It seems to me we are now a nation of the infantilized. I thought that was the goal of prison. Have the powers that be learned their lessons from the pirson-industrial complex and applied them to the nation at large?
For more than two decades, Han has shaped a form of writing equal to his
concerns: brief, concentrated books that think in movements rather than
arguments. Their brevity feels deliberate, as if composed for the
attention economy yet guided by another sense of time. Winding through
subjects as varied as Zen, smartphones, and gardening, they often return
to the same question: What has become of freedom in the digital age?
***
Burnout, depression, anxiety: these are the maladies of our time. No one
denies their spread, but their wider significance is a matter of
debate. For Han, they are not signs that the new order is breaking down.
They are signs of its success. We are free — and the result is not
liberation but exhaustion.
***
What Han would later diagnose as burnout is not just a condition of
exhaustion; it is a condition of perception. Moods are how we feel the
world, even before we think about it. They are less like emotions than
the background conditions of our experience, like slow-moving weather
patterns that give times and places their character. They cannot be
examined like objects from the outside — we are always already within
them — but they can be named and described. In Heidegger, Han found a
way to notice them. And it made him weather-wise, alert to the world at a
time when the weather was changing.
The Berlin Wall came down during Han’s years as a student, marking
the end of the Cold War. For most in the West, the mood was jubilant.
Liberal democracy and the free market had triumphed, and the specter of
totalitarianism seemed to recede into history. The future, many assumed,
belonged to societies that were more market-driven — and therefore more
free. Han, however, had seen enough to question that story of progress.
Growing up under the extreme pressures of Korean capitalism, he knew
that domination could take many forms. South Korea had not followed the
Big Brother model of the North, yet its people labored with an intensity
that suggested another kind of domination — one rooted not in
surveillance or prohibition but in competition, achievement, and the
inner compulsion to perform.
If the twentieth century had feared domination by the state, the
twenty-first would reveal another possibility: domination by freedom.
***
By now, we understand the basic mechanics of the profit model. While
complex in one sense, its logic is painfully simple: keep users using;
sell their attention to advertisers. In the early 2010s, news about
predictive algorithms came as a shock. It seemed uncanny that an
advertising algorithm could detect a woman’s
pregnancy before anyone else knew about it. But the headlines have long
since moved on. What once seemed unsettling has faded into the din of
daily life, normalized under the regime Shoshana Zuboff calls
“surveillance capitalism.”
When Zuboff began writing about it
in 2015, the public imagination often returned to a familiar nightmare:
Orwell’s Big Brother, the all-seeing avatar of the surveillance state.
Zuboff argued that the comparison was misleading. Today’s most powerful
surveillance systems are not instruments of the state, nor do they rule
by repression. They are transnational, driven by a market logic that
shapes behavior without appearing to command it — what she called “Big
Other,” a diffuse computational order that monitors and modifies human
action at scale.
***
Han’s new book, The Tonality of Thought, approaches freedom in a
different mood. Consisting of three public lectures, the book returns
to themes that have run through his work for more than two decades. Han
is not searching for a stronger self, but for a way beyond the
self — another way of inhabiting the world, combining German Romantic
ideals with Eastern thought. “If I may compare my thinking with a
fruit,” he writes, “then its skin and flesh are deeply romantic. The
seed, in contrast, is Far Eastern.”
***
In this clearing, Han’s thinking lets Western concepts take root differently. Among them is eros
— a term that, in Greek thought, signifies much more than desire in the
everyday sense. It is the soul’s movement beyond itself, toward a
beauty that transcends possession. Eros reorients the reflex of
self-enclosure, the habit of drawing the world inward and rendering it
usable. The soul, instead of grasping, is laid hold of.
Against a Zen backdrop, this can seem difficult to place: the Western
longing for beauty seems to unsettle the stillness of Buddhist
detachment. Han’s books, inhabiting that tension, do not systematically
resolve it. Instead, they bear its fruit in a mood that attunes us to
the world. What matters for Han is that both movements, in their
different ways, loosen the grip of a possessive inwardness. The question
is no longer how to possess the self, but how to move beyond it.
***
Han begins from a different premise. Freedom in the digital age is
found not in resisting the Other, but where the Other resists us. It is a
question of ends: does freedom secure the ego or free us from its grip?
