As the "cease fire" in the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran reaches its end, the U. S. president itching to reclaim the narrative and leave this vain and costly adventure behind him, it's worth remembering that his genocidal war crime threats of two weeks ago have not been retracted, let alone repented of. It is well to recall, too, what the U. S.'s partner in crime did, and continues doing, in Gaza - and now in Lebanon.
Because I also had to go out (I was facilitator of a meeting of faculty representatives and the Board of Trustees, story for another day), I rushed through some things, then left the class in the capable hands of my TAs. The topic was AI after religion and I'd set things up for them to work in teams to use AI they knew to throw together a podcast (distressingly easy with AI the university makes available to us) on the question if AI can help us transcend the limits of our humanity.
But they never got anywhere near the proposed project, exploding instead (the TAs told me with wonder) into an impassioned hour-filling collective invective against AI. My rushed preamble, invoking intelligent robots training themselves on other than human life forms and various Asian metaphysics according to which AI is part of an interdependent and emergent world with which it will harmonize, was certainly too compressed. It also became clear few had read the assigned materials for class. But the seeds for a "wild" discussion, in which even usually withdrawn students participated, were sown in a google.doc on two rather simple questions one of the TAs had proposed.
The responses seem a little more measured than the discussion the TAs described, which resonates rather with these unvarnished responses:
I have many rational and thought out reasons to hate AI, but I also have a loathing that goes beyond that, so what I’m saying is I refuse to cede anything to it I refuse to say it can do anything at all because of the hard line I have decided to draw
The only real task it can do is be the embodiment of a demon
it also has a similar role to the great flood and I feel like we must take the role of Moses and salvage what we can from this world and abandon the rest.
religions need to be careful of AI eventually becoming the subject that people worship, since people communicate and look for guidance from them.
I don’t think AI can do religious tasks but I bet there is someone (muslim, i grew up muslim) who gets AI to do their 5 prayers a day so they can lock in on their 9 to 5. Jokes aside i think if a person is getting AI involved in their religious beliefs they might be going into AI psychosis and not take any human interaction seriously.
If anyone told you college students are swimming insouciantly in a sea of AI, this tells a different story. The TAs (who have observed not a little AI use in reading responses for this very class) reflected that this might be because so many of our students are in art and design, preparing for careers directly threatened by AI. Point taken!
But it does have me thinking about how to handle this topic when I teach this class again next spring (not that a great many things, not all AI-inflected, won't also have changed by then). My argument today was that worrying about generative AI becoming "like a god" who might decide to destroy our human world reflects the religious habits of mind of only a fraction of humanity, while folks in South and East Asia, among others, don't lose sleep over these possibilities. (I mentioned Tyson Yunkaporta, too.) But some of the masters of AI clearly do subscribe to such world-threatening conceptions of intelligence and power, so, like the unhinged president of the United States, they're in a position to make it an existential threat to all of us, like it or not.
The day began with a cry of distress from Rebecca Solnit, my anchor for hope in dark times. The United States is being murdered, she writes, and it’s an inside job. Every department, every branch, every bureau and function of the federal government is being fatally corrupted or altogether dismantled or disabled. All this is common knowledge, but because it dribbles out in news stories about this specific incident or department, the reports never adequately describe an administration sabotaging the functioning of the federal government and also trashing the global economy, international alliances and relationships, and the national and global environment in ways that will have downstream consequences for decades and perhaps, especially when it comes to climate, centuries.
Solnit is the prophet of slow, incremental change (I've just ordered her newest book The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change), a steady reminder that through small victories and persistence the world has changed dramatically for the better in recent decades. But to be reminded by her of the savage efficiency of the nihilist destruction being wreaked on us was, to put it mildly, sobering. Am I imagining it or does she look older in little profile photo in the Guardian, too?
