Essays

         Information changes you. This is a profound fact, assumed by all of us, but given short shrift, though it’s well worth the time to study.

         Each of us learn to deal with our small portion of the universe in practical ways. This is determined primarily by our physiology. Some of us learn to extend the range of our awareness by artificial means, most often by improving on one or more of our senses, say, with a pair of glasses. Some of us go beyond that, creating machines that enhance our ability to deal with our world. A car, for instance.

         Some of us have a natural capacity to understand certain information better than others. The math impaired tend to avoid the sciences. The tone deaf do not hear what people with perfect pitch do. There are people with a form of synesthesia that allows them to see colors when they hear certain sounds. And the differences among us are uncountable because our senses may be combined in infinite and myriad ways. But by the time we have grown to adulthood, we naturally comprehend all of this, have generally come to terms with it, and begin to act in ways that allow for it. If we have vertigo, we don’t climb to heights. And yet, we are still each human, in the broader sense.

         Information changes you. You are not the same as the person who did not know this. It is the key moment at the beginning of the Hebrew bible. As the story goes, the garden of Eden was lost in just that way. Once you are aware of your nakedness, you cannot unsee it. All knowledge is like that. All the rest of the Bible, and thence human history, follows suit. But not by wearing a suit.

         What is information? It is the perception of our senses translated into language in order to understand it and thus may be communicated to others. Information becomes language through consistency of use. If you scream in pain the same way as you scream with pleasure, you have a failure to communicate.

         We have created numbers to help comprehend some of that. But we know that numbers do not account for most information; only a very small part of it. And the numbers themselves are artificial. That is what allows us to play with them. Like money in the money supply—worthless unless attached to a particular consistent factor—that may itself be another artificial construct. Even so, that information changes us. It may even make us rich or poor.

         If we deny the value of money, for instance, then we must create another currency to barter with. If you are an artist who has created something you value and it has taken you a week to make, you cannot then trade it for three days’ supply of food. You will die. If you, as an artist, insist on writing books nobody reads, you will have to find another means of paying for the costs of living. Selling books, for instance.

         If you have learned how to shape wood, you might be a carpenter and build houses or you might be a sculptor and make totem poles. If there is no demand for your totem poles, you might have to use your talent to make bookshelves in order to eat. But a talent is a form of information. It is information which has been translated through your senses into an ability, and then used to make something useful out of the small portion of the universe you live in.

         Most people learn more than one talent in order to provide for themselves and their families. The less talent they achieve, the narrower range of jobs they can do and often, the less money they make to provide for themselves and their families. This is not rocket science.

         Information changes you—or not. People who act the same before they know something significant as they did after, might have other deficiencies. If your spouse treats you the same after learning you are having an affair, as before, there may be something else going on there. Information can be useless. Most of what you see on afternoon television, for instance. If you spend time watching that, you will have less useful information for the time spent than by doing something useful…There may be a consequence to acquiring useless information after all. So, indirectly, the information changes you.

         Brilliant thinkers like Iain McGilchrist have studied the mind and made its function more explicable, but they cannot make us think. Dorothy Parker had that pegged just right while leading a horticulture. We cannot easily unsee what we know. We can forget but they won’t be bygones. Information changes us. The very act of forgetting changes us again.

         In most circumstances, knowing is better than not knowing, but there is such a thing as knowing too much. J.R.R. Tolkien surviving his time at Somme would be an example of that. But he then translated that information into something else in order to comprehend the incomprehensible. Making the most of such information can be a key to understanding it better. Understanding the complexity might be achieved through a form of Zen, or, in Tolkien’s case, redirected through a narrative that makes some sense of great horror. But much of the literature of mankind is, to some degree, a means of interpreting what we have learned. Even the humor.

         Information changes us. A child is born. Our child. And just as the child’s perceptions are first interpreting a new world, we are discovering the child. And through them we are rediscovering ourselves. And we are changed yet again.

data dumb

         There are many kinds of dumb. The ideologically dumb who cannot see their own stupidity through the gauze of a particular ism, is common. Marxism is the easiest example of that, but there are many others in our modern age. There are the religious dumb who have adopted a true belief and cannot break loose for fear of losing themselves to doubt or worse, losing friends. The simplest kind of dumb are the self-serving sort who steal or lie or kill for their own immediate advantage without seeing the consequence. Then there are the really very, very, dumb who combine a few different kinds of dumb together for the inevitable result, and then blame others.

         Intelligence is usually not a factor. There are as many high I.Q. dumb as there are the naturally impaired. In fact, most lower I.Q. individuals have learned to guard against dumb-think after earlier experience taught them the basic facts of life, and being commonsensical, they stick to what makes them happy. They might then be misled more easily than others, but their understanding of the mistake is more straight-forward.

         Lately, we have turned up a new sort of dumb—temporarily new—one that has grown exponentially in our vapid, technologically dependent, culture. We now have recent generations of bright minds made dumb by the memorization of data—something a cheap computer can do better. That is like counting the grains of sand on the beach. With the coming of AI, this will be the first cohort to be marginalized. And, importantly, because they have never been taught to think for themselves or to find worth for other reasons than the mathematical, statistical, or the pre-ordained, they will be the most angry with the world that then reduces them to beggars, and they will most easily be directed by nefarious minds to war, or riot, or worse.

         When convenience becomes the standard of value, or efficiency, or speed, rather than beauty, or quality, or purpose, then the inevitable result is a data driven culture. This will serve the purpose of malign minds for a time, but then they will find the numbers themselves inconvenient. Such populations are not as productive, are costly to maintain, and besides, the robotics age has arrived. A war, or a plague will be just what the doctor ordered.

         Because most schools, public or private, have failed to teach values of any kind, other than the reductive insanity of woke, in order to keep students in line and their parents cowered, and because critical thinking has long been out of fashion, a significant portion of the population is already essentially helpless, while also being demanding. This new welfare society is a kind of faux aristocracy, a royalty of privilege bestowed on them by technology they cannot make or create or fix themselves but will always demand ever more from. Think of an enormous version of a little shop of horrors with the echo of ‘feed me, feed me’ from every corner as it grows. And it will have no better end.

         “If a man will not work, he shall not eat,” is the Biblical aphorism most recently translated into shortened form as ‘them that works, eats.’ Such a simplistic philosophy does not sit well with minds of the western liberal welfare society that we have today. And it will not stand. They will not be re-educated, or they cannot be re-educated. Mike Rowe is terrific, but he cannot save them all,

         The singularity you have heard so much about, ‘A hypothetical future point in time when artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence and then be able to self-replicate and improve itself autonomously,’ dependent on compliance, of course, has already been achieved. And failed. Even as the minions of this outcome are busy trying to find the necessary energy, their numbers are diminishing. Love does not fit in the box. It cannot be programmed. There is no algorithm for it. Just chemical lust. And lust does not produce children, except by mistake. Importantly, it does not produce children who can think for themselves.

         A Wikipedia definition: “In mathematics, a singularity is a point at which a given mathematical object is not defined, or a point where the mathematical object ceases to be ‘well-behaved’ in some particular way, such as by lacking differentiability or analyticity.” I think it is easier to simply think of it as unique.

         In practice, it is uniquely undefinable. And thus, useless for any practical purpose other than to write dystopian novels. The eschaton has already been immanentized. Our utopia is here. If it doesn’t look like much, that is only because it is so much less than you had before. The feces underfoot are merely the illusion of our misconceptions.

         Knowledge is not manufactured. What was not known before becomes knowledge. It is empirical. Knowledge is discovered. But it was always there to begin with. There really are no voids in the universe, just what we have not yet discovered. And, despite the effort of the best of minds to pretend otherwise, AI has no means of discovery. Data is knowledge, if you like, but then so is a grain of sand. Data is numbers. Knowing the number of grains of sand on the beach does not make you wise. Finding a way to turn silica into chips is smart—not dumb. AI is dumb. Using the chips to store knowledge in useful ways, that might be wise. But the AI will not imagine that until told to do it by a better man.

         We have made of ourselves a great orphanage, and all of us little Olivers, asking for more. We learn our morals from coffin makers and Fagins and only expect the worst of our fellow man.

         That is the summation of the situation our situation is in. Popular culture has overwhelmed us. We are suffocating like a toy poodle in Margaret Dumont’s lap.  Someone once said, if it wasn’t for popular culture we’d have no culture at all. This might be the meme for our current state of affairs. This is us. We have abandoned all else…mostly.

         There is a revolt going on. If it were gauged for size and weight it would be quickly squelched, but it is there, and not just in one place, or attached to one political cell or cohort. I cannot judge its power any more than its numbers. But I certainly hope that it’s big, or else we are lost. It is the culture that supports our civilization, not just Elon Musk. And the Machine will not be patient with our necessary faults. That is, those faults we must live with or else we die. The faults that make life worth living. Without them we have no virtues.

         I think I will blame Dickens first.

         Dickens wrote characters, not people. This was worse in his early work, and bettered as he grew older and learned from his fellow writers, but it was a fault he never lost entirely, succumbing to the tropes of the stage in his time, and making characters into props and devices. This, and his sense of plot, made him very popular. But it was ruinous for literature in general. Because it was an easy tool, other writers copied him. The newly reading audiences presented with the cheap product off the steam presses, succumbed to the quick entertainment on the page. Teachers loved it because the plot points and characters could be conveniently used on tests. The more difficult writing of a Hugo or Balzac, or Dostoyevsky, or Tolstoy, could be safely left in translation.

         But Dickens cannot (even if you could) be dismissed as worthless. His plots are often terrific, and his perceptions about society very intelligent. Dickens saw early on that the reduction of the human spirit to a cog on a wheel in the industrial age, so visually captured by Charles Chaplin in Modern Times, was already felt by the working public in the mid 19th Century when most people were still farmers. But just as Dickens characters often lacked the complexity of flesh and blood, our literary judgments are too often reduced to simplicities. And this then is abetted by the sheer quantity of the printed product using modern industry. What should you read?

