeballs.

The whole issue is confused by the lurking presence of AI; are these cynical attempts to engage with wrongness, or just bots swallowing up online dumbness and spitting it out again? For example, this list of the best ever Test batters, which starts OK, then descends into increasingly hearty portions of word soup. It looks like AI slop, put out there to provoke – but then we recall the Japanese Nintendo game that was peopled with bizarrely-named baseball players, all without the assistance of AI. Might Gariel Btogby not be a distant cousin to Bobson Dugnutt?

And then we see posts like this, claiming to be a video of “Jingle Bells in Indian” which is nonsensical because there’s no such language as Indian, and in any case the song being massacred is ‘Sleigh Ride’. Pedant bait? Well, not really, because someone who points out the solecism is slagged off for being a killjoy Karen. This was a post born of slack-jawed ignorance, pure and simple, and it’s bad manners to mention it. To be honest, why do we need digitally-generated stupidity when we have the real thing?

About Frank Gehry

Frank Gehry has died. You may not be able to place the name, let alone fit a face to it, but you know the buildings, the ones that look like a stack of imploding loo rolls, the Guggenheim in Bilbao, the Dancing House in Prague, the residential add-ons at our very own Battersea Power Station, beggin’ yer pardon, guvnor.

Not in the mind of a Daily Mail sub, though. In that strange, empty space, Gehry’s not an architect. He’s “Brad Pitt’s architect friend”.  And, look, a rock star employed him, and another actor wrote something. So he must be important. And moreover, the two actors and the musician require no clarification, but we need to have it explained to us that Gehry was an architect. Although if you need that level of explanation, why would you even care that he died?

About fascination and muzzling

The first step in a fascist movement is the combination under an energetic leader of a number of men who possess more than the average share of leisure, brutality, and stupidity. The next step is to fascinate fools and muzzle the intelligent, by emotional excitement on the one hand and terrorism on the other.

—Bertrand Russell, Freedom and Government, 1940

About Vivek Ramaswamy

I don’t go into politics so much these days, mostly because it makes me sad and angry. But I was interested by what Vivek Ramaswamy, soon to get a plum job in the Trump administration, had to say about American culture, and the response to it: 

Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG. A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers. A culture that venerates Cory from “Boy Meets World,” or Zach & Slater over Screech in “Saved by the Bell,” or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in “Family Matters,” will not produce the best engineers. (Fact: I know *multiple* sets of immigrant parents in the 90s who actively limited how much their kids could watch those TV shows precisely because they promoted mediocrity…and their kids went on to become wildly successful STEM graduates). More movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of “Friends.” More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less “chillin.” More extracurriculars, less “hanging out at the mall.”

And there’s much in there I might agree with. On the other hand, this is also the culture that venerates a semi-literate charlatan like Trump, so without all that intellectual mediocrity, Ramaswamy wouldn’t have his new job.

About AI

In the New York Times, the neuroscientist Eric Hoel argues that the increased use of artificial intelligence is forcing any notion of intellectual or aesthetic quality into a death spiral, prompted as much as anything by human laziness. For example he refers to researchers at a conference on AI using AI to conduct peer reviews on AI-related papers, taking any human critical intervention out of the equation. Which is a problem, because one thing AI is very bad at detecting is bullshit, which is ultimately what peer review is for.

Of course, most of us don’t hang around at AI conferences, but Hoel suggests that the process is far more prevalent than that, eroding the fabric of culture itself, to the detriment even of people who reach for their weapons when they hear the word:

Isn’t it possible that human culture contains within it cognitive micronutrients — things like cohesive sentences, narrations and character continuity — that developing brains need? 

In other words, the processes by which people engage with all the gubbins of society is as significant as the content itself, and that’s what AI is stripping away. But it’s not as if the purveyors of AI are doing this deliberately, is it? They’re not consciously proposing policies that will make humanity that bit more stupid are they oh wait hang on...

PS: And even if you’re not that bothered about AI destroying the canon of Western literature, you might want to know what it’s doing to your fridge. 

PPS: And, following on from Musk’s tweet, I think this is supposed to be an April Fool’s gag but these days, who knows?

About stupidity

Searching for something else that I’ve now forgotten, I found something I wrote in 2007, responding to a very reasonable and polite suggestion that in this blog I was being a bit harsh to people who don’t read much and don’t know a lot about politics and philosophy and the like. And I’d probably tweak the phrasing today, but the sentiment still holds up after – bloody hell – getting on for 17 years:

Yes, it may be tiresome, even impolite to point out that some people are dim, but if we don't do it, we'll eventually lose the ability to discriminate between what is stupid and what isn't. And that matters.

