I don’t think I have picked up Wendell Berry’s collection What Are People For? since I bought it in 2018. Here he writes (in 1975!) in praise of Nate Shaw and against what we might now call the ubiquitous voice of R. Buckminster Fuller:

Shaw’s vocabulary and usage will sometimes seem strange to readers not familiar with his region and way of life, but it will never seem empty or inert. When he speaks of “correspondin” a girl or says that his son “got stout enough to accomplish a place,” we have no trouble understanding what he means, and we are also aware that his words convey insight beyond the reach of conventional usage. He speaks always in reference to a real world, thoroughly experienced and understood. His words keep an almost physical hold on “what I have touched with my hands and what have touched me. . . ” Surely this is the power that we have periodically sensed in what is called (vulgarly) “the vulgar tongue.” It is a language under the discipline of experience, not of ideas or rules. Shaw’s words, always interposed between experience and intelligence, have the exactitude of conviction, whereas the words of an analyst or theorist can have only the exactitude of definition.

In a recent issue of Saturday Review/World, R. Buckminster Fuller has an article called “Cutting the Metabilical Cord,” which is based on a virtually unqualified assumption that humanity has begun a process of unlimited improvement by way of technological progress. “Humanity knew very little when I was young,” he says. And he recalls the “skilled craftsmen” he worked with on his first jobs; these people “had vocabularies of only about 100 words, many of which were blasphemous or obscene.” Thanks to radio and television, however, this lamentable ignorance has been corrected by a “historic information-education explosion and its spontaneous edifying of humans in general.” This “explosion” of edification “completely changed the speech pattern of world-around humanity from that of an illiterate ignoramus to that of a scholar.” These and many similar assertions culminate in a sort of Creed for Modern Times: “The great intellectual integrity of universe has cut the metabilical cord of tradition and parental authority—putting youth on its own thinking responsibility.” And then occurs the essay’s only note of caution, which is immediately buried beneath another avalanche of technological mysticism: the young people of 1974, “whose metabilical cord of tradition has been cut, now need a few years time to develop competence to take over the world affairs initiative, and that is exactly what universe is apparently about to do next.”

It may be that Mr. Fuller’s language can be put to some good use. I hope so. It could certainly be used to promote the sale of television sets. Should his jargon catch on with the public, it could also be useful to any politician whose designs required a fit of public optimism. This gobbledygook of “universe” is representative of a lot of the sub-tongues spoken now by people who lead “awesome intellectual lives.” It is speech so abstract, so far removed from anybody’s experience, that it is virtually out of control; anything can be said in it that the speaker has the foolishness or the audacity to say.

There is not a phrase in Nate Shaw’s story so abstract, naive, ignorant, insipid, or tasteless as this language of Buckminster Fuller. An “uneducated” man whose speech was formed long before radio, Shaw is nevertheless well able to say whatever he thinks, and he thinks whatever he needs to think as a man of exceptional competence, both practical and moral. In moments of joy or grief, he is capable of a sort of poetry. The burden—and so the discipline—of Shaw’s language is what he knows from experience. For that reason nothing he says, if correctly quoted, will ever be useful to a salesman or a political propagandist. There is not a single slogan in this book. He has no talk of “education explosions” or “metabilical cords.” He does not say “Freedom now” or “Black is beautiful” or “Power to the people.” He says: “My color, the colored race of people on earth, goin to shed theirselves of these slavery ways. But it takes many a trip to the river to get clean.” He says: “They goin to win! They goin to win! But it’s goin to take a great effort . . . . It won’t come easy. Somebody got to move and remove . . . . It’s goin to take thousands and millions of words, thousands and millions of steps . . . . And I hope to God that I won’t be one of the slackers that would set down and refuse to labor to that end.”

That is eminently responsible language. And it is deeply moving—especially when we realize that the man speaking almost in the same breath of faith, doubt, difficulty, and his own willingness to labor is eighty-six or-seven years old. The movement here is characteristic: the swiftly defined hope or vision or ambition, followed by the recognition of difficulty, the implication of labor. And these passages occur among stories that reveal the nature and the difficulty of effort and the characters of people, black and white. What this responsibility rests on is the knowledge of tragedy. Shaw’s mind has dwelt upon his own limits, both cultural and human; it has dwelt upon loss and upon solitude. Buckminster Fuller writes, “Obviously, humanity if properly cooperative and scientifically coordinated can do anything it needs to do”—acknowledging neither the enormous ifs that cling to “properly cooperative” nor the political portent of “scientifically coordinated.” Nate Shaw, a more unified man, who can speak of acting “with the full consent of my mind,” has done what he thought, and so he knows the solitude of the man who acts on principle. When he “stood up against this southern way of life,” he had to stand alone; the other members of the union fled. He knew the exultation of his stand: “That made me merry in a way. I done what was right . . . ”But he also knew its tragedy: “When they shot me it didn’t shake me, when they arrested me it didn’t shake me. But it shook me to see my friends was but few.”