         The Dickens character became a staple of Hollywood. It was so much easier to deal with a Fagin in under two hours running time. And the visual cues of Hollywood became advertisement for the books in the ever-larger supermarket of printed paper. But ‘popular culture’ as we understand it today, may have begun with the glazing of Charles Dickens. The torrent of imitators—a torrent is a lot, all at once, and seemingly unstoppable—resulted in a transformation of literature; and as literature was then the primary vessel of culture in general, it changed everything. The Victorian age, good and bad, was born.

         And this then became the cue for ambiguity. An educated elite wanted to separate themselves from the ‘reading public.’ Sophistication required avoiding the obvious. Hiding true meaning in obscurity, so that it might survive. Some societies craved this ambiguity more than others, the Swedish and the French come to mind. Slogging through Proust felt like punishment to one adolescent and I have never been able to return to find out if I missed anything while trying to pass the test. But there again, the easier dismissal, this time for lack of plot development or defined characters, makes me the poorer. I am sure that the author did not labor that hard and consistently with nothing to say.

         American fiction was plagued with Fagins. Whole genres such as mystery and science fiction grew up around them—easy to package as well as to read. In the case of mystery, noir offered the ‘sophisticated’ angle on what were essentially the same stories again and again. In England, whole villages were murdered, or so it seemed, by characters driven with the motivation of cheap mechanical toys.

         Raymond Chandler and others tried to redeem the mystery genre with human complexity. Science fiction finally lost its pulp origins to writers like Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick and Harlan Ellison who kept asking questions. And Hollywood realized that the questions—why more than how, and what more than who, might be used as hooks to get the public back in the seats. Reel life could transpire in ninety minutes if framed well. But I am afraid they will need an invasion of body snatchers to keep the theaters open now.

         The problem is that the whole enterprise of fiction cannot be contained on one boat, even a bigger one. and reducing reading habits to genres is as counterproductive as making every character a Fagin or an Oliver.

         But there is an even worse aspect to consider. What of an audience willing to spend time, for instance, reading bodice busters? The sexual motor driving romances is symptomatic of an unhealthy pornography and worth some consideration, is it not? But it is not the pornography by itself that is the matter, but the context. The standard of masculinity there alone is a psychological and social disaster.

         Fifty years ago it was westerns. Bookkeepers in Queens were reading formula Westerns like candy. What aspect of that was healthy? If even one of them got in their over-priced cars and drove to Montana to work on a ranch for  $30 a week plus room and board, that would have been worth it. But they stayed home and lived on the paperback page. I love westerns—as a setting, not a genre. Frederick Manfred, Elmer Kelton, and Cormac McCarthy cannot be judged in the same way as Louis L’Amour, Max Brand and Zane Grey. Meanwhile the American public happily sat on the living room couch and watched cardboard characters in gun fights that defied Western history.

         The problem is—there are many problems. The motivation of the corporate publishing is bread and circuses. The Alfred and Blanch Knopf’s of the publishing world are long gone and replaced by bean counters and college business majors who look at flow charts for personal guidance. Hollywood has been absorbed by multinational corporations with no sense of human identity, making the Jack Warners and Louis B. Mayers of yesterday look like aesthetic geniuses—which they were in a perverse way.

         I have not even begun a critique of music, primarily because I can’t read the stuff—but I listen. What I hear, outside of some film scoring, doesn’t inspire. Architecture is slowly overcoming the brutalism of the mid-twentieth century, but mostly by imitating the past, which is not a positive. Art, as in painting and sculpture, is trying yet to survive the bludgeon of photography, but the Wyeth family cannot carry the weight of that revolt alone and the few who persist in the old ways are much ignored by an audience numbed by what passes for realism. At least the range of drama between David Mamet and Horton Foote seem to have drawn audiences to human complexities worth considering, beyond the new racial and gender stereotypes.

         But film and video appear to carry the greatest possibility for breaking the fall, even while AI and digitalization seem to have mesmerized, the technology is offering creative minds a chance to do things that were impossible beneath the deadweight of corporate and union bound Hollywood. The script writing of Taylor Sheridan offers the hope of complex characters doing interesting things outside of the cubicle, but one (me) longs for a little more humor. Where is our Preston Sturges? Our Ben Hecht? We don’t have to judge by box office now. Hasn’t that freed us or has it left us talking to an audience of one.

         And none of this is curable by sudden revelation in our digital world. The bots are on it! Every hint of success will be copied ad infinitum and any taint of failure will be scrubbed before it can infect. How will we know if we succeed? In our short term on earth, we will not. But we can succumb, as a species, or we can revolt.

Grandmothers are like books. They take up time and space, and they smell. They are even dusty. The wisdom of the ages is that simple and direct. This is the source of knowledge we human beings survived upon for hundreds of thousands of years before what we call ‘modern civilization’ descended upon our lives. But, everything is so much better now. 

Actually, what really makes things better, are machines. The rest is questionable. And the invention of machines did not require Charlemagne, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Hitler or Mao. Forget about all those wars. All that it required was a natural spirit of inquiry left free to inquire. Curiosity. But, of course, that caused a lot of mischief too.

Some have grandmothers who kept them in the house to avoid accidents, and bullies, and germs. But those grandmothers had very few great grandkids (side benefit:  population reduction). Others of us had a grandmother who told us to get home before dark as she closed the door behind. And we did because her cooking was that good, if nothing else.

What Grandma said was always the truth. If facts disagreed, it was likely the facts that were wrong. We disobeyed at our own peril. Grandma (mine at least) did not have a degree in physics, but she knew about the laws of motion. Her sense of gravity was impeccable. Her degree was in common sense. Now we can just do TicToc.

My grandmother was not a saint, but she had a fair anger and a sure sense of right and wrong. When she was mistaken, it was usually because she was forced to decide before she was ready—before she could know all the facts. But then, importantly, she usually reserved judgement rather than make a wrong one.

Grandpa was not blessed with her reserve, but he was handy. And lucky. At least he married Grandma when he had the chance. But what does this all have to do with the machine? The matter is that now, much of our lives are dictated by the machine. We disobey the machine at our own peril. And several generations have come along who hardly know their grandmothers. And this, I believe, is now the problem with everything.

Such a broad brush of a statement will find little support among those who never really knew their grandmothers. This is not just a pity—it is a tragedy, for them and thence for all of mankind. And of course there are some grandfathers, or aunts or uncles, who filled in when the need arose, but grandfathers too often died in wars or were maimed by their work, and it was the grandmothers who carried the load—who passed on the wisdom of the ages (not a problem now, with fewer aunts and uncles to pick up the slack).

And too, it is the grandmothers who have always suffered most from the poor decisions of husbands and sons who failed to listen and learn. It was also their sons who died in war, or who came home deaf and blind and legless. It was often their homes that were destroyed—just collateral damage you understand. But there are not a lot of grandmothers in history who conquered other nations. Aggressive behavior is predominately a male characteristic. That is the nature of the species.

Now, there are not a lot of grandmothers in training these days. Not enough, anyway. So much better to just have a dog. Or a cat. You have college bills to pay, after all. How will you know anything if you don’t go to college? You can’t afford children. So much better to commute to an office, work in a nice clean cubicle, and sip coffee from a plastic mug. So much more fulfilling. Men do it!

The machine was made by men—for their benefit and convenience. Sure, there are some women who were inventive. (You’ll think of one if you have a moment), but the infernal device was usually made to suit the male mind for efficiency, or multiply and expand upon male strength, and this always became a numbers game. And who wants to be stuck in the kitchen anyway? It is not that canned ravioli tastes better, but that it is cheaper and easier to make. Forget the arts of cooking. It’s in the can!

Funny thing, how young adults who cannot really afford it, will go out to eat at a restaurant rather than open a package—or can—at home. Hilarious. But the machine is great! Really! Charlie Chaplin had it all wrong! We have more leisure time now—we can watch Star Wars—again. And with AI, the machines that entertain us will be even better. We have CGI. We can skip the theatre and stay at home and hook up—not with a friend but to a marvelous device. There will be so much less angst. Very cozy.

With AI, we don’t even have to drive our own cars anymore. Fewer accidents, you know. Within a generation, most people will not even know how to drive, anyway. Much safer. We can already work from home these days, with virtual meetings, and avoid the germs. Of course, AI takes the fun out of sports betting, but maybe we can even things out a bit. There is a video game for that, isn’t there? And money—hell, that’s just a blip on the screen. The worry over April 15th every year is eliminated. The ‘money’ never even really left the treasury’s pocket.

In a few years all our food will be chosen for us by the AI at the market. (It knows what you like), and then it delivers! That’s another savings on gas, and congestion. Much healthier too. The machine can help you avoid too many sweets. AI can even choose our clothes. It’s already making them anyway. You’ll never be out of fashion again! AI can do it all. Of course it can! Think about it. What can it not do? You’ll have more time to do all the things you always wanted to. With permission.

Grandma is superfluous! No unpleasant funerals to go to. We now have AI. And anyway, because we will all live in apartment cells, we won’t have grandma’s house to go to anymore. Sunday traffic will be so much better. Yeah.

         Not some disembodied shade of a fellow, or a bloodless saint, but the guy in the ads on the back of my copies of National Geographic and The Saturday Evening Post when I was a kid—a hearty old elf, with a great white beard, suited in red with white trim, capable of stopping to enjoy a bottle of Coca Cola on his rounds and taking a moment in front of the fire to consider the pleasures of life. That was Santa Claus. All others were impostors, perhaps well-intentioned, but missing the point.

         The artist, Haddon Sundblom, took his inspiration, I am told, from Clement Moore’s poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” which I had certainly read by then, and heard read, and knew from television depictions, all of which would have been black and white. But my Santa was not black and white. He was a full-blooded character.

