New Technologies, Old Attitudes

March 5, 2023
Posted by Jay Livingston

What do our reactions to AI, UFOs, and DMT have in common? Ross Douthat, in today’s Times (here), has an answer:

There is a shared spirit in these stories, a common impulse to the quests: the desire to encounter or invent some sort of nonhuman consciousness that might help us toward leaps that we can’t make on our own. The impulse is an ancient one: The idea tha one might bind a djinn, create a golem or manipulate a god or fairy to do your bidding is inscribed deep in the human imagination.

Surprisingly, Douthat does not remind us that these deals with nonhumans always turn out badly for the humans. He seems to share in the optimism for, as the column’s title has it, “the return of the magicians.” In his mention of Dr. Faustus, Douthat says only that “the scientist and the magician were often overlapping figures in the early modern imagination, blurring together in vocations like alchemy and characters like Dr. Faustus.” Douthat sees blurring. Not so bad. What’s a little blurring? But the central plot element in the story is that Dr. Faustus sells his soul to the devil.

I was reminded of Philip Slater’s far less sanguine take on this kind of thinking in his book The Pursuit of Loneliness, published in 1970. That was more than a half-century ago, but it still seems accurate. Here is a long excerpt..

All societies, optimally, must allow for both change and stability.... Every society evolves patterns for attempting to realize these mutually incompatible needs.

Our society, as many have pointed out, has traditionally handled the problem by giving completely free rein to technological change and opposing the most formidable obstacles to social change. Since, however, technological change in fact forces social changes upon us, this has had the effect of abdicating all control over our social environment to a kind of whimsical deity. While we think of ourselves as a people of change and progress, masters of our environment and our fate, we are no more entitled to this designation than the most superstitious savage, for our relation to change is entirely passive. We poke our noses out the door each day and wonder breathlessly what new disruptions technology has in store for us. We talk of technology as the servant of man, but it is a servant that now dominates the household, too powerful to fire, upon whom everyone is helplessly dependent. We tiptoe about and speculate upon his mood. What will be the effects of such-and-such an invention? How will it change our daily lives? We never ask, do we want this, is it worth it? (We did not ask ourselves, for example, if the trivial conveniences offered by the automobile could really offset the calamitous disruption and depersonalization of our lives that it brought about.) We simply say “You can't stop progress” and shuffle back inside.  

We pride ourselves on being a “democracy” but we are in fact slaves. We submit to an absolute ruler whose edicts and whims we never question. We watch him carefully, hang on his every word; for technology is a harsh and capricious king, demanding prompt and absolute obedience. We laugh at the Luddites (Nat Turners in the struggle for human parity with the machine) but they were the last human beings seriously to confront this issue. Since then we have passively surrendered to every degradation, every atrocity, every enslavement that our technological ingenuity has brought about. We laugh at the old lady who holds off the highway bulldozers with a shotgun, but we laugh because we are Uncle Toms. We try to outdo each other in singing the praises of the oppressor, although in fact the value of technology in terms of human satisfaction remains at best undemonstrated. For when evaluating its effects we always adopt the basic assumptions and perspective of technology itself, and never examine it in terms of the totality of human experience. We say this or that invention is valuable because it generates other inventions-because it is a means to some other means-not because it achieves an ultimate human end. We play down the “side effects” that so often become the main effects and completely negate any alleged benefits. The advantages of all technological “progress” will after all be totally outweighed the moment nuclear war breaks out (an event which, given the inadequacy of precautions and the number of fanatical fingers close to the trigger, is only a matter of time unless radical changes are made).

Let me make clear what I am not saying here. I do not believe in the noble savage and I am not advocating any brand of bucolic romanticism. I do not want to put an end to machines, I only want to remove them from their position of mastery, to restore human beings to a position of equality and initiative.

Tom Lehrer – “Sociology”

December 18, 2022
Posted by Jay Livingston

Tom Lehrer has put all his songs online and has ceded all copyright protection.

Performing and recording rights to all of my songs are included in this permission. Translation rights are also included. In particular, permission is hereby granted to anyone to set any of these lyrics to their own music, or to set any of this music to their own lyrics, and to publish or perform their parodies or distortions of these songs without payment or fear of legal action. [The full statement and the songs are here.]

