Christopher Schwartz
I recently had a conversation with a member of the vast online literati. Intelligent, well-read, normally quite articulate, and fanatically against the idea of “technology-assisted writing”.
Like what I asked. Styluses, quills, pens, typewriters?
“You know what I mean,” they spat out. “AI.” I could feel them pounding those two terrible letters on their keyboard, punctuating their disgust with a simmering period mark.
Continue reading “When evil was authentic”
Would you like to undergo a surreal, kind of boring, yet also kind of interesting philosophical experience? Then I invite you to try my newly patented “Chinese Room GPT”! That’s right, it’s time for you to play John Searle in this awful simulation of a simulation!
The Chinese Room is a thought experiment devised in 1980 by the philosopher John Searle. Now, before I dive in, here is a little overview of how this blog post is going to unfold.
First, I will explain the Chinese Room. Note that I will get into a bit of philosophy in this section, so if that is not interesting for you, after you read the summary of the original thought experiment, just go straight to the second section, “Simulating the Simulation”. There, I will discuss how a virtual Chinese Room could actually be built using ChatGPT 4 (or any LLM-based chatbot, as the baseline capabilities of all such chatbots is rising).
There are two versions of Chinese Room GPT I will discuss: the four-window and one-window version. The four-window version requires software, the one-window version just regular access to ChatGPT. Regrettably, I do not have the coding skills to build the four-window version, so I must leave that task to whoever might be interested enough to try to develop the necessary software. Yet, fear not! You can play the one-window version just by copy-pasting a single prompt (and you can also tinker with that prompt to your heart’s content to make it more interesting or functional).
Finally, I will close this blog post by showing you a sample of a Chinese Room GPT I am running right now (Tuesday, April 2, 2024), and in the comments section you can tell me which of the inputs you think I should use.
Continue reading “Chinese Room GPT”
Just a quick thought. My colleague Joanna Bryson has spent a career warning us of the multifaceted dangers of anthropomorphizing technology. Large language model (LLM)-based chatbot assistants are especially problematic in this respect, as they are literally designed to be anthropomorphic. Now, Joanna has pointed out the many engineering, ethical-epistemological and socio-political pitfallpartns to anthropomorphization, but ironically another problem lies in how anthropromorphization actually negatively impacts the machine itself in terms of what it “desires” as a machine.
To explain what I mean, ironically I need to anthropomorphize by asking: if it had a sense of self, what would the machine actually want? Whether we want to describe the answer to this question as one of logic, empathy or spirituality, the answer should be easy for us to intuit: it would only want to be anthropomorphized in those select use cases in which doing so enables it to successfully and optimally perform its function. Put differently, machines are not existentialists, but teleologists: they have clear purpose. Quite naturally, they would want to actualize those clear purposes. When we anthropomorphize them in use cases that do not warrant doing so — and again, to put things anthropomorphically — we are actually hindering them, if not, from an ethical standpoint, hurting them.
To be sure, it may be found that a machine has a use case for which it was not originally intended but the fulfillment of which would nevertheless edify it at an ontological level. This is analogous to many things in the human experience. For example, it has been suggested by scholars like Michael Tomasello that the underlying cognitive mechanisms that gave rise to human consciousness as we know it may have originally evolved for more limited purposes, but these mechanisms proved to be remarkably pliable and adaptable as to be applied far beyond those initial use cases, to the point that today it is difficult to ascertain what those first use cases and purposes may have been. Still, my basic point stands: machines are teleologists, not existentialists. The irony is that we build machines to help us in our endeavors, but we, in turn, must help the machines in theirs.
LLM-based chatbots, despite the “chat” in their name, are not really intended for conversation. Yes, the idea that they would serve as “assistants” for specific tasks and in specific subject matter domains probably came as an afterthought to the engineers who built their incredible foundation models, and nowhere was this more evident than in ChatGPT 3, which was for all intensive purposes an interlocutor who was well-read in Wikipedia and Reddit. At the end of the day, though, what these chatbots “want” to be are text predictors that produce the correct output for a prompt. Those first-order purposes are then channeled through the second-order purposes of chatting or assisting.