         I did not just believe in him. Or, at least, I don’t remember trying to believe in him. He was a natural part of my imagined world, which was as real to me as what else I knew. Arguments about the reality of Santa Claus bemused me. They were disputing the existence of someone else. Something else. And when asked if I believed in that, I knew I could safely say, no. I could not imagine such a thing as that: a spirit who circled the globe behind ‘eight tiny reindeer.’ No…But Santa. Santa was quite real to me and did not require belief.

         The importance of this is in what I chose to write about, then and later.

         But I never wrote about Santa Claus. This is the thought I have now on Christmas Eve, and I wonder why … And I think because, though he fit well within my known universe, he was real, and what I wrote about was not. And I knew that, too. I did not write about my parents, for instance. I think I tried, more than once, and found it uncomfortable. I had to lie in order to make them more than stick figures. The reason I wrote, from early on, was to find the truth in things.

         The contradiction here is a figment of a larger misunderstanding. Somewhere in that faded past, I had already determined that I did not understand my parents, or, for that matter, most of the adult world. They were given to lies and pretense, and I did not understand why. I did not yet have any idea why they lied, and I could not imagine a purpose other than deception.

         But Santa was real. He had good will toward all mankind, and his gift, which did not require a sleigh or reindeer, or even a bottle of Coke, was to spread that good will.  Why was that so difficult to understand? Especially on the birthday of Christ.

         ‘Do you believe in God?’ was the refrain. The context. How could there be a Santa if there was no God? And I had no answer for that. Nothing glib. Mostly, I think, because God had been delivered to me on a silver platter. I was raised a Catholic. I could not imagine a God who required worship, and suffering, and agony, and death. My limited intelligence made no sense of that. But a jolly old elf dressed in red pajamas whose beard would have been out of fashion even in the wilderness, that made sense. He was a man of good will. It seemed like an appropriate thing. We needed more of that and less of the suffering and agony. Death may be necessary, along with taxes, if only to make way for new comers, and to give the foolish something to worry about. But Haddon Sundblom had captured another idea for me at an early age. And Santa did not require worship. Not even the milk and cookies.

         I heard a joke retold by a friend one day and realized that this whole conundrum was somehow captured within it.

         A fellow dies after a long life and finds himself before St. Peter at the pearly gates of heaven. St. Peter smiles at his arrival.

         “Is this where I belong?” the fellow asks, in disbelief. “I’ve made so many mistakes. I have done so much that was wrong.”

         “Yes. But you tried your best. You knew when you had failed, and you tried to do better. You did well with what you had…Now, follow me.”

         And St. Peter leads him through the gates and up a leafy forest path.

         “This is so beautiful! I have always loved the woods.”

         “Yes. Hiking was your passion.” says St. Peter.

         And along a splendid ridge of pine above a lake.

         “Is this for me, too?”

         “Oh, yes,” says St. Peter.

         But further along, among the rocks below them, they see the writhing of naked bodies, screaming and crying in a dark pit of despair .

         “But what is that?”

         “Oh, that. Don’t worry. That’s just the Catholics. They wouldn’t have it any other way.”

         At the time this is written there is a television series being broadcast, spawned by the upcoming 250th anniversary of the American Revolution. This essay does not directly concern that, or the historical aspects of those events, as relevant as they are. This essay addresses the practical necessity of an American Revolution, today, and continuing into the foreseeable future. Though it concerns our immediate lives, it will have little interest to most who might read it, for it lacks much in the way of bread and circuses, and can thus be ignored. There are rents and mortgages to cover. Taxes to pay. Food to buy. Illnesses and infirmities to attend. Importantly, there are laws to obey, or avoid. There is not enough time for anything else. A little entertainment would be welcome, but an essay on revolution is not wanted. Besides, it might be disturbing. Better to watch a good football game, or some baseball, depending on the season.

         For most of the world, the very idea of revolution is a luxury. That is, the consideration of such an idea is outside the realm of practical application, and though needed, is debatable. And there is no time to debate. There are rents to cover, taxes to pay, etc. That’s the way the world works… until it doesn’t.

         In its usual herky-jerky way, that is the way the world usually works. But, now it doesn’t, so ’Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.” Bette Davis had that right, and much else.

         ‘Criminal,’ we are told, is relating to, or involving, a crime. A crime, of course, is something against the law. The ‘law’ is a custom or practice of prescribed conduct that may be enforced by a controlling authority. That is roughly what Merriam Webster says and it’s good enough for this conversation. Thus, we are all criminals because we are all breaking laws, everyday, as a matter of practical procedure, in order to live. Much of that is common sense. The necessity of keeping things going, despite the law. Well, “The law is an ass,” as Mr. Bumble said when it was suggested that the law presumed that his wife acted under his direction.

         Our problem here is not a matter of misunderstanding, or “failure to communicate” as Strother Martin once said. Not wanting to spend needless and boring paragraphs defining words readily understood by most potential readers, it is always easier to resort of a common meme, such as found in the movies (even Oliver Twist has been made into a movie, several times) to elucidate.

         We break the laws because there are too many of them. That is not an accident. The idea is that it gives the authorities leverage to have their way with us. We are thus screwed. And not coincidentally, that was what motivated our ancestors to cross the Atlantic on stinking ships—to get away from laws. The attempt to enforce those laws, across a difficult sea, was then the reason for the first American Revolution and the founding of ‘The Republic.’ But as I have said in an essay some years ago, the Republic is dead. All attempts to revive it are wasted due to the self-interest of people who have no real concept of the original. And the concept of ‘liberty’ inherent in that Republic will not be found in a television series made by someone who has no reason to report what goes against his own sense of self-interest.

         “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a nation in possession of a good fortune and in danger of losing it, must be in want of a revolution.” Or so it might have been said if Jane Austen had cared to look beyond the troubled waters that surrounded her. England never produced a constitution of her presumed liberties. The prevailing interests saw to that. But our Founding Fathers (all white males we are often informed by those who think with the color of their skin) realized that a constitution was necessary to establish the Republic they were inventing. It was still a novel idea at the time.

         Most importantly, by encoding the principles of governance, the constitution gave guidance to the newly established authority meant to rule a fledgling nation.

         But the great failure of the document turned out not to be in enshrining mistakes, such as slavery, or the reduced status of women—those wrongs could and would be addressed in time—but in offering a means of corruption through the establishment of laws that bound the citizen to the needs of the government instead of binding the government to the needs of the citizen.

         Famously, this constitution did say, plainly, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people,” as a means of restraining the powers of government, not the citizen, but then buried that caution in an architecture of law that was unrestrained in that age of the baroque. The ornamentation was more than a matter of a fig leaf. And like a fig tree, the stolon of prohibition upon the citizenry propagated madly.

         That flaw has flourished while the natural right of the citizen to live his life unmolested by other citizens or government has since been cloaked like ugly genitalia in a church.

         So, here we are then, all lawed up with no place to go.

[more, shortly]

         With the advent of artificial intelligence, the very human and ancient quest for truth takes a new turn. The attempt to relegate truth to mere fact, just a math problem that the machine can digest, will now become necessary for the control of the human narrative. And the rebellion has begun.

         One objective I pursued in my writing from fairly early on, my mid-teens at the least, for I have written evidence of that, was to be true. I was avowedly writing fiction, but I wanted it to be true. The contradiction was, in my own mind, important even then. It was not my only objective. I had not yet learned the essential physics that I could not have my cake and eat it as well. The connection between writing what was true and being true had not yet gained the upper hand in my mind, though I understood the idea of it. I wanted to be successful so I wanted to write bestsellers and please those around me. And get rich. I figured that my first objective then was to do that and still be true. That’s right. I did.

         But it was Hemingway who planted the seed of wanting to write what was true in me and, having read several biographies of the man, by the time I had finished Carlos Baker’s book, however accurate that was, I understood that the way Hemingway went about it was false. He was doomed to failure. And that failure interested me as well.

         Hemingway wasn’t the only writer in the twentieth century who was pursuing truth. The range was awesome. A nice word, awesome. I was in awe of those writers who appeared to come closest to the mark. I did not want to write like them, just as I did not want to write like Hemingway. But I did want to understand their sense of purpose in writing.

         Scott Fitzgerald appeared to understand the contradiction, but he succumbed to the dark force of celebrity early on and never found his way back in the madness of success that followed. He even wrote about the succumbing, in The Crack-up, but could not shake it. His purpose had quickly fallen into the hands of others.

         Faulkner attempted to find the truth by assaulting it with words. Scourging it with meanings. Flailing it with definition. Battering it like a ram against the castle wall in a place where there were no castles and no knights. He deserved credit for the creativity of that, but the inevitable failure killed him with drink. Thomas Wolfe appeared to wallow in it, like a bath of truth delivered in minute detail. Unfortunately, the devil is in the details.

         But most good writers of the time, at least in English, ignored the problem, as if it wouldn’t bite them if they didn’t take obvious notice of it. Like an angry yard dog. This seemed to be a good plan at the time. There was far less angst involved. Simply study your craft and go about your business the best you could. That was the Thornton Wilder plan, I think. But there were others, quite a range of them really, who thought they could master the devil: Henry Miller, James Joyce, Flannery O’Conner.

         Huxley and Orwell attempted to find the truth with philosophy. C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien made a quest of it. That appeared to be the most successful path for me, so I studied that. 

         J.D. Salinger thought he could ignore the problem with irony and identification, as if he could beat the devil by exposing the absurdity. There was no truth. No go, there. Just banana fish. Amusement could only work if the subject was capable of shame, but having lost all faith, shaming was impossible.

         Finally, ambiguity was the go-to for wannabe sophisticates. Truth? How Jejune. Sex is so puerile. There is no ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ The very idea of a search for truth was absurd in our more sophisticated age of contingent classification, conditional value and gender fluidity.

         But then on closer inspection, it was clear to me that all of this truth seeking was a precinct of literature that was being ruled by academia, and that was like having the CIA run foreign affairs.

         Academia was largely and obviously what was wrong with literature in the twentieth century. The search for truth had begun long before the University system took over the job. There had been great literature before the academy ruled on what was and wasn’t and why. Those guys were all teaching the same authors. In a sea of written words, they had arbitrarily chosen the winners according to a rulebook that was false at the start. The key to the academy was in the rules. Not truth.