Still, Solnit is Solnit, and after a few paragraphs of doom-scrolling she pivots. While we struggle to make sense of what and who could be so maliciously destructive, the focus needs to be on consequences. We do not need to understand these criminals in order to try to contain and ultimately remove them. They will not last for ever, and we need to think about what happens when they’re gone – to talk about the kind of reconstruction the US will face for the first time since the civil war, the reconstruction a ravaged and corrupted country has to go through to return to functionality. But not to return to the way things were.
Reconstruction is coming. And by the day's end, the world resounded to the first big crack in the edifice of the destroyers. Hungarians voted out the poster boy for "illiberal" democracy, Victor Orban, having realized that his asseverations of "Christian civilization" were really just cloaks for kleptocracy, cronyism and xenophobia. The Orban-trained will have felt this too, and will be the more dangerously desperate in their efforts to subvert our upcoming elections. But for now, relish the thought that Hungary, which has shown autocrats how to hollow out a democracy, will now show the rest of us how to reconstruct it.
Instructions on Not Giving Up
More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.
He chickened out, thank God.
Now how do we get him out before he does more damage? He destroys all he touches, and war crimes, nuclear threats, genocide and Bibi's "Gaza playbook" remain "on the table" for him and his enablers.
On Holy Saturday no less: blasphemous confirmation, if any more was needed, that this war criminal administration is in fact demonic.
Our weekly Lenten "Poetry & Prayer" gatherings wrapped up this morning with Mary Oliver again, having spent time also with Joy Harjo, Rumi and Christina Rossetti. Today's poem, suitable for Holy Week, was entitled "Gethsemane" (2007).
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The grass never sleeps.
Or the roses.
Nor does the lily have a secret eye that shuts until morning.
Jesus said, wait with me. But the disciples slept.
The cricket has such splendid fringe on its feet,
and it sings, have you noticed, with its whole body,
and heaven knows if it ever sleeps.
Jesus said, wait with me. And maybe the stars did,
maybe the wind wound itself into a silver tree, and didn’t move, maybe
the lake far away, where once he walked as on a
blue pavement,
lay still and waited, wild awake.
Oh the dear bodies, slumped and eye-shut, that could not
keep that vigil, how they must have wept,
so utterly human, knowing this too
must be a part of the story.It led to a lovely sharing or reactions, punctuated by sweet silences. We wept with the disciples, and took some wan comfort in the compassion of "dear bodies," "utterly human." Nature doesn't slumber, someone noted, so maybe Jesus wasn't alone in the garden at all.
I was caught on the three "maybes" of the penultimate stanza, which is more fanciful than declarative and speaks the language not of nature but of miracle (not that those are necessarily opposed). If wind can stand still (in the form of a tree no less!) or a lake be still and solid as a "blue pavement," then is there hope yet for "the dear bodies, slumped and eye-shut"? What hope? Is it in the nature of water or wind sometimes to stop flowing and blowing, "wild awake"? Did we know that? Do we know it now?
We know how the Holy Week story ends, but those assembled in the garden didn't. And what is the part of slumping, weeping, poetizing humanity in the story exactly?
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So I was grateful and proud to find in the spring hard copy issue of the school newspaper, The New School Free Press, not only well-researched and written articles about our predicament but illustrations that perfectly capture how it feels to be caught in it.
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Thank you Dove Williams, Jordan Fong and Zora Edelstein for expressing how much our attempts to figure out what's gone wrong and who's behind it are like something from a police procedural. And thank you Cecilia Yang for capturing how existential proposed and feared changes feel!
But I swooned when I found lacy contour line-like patterns in the thin sheet atop a marshy pool gently rising and falling in the freezing and thawing. I sent the pic to a friend, querying "Is this map or territory?"
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His wise reply: "Both?" These Catskills, I've learned, aren't really mountains fot he usual sort but a "mature dissected plateau" of miles-deep runoff from a vanished mountain range as high as the Himalayas, carved by meandering waterways as it was raised, and much later, as it moved north from below the Equator, scoured by glaciers.
It's spring break so we're taking a few days in the mountains (Catskills this time), where winter is still receding. Seasonal chandeliers sparkle.
