Category: Religion
What should I ask Marilynne Robinson?
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with her. Here is from Wikipedia:
Marilynne Summers Robinson (born November 26, 1943) is an American novelist and essayist. Across her writing career, Robinson has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005, National Humanities Medal in 2012, and the 2016 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. In 2016, Robinson was named in Time magazine’s list of 100 most influential people. Robinson began teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1991 and retired in the spring of 2016.
Robinson is best known for her novels Housekeeping (1980) and Gilead (2004). Her novels are noted for their thematic depiction of faith and rural life. The subjects of her essays span numerous topics, including the relationship between religion and science, US history, nuclear pollution, John Calvin, and contemporary American politics.
Her next book is Reading Genesis, on the Book of Genesis. So what should I ask her?
The David Network
I am pleased to have spoken at their yearly conference yesterday. If I understand them correctly (here is their web site), it is for elite college students — grad and undergrad — at Harvard, MIT, Stanford and the rest of the Ivies. No other schools. The group is explicitly religious (across religions and denominations) and also right-leaning and explicitly elitist. [Correction: Unlike as previously stated, Robert George of Princeton does not have a leadership role in the group, though he has a speaker role. The Network is run by volunteers.]
Here is the thing — there were about five hundred people at the event. That shocked me. Overall the energy and talent levels in the rooms seemed high.
The group is four years old, and I had never heard of them before, so I am passing this information along. As I’ve said in the past, the most important thinkers of the future will be religious thinkers (and I’m not one of them). Today I am upping my “p” on that prediction.
Addendum: My comments were on higher education, and they were more optimistic than what the other panel members expressed. There is a good chance they will put it on-line.
*Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative*
That is the new memoir from Glenn C. Loury, and I cracked it open right away, here is one excerpt:
But now Harvard is looking to retool its ailing Afro-American Studies department, and Tom [Schelling] serves on the committee whose job it is to recruit new faculty worthy of the institution. The chair of that committee is the distinguished black historian Nathan Huggins, who has recently taken the helm in Afro Studies at Harvard. Apparently my Econometrica paper on intergenerational transfers had gotten their attention, and my writing on the dynamics of racial income differences has piqued their interest. I’m just six years past my PhD and they’re offering a joint appointment as full professor of economics and of Afro-American Studies. The appointment would make me the first black tenured professor in the history of Harvard’s economics department. I like the sound of that. In the past, the timing hadn’t quite felt right for Harvard. But now it does feel right, and I have the sense that if I say no a third time, they won’t be calling again.
You can pre-order the book here, it is self-recommending of course. And here is my earlier Conversation with Glenn Loury.
John Milton as devout Muslim?
When we read Paradise Lost, we feel that Milton is a devout Muslim. This is reflected in his rejection of Prelates and their mediation between God and His Creatures. You also find Milton as a lover of life on earth. He interprets the Bible and practical and personal ways. He advocates divorce and considers man superior to woman. He also hates the rituals of the church and the icons. He draws on the Old Testament, not the New Testament. For these reasons, I have already said that Milton was not a Christian, but rather a pious Muslim.
That is from Louis Awad, the Egyptian literary critic, reproduced in Islam Issa’s quite interesting Milton in the Arab-Muslim World.
Overcoming Baumol
One way to overcome the Baumol effect is to replace labor with capital. AI and robots are making that possible. Here’s a clip of the Carmelite Monks of Wyoming who are building a monastery in the Gothic style using CNC machines:
CNC machines and robots have unlocked the ability to relatively quickly carve the intense details of a Gothic church. Ornate pieces that used to take months for a skilled carver, now can be accomplished in a matter of days. Instead of cutting out the beauty, using the excuse that it takes too long, thus doesn’t fit into the budget, modern technology can be used to make true Gothic in all its beauty a reality again today.
Bring back the beauty!
My excellent Conversation with John Gray
I had been wanting to do this one for a while, and now it exists. Here is the audio and transcript, here is the episode summary:
Tyler and John sat down to discuss his latest book, including who he thinks will carry on his work, what young people should learn if liberalism is dead, whether modern physics allows for true atheism, what in Eastern Orthodoxy attracts him, the benefits of pessimism, what philanthropic cause he’d invest a billion dollars in, under what circumstances he’d sacrifice his life, what he makes of UFOs, the current renaissance in film and books, whether Monty Python is still funny, how Herman Melville influenced him, who first spotted his talent, his most unusual work habit, what he’ll do next, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: Do you think that being pessimistic gives you pleasure? Or what’s the return in it from a purely pragmatic point of view?