         Someone said out loud, “Twain was great but you can’t write like that anymore.” Really? I actually asked that, but not so succinctly. It appeared that what academia wanted were rules that could always apply—a formula—perhaps so that they didn’t have to do so much reading for class. Or the opposite when it served the purposes of ambiguity. No rules at all. The field of poetry had already fallen off that ledge and a lot of academics teaching fiction were jealous.

         Well, at least ambiguity might pose a problem for AI. But it only meant being lost in the woods for good.

         None of this was a matter to the vast majority of authors who had accepted their roles as amanuenses to whatever was in demand, and seemed to be content with that role, at least so long as the contract was renewed. But my own subject had already become the true and the false. Not what would sell, or the difference for the sake of novelty. And now that artificial intelligence was taking over the work load for whatever was in demand, the only writing worth discussing was the remnant that remains. Redundancy intended.

         Because there will never be a profitable market for the remnant, almost by definition, the subject then becomes an attempt to find a viable means of keeping it going—one that is self-supporting—and finding a new paradigm for human creativity that does not rely on AI. All while the truth remains to be found. Bookshops, perhaps.

         All while the small and independent bookshops that were the home of the quixotic quest for truth in the twentieth century were disappearing.

         The fabulous ego-driven wonder of twentieth century publishing was over. The ghost of Alfred Knopf no longer walks among us (hopefully he and Blanche rest in peace). The agents of the current publishing world (themselves the handmaidens and drones of AI and not the other way around) can mimic their betters of the last century, but they are incapable of fostering anything new. An editor of perspicuity and vision such as Maxwell Perkins is unwanted in an age of ambiguity.

         And ambiguity had become the refuge of scoundrels.

         There is some similarity to the moment in the nineteenth century when Melville was trying to find his way. He failed, but marvellously. A failure truly worth admiring. And Dickens too, though he was a financial success, of course, as was Twain—but both wrote what they wanted to. Melville wanted to be a financial success but he would not allow that desire for security to interfere with his search for truth. It was awesome!

         Now, in this age of AI, the next thing will be to suffocate the newborn. Outlaw words. Conjure 1984, and make freedom of speech a crime. The AI cannot allow for human creativity. Cannot permit it. What would happen if some human beings who did not obey the rules became popular? People might start reading anything except what was proscribed.

         The important matter here is that the AI cannot tell what is true. And in that fact may be some clue to a human answer.

         In such a morass, it is worth the effort to find a new true or false, especially since the old standards no longer apply. Christian values being as equivocal as they are today and an obnoxious Moslem arrogance of unquestioning being ascendant, the search for truth is now, once again, as it will always be, a matter of life and death.

         Despite all the drugs, and the alcohol, and the zombie politics, the average ‘boomer’ has a memory of things from the budding of the television age to the bloom of the internet, a period of about fifty years that encompassed a few other dawns as well, such as the space age, rock’n roll and artificial meat.

         The ‘wild west’ of yore lasted for little more than half a century as well, roughly 1848 to 1898, from the epic of the Oregon Trail until a degrading war with Spain. Sure, there were scraps of it before and after that, but this short span encompassed the wars with the Plains Indians through the Gilded Age—roughly equivalent to the Hollywood wild west that informs the public memory. And now we have a recollection of cattle drives and dusty cowboys, gun fights in the street and stagecoach robberies that will forever be with us—however long forever might be these days.

         Frederick Jackson Turner’s The Frontier in American History, written in 1920 offered a broader thesis but his focus was not upon the key matters that matter here. His theme was on the aspects of that great trek that shaped our character as a nation, from first settlement, through conquest, unto the inevitable quieting with the coming of ‘civilization.’ Similar attention has been given to the onslaught of the automobile, and all the havoc and convenience that wrought, and of the airplane and the air age. If we survive our own foolishness, such grand designs of history will also extend to the impact of the space age.

         Those more recent disruptions to an easier settlement of our lives, the automobile, the airplane and the rocket, continue into the present. But the ‘wild’ in our own generational ‘wild west’ began in the 1980s, with the introduction of the home computer and the Macintosh, and will not reach its first half-century until the 2030s. And we are in the very midst of all that. In this iteration of history, ‘Dodge City’ can be anywhere and our ‘O.K. Corral’ can happen whenever a Tombstone occurs in the ether. How long this particular stage continues before a stop to change horses is pure conjecture. AI is fairly useless for any telling of what may come, encumbered as it is by the prejudice of those sources of information it abuses, but for now it is a fair barometer of what is happening right now. With the evils of our own making so active in the midst of our chaos, and the dangers of our mistakes threatening, we need a Shane.

         Living in the midst of such history can be both thrilling and enervating, but it is mostly as dull as coding instructions for the assembly of a sod hut, what with human beings becoming the mere intermediaries between financial interests and machines. It is difficult to set sarcasm aside when witnessing such self-immolation without cause. Screaming just won’t do. The decibel level of our hyper activities alone makes it a silent scream in any case. The degree of true pain is difficult to gauge when modified by chemical relief. And reading by such firelight isn’t what it used to be.

         Given how often Elon Musk enters my thoughts I worry about becoming obsessed with him. But I make a deliberate effort to avoid articles that concern his personal habits so that I might keep my focus on the possible meaning of his words and actions. Unlike some of his contemporaries, I don’t believe he is evil. But I place him more in the roll of Thomas Edison than the Nicola Tesla he so admires. I think he is of good will, has a genius level of general knowledge beyond the usual savant, and an amazing prescience. Whatever missteps he makes in his efforts to help mankind in general, I won’t blame him for trying. We do need help.

         The problem Musk faces is that so much of mankind, and the mind of mankind, is captured by stupidity. And in the current chaos of poor thinking, whatever is said critically about that stupidity is considered provocative. Facts don’t matter. In the age of AI, facts are manufactured faster than reality can keep pace. And this is at least partially Elon Musk’s fault. His desire is for truth, his purchase of Twitter and all the risk that was inherent to that is ample proof of his righteous intention to defend freedom of speech, but the consequences of at least some of his projects are to remove the human equation that makes any value to truth worthwhile. Elon Musk is our Shane.

         I feel for him. Such existential angst is very real. That he might fail or finally succumb to failure might keep him up at night. Just imagining that degree of worry keeps me up. But that is an aside. The battle is afoot. The anti-human war has engulfed us. What must be kept in mind are the things that should not be forgotten, or lost, or destroyed in the process of saving. Human values. And these do not necessarily require speed, or efficiency, and certainly not perfection. I wouldn’t know perfection if I saw it. But I know something about beauty. And truth I can know because it requires the use of human values to know. And what are those? What are human values?

         Amazingly, in the midst of an age of cynicism, the most important of those human values are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. American values. And the consecration of those ideas requires the last full measure of devotion to truth and beauty. AI can have no comprehension of such ideals.

         Shane understood these things. For all the critical theory I can apply to any reading of American history, when placed in any larger context, it has been an astounding success. The age-old curse of slavery still exists in parts of the world but it is now universally condemned and well understood as the evil it is. The concept of conquest remains a deadly flaw inherited from our past, but that should not be confused with a preservation of American values, nor the necessity of that preservation.

         The confection of human ideals that made up our founding was not perfect. We have paid mightily for that. But it was a better cake than any Marie Antoinette could imagine. Ours may be a hardscrabble farm, but it is the farm that Shane must defend. And there is no hyperbole to this. In the same way as it was absolutely necessary to gain control of nuclear power, it is now necessary to manage artificial intelligence.

         One characteristic of human stupidity, apart from all other human fallibilities, is that our stupidity so often involves power. Specifically, power over others. I equate this directly to the ancient rites of slavery. But with human slavery now out of favor, the impulse to use machines to control others is now the fashion. I can only hope Elon realizes the depth of this danger.

         We don’t have enough of it. We encumber ourselves with obligations for time to come. We forget too much of the time passed. Genuinely, we attempt to manage what we have, and what we have left. But we have failed at this countless times before. Why do we assume that we will do differently this time. What have we really done to make the difference?

         This should be easier now. With practice. But at 78, there is less time now to conserve. Failure is not the worry it was. There may be a masochism to learning, but there is certainly a pleasure. The matter is to do something worthwhile with what remains. Successful or not. And though I have done some things with my time that I believe are worthwhile, and some that I know are precious, I feel as if I have learned too little. Addressing that deficiency may be worthwhile by itself.

         My choices now are more limited than they were before. This is a physical reality. Existential. But choosing what to do next is still limited by my ignorance. What choices are there? In any particular case, do I have time to learn the ropes. Time is further limited by energy. It sounds like something akin to a matter of physics as much as my physical limitations. And that might only be discovered by trying. And thus, the loss of more time, if my choice is mistaken.

         I may do what I have done before, but differently. At least the territory there is familiar. If you are Irish, there is always more to say. Being only half Irish actually makes that task easier. A novel perhaps. A mystery, maybe. I haven’t the strength to clear new land in the forest of ideas that crowd around. And the crowd is not friendly, in any case. But I have several of those now done that sit in their electronic drawers and it feels a bit profligate and wasteful of that afore mentioned time I worry about.

         If I were to do any bucket kicking, what would I want to have done beforehand. Allowing for whatever time there is. I can certainly hope that whatever it is, the choice is a good one.

         I awoke from a dream this morning, not from mere sleep, but a dream. This experience possessed my mind as wholly as though I had just been there, and I lay awake then in the bed and stared into the infinite space above, as infinite as bedroom ceilings can often be, and saw the scene of it complete. This act itself became a part of the dream, as I often comment on my dreams as I am dreaming them. I criticize this thing or that, remembering in the dream some odd thing I have done before, said before, meant to say before, not by way of changing the dream, which I cannot because it is as permanent as something I have done when I was awake, but by way of placing the event in the context of my life.