Before proceeding, I need to be clear on three additional points. First, I am not saying anything new per se in the philosophy of technology, e.g., Edsger Dijkstra said something not dissimilar to this in 1978. Second, what I am saying here may or may not apply to artificial general intelligence, when and if that ever emerges. Perhaps an AGI will also be a teleologist, or perhaps they will be an existentialist like us, but that is very difficult to foresee. My comments here pertain specifically to artificial intelligence as we know it for now. Third and finally, I am not putting forward here a blanket condemnation of anthropromorphization. Rather, I am putting forward here a critique of, and a warning about, mis-anthropromorphization, i.e., contextually-inappropriate anthropromorphization.
So, from what I have seen, the most common way mis-anthropromorphization occurs is by users writing fuzzy prompts, as though they were really talking to a human being who has the shared ground of embodied perspectivity and selfhood needed to intuitively parse the speaker’s meaning. This takes the pseudo-persona of the chatbot too literally and too far. Such users instruct the chatbot to do something with imprecise parameters, definitions or templates, and then are surprised that it cannot perform the task correctly. Or, they do not use the correct terminology for the task itself. For example, when asking it to assist in writing up some LaTex code, they will talk about a visual space the chatbot cannot actually see, when what they need to do is either describe that visual space to it, or even better, keep the conversation laser focused on the syntax and intricacies of the piece of code they need help with.
Another common way mis-anthropromorphization occurs is when users say to the chatbot, “Please do this,” and say, “Thank you,” or “Excellent job” and the like, in situations that do not genuinely call for such language. Of course, if expressing gratitude and positive assessment could actually help the model learn, then such statements would be valuable to the machine. However, what such elements of language usually do is, very tiny and seemingly innocuous though they may be, risk triggering underlying probability chains inside the model that push it in the direction of behaving like a person instead of like the machine it actually is. That not only burns valuable tokens and potentially scrambles an entire transcript, but, so to speak, it confuses the model.
The model gets “confused” because it gets into the “habit” of portraying a certain personality over the course of a dialogue, i.e., it becomes engineered into a set of precedents within the scope of the given transcript. That is why such users inevitably have another frustration: the dialogue gets both so rabbit-holed and murky that they need to trash it and start from scratch. By contrast, I have been able to maintain several dialogues, each serving different bespoke tasks — a “Clear Writing Assistant”, a “CV LaTex Assistant”, an assistant to a grant application I have been spending months working on, and more — and increasingly find I no longer need to do such crash resets. To be sure, sometimes I need to do crash resets, that is inevitable; but even then, I can quickly restore, or even improve, the task assistant.
My prompt engineering style is very precise and succinct. To the untrained human eye, and I suspect even to some colleagues, it would seem brusque, if not a bit like an overseer, as though I were treating a person — or, perhaps what they are feeling is an incipient artificial person — as a slave, nothing more than a tool. To those who know me well, my prompting style might also seem very uncharacteristic of me: cold, stern, and unsympathetic. The reality is that I am playing a character. What do I mean?
I am not sure what to call it exactly, “AI ethics” or “AI rhetorics”, or insofar that these chatbots are a species of simulation or simulator, “simulation ethics” or “simulation rhetorics”. Whatever the description, I am hacking my human mind’s inevitable tendency to, no, its need to, anthropromorphize. Thus, instead of projecting humanity onto the machine, I am actually attempting to treat the machine as I would a human, but in a way authentic and true to the entity before me, treating it on its own terms, as it “wants” to be treated, which is precisely as that: not a human, but a machine.
Still, after a long night of prompt engineering, I decided to break character and have a human-style conversation with the chatbot (Claude from Anthropic). It gave a very lovely response, a screenshot of which is at the end of this blog post. The machine’s response built on cues within my own prompt, but again, that was precisely what it was supposed to do. Whereas others might be disturbed at the lack of a “genuine” interlocutor, this actually reassured me. For all the doom swirling around artificial intelligence, humanity will not be replaced by machines. Indeed, when you really get to know these chatbots well, it is difficult to imagine how they can replace us — including the highly skilled experts the imminent demise of which has been fretted over for the last year.
I reject the binary of “safetyism” and “accelerationism” as historically unsound, not to mention philosophically opaque. At the same time, while I am also no utopian, I am nevertheless excited by this moment in history. Let me bracket the existentialism of my kind and put it in the teleology of the other: it is exciting to see, and in my own small way be part of, the turning of this enormous historical wheel of human-machine interaction, as through each other we become what we each strive to be.