GRAY: You are well prepared for events. You don’t expect —
COWEN: It’s a preemption, right? You become addicted to preempting bad news with pessimism.
GRAY: No, no. When something comes along which contradicts my expectations, I’m pleasantly surprised. I get pleasant surprises. Whereas, if you are an adamant optimist, you must be in torment every time you turn the news on because the same old follies, the same old crimes, the same old atrocities, the same old hatreds just repeat themselves over and over again. I’m not surprised by that at all. That’s like the weather. It’s like living in a science fiction environment in which it rains nearly all of the time, but from time to time it stops and there’s beautiful sunlight.
If you think that basically there is beautiful sunlight all the time, but you’re just living in a small patch of it, most of your life will be spent in frustration. If you think the other way around, as I do, your life will be peppered, speckled with moments in which what you expect doesn’t happen, but something better happens.
COWEN: Why can’t one just build things and be resiliently optimistic in a pragmatic, cautionary sense, and take comfort in the fact that you would rather have the problems of the world today than, say, the problems of the world in the year 1000? It’s not absolute optimism where you attach to the mood qua mood, but you simply want to do things and draw a positive energy from that, and it’s self-reinforcing. Why isn’t that a better view than what you’re calling pessimism?
And:
COWEN: Under what circumstances would you be willing to sacrifice your life? Or for what?
GRAY: Not for humanity, that’s for sure.
Recommended, interesting throughout. John is one of the smartest and best read thinkers and writers. He even has an answer ready for why he isn’t short the market. And don’t forget John’s new book — I read all of them — New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism.
Same-sex marriage and priestly employment
We study the effect of legalization of same-sex marriage on coming out in the United States. We overcome data limitations by inferring coming out decisions through a revealed preference mechanism. We exploit data on enrollment in seminary studies for the Catholic priesthood, hypothesizing that Catholic priests’ vow of celibacy may lead gay men to self-select as a way to avoid a heterosexual lifestyle. Using a differences-in-differences design that exploits variation in the timing of legalization across states, we find that city-level enrollment in priestly studies fell by about 15% exclusively in states adopting the reform. The celibacy norm appears to be driving our results, since we find no effect on enrollment in deacon or lay ministry studies that do not require celibacy. We also find that coming out decisions, as inferred through enrollment in priestly studies, are primarily affected by the presence of gay communities and by prevailing social attitudes toward gays. We explain our findings with a stylized model of lifestyle choice.
That is from a new working paper by Avner Seror and Tohit Ticku.
Classical liberals are increasingly religious
Not too long ago, I was telling Ezra Klein that I had noticed a relatively new development in classical liberalism. If a meet an intellectual non-Leftist, increasingly they are Nietzschean, compared to days of yore. But if they are classical liberal instead, typically they are religious as well. That could be Catholic or Jewish or LDS or Eastern Orthodox, with some Protestant thrown into the mix, but Protestants coming in last.
The person being religious is now a predictor of that same person having non-crazy political views. Classical liberalism thus, whether you like it or not, has become an essentially religious movement.
Many strands of libertarianism are being left behind, and again this is a positive rather than a normative claim. It is simply how things are.
Aayan Hirsi Ali announces she is now a Christian.
The neo trad movement gets ayaan 🙁 But seriously this seems to be a real trend – lots of otherwise smart, successful, secular people I know have been going religious, but it’s not in the same way people used to go religious. It’s much more *cultural* now, and less about belief
Seconded. You may recall my earlier prophecy that the important thinkers of the future are going to be religious thinkers. I believe that will prove true outside of classical liberalism as well.
That was then, this is now
…the first German pogroms of the modern age, the so-called Hep-Hep riots, took place in 1819. Jews were attacked on the streets and Jewish stores were ransacked. It was a new and as yet unknown phenomenon in the German-speaking lands. The riots were led by students, ostensibly the anti-absolutist and progressive force in German society.
That is from Shlomo Avineri’s Herzl’s Vision: Theodor Herzl and the Foundation of the Jewish State. Here is a new bulletin from MIT.