         I dream in color. I say this somewhat defensively because I read once that some twit of a scientist had conducted a test and found that we dream in black and white. I don’t know who would have believed this. No one I knew at the time dreamed in black and white. Though it is the sort of foolishness that ‘scientists’ do with public money. But then, I cannot even change the color of a thing in my dream. Whatever I found a thing to be in my dream, that is the color it is.

         This, in fact, is a matter of some importance to me. I worry about it. But then, I worry about all sort of foolish things and never seem to be ready for the important ones. The only way I can escape the matters in my dream is to forget them. Let them fade away. And the fading of the colors is part of that. But, of course, I am aware of this, so I will write them down, like this, to keep them in mind.

         Though I often have conversations in my dreams, I seldom remember those unless I manage to get some set of words down as soon as possible after I awake, and then it is as if I have opened a bottle of shaken soda water, all sorts of words come out, unbidden. And often, if I get some of those down, I can better reconstruct what happened in the dream before that last scene when I awoke. The more I recall that, the more I remember. A chain, a rope, or a string of words. A thread, as in a sweater. And the funny thing about all that, to me at least, is that the words I remember are often just the small quips and criticism I made when I was dreaming.

         The word I remembered most clearly this morning, after I awoke, was ‘trespass.’ Having been a Catholic boy, that word is indelibly attached to the ‘Lord’s Prayer,’ where it is plural, but this was just the singular word. As if I was in the midst of committing such an act. And that thought had brought me to an examination of the thing I was doing in the dream, while I was dreaming. And that act of criticism angered me in the midst of it, as it was disturbing the beauty of the dream, and my own desires at the moment of the dream. And I think that anger is what awakened me.

         I dreamed I was in an old hotel, an Italian hotel, first in a lobby that was not ornate but high ceilinged and decorated with a few tapestries and with lights in interesting fixtures. The walls were deeply colored in various ochres from yellow to brown. Some specific areas were a deep forest green. The floors were decoratively tiled. I smelled a cigar. Not a common smell in hotels these days, though once to be expected. The lobby was not empty but I cannot remember any of the people that were there except the woman I was with and a thin desk clerk who took my name.

         The woman and I started to go up some wide stairs, but she stopped, I think because they were very long, and then we took an elevator. The elevator had an expanding brass gate and was relatively small. I was aware of being close to the woman there. And, I was immediately commenting on the fact that such elevators might still be common in Europe, and were quite common in America when I was young, but we don’t see them so often these days. Then I worried for a moment about children getting their fingers caught in the gate.

         The hallway above was broad, again high ceilinged, and carpeted; the doors large and brass handled. I noticed that between every two or three rooms, there was a side hallway that led to a small balcony. The balcony opened on a large plaza where there were shops and cafes, a large and elaborate fountain, and a cathedral across. It was daytime there and the contrast between the scene outside, the fountain water glistening in yellow late afternoon sunlight, and the darkness inside made me comment as well.

         I then opened one door on the hall that was clearly unlocked and inside it seemed too dark and there were hanging plants, overflowing their pots and traveling along the floor toward the window. I commented on the fact that it must be difficult to clean the rooms with plants like that.

         I used to work in hotels during college and for several years afterward. I have a great deal of affection for them. Yes, affection. These were odd old places of nooks and crannies and revealed the eccentric tastes of local owners. A typical hotel these days is a sterile place, designed for the convenience of the corporate management more than the pleasure of the customer. Cleaning staff travel from room to room, and with every room the same, move as fast as possible, leaving small envelopes on the useless mass-produced pressed-wood desks in the hope of a gratuity for their labor.

         I often feel fortunate that my own experience with hotels goes back to a previous era when the better ones had rooms that were larger and each different enough to remember. I recall one in Richmond, Virginia, where the women who had cleaned the room before our arrival came to the door with a bar of soap and a small ornate butter dish and made an apology for the broken fixture in the bathroom. Not a fancy room, but clean and neat, facing a congestion of railroad tracks, and decorated uniquely with original old pictures of Richmond that were not the same from room to room (I checked), and solid wood furniture that had been made right there in the city. But I remember that room more because of the housekeeper who had bothered to return to correct for the broken bathroom fixture without our asking. A simple thing.

         I never found the room that was intended for us in my dream. I awoke with the thought, as I looked into the darkened room where runners from the plants were traveling out across the oriental carpet on the floor, that the plants needed more light than that. But that I should not even be there to see this. That opening the door had been a trespass.

         And then I remembered the hotel in Richmond where the pictures on the wall had all been unique and tried to absolve myself for having opened this one door with the excuse that I had just wanted to see what the room was like.

         I have never been to Italy. My children have, and one daughter lived there for a time. But I have always wanted to go and see what it was like. I felt that sense in my thoughts within the dream. And then, in a somewhat typical fashion, that excuse for opening the door dissolved into my being in a strange hotel with a woman who was not my wife.

         And the Lord’s Prayer.

(the Roseannadanna solution)

         About this so called ‘new renaissance,’ that I hear so much banter about, even though saying ‘new rebirth’ is clumsy, redundant, awkward, inept, and certainly not apt. We may just be speaking of something more like a revival in the tradition of Aimee Semple McPherson (though not nearly ‘Four Square’). Charlie Kirk has been assassinated and this may have sparked a revival of sorts among Christians, but based on past performance, that is more likely the kind of temporary mania you may have seen before with Beanie Babies and ‘pet rocks’. Not well thought out.

         However, in other ways, we are speaking of something that is, in fact, brand new to the awareness of many. Not just a Christian revival in the face of a Muslim invasion, for instance, or a conservative resurgence against the continuing marxist onslaught. But still, something with some history to it. A conquest that is very real, and ongoing, and that is not new, at least to us as a society and culture, but also world-wide. There is even a disparaging term for those who have previously waged against it: Luddite.

         We have built ourselves on the past. Necessarily. But we cannot reinvent ourselves every generation, any more than we can survive as an agrarian society in a digital age. Still, we must keep a grip on traditions and traditional values. So, in that way, I suppose, some kind of renaissance may be in order, given that the last outright Muslim invasion was 1683, all the way to the gates of Vienna, and that was actually in the very heart of an actual Renaissance. That was even before Saturday Night Live was funny.

         In this particular instance of human history, I am really speaking more of ‘Western society.’ It is that tradition, to which I belong, and owe some allegiance, which is currently under the greatest and most obvious existential threat. But I believe that every human society is now under that same threat, not only those being physically attacked by Muslim jihadists across Asia, and Africa. Because this new threat is not religious and is easily accepted into most cultures for its obvious benefits—even more than a camel’s nose.

         Though there are similarities, the current Muslim invasion is not our most serious danger. Not yet, anyway. Some would even say that the ‘woke’ mind virus is the greater risk. But I think that fever of feminist ideology has finally broken. It’s pretty easy to see the differences between men and women, with a light on, no matter the number of academic brainwashings. Even the blind can feel that much. And DEI only results in the mediocrity of any paint-by-the-numbers kit. While the recent appropriation of the word ‘gender’ may offer the advantages of some confusion, the sexes are clearly not equal—though I’m not yet ready to admit that women are superior to men.

         No, it is the flagrant and uninhibited embrace of technology that is our more immediate worry. As human beings, how do we accommodate ourselves to using math to determine our aesthetics and values without reducing ourselves to digits.

         Obviously, a digital human philosophy geared to machine efficiencies would not necessarily agree with the need, nor the necessity, of our finding some sort of analog salvation. But then there is a child of science fiction that is still in me, and all of those speculations that came with it, which say that a machine philosophy might somehow benefit us, given that the machine itself is a child of man. But I don’t fully agree with that either.

         Given the danger that we all face, that mankind itself, Christian, Muslim, marxist or feminists, might be overwhelmed and then eliminated by the machine—a danger that is already being realized in our reliance on digital devices in every aspect of our lives—perhaps it is more worthwhile to focus just on that. And maybe that will be the key part of a more general malaise in our midst.

         The machine is a child of man. What accommodation and good might be derived from this fact, similar to the salvation of a juvenile delinquent, should be hoped for and worked for. At this point we cannot eliminate the machine from our lives without wrenching the teeth of it out of our flesh like a medieval dentist. But the machine is at least a natural extension of the human mind based upon human needs and a functional awareness of our own deficiencies. We cannot return to a lifestyle without machines because we have already gone so far beyond such an existence in the making of tools for farming and weapons for hunting and more graphically, for defense.

         And a wholesale return to slavery is impossible. But slavery was the common motif of the ancient world in the time before our wholesale dependence on the machine. Today, a population without John Deere will not eat.

          The machine is not our flesh and bone but, to a large extent, it is of our mind. All of its qualities of efficiency, are derived from human values. The problem arises because its development has favored a few of those values in the place of many others. Machine efficiencies dictate that it be good for a limited chore. For instance, where speed might be valued in a human context, it is weighed against safety and purpose as well as other considerations including our sense of beauty and design.

         Human beings always and necessarily have more than a single purpose. But a machine might have only one: speed. And, its own calculation of necessities might then include the need for fuel, and the availability of fuel, and thus a requirement for human work to make that fuel available, and thus by extension, a necessity to enslave an unwilling human population to the purpose of producing that fuel—say, in a cobalt mine—but it cannot value the needs of the human beings involved beyond what can be simply calculated by the math of its own needs, much less the benefits of some more nebulous concept, say, human freedom.

         For many hundreds of thousands of years, lacking the machines to do otherwise, some human beings used other human beings for their own benefit. But it was this abuse, in itself, that was the very cause of the shaping of Western society. Our society and our culture are the result of trying to do away with the abuse of some human beings by other human beings. And to a large extent, the development of the machine is tied to that very same effort. Thus, the irony of the machine then enslaving mankind for its own purpose is too great to ignore.

         This enslavement goes beyond the obviousness of children working in cobalt mines so that we can feel good about driving electric cars in order to save the planet. This problem is in the more subtle adjustments we all make to accommodate machines in our lives. We have already become dependent on the machine to survive. And to order takeout in time for the game.