One posture is habitually on guard, the other habitually open. For
Zuboff, who draws again from Sartre, the danger is plain: “Hell is other
people.” For Han, the more radical danger is an “inferno of the same”
in which the Other disappears.
A life organized entirely around the self — its projects, its
performance, its wants — leaves no room for the kind of relations in
which freedom can actually take shape. The word freedom, Han likes to note, shares a root with friend.
One is not free alone. Freedom arises from vulnerability. It begins not
in mastery but in exposure, where one is no longer fully one’s own.
Which, since John Locke is integral to my research project, makes me think of Locke's idea that true freedom reaches its height in civil society - with other people, ordered liberty.
AI Is Changing What We Can Do. Who We Become Is Still Our Choice. | The Humanist Review of AI
Let’s step back and ask one of the central questions of ethics: “What
kind of people should we want to be?” Ethics, in the classical sense,
is about how to live well. And that involves more than producing the
right outward acts. It involves becoming the sort of person who can
recognize what is right, choose it for the right reasons and respond to
the world with the appropriate thoughts and feelings.
How, then, could an automated oracle help? It cannot tell you what to
feel, because feeling is not something you can summon by obedience. But
neither can it settle the matter by telling you what to do. Reasons
matter, and to be a morally responsible agent you must reason for
yourself. That thought is central to the ethical tradition that reaches
back through the European Enlightenment and to Immanuel Kant. Central to
Kant’s thought was the ideal of people fully in charge of their own
lives, reasoning toward the right decisions through a kind of
self-government he called autonomy. People who simply do what they are
told, even when what they are told to do is right, are not living
autonomous lives. Nor is this a uniquely European idea. Confucius taught
the virtue of yi, which involves recognizing what is right and acting
in harmony with moral principle. Buddhism offers similar lessons. What
matters is not just what you do but the intention with which you do it.
Accordingly, philosophers have rightly been suspicious of “moral
deference”, in which someone decides what to do based on what another
person or institution declares to be right. Moral guides, your priest,
your rabbi, your imam, your guru, even a humble philosopher, can help
you think things through. They can draw your attention to features of a
situation you may have overlooked. But if they are doing their job, they
will not simply listen to your quandary and pronounce a course of
action without giving reasons. They will want you to do what is right
because you understand why it is right, because only acts that arise
from your own deliberation are fully yours. If they espouse values you
do not recognize, your compliance does not turn their judgment into your
own.
I should add that I am not assuming values are matters of mere belief
rather than knowledge, or endorsing relativism, the notion that
different normative traditions are entitled to their different answers.
You can reject moral deference and affirm autonomy while still believing
that there is such a thing as moral truth, and even moral expertise.
Perhaps many moral questions, perhaps even all of them, have a
universally correct answer. It remains the case that, even if LLMs give
excellent answers to moral questions, you still should not defer to
their conclusions. You should try to understand the reasons they offer,
because it remains important that people act on the basis of their own,
admittedly imperfect, understanding. That, in my view, is itself one of
the universal moral truths.
***
Once we recognize that people, media outlets or spiritual guides may
try to shape us in these ways, we can take that into account. We can ask
what interests they have in influencing us. We can consult a range of
sources with different interests. I know the pastor has an interest in
getting me to make a larger offering. I know that Fox News tilts right
and The Guardian inclines left. So, I can weigh what they say
accordingly.
But the most effective forms of manipulation are invisible. And one
problem with applying this strategy to AI is that we often lack any
clear picture of the interests, if any, that guide it. That is one place
where public education would help. One strength of LLMs, however, is
that, unlike the pastor, they are often willing to tell you what they
“know” about the forces that shaped them. And researchers have explored
the political bent of the major models. There is a lot of evidence that
existing LLMs tend to lean somewhat left of political center. It would
be unfounded conspiracy-mongering to suggest that some secret
center-left cabal is controlling things behind the scenes. Once you
consider the shape of politics in the North Atlantic world, where the
main LLMs are based, more ordinary explanations present themselves.
***
Political outlooks also differ in ways that reflect evaluative
disposition rather than straightforward factual belief. Moral
psychologists Graham and Haidt, for example, argue that concern about
fairness tends to diminish, and concern about group loyalty to increase,
as one moves rightward.[8]
If so, users should know that fine-tuning may favor equality over
national loyalty, reflecting the outlook of the cosmopolitan, highly
educated people who help shape these systems. Autonomy is strengthened
when people can judge advice in light of the perspective that informs
it.