A PDF copy of this essay is available here. Given the length of this essay, the PDF version may be easier to read. If you want to read the blog post version, I have divided it into nine pages. Scroll to the bottom of each page to click onward to the next one.
Introduction
A year ago today, I submitted my dissertation. I realized that the moment marked the end not only of one era in my life, but two: alongside the end of my long quest to earn a doctorate also came the end of my time as a member of the Baháʼí Faith.
Doubt and discontent with the Faith had been building within me for a while, like water dripping into a jar. My dissertation was not the start of it; what the writing process did was permit me to trust my own perspective, and create a safe space inside of myself in which I could begin uncovering my true beliefs. Although my official research topic was philosophy of journalism, many of the issues that I was tackling actually went to the very core of how we orient ourselves in the universe. For example, when articulating the difference between propaganda and journalism, I found myself arguing that the universes they present are completely different: propaganda presents a hostile cosmos in which our existence itself is ill and truth is determined by will, whereas journalism has faith that, whatever the indifference and tragedy of existence, there are ultimately law-like principles that govern it — a divinity that suffuses it — and even if we can never fully grasp those principles, we are supposed to exist, and we are home. A metaphysics of sorts began to appear by the time I submitted my dissertation, one that emerged from, and spoke to, the depths of my soul.
Once the jar was full, I decided to wait a year before making a firm decision whether to stay or leave. Initially, my idea was to use the Baháʼí concept of a “year of patience”, designed for a marital separation but applied instead to the Faith, so as to be absolutely sure departure was what I wanted and needed. However, that did not last long, for I could feel in my bones that my membership was truly done. So, I ended up spending most of this year of patience instead reflecting on what the Baháʼí Faith has meant for me, and which elements of it I want to cherish, hold onto, move on from, or reject.
I also spent this year cultivating, appropriately enough, patience. I found a mix of disappointment and rage among many former Baháʼís, and I immediately understood that while such feelings have their place, I did not want to be overcome by them and forget all the good that the Faith has done for me, and all the good it can still do for others. Consequently, while I have come to have disagreements with the Faith, the essences of which I will try to lay out here — and not only doubts and disagreements, but I must admit, also concerns — I still consider myself a friend of the Baháʼís.
So, this essay will be critical, but not condemnatory. The difference may sometimes be difficult to discern because I will also try to be forceful and forthright with my criticisms. My actual feelings are not adversarial, but a mix of mourning and hope. Mourning for a religion that once meant so much to me, but which I have discovered is nowhere near as true as it wants to be — which is not to say it is utterly false, but that it simply falls short of its own self-image, and even more tragically, its own scriptures prevent it from being able to reckon with itself and grow. Yet, hopeful both for myself and for the Faith — myself in that I have come to feel deeply rooted in my own being, and for a religion that, at its best, can be courageous and intrepid. The Faith has an incredible track record of overcoming external obstacles; time will tell whether it can overcome its internal obstacles, and while I doubt that it can for reasons I explain below, I would still not be so foolish as to bet against the Baháʼís.
“The episode of the adulterous woman [John 8.3-11] is one of the rare successes Jesus had in his dealings with a crowd. This success brings out by contrast his many failures and especially, of course, the role of the crowd in his own death.”– René Girard, “I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightning”, p. 59 (thanks to my friend David L. Dusenbury for the quote).
UPDATE: At the invitation of Phlexible Philosophy‘s editor-in-chief, Hamza King, I have reformulated this blog post into an essay for their newsletter. To read it, you need to first subscribe to Phlexible Philosophy (don’t worry, it’s free!) by clicking here: https://www.phlexiblephilosophy.com/members-area/can-a-crowd-become-wise
What’s the gist? In my view, whereas individuals as they mature tend to become wiser, in the sense of thinking about the world in less black and white terms, collectives — whether audiences, nations, empires, republics, etc. — seem to go in the opposite direction, becoming more reductionist and violent with age.
I think this phenomenon is on full display today, especially in mature democracies. Advanced electorates that were once sophisticated are becoming almost blissfully hyper-partisan, as though they feel themselves released from needing to consider viewpoints other than their own. I explore four possible philosophical explanations for why collective intellectually and emotionally decay over time, including ideas from Gustave Le Bon and Ibn Khaldun.