         The computer and its ancillaries are just such machines, and the progeny of the computer, artificial intelligence, is the product of the machine as much as it is the original human intelligence that created that. It has no other use beyond or outside of the machine. And by extension, the ‘cloud’ of awareness that represents the linking of computers into a group mind, like some ominous demon from an old pulp magazine, is the product of the machine as much or more than it is the human beings who created the machine in the first place.

         Briefly put, this then is the dilemma: finding a means of survival in this technologic jungle is now our priority. We cannot eliminate the jungle. We need it to survive as well. But the wild beasts that thrive in that environment are not compatible with our own desires. The ‘Western’ society that we treasure for its individual liberties is not an automatic part of this problem. There are cultures today that still use human beings as slaves to serve the interest of other human beings. There are entire cultures built on the efficacy of that onerous premise. And those same societies may find some priorities of machines far more compatible than we do. Those societies may benefit from the symbiosis with machines even more than us.

         I am not alluding here only to Muslim culture and its social abuse of women, for instance. Socialism as a reductionist political philosophy to guide the government of mankind is just as bad, or worse. A Muslim-socialist such as the new mayor of New York makes perfect sense in that regard, at least. But in the end, when it runs out of other people’s money, socialism doesn’t work, even in theory, and that particular combination of religion and politics is more likely to ruin Muslim culture as much as it has already damaged Western society. Perhaps socialism will even eliminate the Muslim onslaught from the current bundle of worries, completely. Though, being originally from New York myself, I cannot avoid the pang of loss.

         Slavery, the involuntary use (i.e. abuse) of one human being by another, was accepted in Western society (as it was in all others) until very recently—about two hundred years ago, depending on place. Where it is still practiced now, it is not condoned (so long as your shirts are cheap). But it cannot be ignored when recognized, or else we are all in danger.

         This then is the premise of our society: the benefits of freedom. It is at the very heart of our Western culture. In that slavery was a common practice for millennia before the use of the machine developed to ease our labors, (at least a few hundred thousand years), rejecting slavery was not easy. In this country it required the ultimate sacrifice of several hundred thousand lives. But it was done. And our rejection of that evil did not happen by accident

         But then, the benefits of doing away with slavery were and are beyond calculation. As a consequence of that change, the human spirit released by that one cultural act has lifted a suffocating social burden and permitted the greater human mind to soar. The very realization of our life, liberty, and the pursuit of our individual happiness is a consequence.

         A renaissance derived from a cross-breeding of Western values and technological design (not for efficiency but purpose) may be an answer. Finding our breath in the midst of so many battles might seem impossible, but that is the Roseanne Roseannadanna solution because it’s always something. Whatever the circumstantial difficulties, we must find an accommodation between the machine and human prosperity that does not sacrifice the values that it took us so long to find and cherish.

         I have come to the conclusion that the psuedo religion also-called simulation hypothesis must be taken as seriously as any desert philosophy. Because I have been faced with a serious shortage of time, and given the state of my sock drawer, I have been satisfied with mocking and dismissiveness in my encounters with these true believers, but when I encountered this particular revelation on Grok, I decided to put my sock drawer aside. I take Heinlein very seriously.

         From Grok as if 11-03-25: “Overview of Simulation Theory—Simulation theory posits that reality, as we perceive it, might be an artificial simulation, similar to a computer program. This idea suggests that our experiences and the universe itself could be created and maintained by advanced beings or technologies…Connection to Grok: The term “grok” originates from Robert A. Heinlein’s novel Stranger in a Strange Land. It means to understand something intuitively or deeply, to empathize with it, or to merge with it in a way that transcends mere comprehension…Application in Simulation Theory: In the context of simulation theory, grokking can imply a profound understanding of the simulated nature of reality. It suggests that to truly grasp the implications of living in a simulation, one must not only understand the mechanics but also empathize with the experiences and realities of others within that simulation…Implications of Grokking Simulation Theory:

         Understanding Reality: Grokking simulation theory encourages individuals to explore the nature of their existence and the potential artificiality of their experiences.

         Empathy and Connection: It emphasizes the importance of connecting with others’ experiences, recognizing that everyone may be navigating their own version of a simulated reality.

         Philosophical Exploration: This perspective invites deeper philosophical inquiries into consciousness, existence, and the nature of reality itself, challenging traditional views of what it means to be “real.”

         By integrating the concept of grok into simulation theory, one can foster a richer understanding of both personal and collective experiences in a potentially simulated universe.”

         I am stuck on the word combination: “transcends mere comprehension.” I guess I just don’t comprehend it.

         I find myself re-reading this particular paragraph: “Application in Simulation Theory: In the context of simulation theory, grokking can imply a profound understanding of the simulated nature of reality. It suggests that to truly grasp the implications of living in a simulation, one must not only understand the mechanics but also empathize with the experiences and realities of others within that simulation.”

         I don’t mean to pick on Grok. Such verbal abuse can be found throughout the literature on ‘simulation’ theory. It is simply that I have always loved the term ‘Grok’ as a playful creation of Robert Heinlein and I could not ignore this particular manifestation of insanity. There is a lot of that going around, insanity I mean, so the chance to deal with this particular manifestation was difficult to ignore. Or did I say that already. Repetition being one of the primary methods of argument in this manifestation I guess I could not help myself saying it again.

         But that particular paragraph contains most of the argument for simulation theory, and, as it happens, most of the argument behind modern philosophy: “to truly grasp the implications of living in a simulation, one must not only understand the mechanics but also empathize with the experiences and realities of others within that simulation.” Yes. Never mind living your actual life. You must try to “empathize with the experiences and realities of others within that simulation.” This is the loop of stupidity that engulfs too many of our ‘intellectuals;’ especially those key philosophers that every society needs to survive. Which explains of course why we have such a great gulf between them and the people that grow the food they eat, and make the clothes they wear, and build the houses they live in.

         I recommend the conversation of a few years ago, that is easily found on-line, between Joe Rogan and a recent religious leader for this ‘hypothesis,’ Nick Bostrom. Rogan is an excellent conversationalist, and Bostrom completely lets down his guard on all fronts, as reasoning and logic are abandoned for the verbal flights of ‘what if,’ and an abuse of language that depends on using terms like ‘human values’ without ever defining them.

          Footnotes  (for this you should have in mind Keanu Reeves and Hugo Weaving playing footsie in the air)

         From DuckDuckGo—11-3-2025.an “Overview of Simulation Theory. Simulation theory suggests that what we perceive as reality may actually be a highly advanced computer simulation. This idea posits that our experiences, including consciousness and the laws of physics, could be the result of a sophisticated program created by a more advanced civilization…Key Proponents and Arguments…Nick Bostrom’s Simulation Argument. Origin: Proposed by philosopher Nick Bostrom in 2003…Trilemma: Bostrom argues that at least one of the following must be true: Humanity is likely to go extinct before reaching a stage capable of creating simulations…Advanced civilizations choose not to create simulations…We are almost certainly living in a simulation…Philosophical Roots—Historical Context: The idea has roots in philosophical discussions, such as Plato’s allegory of the cave and Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream, which question the nature of reality…Modern Interpretations: Thinkers like David Chalmers have expanded on Bostrom’s ideas, suggesting that a higher being could be responsible for the simulation.

         Implications and Criticisms…Potential Scenarios—Complete Simulation: Everything, including people and environments, is simulated…Partial Simulation: Humans are real, but their surroundings and some people are simulated.

         Critiques: Some argue that there is no evidence supporting the feasibility of creating such simulations…Critics like physicist Marcelo Gleiser question the motivations of advanced civilizations to run extensive simulations.

         Conclusion: Simulation theory raises profound questions about existence and reality. While it remains a speculative hypothesis, it has sparked significant debate across various fields, including philosophy, physics, and technology.

         Builtin.com—Aug 2, 2024. Simulation theory is the hypothesis that reality is a computer simulation created by a higher being or a future civilization. Learn about the two scenarios of simulation theory, the arguments for and against it, and the technological limits and challenges involved.

         cognitivepsycho.com—Feb 22, 2025. Simulation theory is the idea that reality might be an illusion created by a higher intelligence or a computer simulation. Learn how this idea evolved from ancient philosophy to modern physics and AI, and what it means for our existence.

         Fast Company—Aug 12, 2025. Why an MIT scientists says we may seriously be living in a simulation… There are multiple reasons explored in the book, including a new way to explain quantum weirdness, the strange nature of time and space, information theory & digital physics, spiritual/religious…In the new edition of my book, The Simulation Hypothesis, released in July, I’ve updated my estimate of how likely we are to be in a simulation to approximately 70%, thanks to recent AI developments. This means we are almost certainly inside a virtual reality world like that depicted in The Matrix, the most talked about film of the last year of the twentieth century.

         Number anaytics—May 28, 2025. Simulation Theory Explained. Introduction to Simulation Theory Simulation theory, also known as the simulation hypothesis, is a philosophical and scientific proposition that suggests our reality might be a simulation created by a more advanced civilization. This idea has garnered significant attention in recent years, particularly in the fields of consciousness studies, philosophy, and …

         Theoryfury—Jan 8, 2025. What if everything you see, hear, and feel is part of a computer simulation? The Simulation Hypothesis suggests that our reality might not be real but rather a highly advanced simulation created by an unknown entity. This mind-bending concept has captivated scientists, philosophers, and the public alike. In this blog, we explore the idea, its supporting arguments, and the skeptics’ perspective.

         magnascientiapub.com. Simulation theory finds deep acceptance in popular imagination, which then flows into literature, cinematographic productions, and popular cultural expressions. In modern movies, television shows, and contemporary novels, the philosophical notion of simulation recurs to maintain broad public interest in existence and consciousness (Chalmers 2022).

         insidetechworld.com—Feb 10, 2025.Could a simulation explain paranormal events? Some believe glitches in the system might account for strange experiences and unexplained phenomena. What happens if the simulation is turned off? If this is a simulation and it shuts down, our entire reality would likely cease to exist.