That was then, this is now — Gaza edition
The [Assyrian] empire’s chief concern were the corridors and trade routes that ran through Gaza on the coast as well as Megiddo, which had been an important city in the Northern kingdom. Scholars are divided on the issue of Assyria’s economic interest in the Southern Levant. Some insist that the empire was eager to exploit the resources of the region and even encouraged its economic development. Others argue that it was interested in little else than collecting tribute from its client states, and that it left most lands (especially those that did not serve a strategic purpose) to languish under the imperial “yoke” it imposed on them.
That is from the new and quite interesting Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and its Origins, by Jacob L. Wright. From the jacket copy: “…the Bible began as a trailblazing blueprint for a new form of political community.”
AI Worship
i expect ai to be capable of superhuman persuasion well before it is superhuman at general intelligence, which may lead to some very strange outcomes.
Sam Altman on Twitter. Clearly true.
I predict AI driven religions. At first these will begin as apps like, what would Jesus say? But the apps will quickly morph into talk to Jesus/Mohammed/Ram. Personal Jesus. Personal Ram. Personal Tyler. Then the AIs will start to generate new views from old texts. The human religious authorities will be out debated by the AIs so many people will come to see the new views as not heretical but closer to God than the old views. Fusion and fission religions will be born. As the AIs explore the space of religious views at accelerated pace, evolution will push into weirder and weirder mind niches.
What strange outcomes do you predict?
My excellent Conversation with Jacob Mikanowski
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Jacob Mikanowski is the author of one of Tyler’s favorite books this year called Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land. Tyler and Jacob sat down to discuss all things Eastern Europe, including the differences between Eastern and Western European humor, whether Poles are smiling more nowadays, why the best Polish folk art is from the south, the equilibrium for Kaliningrad and the Suwałki Gap, how Romania and Bulgaria will handle depopulation, whether Moldova has an independent future, the best city to party in, why there are so few Christian-Muslim issues in Albania, a nuanced take on Orbán and Hungarian politics, why food in Poland is so good now, why Stanisław Lem hasn’t gotten more attention in the West, how Eastern Europe has changed his view of humanity, his ideal two week itinerary in the region, what he’ll do next, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Why isn’t Stanisław Lem more popular in the West today as a writer?
MIKANOWSKI: That’s interesting. I grew up on Stanisław Lem like some people grow up on the Grimms’ Fairy Tales. My dad’s a computer scientist. His father set up one of Poland’s first computers. The world of Polish science and science fiction: he used to read the Tales of Pirx the Pilot and the Ijon Tichy stories — the robots, the short, fun ones — like they were fairy tales. I grew up with them.
I think — actually I have trouble going back to those. I’d go back to Solaris, and I think Solaris is a real masterpiece and I think it’s had lasting influence. But there’s something pessimistic about them. They don’t have that thing that Asimov does, or even Dune, of world-building and forecasting the human future far in advance. They are like Kafka in space, and that’s absurd situations, strange turns of events — I think a pretty pessimistic view of progress. Maybe that makes them hard to digest. Also a kind of odd sense of humor with the short stories. Almost a childlike sense of humor that maybe makes them hard to take.
I think there’s been a little bit of a Lem revival, though. I know technologists, some people like them; futurologists like him. I like him.
COWEN: Some of the cybernetics tales, they seem weirdly close to the current state of LLMs. And I think I’ve seen this mentioned once, but it’s not generally known: the idea that you use them to talk to, that they’re weird, they might be somewhat mystical, they serve as therapists or oracles — that’s very much in Lem, quite early.
MIKANOWSKI: I think people should go back to them. I think — I was just thinking of Solaris, which I always thought about as this story about contacting a truly alien alien. Now it’s like, well, this is a little bit of what we’re doing with virtual reality and AI. It’s like, what would happen if you could actually talk to your dreams, if you could revive people? You could have the mimicry of consciousness, the appearance of consciousness, without anything behind it — without a consciousness.
There’s something seductive about it, and there’s something monstrous about it. I think he was there way ahead of anyone else, and people should be going back to them. Maybe they will.
Of course we talk about the Suwalki Gap as well. And this: “Given all your study of Eastern Europe, what is it you feel you understand about the current war in Ukraine that maybe other well-informed people would not?”
Recommended, interesting throughout. Again, here is Jacob’s new and excellent book Goodbye Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land.