A passage from Wendell Berry that I’m meditating on:

IV

Good work finds the way between pride and despair.

It graces with health. It heals with grace.

It preserves the given so that it remains a gift.

By it, we lose loneliness:

we clasp the hands of those who go before us, and the hands of those who come after us;

we enter the little circle of each other’s arms,

and the larger circle of lovers whose hands are joined in a dance,

and the larger circle of all creatures, passing in and out of life, who move also in a dance, to a music so subtle and vast that no ear hears it except in fragments.

V

And by it we enter solitude, in which also we lose loneliness.

Only discord can come of the attempt to share solitude.

True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation.

One’s inner voices become audible. One feels the attraction of one’s most intimate sources.

In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives. The more coherent one becomes within oneself as a creature, the more fully one enters into the communion of all creatures.

One returns from solitude laden with the gifts of circumstance.

VI

And there is no escaping that return.

From the order of nature we return to the order—and the disorder—of humanity.

From the larger circle we must go back to the smaller, the smaller within the larger and dependent on it.

One enters the larger circle by willingness to be a creature, the smaller by choosing to be a human.

And having returned from the woods, we remember with regret its restfulness. For all creatures there are in place, hence at rest.

In their most strenuous striving, sleeping and waking, dead and living, they are at rest.

In the circle of the human we are weary with striving, and are without rest.

VII

Order is the only possibility of rest.

The made order must seek the given order, and find its place in it.

The field must remember the forest, the town must remember the field, so that the wheel of life will turn, and the dying be met by the newborn.

The scattered members must be brought together.

Desire will always outreach the possible. But to fulfill the possible is to enlarge it.

The possible, fulfilled, is timely in the world, eternal in the mind.

Seeing the work that is to be done, who can help wanting to be the one to do it?

But one is afraid that there will be no rest until the work is finished and the house is in order, the farm is in order, the town is in order, and all loved ones are well.

But it is pride that lies awake in the night with its desire and its grief.

To work at this work alone is to fail. There is no help for it. Loneliness is its failure.

It is despair that sees the work failing in one’s own failure.

This despair is the awkwardest pride of all.

VIII

There is finally the pride of thinking oneself without teachers.

The teachers are everywhere. What is wanted is a learner.

In ignorance is hope. If we had known the difficulty, we would not have learned even so little.

Rely on ignorance. It is ignorance the teachers will come to.

They are waiting, as they always have, beyond the edge of the light.

IX

The teachings of unsuspected teachers belong to the task, and are its hope.

The love and the work of friends and lovers belong to the task, and are its health.

Rest and rejoicing belong to the task, and are its grace.

Let tomorrow come tomorrow. Not by your will is the house carried through the night.

Order is only the possibility of rest.

Matthew Crawford:

Ken Jansen is one of those guys in the trades without whom the world would simply come to a stop. And in fact, as they retire and die off, the world kind of is coming to a stop. Have you ever found yourself wailing into the void, “why does nothing work anymore?!” It turns out that for stuff to work, you need people on hand who know things.

Not people who know how to Google it, or AI-prompt it, but who have a web of knowledge in their heads that is vast and detailed and synoptic, and who are able to synthesize it on the fly to arrive at some practical solution. This kind of knowledge accumulates over the course of a lifetime, slowly ripening and finding its way into their bones, to the point they probably couldn’t tell you how they know what they know.

[…]

Eddie’s father was a pilot in the Luftwaffe during WWII. My father was a radio operator and waist-gunner in a B17 bomber over German-controlled territory. It is possible, just barely, that they exchanged fire at some point. Today we exchanged stories of the war, stories of cars, and our own histories of learning under mentors. I have learned from Ken, who learned from Eddie, who learned from particular men in Wolfsburg wo are unknown to me. Ken’s own son Joe works at the shop, as does his wife Maria. Maybe civilization is made up of a million such lines of descent and transmission, invisible to all but those who live them.