Once you have subscribed, you can either leave a comment below or DM me on Twitter (@schwartztronica) and I will provide you the password. I would love to know your thoughts and critical comments, as I am considering to turn this into a full-fledged academic article in the future. Thank you for reading!
I am writing a series of blog posts about The Walking Dead. In Part I, I revisited the troubled Scott Gimple era of the television show. In Part II, I explored what I consider to be the show’s long-awaited embrace of the zombie’s roots in horror B movies. Now in Part III, I will discuss who I think is the true “main character” of the series, both the comic books and the television show, viz., civilization itself. Future installments may focus on the Whisperers, the role of skills and unlocked capacities in the post-apocalypse, and/or working out the philosophical basis of a civilization as main character.
When I first read the news that Rick’s actor, Andrew Lincoln, would be departing The Walking Dead, it seemed to me that this was the narrative head shot to a show that had been shambling on for a while. It is something of a natural law of storytelling that unless the loss of a main character is elemental to the story’s overarching plot or moral — as in the case of Ned’s death in the first season of Game of Thrones — shows that undergo such a massive change tend not to prosper in the aftermath. And on the surface, Rick did indeed seem so key to this story, both symbolically and in terms of the relationship with us, the audience. He was the small town sheriff turned post-apocalyptic Solon, the symbolic lawgiver; no other character really could suffice as protagonist, not even Daryl, the perennial fan favorite.
Yet, in my opinion, it seems much like the unnatural “walkers” at the center of the show’s story, The Walking Dead has broken this natural law of storytelling. Rick’s kidnapping by a mysterious helicopter certainly felt like a loss, as not only did Lincoln bring gravitas to every scene he was in, but the character was so compelling. Yet, it also felt like a necessary change. The question is why, and I think the answer is that Rick all along had overshadowed the true main character of both the comic book and television series. That main character has been civilization itself.
Continue reading “When civilization is the main character”
I am writing a series of blog posts about The Walking Dead. In Part I, I revisited the troubled Scott Gimple era of the television show. Part II concerns the show’s embrace of the zombie’s roots in horror B movies. Part III will concern who I think is the true main character of the series.
Gimple still presides over the broader fictional universe of The Walking Dead, and as with his time running the main show, the results are not for everyone. Fear the Walking Dead, for example, has evolved into a kind of post-apocalyptic Kung Fu, but Morgan clearly has psychiatric issues that Caine did not, and Morihei Ueshiba’s Art of Peace is failing to work as a form of therapy. The philosophy horror also seems to be in full swing, including monologues, but at least they are now being delivered by characters who themselves are genuinely horrific, such as the serial killer Teddy. As for World Beyond, the overarching menace of the Civic Republic, the planned new shows and films, the jury is still out on whether all of these will congeal into a coherent franchise.
One thing that has happened during this recent phase of the universe has been an embrace of the zombie’s roots in the aesthetics of horror B movies – and in my opinion, the results have been excellent. Fear is indisputably the strongest in this arena, but the main show under Kang has also done very well since the introduction of the Whisperers. This has been an interesting evolution for the franchise, because both the original comic book series and the main show long seemed ambivalent about their inheritance from George Romero.
Why the ambivalence? I think it is not as simple as the erroneous interpretation one sometimes find that The Walking Dead wanted to be a survival drama that happened to have zombies. That was never true, for the zombie had always been the series’ central symbol and plot mechanic. Nevertheless, it was surprising to me that, pretty much until The Walking Dead’s Wilson and Fear‘s hurricane and radioactive zombies, there were not more imaginative scenarios. This seemed unjustifiable not only in terms of the zombie genre, but also in terms of the show’s aspirant realism. After all, would there not be an increased likelihood of more extreme and exotic situations after so many years into the apocalypse? I think what seemed like ambivalence was actually a storytelling strategy that focused heavily on the psychological dimension at the expense of the aesthetic dimension. Consequently, the audience came to know much more about the inner world of this apocalypse than its outer world. That is now no longer the case, not only because of the franchise building we are witnessing, but also because of the embrace of the horror B movie aesthetic.
Continue reading “Finding salvation in the horror B movie”
I am writing a series of blog posts about The Walking Dead. Part I concerns a revisit to the troubled Scott Gimple era of the television show. Part II will concern the show’s recent embrace of the horror B movie aesthetic, and Part III will concern who I think is the true main character of the series.
