Democratic socialism, American style: Douthat interviews Bashar Sunkara

Ross Douthat, A Vision of a ‘Society Without Capitalism’, NYTimes, July 16, 2026

Democratic socialists are having a moment. But can they actually remake the Democratic Party — and the American economy — in their image? My guest today, Bhaskar Sunkara [founding editor of Jacobin], WLB, is a longtime democratic socialist, and he makes the case that socialism has a universal appeal that transcends our current politics and will ultimately triumph against capitalism.

Well into the interview, Bill of Rights socialism:

Douthat: So you’re saying that if there’s a socialist contract with America, it does not promise collectivization and a one-party state?

Sunkara: I think we believe in a Bill of Rights socialism.

Douthat: So what is it?

Sunkara: There’s an immediate set of demands that you could call us attempting to bring about doses of socialism within capitalism.

This comes in the realm of decommodification of certain goods, providing them as social rights instead of them being dependent on your ability to pay.

Health care in America is partially decommodified. If you’re elderly, if you’re very poor, if you’re a child, you’re going to have guaranteed access to health care. We want to see that extended.

Same thing with things like Social Security and certain other benefits, or an expansion of the welfare state — not unlike Norway.

I also would go further and say that even within capitalism in the here and now, there are sectors of the economy that I would like to see greater state control of. In the old language of the left, we would call it the commanding heights of the economy, but even things like rail — there are benefits to selective nationalization, particularly of natural monopolies.

That vision right there of socialism within capitalism, could be true of a lot of social democrats.

So beyond that, the question is: Why would you go about calling yourself a democratic socialist? For me, I call myself a democratic socialist because I actually believe in a socialism beyond capitalism.

I actually do believe in an economy built on the idea that workers should control their workplaces and on this more radical vision of a society without capitalism, even if it still has a motor needed for investment and for efficiency gains and growth and so on.

Housing:

Douthat: OK. But those people in Queens who you mentioned, they’re concerned about housing, right? Is the leftward view of what housing policy should be for the Democrats, going forward?

Sunkara: I think everyone can see, across the political spectrum, that there’s a huge problem with housing construction in the U.S.

So Zohran’s policy, for example, in New York, is very heavily built around upzoning and making it easier for developers to build, and I think people agree with that.

But beyond that, I think on the left, we point to successful examples around the world of public housing being done right. We think at least part of the construction needs to be public housing. We also need to maintain and expand existing units.

I think that’s the room for the state to step up and do more things. But I think these solutions are largely, first and foremost, on the supply side. Then beyond that, we do believe in certain stabilizations and other things.

Douthat: Rent stabilization, meaning rent control or —

Sunkara: Rent control, which can be designed well. It could also be designed poorly.

But you could imagine, for example, telling landlords: “We’re going to clear the way. We’re going to allow you to create this big housing development. We’re going to fight against the interests of local homeowners, and you build your big piece of housing. But after 30 years, after you have a reasonable return on investment, that unit is going to have some degree of rent stabilization,” for instance.

That, to me, is a perfectly common sense, economically coherent vision for housing. I know there’s lots of talk on the left and in the Democratic Party about the debate over abundance, but fundamentally, any form of social democracy is grow-give.

There needs to be a motor for economic investment. There needs to be profitability in order to have something to redistribute. The added component that I would say is an important part of a socialist agenda is making sure that there are strong unions in workplaces that can advocate for higher wages even before the state gets involved with redistribution.

A.I.:

Douthat: What about A.I.? Bernie has taken some pretty strong stances, I would say. He has sort of staked out a position as the Democratic politician most open to both doomer narratives about A.I., but also most enthused about the prospect of strong government intervention.

What is the socialist position on the A.I. industry right now?

Sunkara: I think there’s a host of different socialist positions. I lean more on the side of just seeing it as any other technology. Companies are going to invest in new technologies. The economy is going to change. We’re going to need to adapt and figure out how to regulate it.

Obviously, any changes that we do, any regulation we need to do, need to make sense in an international context too.

It doesn’t make sense to tank certain U.S. companies if there’s going to be other companies creating the same disruption that are coming from other parts of the world.

But I think this gets to the level of policy where there’s legitimate debates. I think the idea which has been touted by figures as varied as Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon is of the U.S. government owning a stake in major A.I. companies.