I guess it’s the distinction between the “what” and the “who” that matters here. But maintain that we do need to call out the “what”, even if some of the “who” get caught up in the fracas.

PS: On similar-ish lines, someone put this up on BlueSky, to which I’ve slunk off because Elon Musk’s a colossal arse. From Neil Postman’s Technopoly:

...every teacher must be a history teacher. To teach, for example, what we know about biology today without also teaching what we once knew, or thought we knew, is to reduce knowledge to a mere consumer product. It is to deprive students of the sense of the meaning of what we know, and of how we know.

About Quora

When the Web arrived, and more specifically when it spawned social media, there was general optimism that it might effect a digital enhancement of Habermas’s public sphere, serving as a forum for discussion and debate in which we could all gain knowledge and understanding of our fellow users and their lives.

Then Quora happened.

About magic

My alma mater has announced what sounds like an intriguing MA in Magic and Occult Science, an interdisciplinary degree combining history, religion, archaeology and more. Inevitably, a number of parties have decided to label it as a so-called Mickey Mouse degree, implying that it’s for people intent on pursuing careers as witches and/or wizards. To be fair, I’m not sure whether this demonstrates intellectual laziness (just reading the website beyond the headline would have told them what the course really offers) or a zombie-like understanding that the true purpose of education is to get a job. In any case, universities have been offering courses in religion for hundreds of years and I’m not really sure what the difference is.

It’s more than a little depressing, though, that among those grabbing the wrong end of the wand is one of the most high-profile head teachers in the country.

PS: And, in further education news:

About Linklater

Richard Linklater, in the course of discussing his new movie in Hollywood Reporter, tries to be optimistic about the state of cinema but I’m not convinced: 

Some really intelligent, passionate, good citizens just don’t have the same need for literature and movies anymore. It doesn’t occupy the same space in the brain. I think that’s just how we’ve given over our lives, largely, to this thing that depletes the need for curating and filling ourselves up with meaning from art and fictional worlds. That need has been filled up with — let’s face it — advanced delivery systems for advertising. It’s sad, but what can you do? I also don’t want to go through life thinking our best days are behind us. That’s just not productive. So, in your own area, you just have to persist and do what you can on behalf of the things that you believe in. You have to believe that everything can change and that things can go back to being a little better. Isn’t that what we all want for everything these days, from democracy on down? Can’t we just go back to being a little better?

PS: Paul Schrader holds forth on the way modern audiences approach, not films, but film criticism and, as one might expect from the movies the two men make, his approach is a little more, uh, forthright than Linklater’s: “Audiences are dumber. Normal people don’t go through reviews like they used to. Rotten Tomatoes is something the studios can game. So they do.”

About pronouns

I must admit, I do have issues with the current vogue for preferred pronouns, not least because the singular “they” has always grated (give me a neopronoun any day), even before it was adopted by non-binary people. But if it makes people happy with themselves, and makes everyday discourse easier, that trumps my instinctive pedantry. I’ve never gone so far as wanting to eradicate a whole part of speech, which would appear to be the crusade of one Lavern Spicer, Congressional Candidate for the 24th District of Florida. Here are some of her recent pronouncements. 

There are no pronouns in the Constitution.

— Lavern Spicer 🇺🇸 (@lavern_spicer) July 26, 2022

(Although the very first word is a pronoun.) 

Jesus Christ never introduced himself using pronouns.

— Lavern Spicer 🇺🇸 (@lavern_spicer) July 26, 2022

(John 14:6)

So many people want to try and tell me about pronouns today and try to convince me that the Lord himself introduced himself to Moses using pronouns.

I can't believe how far some of y'all have gone down the rabbit hole with these pronouns.

God bless your hearts!

— Lavern Spicer 🇺🇸 (@lavern_spicer) July 26, 2022

(Exodus 3:4) 

I always speak my mind and I think y’all have LOST your minds when you got the Vice President introducing herself with PRONOUNS.

I have never used a pronoun in my life nor do I go around calling people Filipinx or Latinx.

Y’all went so woke your brains went & fell asleep.

— Lavern Spicer 🇺🇸 (@lavern_spicer) July 26, 2022

The really amusing bit is that these comments sit alongside Lavern’s tirades about the failings of the American public education system. The less amusing bit is that, as the clown juggernaut of the Tory leadership contest proceeds up its own fundament, we Brits can’t really point and laugh at the silly colonials, can we?

About the singularity

(Note: Small Boo had these thoughts, not me. But she hasn’t got a blog, at least not that I know of.)

There’s an idea knocking about in the tech world called the singularity. Essentially, it’s the point at which artificial intelligence transcends human cognition, where machines become cleverer than brains. It’s long been assumed that the singularity, if it happens, will be a case of machines playing catch-up, of AI’s thinking power developing faster than that of homo sapiens. 