In the movie White Christmas, Danny Kaye sings a song called “choreography.” It’s  not the most famous Irving Berlin song from this movie (guess what is). You’ve probably never heard of it. It’s gently satirical — a  commentary on the pretentiousness of hoofers in the dance biz. Once, they simply spoke of “dancing”; now they prefer the inflated term “choreography.”

Lehrer used Berlin’s melody and the structure of the song to do a similar skewering of quantitative social science. His target, as he explains in the introduction in this video, was really political science, but you can’t swap out “choreography” in the Berlin song and replace it with “political science.” “Sociology,” on the other hand is a perfect fit.

Can We Talk?

December 8, 2022
Posted by Jay Livingston

Molly Worthen begins her column in the Sunday Times Opinion section by quoting a student who said that if she had known her intro sociology class required oral exams, “I’m not sure I would have taken the class.”  Worthen goes on at length (2500 words) in favor of oral exams.  

I think she’s right in principle, though I cannot speak from experience. I had no oral exams as an undergraduate — Worthen is talking mostly about undergrad courses — and even for the Ph.D., my department did not require an oral defense.

“American universities tend to infantilize students,” says Worthen, “taking attendance in class, employing fleets of student affairs bureaucrats to tend to their needs.” She neglects to mention the most infantilizing and bureaucratic practice of all – multiple-choice exams. Bureaucratic because in the interests of efficiency and universalism (objectivity) multiple-choice exams force students to minimize the information they present. Infantilizing because multiple-choice exams treat students as though they are incapable of complex thought. To take a multiple-choice exam, you don’t have to be able to think about and discuss ideas and evidence. You don’t even have to know the material, though it helps.

Multiple-choice exams replace the original goal of education — learning — with the ability to answer simple questions. My favorite example of the difference is again from grad school, in this case the foreign language requirement. The idea underlying this requirement is that not everything relevant in your field is written in English, especially work that is more recent and not written by superstars like Bourdieu or Foucault.

My French at the time was so feeble that I doubt I could have read a newspaper, certainly not Le Monde, probably not even the French counterpart of the New York Post. But to fulfill the language requirement, all I had to do was get a #2 pencil and pass the standardized test from (if I recall correctly) ETS. I don’t know how low the bar was set, but I passed.

A friend who had gotten his degree at Brandeis told me what the language exam there was like. “You go see Hughes [Everett C. Hughes] and he gives you a piece of paper with a citation for an article in a foreign journal.. ‘Go read this, come back Wednesday, and we’ll talk about it.’”

As Worthen says, “The most empowering thing a teacher can do for her students has nothing to do with constant surveillance of their academic engagement . . . . It is to simply talk with them, face to face, as fellow thinkers.”

When Chappelle Says It, It’s Funny

November 18, 2022
Posted by Jay Livingston

Dave Chappelle, in his SNL monologue, offered an insight about language that I’ve used a few times in this blog. It’s about adding the definite article “the” to a demographic category.



Here’s how I put it in a blog post seven years ago after candidate Donald Trump (remember those good old days? they’re back) had told an interviewer, “I’d be phenomenal to the women.”

When you add “the” to a demographic group and speak of “the women” or “the Blacks,” you are separating them from the rest of society. Without the definite article, they are included. To say, “In our society we have Blacks, Jews, women. . . . .” implies that they are all part of our group. But, “We have the Blacks, the Jews, the women . . . .” turns them into separate, distinct groups that are not part of a unified whole.

Chappelle got more laughs.

In another post a year later (here),  I quoted linguist Lynne Murphy on the same topic.

“The” makes the group seem like it’s a large, uniform mass, rather than a diverse group of individuals. This is the key to “othering:” treating people from another group as less human than one’s own group.

Turning those individuals into “a large, uniform mass” not only allows for “othering”; it’s also the precondition for paranoid conspiracy theories. Even if, as Chappelle suggests,* there are a lot of Jews in Hollywood, you can still see them as individuals, as Jews trying to turn out successful movies and TV shows. To see them as a cabal conspiring against Kanye or Christians or America it helps to think of them as “the Jews.”

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* See also Joel Stein’s 2008 article “Who Runs Hollywood? C’mon” (here).