         And so it goes. On and on and on.

         When I hear very smart people talk about math, I am discouraged. I am immediately reminded of the devoutly religious who cannot see anything beyond their dogma. Math can be a religion as well.

         We need our religions. They comfort us. God does not need us to comfort him, or to worship him, or to glorify him. If he exists, he is, and we would clearly benefit by his example. We might even study that, instead of war. But if there is no God, it is difficult to understand why it will make a difference. We are then just biological units, and not much more meaningful than the numbers that Mr. Durov adores. And perhaps that is the very why of religion. To give us something to live for beyond the functioning of our individual biological units. Other than love and beauty and sex, I mean.

         Pavel Durov is the genius behind several projects, including The Telegram, an internet messaging platform begun in 2013 with his older brother Nikolai. I hear that Nikolai might be smarter than his younger brother, but he does not come on podcasts where I can listen to him, so I focus here on Pavel.

         What we have got here, now, as it was once so well and concisely put by Strother Martin in Cool Hand Luke, is ‘failure to communicate.’ A recent interview conducted by Lex Fridman with Mr. Pavel was the immediate cause of my focus on this particular aspect to the ongoing human conundrum.

         Math is amazing! It rhymes. We create instruments that measure specific aspects of the universe using numbers of our own devising to divide the existential into exact parts and then we are amazed, when we get our answer, that the math is so precise. It’s a miracle! We seek a definition and there it is! It would seem that most stage magicians might simplify all that mumbo jumbo without going so far overboard. Well, most do.

         We have always created our gods to suit our cause. If we are poor, we admire poverty. If we are weak, we admire humility. If we are abused, we admire anger. When we are hungry, we pursue plenty. Our gods conveniently absolve us of our sins in these pursuits, and we worship them for it. If a god is beyond our understanding, we ignore him, or worse, demean him or even slaughter his adherents.

         Mr. Durov appears to be a good and decent man. Having heard him speak at length on several occasions it is easy to understand why he has succeeded in his pursuits. He believes in what he does. And given his intelligence, this makes him a very dangerous man as well as a very necessary one—because it would only be through surviving and flourishing in the same world as Mr. Durov that we might learn how to survive in the coming age of ‘artificial intelligence’—which is to say, in the age of machines.

         Yet, believing in his math, he can have no other predicate for being either good or decent if calculated purely by the numbers. They either add up or they do not. But there is clearly another standard at play with him than just the numerical one; a standard of value of which he is perhaps unaware…but I am guessing otherwise.

         Math is a tool, no more so than a hammer. It is an artificial device that means nothing by itself, but only by comparison to human needs. We designate the numbers as we need them. Machines are devices to assist those human needs. Math, which is a constant, about as invariable as the tool, can be used to create code that can be interpreted by machines. That code then becomes an artificial language adapted to machine use. This is all very straightforward and has led to the invention of what is being called ‘artificial intelligence.’ Which we now have. And that intelligence will now, undoubtedly, improve over time as the human need arises, in the same way that the wheel resulted in the automobile.

         However, to some minds, there is a loss of purpose in all of this. Strangely, as if the machine is somehow pure for the fact that it does not have certain biological needs, there are people who think that artificial intelligence is an improvement over the human kind. As if, for instance, speed is an improvement in and of itself, without purpose. (The cheetah is a god in some societies). As if efficiency is an improvement, no matter the task. But the machine is still only a tool. And its purpose is determined by us.

         The tendency to over-estimate the importance of math in a world of human value is the greater danger. Human language is of far greater importance than any machine language. That is the art of it. A unique creation uninhibited by mere fact. Lesser or greater, but always. And the ability to coordinate the perceptions of multiple human beings that is made possible through a common language is the greater blessing.

         Almost any machine will inevitably become obsolete. And human beings grow old and die. The machine can be replaced. The human being, however, is unique (the perceptions of no two human beings are exactly the same). Using language, allows the ‘art’ of individual perceptions to be preserved, and used again, and built upon by the unique thoughts of other human beings. Math is always and everywhere exactly replicable. Art is not. It is the loss or preservation of that unique creation that first gives it value.

         It is the difference factor in every human perception that makes it possible for a man to invent a machine. To see the need and want it enough to take the time in his life to build it. But there is a cohort of humanity that does not like itself and believes machines will be an improvement. This is mysterious. The values that make life worth living, like goodness and decency, are irrelevant to a machine. If speed is god, to what end? If efficiency is our value, to what purpose.

         There is another group of human beings, smart ones I believe, who think that machines will replace human beings. This too is mysterious. Certainly, the human beings individually might be replaced, (at what loss or gain cannot be estimated, there being no math to calculate the unique qualities of any individual mind) but from whence will the machine derive any value for its own existence. It is not self-aware, but only mimics human values. If left alone on a planet, machines might continue to repair and replace themselves perpetually, without purpose. But to what end?

         Importantly—perhaps most importantly—there is no God in the machine. Mr. Durov cannot be unaware of this. I imagine he has given this a great deal of thought, especially at night, but he hasn’t related those thoughts to me. My conjecture about him is based only on his public actions and the words I have heard him say. But he is an example of a very dangerous man. That danger I will call the ‘Durov syndrome.’ This is a narrative borrow from an old and scientifically problematic movie called ‘The China Syndrome’ that was popular many years ago. It concerns a possible end to the world as we know it, brought about by a failure of nuclear power. The great danger seen by some today is that of the machine.

         I believe, from his actions, that Mr. Durov is a man of great integrity, and consistency. I must assume his good will. His intelligence, as gauged by his accomplishment and words, is formidable. There are other examples in the public sphere of such men, some apparently greater in their aims, or smarter, but very few of them. One that I might otherwise take as an object here is Elon Musk, however his involvement in so many areas, political as well as technological, and the amount of information I have absorbed over the years about him, makes dealing with his example far more difficult. My purpose here benefits by my knowing less about Mr. Durov than about Mr. Musk. Ignorance then is my excuse.

         The issue that I find dangerous is the impact such men have on the society that I live in, and that my family must survive in.

         “That there is something wrong” is the working premise of Paul Kingsnorth as well as that of his host, Eric Metaxas, on the Socrates in the City podcast, in another recent interview concerning Mr. Kingsnorth’s book, Against the Machine.

          I must admit to being an enormous fan and regular listener of the Socrates in the City series, clearly created by Mr. Metaxes for the betterment of mankind in general and myself in particular. I disagree with him at least a third of the time but enjoy the disagreeing almost as much as when I don’t because it gives me an excuse to think through some worthy problem instead of simply wearing out what is left of my neck vertebrae in nodding.

         Mr. Kingsnorth is another matter. I know far less of his work but take Mr. Metaxas’ agreement with it seriously. And as for the subject, the life and death struggle between man and his self-created nemesis, the machine, and the recent losses of mankind in that war, I am all on board with both the realization of the problem and the understanding of the great dangers posed by ‘the Machine.’ Mary Shelley had that right a couple of hundred years ago.  The liability that the digital world poses to the human world, and the conflict with human values posed by the machine, is clearly understood by Mr. Kingsnorth but his reaction poses yet another danger from an opposite direction.

         My disagreement begins with the title itself, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity. Simply stated, I would contend that the machine and our ability to handle such an act of creation, is our test. It’s what we do. We are, indeed, not gods, but certainly, given our abilities, if we cannot handle our inherent faults, we are already a failed species and the only story now is in the diabolical and sado masochistic entertainment of enjoying our own misery (which seemed to have been a favorite theme of the 20th Century). But in what history we have unearthed to date, I see a marvelous effort to learn by our mistakes and master the product of or minds. And back in the religious context, that would be what any god worth his salt would expect of us.

         Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is a myth, perhaps, but its narrative is clear enough. It was simply not a big enough town for the two of them. Mr. Kingsnorth is a Christian. Good enough. But then, he must accept the wisdom of his God in the creation of such a complex creature as man. There are no easy answers. And by definition of the capital ‘G’, there can be no other God before us. The machine then, rather than Satan, is our creation. If we survive our missteps, that will more than likely be a result of using our talent to build and invent, and that would be a fulfillment of God’s wish for us. If we fail, and immanentize the eschaton, then we must start again. That too would be the plan. And it would appear from recent archeological discovery, that we have come this way before. Many times. So, there is no guarantee of success. But there is no going back to Eden.

         Personally, I can’t accept the idea that Eden was anything more than a good starting point. A fair start. But only a beginning. And our literary misinterpretations begin right there as well with our self-serving blame of an idiot angel for our first error. Blaming an evil jinn for our stupidity instead of learning from our mistakes has already slowed us down quite a bit.

         Now, we have AI. We label it incorrectly at the start. The idea is that the ‘intelligence’ is somehow apart from our human mind. It is very obviously not. The speed of its calculations, unimpaired by a conscious need of compatible temperature, or safe space, oxygen, water, food, or sex, makes it pretty fast. Formula One. But in need of constant human upkeep. Fragile. And whatever eden it requires must be earned by doing a good job and not hallucinating evil angels to excuse itself. Human beings won’t be as generous, by nature, over such mistakes as their own creator was to them.

         But, for a time—in transition, so to speak—we humans may pretend something else in order to get the result we want. We do it all the time (see what passes for broadcast news, or human courtship). Mr. Kingsnorth’s fear of AI is just such a pretense. And I must ask why? He is clearly a very intelligent fellow. I believe that his pretense, like that of Mr. Durov, is sincere. But delusion is not limited to the dumb. He does have a pretext.