But then a news story broke a few days ago, about the budget airline RyanAir seeking to identify people travelling with fake South African passports by setting them a general knowledge test in Afrikaans. This has inevitably caused great offence as Afrikaans is still seen by many South Africans as the hated language of apartheid; but aside from the PR blooper, it’s a pretty pointless exercise, since only 13% of citizens speak the language – Zulu and Xhosa are more widespread. Add the fact that the questions on the test are littered with grammatical errors and it really looks as if some junior RyanAir apparatchik ran them through Google translate, operating on a vague memory that it’s one of the languages that they speak down there.

And the thought presents itself – could the singularity arrive as a result of AI standing still, while humanity’s intelligence declines to meet it?

About GB News

In the New Statesman,  Stuart McGurk describes the first shambolic months of the TV channel GB News and the most startling moments come not when stuff goes wrong, but when the company tries to explain away the wrongness. When asked why it tried to go on air without most of the equipment that TV professionals would regard as necessary – indeed, without most of the professionals – the official line is:

GB News is an entirely different broadcasting model. We never set out to replicate the legacy infrastructure or roles of establishment broadcasters.

Yet again, the libertarian battle-cry of “disruption” is a less-than-convincing euphemism for amateurish incompetence. (Not coincidentally, my recent reading has been dominated by meditations on why modern society increasingly tolerates such abject mediocrity, for fear of being thought elitist, and how a surprising amount of this anti-elitist thought originates with the political right. See Frank Furedi, Where Have All The Intellectuals Gone?; Eliane Glaser, Elitism: A Progressive Defence; Ronan McDonald, The Death of the Critic.)

But how do we respond to this? Do we really have to bite our lips when confronted with crap, for fear of hurting the feelings of those who produce crap and/or those who buy it? Who’s a snowflake now?

PS: And a reminder that, yes, it comes from the left too. From a couple of years back, John Halle defends Kenny G, and implicitly all else that is “fundamentally unserious and beneath discussion.”

PPS: On similar lines, an old friend, Caroline Langston, ponders what you really need to get into college:

The admissions system today, I read somewhere, rewards not the “bright well-rounded kid” (abbreviated BWRK by admissions reviewers), but the “pointy” kid instead, by which is meant an outsize and distinctive feature—like innovating a patentable medical device, launching a business, or testifying before Congress. Three sports and extracurriculars are nowhere near enough.Conversely, in the absence of such achievements, one way to mitigate it is by being able to foreground an experience of personal disenfranchisement or suffering, and demonstrate how one has overcome it... This is a problem not just for college admissions but also for the nation’s intellectual culture—and literature—in general. Books, online culture, radio interviews, novels, podcasts, all of them swept up into one... Basically, it’s a darkling plain where ignorant armies of the nation’s Pointy Kids-in-Chief clash by night.

About Shakespeare

A letter to the Telegraph, from one Alan Mordey of Leamington Spa, that is so many flavours of wrong it becomes rather impressive: 

I find that Shakespeare can be difficult to follow at the best of times, and often, halfway through one of his plays, I find myself wishing I were somewhere else. Imagine my confusion some years ago when I went to see a production of Macbeth at my daughter’s school, where the various characters were played randomly by either sex, which meant it was way beyond my comprehension. I was always under the impression that stage performances were for the entertainment of the audience, which I’m sure was what William Shakespeare intended, but the modern idea of challenging conventions and asking the audience to suspend their preconceptions of reality falls far short of this ideal.

About Foucault

I’m a little surprised that a member of this most performatively anti-intellectual government of my lifetime might namecheck Foucault in a speech; less so that the hapless Liz Truss got him so egregiously, so spectacularly wrong.

Knowledge is not for knowing: knowledge is for cutting.

About the Daily Mail

Sneering at “Daily Mail readers” is a regarded as a pretty facile tactic by which third-rate comedians ingratiate themselves with the liberal soi-disant intelligentsia, but it does seem that the Mail’s online subs, at least, have a similarly low opinion of their customer base.

About Jerusalem

Boris Johnson ruffled a few feathers today by laying claim to the concept of “a new Jerusalem” beloved of English radicals from Blake to the Attlee government and beyond. I was similarly annoyed with him until I saw this tweet by Dr Jennifer Cassidy, apparently a politics lecturer at Oxford University – Johnson’s alma mater of course – and now I just want to hide under the covers and whimper.

“In the depths of the Second World War...the government sketched out a vision of the post-war, new Jerusalem that they wanted to build”

Does the PM know how fractioned Jerusalem is? It is of the most divided cities on earth. pic.twitter.com/qBXBidIiGm

— Dr. Jennifer Cassidy (@OxfordDiplomat) October 6, 2020