David Hays, language and love + Leslie Farber [why techbros are dangerous]

I first learned of David Hays, who would become my teacher, mentor, and colleague, from an article he published in Dædalus (Vol. 102, No. 2, 1973): “Language and Interpersonal Relationships.” I note, however, that that’s not the title he gave it. That was the editor’s title. His title: “How Now, I and Thou?” He begins with a question: “How does language engender love?” He then sketches a possible answer in the rest of the article, drawing on his knowledge of psychology, sociology, linguistics, and computing. He was, after all, one of the founders of computational linguistics.

On the second page of the article Hays remarks:

According to Martin Buber, the conversation of friends and lovers serves, at its best, to confirm them as particular human beings. The psychoanalyst Leslie H. Farber puts it this way: “Real talk between a man and a woman offers the supreme privilege of keeping the other sane and being kept sane by the other.” To which I would add that good talk also makes each aware of his own sanity.

Farber’s remark has stuck with me ever since I read Hays’s article back in the summer of 1973, though I can never remember the exact wording.

Last night I went looking for Farber on the internet and found a book review by Anatole Broyard, which was published in The New York Times (June 5, 1976), which quotes that sentence near the end. Here’s how the review opens:

“The attempt of the will to do the work of the imagination”: W. B. Yeats applied this phrase to an incorrect approach to poetry. In “Lying, Despair, Jealousy, Envy, Sex, Suicide, Drugs, and the Good Life,” Leslie Farber applies it to an incorrect approach to life. Ours, he says, is the age of the disordered will. It is our conceit that no human possibility is beyond our conscious will. T. S. Eliot had something similar in mind when he said that the bad poet is conscious when he should be unconscious, and unconscious when he should be conscious.

LYING, DESPAIR, JEALOUSY, ENVY, SEX, SUICIDE, DRUGS, AND THE GOOD LIFE. By Leslie H. Farber, 232 pages. Basic Books. $10.

Trying to will what cannot be willed, according to Mr. Farber, brings on anxiety, and this anxiety, in turn, cripples our other faculties so that we are left with nothing but anxiety about anxiety, a double unease. Among the things we try to will are happiness, creativity, love, sex and immortality. Sex has been emancipated from a repressive morality only to fall a victim to our coercive will. Instead of experiencing or knowing sex, we increasingly tend to know about it. The inappropriate intrusion of will has the effect of distancing us from emotion, substituting the theoretical for the phenomenal.

That sentence hit me, hard: “It is our conceit that no human possibility is beyond our conscious will.”

That encapsulates what is so very wrong with homo economicus, and with AI. And that is what drivers the Doomers crazy, that through an act of conscious will they should create something that is beyond both their will and their understanding. THAT, more than anything else, is what makes AI so dangerous. The technology is currently dominated by people who can see nothing beyond their will. They are blind.