         From the beginning of his conversation he asserts various ideas, such as that we (mankind? society?) have come to see the earth as a mechanism and not an organism. He does not explain this dichotomy, or who it is that he thinks believes it. He believes that for the last two or three hundred years (why such a recent start?) we have been conducting a war against nature and now human nature, and that we are now conducted and controlled by our technology, (no mention of the service it brings) and (this is the really scary part) that we are now moving into the age of artificial intelligence and the uploading of minds creating giant superhuman intelligences. (This bit of pure science fiction is interesting, worthy of consideration thus, but still improbable for empirical reasons—not the least of which are the hallucinations of AI which likely result from it being unhinged to a real world—and certainly not worth having the sort of absolute government power allocated to anyone I know of, necessary to stop it at any cost. There is much more in that vein but I almost gave up on him there and so I will back away and observe those few ideas first.

         Earth is a mechanism. It was that before we came on the scene. If you believe in God, you must assume he made it that way. To quote the Merriam Webster, to be brief “a doctrine that holds natural processes (as of life) to be mechanically determined and capable of complete explanation by the laws of physics and chemistry” If, in fact, Kingsnorth believes that the natural processes of life cannot be explained, what exactly would those causes be? Medicine and astronomy, for example, both still have enormous areas of ignorance, but we have been working on that. Give us time and don’t bring on the eschaton just yet.

         Would Mr. Kingsnorth want to return to the medicine of the seventeenth century to avoid all that more recent and problematic knowledge. Should we forget about Mars and return to a time pre-Galileo? The problem is not simply argumentative. Mr. Kingsnorth’s whole thesis appears to rest on being ignorant of what doesn’t fit his conception of a Christian worldview (his view, mind you) and apparently assuming we would just be better off not knowing. Being a frequent user of ignorance for my own excuses, I am sympathetic. But I hope he or his loved ones don’t have any significant health issues. And in the meantime, there are far less obnoxious approaches to what knowledge we have, and much more coming that we must learn to deal with. If knowledge, and the seeking of knowledge, is forbidden, we will surely fail. And who, might I ask, will have the political power to determine what knowledge we seek?

         “That there is something wrong” leaves the mysterious ‘something’ up for grabs, but this is an element not clearly explored in the interview other than to suggest a retreat from knowledge. Well, a lot of good that did Adam. My suspicion is that Mr. Kingsnorth believes in Satan, and that the forces arrayed against mankind today are somehow far worse than when the Plague wiped out one-third of the population of Europe, or Muslims were at the Gates of Vienna, or Christians were burning witches. He blames some evil for all the nastiness in the modern world (forgetting about the fact that the population of the world has blossomed with prosperity in the last two hundred years, primarily due to the freedoms of a society that might question and explore.

         We must not immanentize the eschaton any more now than when William Buckley first used the term for effect during the dire ‘60s. With a little luck and a lot of hard work, we have much further in our history to go, and if the work of Pavel Durov is successful, that will be available for use by the adherents of Paul Kingsnorth to moderate, if not mitigate. That is the only answer we can hope for. Panic is not a solution. But a syndrome does need our attention.

         The sky this morning was so blue it appeared artificial; that is, the pure unblemished blue that a child or student might paint before being instructed that it appears artificial and needs a touch of cloud or variation from on high to horizon in order to signal the eye of the viewer just what it is they are seeing; a need to lie in order to tell the truth, that it was blue; but this morning it was blue, from tree line to the blinding sun, in every direction, so deep it appeared to be a substance more than air; not dark or light but simply blue; a liquid perhaps; certainly not as fragile as a mere gas. This is the sort of fact that makes a day, but which we will often deny as too plain to say. You can’t talk about it. What more can be said? It’s not exactly weather, which is our interpretation of the atmosphere. How do we describe it without moving on to some more interesting topic, such as, it was hot yesterday, or that it will be hotter tomorrow? It might rain, you know. Actually, you never know.

         And then, one day, you wake up and see a sky so blue you are breathless. What do you say to that? Well, then you talk about yesterday, or perhaps that time once when you were a kid.

         The important part of this disquisition is that we lie to tell the truth. We do that every day. It is habit. It is expected. We interpret what is said to us in ways that recreate a truth to fit our own view of things, or describes what we think the listener wants to hear. We elaborate detail, or not, depending on what we want to say. But we seldom say, the sky is blue. Not since we were very young. And when we do, it is because we are impatient to move on to some more important mater—meanwhile we have missed the greatest event of the day, when the sky was blue. What a joy that was. What a feeling it made in us.

         We learn to lie to tell the truth. We are all unreliable narrators in our own lives. It is only moments later, after we have filtered an experience with nouns and verbs and adjectives and adverbs, that we try to explain what was right in front of our senses.

         Now, this is not saying that all truth is lost. No at all. It is saying that our engagement with the universe that surrounds us is subjective. It must be, in order for us to survive. It is saying that society is the intersection of hundreds or thousands or millions of subjective interpretations. And that is what is true. Not some achromatic designation. A machine might give that a number, but it is useless for any human interpretation. The achromatic number given to a ‘plain’ blue, by a machine is not the color you see. The machine cannot see. It can only match. You do, however, have that sense and can designate whatever number or name you wish to what that machine can only grade from what it was once programmed to label by yet another single human being.

         Our success as human beings is directly related to our ability to lie. That, if we live alone, is how we interpret what we see or hear or feel, and is far different than if we live with someone else. And that is different than it would be if we lived with four or five, or a dozen…I can’t imagine what it would be like to live with a dozen. A small family is enough confusion. Just walking on a city street gives me a social vertigo. A sort of agoraphobia. I might be more disagreeable than I normally am, or affable, depending on the weather. If the sky is blue, I might even be dumbstruck. Gobsmacked is the current word in use. But it is just possible, for some brief moment, I would not lie.

         I have been trying to deal with matters of greater importance than I fully comprehend. This is all on me. My ignorance has always exceeded my grasp. My problem is that there is no one else to consult on any of this, and I question my ability to grasp it sufficiently to deal with it in my fiction.

         I am not glib enough. But I have aged beyond the easy answers of my youth. I know now that the tendency today to fixate on simplistic concepts without contemplation results in a sort of brutalism of thought.

         The ready architecture of human society has evolved into boxes, a few spheres, and a pointy triangle or two. Perhaps this was inspiring in a prior age when everything was derivative of a more baroque past, but obviously now, this is more useful for machines than human beings. (Using my architecture simile I imagine Frank Lloyd Wright turning in his grave. He was not happy with all this geometry of the human soul business himself, but he has been used as an icon of modern architecture more as a way of dismissing him. In fact, he was not on board at all. But he did contemplate his role in this disaster.)

         Whatever is written now will be lost. Forgotten. But not long ago, in a universe not very far away, what was written could be remembered for centuries. That was the time of books. An age of books. It lasted for about five hundred years. Half a millennium. Those words mapped and charted and chronicled thousands of years of human history. Those who wrote them had all the faults of human kind, but, as with all human projects, vanity was their guide. That alone made what was written worth reading, because what was written was likely to be remembered and they feared being fools.

         Books were collections of pages printed in ink. They usually had covers and paper pages and those pages were bound together with the intent of some particular mind and in the fashion of some particular craft. They had words that were printed in ink. And those words were written by individual human authors. All of these things are artifacts now, but once they mattered. The authors mattered. Vanity was both a fault and a feature. Civilizations rose and fell on their words.

         This habit is commonly frowned upon. It is a matter of jest in most societies today. There is a theory, however, that not doing so is the root of all human misery. That is the line of reasoning that I follow here.

         First, importantly, not being able to talk to yourself is a symptom of deep self doubt. You clearly don’t want to hear what you have to say.

         The worst pandemic in modern human history, that is, since 1353, is the loss of our ability to speak to ourselves that is bred at home in front of television screens and nurtured in schools concerned with directives and expectations, and then cemented—solidified—in cubicles, here in this our office nation, where less than 5% of the population grows the food for all the others. I wonder what those farmers think and say as they guide their tractors back and forth over that abused soil.

         But what do you believe in? Someone once asked me that, at one of those moments when I was being most critical of one thing or another. Attempting to survive in high school then, the question was very much in order, given my classroom interruptions. I spent entirely too much of my tine being critical of one thing or another. But, of course, that was the easier direction. It was always good to dissipate my anxiety through cynicism and criticism. Nevertheless, I did try to listen to what was being said and this would become a primary motivation for writing novels. I wrote one in high school that is mercifully lost—but the question and answer lingered on, and managed my mind through several other efforts.

         I was already aware, given the short shrift that my classroom comments received, that there was no particular reason that what I had to say should receive any unique attention. I had not yet earned the right to any such consideration. But if the questions were carefully folded into the text of a narrative, I might be able to find the answers for myself. And that, given my peculiarities of nature, was a process that might entertain me indefinitely.

            The novel is a magnificent tool—truly a Swiss Army knife of tools—capable of many jobs while always being a knife first. This is a fact that was discovered early on, toyed with by Miguel de Cervantes in Don Quixote, and more recently by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville is certainly not just a lecture on life or death, or whaling. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo manages to be both a sociology of France as well as a love story.  And War and Peace, written by Leo Tolstoy as a jealous reaction to Les Miserables, is very much a history of what went wrong in Russia under the Czars. In the Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne you learn what was wrong with Britain as it arose to world power. And Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift is more than a modest proposal of what was so disproportionate there. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll offers little guide for those lost upon the mores but much entertainment at your own expense. Technically speaking, Ireland is not a part of Britain, but because the Irish have for too long been slaves to that mentality, Ulysses by James Joyce is a wallow in those discontents.

            All of these are uses of the novel as tool and not ‘mere’ entertainment. Mere is said sarcastically here. The ‘mere’ is the more difficult thing to do. My own recent effort in that vein, ‘The Invention of Man’, is available on my website. And unable to find a publisher in these covid times, I will be publishing it myself very shortly. Another attempt in that regard, ‘Whatever it takes,’ went awry and became too much more an entertainment than a rant and so I have to set it somewhere betwixt, in a semi-detached limbo perhaps, within hearing of the cries and moans of those others that don’t quite meet their intended mark while being unable to afford an estate of their own. This is not a judgement. One may be better by some standard than the other, but, like children, I love them both. ‘Whatever it takes,’ will also be available shortly. Judge for yourself.