***
But notice that an AI guide that did agree to simply choose options
would not be much use if you could neither identify the relevant
features of your situation nor see what your options were. An LLM cannot
tell you anything useful unless you can inform it about your situation.
And grasping what matters in your situation is a capacity you can
acquire only through practice. There is always something else you might
consider. You have to learn what is relevant and how to respond to it.
I would add it is not enough to learn, but to remember and to have faith in what you know in the face of a world that does not care. I knew much. Depression became nihilism as my faith in ethics, in people, in what I was doing with my life dissipated.
Oops, I stopped reading too soon.
Aristotle thought that we develop this capacity through habituation,
by practice. For him, the virtues were not rules or isolated good acts
but settled dispositions of character, ways of seeing, feeling and
responding that are formed over time until they become, in a good sense,
second nature. Confucius, in a different key, stressed the role of
ritual and custom in shaping good habits of response. Our sensibilities,
our capacities for detecting what matters in the human world, do not
come ready-made. That thought, largely sidelined for a time in modern
moral philosophy, was revived in the twentieth century by thinkers such
as Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot, who urged that ethics return
its attention to character, judgment and human flourishing.
One role of fiction, in fables and parables—in novels and short
stories, in film, video and even painting—is to let us imagine complex
moral situations and so develop habits of judgment and feeling.
Conversational exchanges with an LLM, in which scenarios are built out
collaboratively, could certainly engage the imagination in ways that
help shape character and sensibility. Still, it is likely to remain true
that we develop these capacities mostly by using them in the situations
we face, alone and with others. Time online draws us away from those
encounters.
I once told a friend of mine that the hardest ethical questions were between two equally bad choices. It seems now that may not have been taken as much comfort. I think that was the last time I saw Paula.
I am not a Saul Bellow fan. He put me off my writing for decades. I felt it was a milieu that had no reality - factual or emotional - for me. Yet, I keep coming back to him. Wondering was I wrong about him. Did I close my mind? I wish I had read Philip Roth first rather. Bellow was older - closer to Mailer, whose fictions leave me cold. But I admire Nelson Algren - also of Chicago and close to Bellow's age. And Vonnegut, Heller, Gore Vidal were of the same generation. There is someone else from the Fifties dancing in the shadows of my mind who leaves me as disinterested in his topics as does Bellow. I cannot get a name to form. Cheever's people have all the sexual tics and social anxieties. Yet, I understand their problems better. Augie March I found a novel worth reading, but Humboldt's Gift preceded it by decades.
And today I received a link to ‘Ravelstein’ Revisited - by Jonathan Marks (The Bulwark). This fit into the previous entries in this post. It might have also sparked a bit of reflection on my Bellow bias. A recession of sorts. It is a consideration of a Bellow novel for which I have only read disdain, to be polite.
I DON’T THINK THAT CHICK’S EXPOSURE, sometimes intentional,
sometimes unintentional, of his own defects justify his shameless
exposure of a friend. To be sure, Ravelstein and Chick both merit praise
from Bellow’s perspective. Bellow, throughout his career, took a
special interest in ineffectual intellectuals, most notably Moses Herzog
in Bellow’s novel Herzog, whose book-learning and
talent for observation does little to make him wise. Herzog is,
however, raised above his fellow moderns, who are less foolish than he
is in some ways, by his high ambition, rare in a world ruled by
economics, natural science, and the quest for the comforts those
pursuits provide. Herzog wants to “live out marvelous qualities vaguely
comprehended.” That desire, pursued even to the brink of madness,
matters more than the failure of Herzog to gain more than the mystical
conclusion that “only the incomprehensible gives any light.”
Chick
and Ravelstein, who attempt but fail to understand a world Chick deems
“mysterious,” are honorable in the same way Herzog is, a way that is
compatible with great foolishness. Perhaps Ravelstein, who understood
the quest for human completeness to be nearly always futile, wouldn’t
mind being understood as a noble failure. But I doubt that even Chick’s
Ravelstein would consider the abandonment of his lifelong convictions
and preferences in the face of death to be the kind of failure that is
noble.
Yeah, pretty sure I will only read Ravelstein if I am stuck with nothing else to do.
Effing brilliant: Star Shrapnel by Ata Zargarof
Book Review: Talking Classics by Mary Beard
sch