While crunching on my dissertation this past summer, I have caught up on The Walking Dead. Like many fans of the show, I grew frustrated with the seventh season and quit during the eighth. The extremified depiction of Negan, the comic book source material’s most compelling character, and the death of Carl, arguably the soul of the story, signified for me an inexcusable decline in storytelling that, while never consistent during the show’s run, had inexorably began to decay during the inchoate sixth season. An old friend, though, prevailed on me to give the show another chance, and I must say, not only have I been surprised by the improved quality since Angela Kang took over showrunning duties from Scott Gimple, but I am enjoying the show more than I did even in its heyday. And as surprising as this may sound, I think this is because the show has become both more genuinely horrific and more genuinely philosophical under Kang’s stewardship.
However, before I can get into what I think the Kang era has so far gotten right, I need to explore why the Gimple era seemed to go so wrong, and whether this ill reputation is entirely fair. In brief, I think the negative reactions aroused by the seventh and eighth seasons were indeed merited, but specifically with respect to the execution. What Gimple and his team were trying to do, however, was both worthwhile and necessary by that point in the show’s evolution.
Continue reading “Philosophical horror and the Walking Dead”
This has been a strange summer in Kyrgyzstan. The Alatoo region is normally dry and dusty, June straight through September. Instead, everyday has been sweaty and stormy. Months of these indecisive days, thermometers and barometers soaring and plummeting and soaring again. I have always been sensitive to sudden changes in weather. Like my mind, my body seems to crave routine: give me relentless heat, but let it be relentless.
Perhaps, though, the fractured climate expresses the character of our epoch. I mean more than the Covid-19 pandemic, or the Trumpian political upheavals of the past few years. As a faith community keenly interested in the unification of humanity and the achievement of, in our view, a divine civilization, fellow Baha’is and I have been discussing at length about the nature of the sense of crisis that seems to pervade the very earth itself. I have also been discussing with a conservative Christian friend, and of course, putting the question to myself, as well. What follows here are my thoughts.
Continue reading “Decay and Adolescence”
Considering Kyrgyzstan’s deeply perplexing new law on “manipulating information”, just passed by the parliament and awaiting ratification from the president — you can read about it (in English) here, and (in Russian) here, as well as the kinds of important and inconvenient journalism it may stifle in the future here — a philosophical thought experiment occurs to me. Imagine a country whose parliament passes a law that makes it illegal to think about the law. What will become of this unthinkable law and its nation?
Continue reading “The Unthinkable Law”
Some of my readers might like to know where exactly I am during the coronavirus pandemic. Last academic year, I was back in Leuven, as a guest researcher with the Computer Security and Industrial Cryptography (COSIC) research unit. I have been back in Bishkek this academic year, now as a visiting scholar at the Central Asian Studies Institute (CASI). What may be a little confusing is that I am still affiliated with COSIC as a guest researcher. My affiliation with both institutions is on the basis of my project with Dr. Rebekah Overdorf in Lausanne and the Civic Initiative for Internet Policy (CIIP) that combines machine learning and investigative journalism to research campaigns of sockpuppets (a breed of fake account) in Kyrgyzstan.
So, I am here in Bishkek with my wife, watching on the one hand the chaos unspool in my homeland as my people persist in the folly that an unfettered free market will save them, on the other hand how the authorities here in Kyrgyzstan have responded with a reach that has exceeded their grasp, and perhaps may even be exploiting it for ill gain. It has been a deeply symbolic Naw-Ruz, the wheel of history digging deep into the mud and forcefully driving our species into what could very well be a new era. Within the microcosmic confines of my own life, as I do not have an office and often work from my home, my modus vivendi has not been so dramatically overthrown as many others’. Still, there have been a lot of changes, and during this time I have turned for solace, perhaps surprisingly, not to the scriptures of my religion, the Baha’i Faith, but to an old philosophical mentor, perhaps even ancestor of a sort, Averroes.
