I did not mean to pair these two articles. Only the time I finished the first paragraph, I decided they belonged together.
Read Model Behavior, an interview with George Saunders, if you want to know why we should not be using AI for writing and why writing matters. Maybe you will not agree with me that George Saunders is a genius, but there is enough common sense for those think about Saunders differently than I do.
Drew Calvert's Literature Is Not About You (Commonweal Magazine)is here because how he takes down self-help books relates in my mind with this bit of Saunders:
When I read a novel or story, what do I want? I want the writer’s full experience, as expressed in the subterfuge of a made-up story. I want her life experience, her aesthetic feelings (and even biases); I want that subtle record, that is there in her prose, of every book she’s read and where and when she read it, and how it subtly altered that younger version of her—how it moved her and changed the voice in her head—I want all of that, and I want it from a person. That’s its whole value, that it comes from another person. She and I are in communication....
What Calvert wrote was:
In May, during an audience at the Vatican, Pope Leo connected the practice of serious reading to the “culture of encounter.” I find this phrase useful for explaining what I value about the transfer of consciousness between an author and a reader or the deep sense of compassion one can feel for a fictional character. The problem with self-help is that in offering solutions, diagnoses, boundaries, and methods, it protects suffering readers from a genuine encounter. Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn calls that tendency in therapeutic culture “gnostic escapism.” In Ars Vitae, a book that attempts to wrest philosophy back from the corporate festival crowd and YouTube intellectuals, she makes a persuasive argument against that ancient heresy, which claims to offer access to a secret knowledge beyond the “hurly burly” of human experience. Gnosticism, or “knowingness” (the red pill, the life hack, the silver-bullet insight) “destroys revelation, and revelation is the necessary ingredient to transform the constitution of a self to a soul.” For Lasch-Quinn, the antidote is Neoplatonism. In particular, the work of Plotinus, who accused the Gnostics of arrogantly treating life as a puzzle they could solve instead of the mystery it is. The same accusation could be leveled against the authors of many popular psychology books.
Encounter. Experience. Communication. Life as a mystery.
Several weeks ago, the instructor of my Friday class (my group “therapy”) mentioned he thought cars would be all self-driving in the near future. I have been chewing that since then. These two pieces seem supportive of my conclusion that we want lives without experience, without any need to learn skills, to be self-contained in our own fantasies, to have things done to us rather than us doing them. The world of Wall-E made flesh. That should be enough to make me queasy, but is not such a world the promise of AI? Could AI be meant to be our ultimate self-help literature?
I will close with Writing forces your brain to discover what you really think (Big Think) and points I agree with and tie in with the preceeding.
Writing can be tedious. It can be tiresome to sit down with pen and paper. Your hand cramps. The pen bleeds ink. Or you start typing and notice your posture is truly and utterly poor. My grandmother would be horrified.
Orwell likened writing a book to a “long bout of some painful illness.” As Rose Horowitch put it in The Atlantic, writing “is not merely the act of transcribing fully formed thoughts—if it were, it wouldn’t be hard.” It instead “exposes flabby thoughts and shoddy reasoning. And the time and focus it takes to form thoughts into words, sentences, and paragraphs allow the author to make new connections and discover new insights.”
But the hard part of anything does something good for your brain. I saw it up close as a Spanish tutor. Someone was trying to recall the word for soldier, soldado. They couldn’t get it, and I wouldn’t give it to them. I asked them to think about what they were doing when they first learned the word. It probably took five minutes of this word being on the tip of their tongue, which is excruciating. There is a fine line between being a teacher and being an asshole.
***
Good writing forces logic. To write clearly for you, the reader, I have to be clear to myself first. Do I have a good thought process? Is there good logic? What counterarguments can people make against my points? Have I thought through my counters to those counters?
I often write about topics under the larger umbrella of wisdom, in the hopes of helping people live lives aligned with meaning and purpose. Well, what is wisdom? The psychologists Paul Baltes and Ursula Staudinger called it “an expert knowledge system concerning the fundamental pragmatics of life.” Monika Ardelt read that and said, essentially, no. Wisdom “should not be reduced to expertise.” It’s “an integration of cognitive, reflective, and affective personality characteristics.” One camp says wisdom is something you know. The other says it’s someone you are.
Oh, how I agree with wisdom is more than expertise. And I agree this is what we should be working on as human beings. This I came to by being unwise.
My own working definition, from scribblings back in August, argues that wisdom is the craft of living well — a skill and expertise in dealing with the fundamental, uncertain, value-laden (inevitable) problems of life — which, I realized while writing this, means that wisdom can be learned. Possibly true. Certainly a position to test. And ultimately a realization that I still don’t totally know how to define wisdom. Maybe those experts were on to something.
As I agree with this advice:
Write more often. Journal in some shape or form. Eat your word vegetables. You don’t need a perfect leather-bound book, the smell of rich mahogany, or the zen of Malte Marten handpan music to find five minutes to put words on a page.
This blog exists as my journal as well as a source of information for whoever deigns to read me. My writing projects in prison straightened out my thinking. What I write now maintains that streak.
People need to be creative, doing otherwise stunts us. Seek wisdom because that belongs to humans. For all the vaunted abilities of AI, no one speaks of wisdom.
sch 10/4