There is a quality one can detect in the presence of genuine competence, an aroma of integrity. It is just this that seems in danger of dying off, if we are unable to cultivate the next generation of excellent tradesmen.

Also, the poster in this image from the essay is just perfect:

Nick Catoggio:

Firing a capable officer like Randy George is bad. Firing him because he didn’t show proper respect for Kid Rock is so unbearably humiliating for the United States that I feel it in my chest. 

“Shameful” isn’t the right word, as shame implies a sense of guilt over some serious offense for which you feel directly or indirectly responsible—and, to be sure, the Trump administration routinely acts in ways that fit that bill. The George episode isn’t so much shameful as it is pathetic. It betrays a bratty juvenile fatuousness that’s only possible in political leaders who fundamentally don’t grasp, or actively disdain, the concept of dignity.

Alasdair MacIntyre:

[I]f we fail to give [nonhuman animals] their due, we will also fail to understand adequately what the significance of the difference between human beings and some other intelligent species is. And this is Heidegger’s second failure. It is not just that he misdescribed nonhuman animals. It is also that in consequence he omitted to notice crucial aspects of Dasein, human existence. And his omissions are not unrelated to those of some of the analytic philosophers whom I have discussed.

What I already stressed then in respect of the relationship between human beliefs and the beliefs of some nonhuman animals was the extent to which the development of some distinctively human language-using powers and capacities extends and is founded upon animal powers and capacities shared with members of some other intelligent species. I now want to amplify this claim. It is not only that the same kind of exercise of the same kind of perceptual powers provides, guides, and corrects beliefs in the case of dolphins—and some other species—as in the case of humans, but that our whole initial bodily comportment towards the world is originally an animal comportment and that when, through having become language-users, we under the guidance of parents and others restructure that comportment, elaborate and in new ways correct our beliefs and redirect our activities, we never make ourselves independent of our animal nature and inheritance. Partly this is a matter of those aspects of our bodily condition that simply remain unchanged, of what remains constant through and after the social and cultural scheduling and ordering of our bodily functions: toilet training, developing what one’s culture regards as regular sleeping and eating habits, and learning what constitutes politeness and what rudeness by way of sneezing, spitting, burping, farting, and the like. And partly it is a matter of what is involved in our becoming able to reflect upon our overall comportment and our directedness towards the goods of our animal nature, and so in consequence to correct and redirect ourselves, our beliefs, feelings, attitudes, and actions. For it is of the first importance that what we thereby become are redirected and remade animals and not something else. Our second culturally formed language-using nature is a set of partial, but only partial, transformations of our first animal nature. We remain animal selves with animal identities. Heidegger’s omissions and exclusions from his account of nonhuman animals are such as to obscure this from view. I take it that it is no accident that on those later occasions when Heidegger wanted to stress the kinship between nonhuman and human animals rather than the extent of the difference between them, what he said was, even for Heidegger, enigmatic and cryptic. He had left himself with no way of saying what needed to be said. But more is at stake here than the criticism of Heidegger.

A few weeks ago, I posted an audio message to a friend, and I said something about how the Wendell Berry fan in me thinks modern humans just don’t go out and climb trees enough. I certainly wasn’t kidding, and I did have the physical act of climbing a tree in mind, but I mostly meant it as more of a metonym. (Ron Swanson: “I also think it’s pointless for a human to paint scenes of nature when they could just go outside and stand in it.”) While I could be sure there must be some tree climbing somewhere in Berry’s oeuvre, nothing specific came to mind.

Until now.

I’ve been reading (i.e. had laying around the house) a collection of Wendell Berry’s Sabbath Poems for years, with no desire to ever finish the book. A happy slow pace is the way poems were meant to be read. Sadly, the end of the book is near.

This is from 1995, “VI The Old Man Climbs a Tree,” about a man who needs to fell a cedar for posts but needs the leverage with a high rope to pull it in the direction opposite its lean:

And so, he thought, he would need to climb
the tree itself. He’d climbed trees many times
in play when he was a boy, and many times
since, when he’d had a reason. He’d loved
always his reasons for climbing trees.
But he’d come now to the age of remembering,
and he remembered his boyhood fall from an apple tree,
and being brought in to his mother, his wits
dispersed, not knowing where he was,
though where he was was this world still.
If that should happen now, he thought,
the world he waked up in would not be this one.
The other world is nearer to him now.
But trailing his rope untied as yet to anything
but himself, he climbed up once again and stood
where only birds and the wind had been before,
and knew it was another world, after all,
that he had climbed up into. There are
no worlds but other worlds: the world
of the field mouse, the world of the hawk,
the world of the beetle, the world of the oak,
the worlds of the unborn, the dead, and all
the heavenly host, and he is alive
in those worlds while living in his own.
Known or unknown, every world exists
because the others do.

