Human persons

Not going to really go into it right now but suffice it to say that Jacques Maritain had quite an interesting life. It probably helps that―for a time, at least―he was a pupil of one of my favorite philosophers, Henri Bergson. 

I've been reading a collection of Maritain's works, The Social and Political Philosophy of... and several bits of it wow me. Here's one.

The end of society is the good of the community, the good of the social body. But if this good of the body is not understood to be a common good of human persons, just as the social body itself is a whole of human persons, this conception would lead in turn to errors of a totalitarian type. The common good of the body politic is neither the mere collection of private goods, nor the good of the whole which, like the species with respect to its individuals or the hive with respect to its bees, draws the parts to itself alone and sacrifices them to itself. It is the good human life of the multitude, It is the good human life of the multitude, of a multitude of persons; it is their communion in good living. It is therefore common to the whole and to the parts; it flows back to the parts, and the parts must benefit from it.

Dense stuff, perhaps. But the central theme―that the good of the people can only be applied to that which respects their life as humans, with all that includes―is as relevant as ever.

Heavens!

Do we live in a clockwork universe? I would say that the fact that we're not clockwork says no.

But clockwork representations of the universe can still be very cool, Besides their considerable aesthetic charm, they show makers engaged with the big and little questions around them. And this craft goes back a long way. At least to Ancient Greece with the Antikythera mechanism. That's a wild story.

Orrery makers in our own century would have their hands full with updates. A few years back we had the first new planet adapted as part of the solar system since Pluto in the 1920s. Then they tried rounding out our new 10-planet solar system with asteroid Ceres and Vulcan, a near-Mercury planet no one had ever actually seen. Then it all collapsed and we wound up with an eight planet system.

那很好笑

I found this to be an interesting story. Jesse Appel studied in China. As he gained fluency in Mandarin, he started doing comedy there. In fact, he had a Chinese mentor. 

I can't judge whether he's funny in Mandarin Chinese. But there's a good chance he's a harbinger of upcoming trends. China is thriving in many respects. Even as they're a rival country, there could be a lot of Americans and Westerners in general living there in the near future. And they'll be doing all sorts of things. From the Chinese perspective, "American" may become an ethnicity, more or less.

Self-justifying

Lewis Mumford is a new name to me, but this overview does a very interesting job placing his work and ideas in the context of modern society. Specifically, society's relationship with technology.

The most striking evidence of the myth’s cultural pervasiveness is that many avid accelerationists do not deny that AI could mean the end of humanity. They merely differ from the doomers in believing that this risk is necessary—even desirable—to achieve the spectacular increases in efficiency and productivity promised by AGI. Mumford foresaw this extreme endpoint. “The myth of the machine,” he wrote, “the basic religion of our present culture, has so captured the modern mind that no human sacrifice seems too great provided it is offered up to the insolent Marduks and Molochs of science and technology.” 

Those branded as skeptics or doomers also still accept the premises of the myth of the machine. The stated aim of many organizations concerned with avoiding the worst AI outcomes is that we should “realize the benefits while mitigating the risks” of the technology. Mumford would argue the first half of this statement concedes too much, accepting the basic premise of the myth of the machine while presenting the task as removing the obstacles to realize its benefits. Many skeptics also share a basic misanthropic premise of machine superiority, focusing as they do on the biased, irrational, and flawed nature of human beings that needs machinic augmentation. 

This is it, of course. There's a new generation of business tycoon. Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, and Alex Karp are representative. While he has a nicer demeanor, Dario Amodei probably fits here too. While they are government contractors and, to a lesser degree, producers of goods for the consumer market, they're not satisfied with being seen as the widget makers they are. So they've taken it upon themselves to redefine the role of humanity. And of course that role is subservient to their machine god.

Sixty-odd years ago, on The Jetsons, mundane sitcom suburbanites were depicted as living in splendor above the skies. A homey kind of splendor, to be sure. They had a robot maid, but she sounded just like Hazel. Now, in order to get that level of futuristic ease, we're expected to submit to robots we're not allowed to question. Have they done a good enough job at changing and replacing the audience that people will take this deal. Some probably will. Time will tell how many.

Big sound

The gentleman playing the rather Seussian-looking musical instrument is also the man who invented it. His name is Gorkem Sen, and he's a Turkish musician and instrument maker. It's called the yaybahar, and it's only been around for a few years. It's the twenty-first century and we don't expect to see new instruments invented that aren't synthesizers or otherwise somehow electronic. Which is also in some ways a surprise because that big echoing effect sounds like something you might need to go to a studio to get. 

In the coming years―assuming the years continue to come―it's interesting to ponder if this thing might take off the way steelpans did in the 20th century.

Horseshoe vs. horseshoe

The other day I was in a bookstore looking in vain for a decent book of crosswords.* While in that part of the shop I saw a weighty tome called Hated by All the Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind by Jason Zengerle. Reading the jacket copy didn't convince me that it was much more than a hatchet job, and nor do the glowing reviews. The publisher being founded by former Obama staffers doesn't help.

Carlson was also lampooned on SNL as a paranoid Oscar commentator, although if you can take more than thirty seconds your tolerance is higher than mine. This comes at a time when talk is being floated of prosecuting Carlson for not being down with the war effort. It's all just a wacky coincidence, I'm sure.

In recent years, there's been a different kind of anti-establishment movement on the Right, Tucker included, which has more than once aligned with dissident voices on the left (Glenn Greenwald being one example) and free agents like Joe Rogan. The people who have power in both major parties and consider themselves responsible stewards of public thought aren't keen on this. Big Lib does its best to make these people seem icky. Big Con is less shy about being openly authoritarian, and so threatens them with jail. It's a process that can be used and reused against many different targets, which seems to have at least someone at Daily Kos rightly worried.

* Sad to say, crossword content outside of The New York Times tends to be wan. I wound up turning to Thriftbooks. 

Temperance and friends

It's interesting to find out that the Tarot began as a deck of playing cards and wasn't associated with divination until the eighteenth century. That doesn't mean that the use of cards―playing and otherwise―to divine the future doesn't go back further. But these particular cards had been around for a few centuries before they picked up that reputation. 

The Visconti-Sferza deck is quite pretty and distinctive. There's obviously a lot of craft involved in these things. An almost lost craft at that.