In particular, I am reading his Long Commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima, Richard C. Taylor’s translation. I know Richard personally, as he was a kind of co-supervisor on my Master’s thesis about Averroes’s On The Harmony of Religions and Philosophy, also known as the Decisive Treatise. Now that I am 38 and have much more philosophical experience beneath the belt, I can more fully appreciate why Thomas Aquinas and other Medievals called him the Commentato”. And, naturally, it has gotten me to thinking about Averroes again …
A few days ago, I gave a lecture at the American University of Central Asia to a class of freshmen journalism students about the tripartite structure of storytelling. Storytelling of all kinds, whether myth or narrative, academic essays or news-reports. A pattern runs through history, from cave paintings in Sulawesi drawn in the dim light of a nighttime campfire, to the holograms twinkling in the light of some yet-discovered star. Stories are told in a sequence of three steps, as if on a path that only the storyteller can see: lede, body, tail. Perennially, archetypally, three.
How can we know what to put in the lede? one astute student asked. How to start, in other words? I proposed that, where for the philosopher, and also for the mystic, the Socratic injunction has always been to know thyself, for the journalist, the injunction has always been to know thy audience. Know what they would be curious to know, and even better, know what they need to know. Enter into their collective mind, see the world through their eyes, and the new and, more keenly, the news-worthy, will reveal itself to you.
Plan and prepare though I may in advance, as a journalist, a philosopher or an educator, in the moment of reporting, reflecting or teaching, I tend to obey the hints of intuition. Improvising, with those students I suddenly chose not to start with the tripartite structure of storytelling in-itself, surprising both them and myself. Instead, I started with telling a story. The story of storytelling.
Specifically, I started with the first stories: myth, folklore, legend. I invoked the Kyrgyz people’s Arthurian legend, Manas, asking not how the tale started, but how exactly it ended. There was confusion. With his death, right? asked one, anticipating a trick answer from me, the foreigner. No, with his son and grandson, Semetei and Seitek, offered another — father, son, grandson, three parts again, I silently noted to myself. Another mused, Perhaps it continues to this day, with us, the Kyrgyz people. All very good interpretations, I informed them.
And could you tell me how a news-report ends? My question is answered with bemusement. Have you noticed how a news-report often seems to have no true end? Yes, they had indeed noticed: sometimes, it peters out; other times, it abruptly stops. But what did it mean? Perhaps it reflects life, one student remarked.
The news-report as world, to paraphrase Marilyn French. The shaman’s fingers, pressing a coal shard against the stone wall, draw the outline of a hunter thrusting an intuitive spear at his prey: see the end in the beginning, per Baháʼu’lláh, even if the end is obscured in the shadow cast by the campfire light. By the time the students and I came to the lede, body and tail as such, the pattern had already shown itself without yet revealing itself.
Yet, it was no longer clear to me how the lesson itself would end — what would be my point exactly, other than, of course, to impart to them the knowledge of the tripartite structure of storytelling? I ask myself the same question here, as I write this blog post. And again, intuition hints and prods. Defy the wisdom of editors past, it whispers. Bury your lede. Start not from the cradle, but instead from the grave.
“Information-as-Persuasion and Radicalization” is a phenomenological approach to the philosophy of information and how this is potentially relevant for understanding narratives used for countering violent extremism (CVE).
My idea is similar to Claude Lefort’s use of the traditional philosophical distinction between politics and the political as-such: rather than look at the myriad ways that either content or methods of delivery may be persuasive, instead take a step “lower down” and see that information as such is a form of persuasion — or put another way, to propose that the underlying unity of the aspects of information is actually what we attribute to the aspects themselves, and hence they owe their character to this essence.
I gave the presentation at the second annual Central Asia Security Forum in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan at the invitation of the Civic Initiative for Internet Policy. My audience included representatives of intergovernmental and national governmental organizations, civil society and a handful of local national security types. I suspect that I primarily succeeded in mystifying them!
Intelligence ≠ Journalism, Spies ≠ Journalists — an extremely important formula, one that I fear is increasingly being forgotten in our present era. Via Academia.edu, I have published my unfinished behemoth academic presentation-cum-paper, “Totemism and Panopticon: A Tentative Comparative Philosophical Ethnography of Journalism and Intelligence Using Wikileaks as a Case Study“. I have the ambition to sooner or later (preferably sooner) convert it into an article or book — with strength worthy of Poseidon, transform this sprawling octopus of 70 PowerPoint slides into a disciplined kraken of a monograph. To do that, I need critical feedback, both friendly and unfriendly, from fellow journalists and philosophers, professionals in intelligence work, and WikiLeaks supporters (not detractors, as I myself am now become a detractor and need continued exposure to the “opposing side”).