          The treetops
are another world, smelling of bark,
a stratum of freer air and larger views,
from which he saw the world he’d lived in
all day until now, its intimate geography changed
by his absence and by the height he saw it from.
The sky was a little larger, and all around
the aerial topography of treetops, green and gray,
the ground almost invisible beneath.
He perched there, ungravitied as a bird,
knotting his rope and looking about, worlded
in worlds on worlds, pleased, and unafraid.

There are no worlds but other worlds
and all the other worlds are here,
reached or almost reachable by the same
outstretching hand, as he, perched upon
his high branch, almost imagined flight.

Source

Chaekgeori (Korean: 책거리; Hanja: 冊巨里), translated as “books and things”, is a genre of still-life painting from the Joseon period of Korea that features books as the dominant subject. The chaekgeori tradition flourished from the second half of the 18th century to the first half of the 20th century and was enjoyed by all members of the population, from the king to the commoners, revealing the infatuation with books and learning in Korean culture.

That came via Peco and Ruth Gaskovski, who also open with this:

All civilization comes through literature now, especially in our own country. A Greek got his civilization by talking and looking, and in some measure a Parisian may still do it. But we, who live remotely from history and monuments, we must read or we must barbarise.

from The Rise of Silas Lapham by William Dean Howells, 1885

“Generative AI is cognitive cancer and we are doing next to nothing to stop it from spreading.” That very aptly sums up Benjamin Riley’s coverage of what is almost certainly the first “rigorous, empirical,” large-scale study on the impact of AI on student learning.

Consistent with the two previous data sets, we again see near-perfect alignment between the Pre AI and Never AI students on the monthly closed-book exams administered to students. But now the adverse impact of AI is laid bare—just look at that shift to the left. The Used AI students are scoring at levels far lower than their Never AI peers, indeed, many score far lower than anything recorded prior to AI existing. […]

This isn’t about academic integrity, it’s about a generation of kids being told AI is “inevitable” and “the future” and acting accordingly, in a societies where we’ve yet to develop firm norms about what’s acceptable to do with these tools within education. The upshot is that students are using AI in ways that are harming their cognitive development and foreclosing their life opportunities. Harms that are not easily remediated, if at all. […]

The Edu-Cognoscenti continues to chatter about learning loss related to school closures during the pandemic. Well, the learning loss stemming from generative AI appears more substantial, it’s happening right now, and it may endure for far longer. So to all the policymakers and philanthropists and so-called thought leaders who purport to take education evidence seriously, I ask you: What are you doing to prevent ongoing educational harms of generative AI? Are you doing anything at all?

We are in cognitive crisis.

I will add one complaint. Riley ends with a quote from his friend Dan Wellingham, who says “Artificial Intelligence tools should not substitute for tasks wherein students would benefit from doing the mental work themselves. Only use AI for what you already know how to do.”

Really? Come on, smart people. This is weak sauce. A major, major, major, major part of this whole hullabaloo is in the very fact that humans can’t or are very bad at or otherwise just harm themselves by offloading cognitive tasks, period. The very category “tasks wherein students would [or would not] benefit from doing the mental work themselves” is the problem. And the idea that using AI only for things “you already know how to do” would not also be cognitively harmful also seems mildly sophomoric, especially under the circumstances.

As I have said before, offloading and short-circuiting our imaginations makes us lazy, but behind this problem, or built into it and built into our very humanness, is the fact that we don’t actually get to choose when we are offloading. Imagination thrives on randomness, friction, and surprise, but also on repetition, dedication, and constancy.

Again, even I, self-declared leader of the He-Man AI Haters Club, will disclaim some possibly-maybe-sorta-could-be good uses of AI. But I think Riley ended this very good and important piece on a slightly self-defeating whimper.

Nick Catoggio:

We’re a country that’s $40 trillion in debt and counting; dealing soberly with long-term threats isn’t really our thing.

There’s no such thing as luxury nationalism, but the idea may have been inevitable in a population that imagines inexhaustible wealth and power as its birthright. And given Donald Trump’s upbringing and approach to the world, that he’d end up as the face of it may have been inevitable too.