Ross Douthat, telephone!
In the ancient city of Exeter, three women were hanged for practicing witchcraft in the late 17th century, the last of such executions in England. Now, merely a short walk from where the hangings occurred, the University of Exeter will offer a postgraduate degree in magic and occult science, which the school says is the first of its kind at a British university.
Prof. Emily Selove, the head of the new program and an associate professor in medieval Arabic literature, said the idea for the degree, which will be offered starting in September 2024, came out of the recent surge in interest in the history of witchcraft and a desire to create a space where research on magic could be studied across academic fields.
Coursework will include the study of Western dragons in lore, literature and art; archaeology theory; the depiction of women in the Middle Ages; the practice of deception and illusion; and the philosophy of psychedelics. Through the lenses of Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions, lecturers will explore how magic has influenced society and science.
Christina Oakley Harrington, a retired academic of medieval history and the founder of Treadwell’s, a London bookstore specializing in literature on magic and spiritualism, said that many witches she knew were talking about the degree program, announced last week, and were thinking about enrolling.
Here is more from the NYT. The school has received hundreds of inquiries in the last few days.
My Conversation with Ada Palmer
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Ada Palmer is a Renaissance historian at the University of Chicago who studies radical free thought and censorship, composes music, consults on anime and manga, and is the author of the acclaimed Terra Ignota sci-fi series, among many other things.
Tyler sat down with Ada to discuss why living in the Renaissance was worse than living during the Middle Ages, how art protected Florence, why she’s reluctant to travel back in time, which method of doing history is currently the most underrated, whose biography she’ll write, how we know what old Norse music was like, why women scholars helped us understand Viking metaphysics, why Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist is an interesting work, what people misunderstand about the inquisition(s), why science fiction doesn’t have higher social and literary status, which hive she would belong to in Terra Ignota, what the new novel she’s writing is about, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: De Sade — where does that come from? What are the influences on de Sade as a writer?
PALMER: Thomas Aquinas. No, lots and lots of things, but he’s very interested in the large philosophical milieu in the period. Remember that the 18th century is a moment when the clandestine bookshop is a major, major thing. And if anyone enjoys and is interested in the history of censorship and clandestine publishing, I can’t recommend enough the work of Robert Darnton, a brilliant, brilliant historian of clandestine literature.
But the same underground bookshops sell all underground materials, which means an underground bookshop sells pornography, and it also sells Voltaire and Rousseau, and it also sells diatribes criticizing the king, and it also sells radical Jansenist theological pamphlets about whether the Holy Spirit derives from the Father and Son equally or from the Father alone.
The same kinds of people frequent these shops, and the same kinds of people buy things. So, think about how, when you go into a Barnes & Noble, the science fiction and fantasy section is one section, even though science fiction and fantasy are different things. But they have a lot of overlap, both in the overlap of readership and in overlap in books that have both science fiction and fantasy elements. It was perfectly natural, in the same way, for clandestine bookshops to generate these works that are pornography and radical philosophy at the same time. They’re printed by the same printers, sold to the same audiences, and circulate in the same places.
De Sade uses his extreme pornography to get at questions of morality, ethics, and artificiality. What are the ethics of hurting each other? Why do we feel that way about hurting each other? What are so-called natural impulses, as John Locke and Hobbes were very dominant at the time, or Descartes, who is differently dominant at the time in rivalry with them? They make claims about the natural human impulses or the natural character of a human being. What does extreme sexuality show us about how that character might be broader than it is?
I mean it when I say Thomas Aquinas, right? One of Thomas Aquinas’s traditional proofs of the existence of God is that everything he sees around him in nature — this also is one that Aristotle uses, but Aquinas articulates it in the most famous way for de Sade’s period — that when we look around us, it’s clear that everything is designed to work.
Interesting throughout.
The best sentence I read today (so far)
“Robots can’t replace senior clerics, but they can be a trusted assistant that can help them issue a fatwa in five hours instead of 50 days,” said Mohammad Ghotbi, who heads a state-linked organisation in Qom that encourages the growth of technology businesses.
And this follow-up:
Ghotbi, who leads the Eshragh Creativity and Innovation House, affirmed the approach, arguing that the clergy should not oppose the desire of Iranians to share in global technological advances. “Today’s society favours acceleration and progress,” he said.
Here is the full FT story, via Jesper.