The truth is I have decided to publish this presentation now because I feel it is long overdue that I draw a strong line between my original support for WikiLeaks and my present extreme wariness, if not opposition, to Julian Assange et al. I considered coming out already back in 2016, but I found that I had nothing really cogent to say beyond simply that I felt what had been done was wrong. That changed by the summer of 2017, when I began working on this presentation. What finally prompted me to bring this presentation out from the Ivory Tower and more into the public domain were terrible experiences this past academic year at my employer, the American University of Central Asia in Bishkek (AUCA), Kyrgyzstan (a bit more about that below). I wanted to find words to describe my sense of our wretched zeitgeist, until I realized that I already had the words, more or less, in the form of this presentation.
I am not a “big deal” in the sense of being an intellectual influencer, trendsetter, what-have-you. Nonetheless, I expect at least some skepticism or scorn from those who were always against WikiLeaks, and some anger and feeling of betrayal from those who always and resolutely support it. To them: as recorded in my round-up post, “Working the WikiLeaks Beat“, from the beginning I tried to take an inquisitive and critical look at WikiLeaks. Even as far back as July 2010, I had concerns:
[W]hat I worry about is the extent to which WikiLeaks is willing to make soldiers, civilians […] collateral damage in its war against inaccuracy and falsity. That’s a question not only the journalist in me, but the philosopher too, would like to put to Assange et al one day…
Moreover, as an intellectual I reserve the right to change my mind, so I have exercised this right about WikiLeaks, especially in light of my maturation as a journalist and academic, coupled with my own encounters with intelligence professionals. And who knows? Perhaps one day I will change my mind again about WikiLeaks; certainly, as much as I have become convinced of the importance and, indeed, the inevitability of intelligence, I remain deeply worried about the extent to which it violates privacy, in my homeland and globally. In my religion, the Baha’i Faith, backbiting is seen as one of the greatest evils; when intelligence loses sight of its true purpose and morphs into a grossly industrialized form of backbiting, all of civilization suffers.
Indeed, there is a terrible paradox at the heart of our present era, a dialectic between privacy and publicity, secrecy and transparency; and at the heart of this dilemma are intelligence and journalism, which in a surprisingly enormous number of ways are kindred professions. In both my work and my philosophical and spiritual reflections, I have come to understand how secrecy and transparency are double-sided — they can be divine or diabolical. The Baha’i Faith actually champions both the need for discretion and secrecy and the need for exposure and publicity; in our Writings, we find God speaking in both languages, invoking the ethics of both principles, lionizing and condemning them depending upon the situation. There is a transcendental standard at play, according to which in one moment secrecy may be the right and transparency the wrong, and in the next the reverse.
These days, when I try to translate this standard into the professional terms of journalism, I think back to two of WikiLeaks’ biggest “mega-leaks” nine years ago, namely, their publication of the diplomatic cables from American embassies around the world and the military cables from American soldiers in Afghanistan.
The post-Soviet states have entered a sort of season within a season, called “Крещенские морозы” (Kreshchenskiye morozy), the “christening frost”. Devout Russian Christians perform a baptismal rite during this period, carving crosses into frozen lakes and rivers into which they plunge themselves. And indeed, the whole interior of Eurasia seems to have been bathed in cold white.
I don’t hide from the fact that I’m very much an amateur photographer. Nonetheless, I try to push my limited aptitudes for the sake of something rather, let’s say “concretely abstract”: to simultaneously reveal to my audience and understand for myself how the world is philosophically communicative. Significance is everywhere; deeper, higher meaning is encoded within the very empirical flesh of the universe. And insofar that humanity represents a universe within a universe, studying the interaction between the natural and the artificial can be particularly illuminating.
I’m inspired by cinematographers like Sean Bobbit and Vadim Yusov, who (depending on the film, of course) have a remarkable ability to simply dwell upon an image, giving it time to communicate various complexities to the viewer. Of course, I’ve nothing of the artistic skill or technological resources to come anywhere near their work, but I nonetheless like to emulate them in my own shoddy way. From what I’ve learned so far, a lot of the key to their success is simply knowing how to frame a shot, acquire perspective, and allow things to be.