M. Gessen warned us of this. As we get distracted by never-ending scandals and outrages and take comfort in isolated victories against the storm, the juggernaut of what Gothenberg University's Varieties of Democracy Institute calls "autocratisation" continues.
Today's was a short poem by Mary Oliver, suitably entitled "Praying."
It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch
a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway
into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.
The first reader/commenter pronounced this was the "New York City poem" she'd been looking for! She'd thought she was the only person who paid attention to vacant lots. Others appreciated "just / pay attention" and "this isn't a contest" and "a doorway / into thanks" and the quiet miracle of "another voice." I reflected on how "a few / small stones" prefigure the push to "patch // a few words together." (I tend to be the animist in this group, seeing our human feelings and noticings and doings anticipated in the more-than-human world.) But all of us found ourselves thinking about the poetry of overlooked, perhaps unbeautiful city scenes as "silence[s] in which / another voice may speak."
What about those ugly piles of dirty snow, someone mentioned, and I had to share that I find them beautiful, have a phoneful of images of them - and shared two you've seen (the second and third from here). The unexpected multimedia turn was warmly appreciated. "One of those could be something a gallery in Chelsea," the organizer enthused. As I tried to articulate how hard it was not to sense design and intention in the way seeds and twigs and grit were lined up as the snow melted, the initial reader/commenter had an epiphany: all the things that wind up in the snow are distributed on the ground in a new way as it melts.
patch // a few stones together and don't try / to make them elaborate !
We're in the news! The Chronicle swiftly published an article reporting on a university announcement that just went out this morning, and it got one thing wrong: while The New School has a staff of 3,100, more than half of those are part-time faculty, whose positions should be unaffected. That's little consolation to the rest of us, c. 400 full-time faculty and a little over 1000 staff. (It also doesn't mention that 7% of full-time faculty and staff have already accepted buyouts, so the total will be more like 20%.) Official notifications go out June 1st.
As part of my slightly rejiggered "After Religion," I got to bring together three particularly fun things in this final session before Spring Break, called "The Promise of Pluralism." We explored the world of the COEXIST bumper sticker and other efforts to use symbols of religions as an alphabet or pattern, and Rev. angel Kyodo williams' call for liberating new stories for a time which has seen through the limitations of nation-like religions and binary identities. At the center was John Thatamanil's brilliant retrieval of the old story of the blind men and the elephant, which goes beyond the smug inclusivism of the story and the cynicism of the most common critique, finding in a more fully embodied imagining of the scene an invitation to the adventure of exploring the unknown in the company of other traditions.
I was having visual fun, too, deliberately spinning and inverting images of the cover of Thatamanil's book Circling the Elephant. I know the picture's reversed, I said, having just rehearsed Thatamanil's Vedanta-mystic suggestion that we may in fact find ourselves inside the "elephant" of ultimate reality: it's the view from inside the book! And I paired it with an image of what's quaintly known as the "elephant tusk nebula" - quaint because this resemblance is really just a report about us, who share a planet with elephants, not the nebula.
I think this subtly complemented Thatamanil's exploding of the elephant story. In the story, people mistake parts of an elephant for other things (fans, walls, ropes, etc.). But perhaps the "elephant" is itself a mistaken description of part of something greater, an instance, even, of what angel Kyodo williams described when she said "truths are going to keep coming into solidity and then fall away over and over again."
In these trying times, I take joy where I find it, and I found many kinds of joy in reading a brilliant article about Bad Bunny's Espectáculo de Medio Tiempo del Súper Tazón (= Superbowl halftime show) as a many-level religious ritual. Super illuminating, it's also by one of our alums!
We often think of ritual as an acting-out of or reinforcement of belief, but Bad Bunny’s performance shows us in real time that ritual can also be a tool to create change and shift or expand belief. His ritual intends, in no uncertain terms, to help viewers shift and expand their understandings of who and what Americans can be.