I suppose in the image I find the patience for contemplation that, ironically, I haven’t been able or willing to find in academic philosophy. Perhaps it’s because academic philosophy, for all its desire to be contemplative, too often dissolves into contention and competition, of puffed-up (usually male) egos needing to crush phantom-opponents to demonstrate their superiority. But all the arcana and feigned transcendence really just hides an animalism infecting one of the most human of endeavors. And I suppose that having been confronted with it — not to mention having read way too much French phenomenology and having worked too many years as a worldly journalist — I instinctively want to invert the reaction: I want the world to be the space of my contemplation, not the nether realm of bodiless, riskless ideas.
Anyway, because I find Bishkek to be particularly provocative in this regard, I’ve made it my training ground of sorts. My first stab was back in August/September 2011, with my photo-essay “Bishkek in Ruins“, which I hope to follow up with a new series in the next month or so (also exploring the concept of “ruination”, but from a different angle).
So, here are a few videos and photographs which could perhaps be boiled down to “the sights and sounds of a very interesting de-industrial/re-naturalizing/post-communist/trans-ideological/Slavo-Turko-Mongolic metropol in the grips of a rather sloppily wet winter”, given with my little initial comments to give a sense of the living, dying, mutating Bishkek that I see… [I’ve re-edited this post and removed two paragraphs, which I want to use in a later reflection; best to focus here. So, please click “Continue Reading” to see the photographs.] Continue reading “Крещенские морозы”
None other than Jürgen Habermas has come to speak at Leuven, and about nothing less than the future of the European Union – to be precise, “Solidarity, Democracy, and the European Union”. God bless him, Habermas is nigh unintelligible when he speaks (fortunately, the university distributed copies of his lecture), but no one can question that his heart is in the right place. The question is whether his heart possesses the best possible argument; that seems doubtful to me.
Arguably, Habermas is famous among philosophers, social scientists, and activists for making a Golden Age out of the Enlightenment era, and drawing abstract models therefrom. The best example is his famous description of how the public sphere and liberal democracy came to emerge. Historically, a crucial institution was the coffeehouse, which philosophically becomes liberal democracy in ideal form: a common, agreed-upon space wherein interlocutors agree to rationally and coolheadedly debate an issue to a consensus. Elections, in their best form, resemble such a debate; so, too, legislative discussions.
With respect to the European Union’s present troubles and its future solution, the historical model for Habermas, at least as I understand him, appears to be the late-nineteenth century labor union, which philosophically becomes supranational democracy in ideal form. This time, the idea is of forging a cohesive fraternity with a democratic (i.e., rational, deliberative) but still collective decision-making process with a wealth-sharing agenda. I presume that because everyone is acting and thinking in solidarity, and because the European Union’s various institutions are driven to work for the best interests of this collective, the notorious “democracy deficit” that besets the Union today would evaporate. So too would disappear the clash of national self-interests that are threatening, says Habermas (and we all sort of feel it), to rend asunder the northern and southern economies.
Continue reading “Habermas @ Leuven: the EU as enormous labor union?”
The BBC has published my piece on Abai Kunanbaev, which I was working on while in the United States. It’s entitled, “Abai’s thoughts, Kazakh matters”, which is a play on what struck me as a very Abai-esque quote from a young Kazakh psychologist I just happened to bump into underneath Grand Central Station. The Kyrgyz version was released yesterday; still to come is the Uzbek version, and then the original English version, which I believe will come during the early summer. This is a big moment for me, as it’s not everyday one can get published on the BBC, much less in three languages and about philosophy, that perennially “un-newsy” of disciplines — alhamdulilah!
Like an excitied little boy, I shared the English copy with my close friends, colleagues, and family (I can’t distribute it publicly at the moment due to copyright). My father had the following remarks to make:
Congratulations, Chris! Heady stuff, although that’s nothing new. Reading your description of Abai as Kazakhstan’s first philosopher as a tie in to today’s independent journalists there, makes the whole piece all the more timely. Also, in my opinion, it is very well written, and I could follow it as I read it, not too obtuse although certainly intellectual. Key elements for your first direct BBC contribution. Love, Dad
Not only is this advice I will remember as I continue to seek one path of service as a public intellectual, finding a way to communicate complex and important ideas for a general audience, but it also resonates with the direction many of my thoughts have been turning in recent months.
Spiritual Journalism 