It makes perfect sense, too. But, fundamentally, we have to respond to a dynamic economy in which there’s always going to be new technologies, there’s always going to be new wants and needs, and new goods and services, and we need regulation that’s able to be flexible and adapt with changes. [...]

There needs to be a motor for economic investment. There needs to be profitability in order to have something to redistribute. The added component that I would say is an important part of a socialist agenda is making sure that there are strong unions in workplaces that can advocate for higher wages even before the state gets involved with redistribution.

What of capitalism?

Douthat: But just pulling back, I feel like we’ve danced around this a little bit, so let me just ask it directly: Is democratic socialism compatible with capitalism?

Sunkara: In the long term, no. We’re anticapitalist. We want a world beyond capitalism. But in the short term, while we’re within a capitalist economy, of course, we need firms that are profitable, that are providing employment, that are providing taxation. So I think to govern in the short term as social democrats, we need profitable firms.

But in the long term, you know, I don’t hide my desire that I think the economy should be socialized, even if I think in the socialized economy, there needs to be a role for markets and also a role for worker-controlled firms to be able to meet people’s needs and provide new goods and services.

Douthat: What’s the distinction you make between capitalism and markets then?

Sunkara: Well, I think markets existed before capitalism. Capitalism is a regime of property ownership that says that as an individual capitalist or as a corporation, we own this private property and we use this private property to employ people and to produce goods and services.

And in my vision of a just society, of a socialist society, that private property would be controlled by ordinary workers who would get their financing from public banks, who would still operate with hard budgets. They would still need to meet goods and services and meet their payroll obligations and things like that.

But you don’t have a class of people who, as individuals, control investment decisions.

There's much more at the link.

America and China have different attitudes about and approaches to AI and work

Ross Douthat, Why China Isn’t Worried A.I. Will Replace Its Workers, NYTimes, May 14, 2026.

The United States and China are really the only two countries that matter right now in shaping the A.I. future. As President Trump and President Xi Jinping meet in Beijing, there’s a kind of Cold War atmosphere, with people talking about an A.I. arms race. But who is winning? Are we even in a race at all? Kyle Chan, a foreign policy fellow at the Brookings Institution, says it’s hard to call it a race because the U.S. and China have very different A.I. goals.

I presented the conversation to Claude (Sonnet 4.6 Adaptive) and asked it for a summary. 

 * * * * *

I have uploaded conversation to the project area, filename “China AI workers.”

It is between Ross Douthat, who writes for The New York Times, and Kyle Chan, who is a foreign policy fellow at the Brookings Institution. I would like you to summarize the conversation for me. I’m particularly interested in the Chinese attitude toward AI in general and the (proper) relationship between AI and humans.

This is a rich and wide-ranging conversation. Here's a summary, with particular attention to the themes you flagged.

Overall frame

Douthat's central premise is that the U.S. and China are in an AI "arms race," but Chan's main contribution is to complicate and largely deflate that framing. China, he argues, is running a different kind of race, not the same race at a slower pace.

The Chinese approach to AI: practical, not transcendent

The sharpest contrast Chan draws is between the American fixation on AGI — the idea of a "machine god" that surpasses all human capability — and the Chinese orientation toward diffusion and application. China wants AI in food delivery, ride-hailing, health care, government services, and factory floors. They want smaller, cheaper, more deployable models, not necessarily the most powerful frontier model. Chan puts it directly: Beijing is not "AGI-pilled."

He sees this as continuous with how China approached the internet era: not as a transformative metaphysical event, but as infrastructure to be integrated into daily life and governance. The Chinese state is also notably more willing to use open-source models, giving away AI capabilities to gain adoption at scale — both domestically and in the Global South — which is a strategy the commercially driven American labs largely ignore.

The proper relationship between AI and humans: tool, not god

This is where the conversation is most relevant to your homo ludens framework. Chan describes Beijing's view of AI as essentially instrumental — AI serves human economic and social purposes. The Chinese government is actively hostile to AI use that it considers "nonproductive": AI companions, AI boyfriends/girlfriends, even excessive gaming. The fear is that young Chinese will waste time on AI-mediated entertainment and social substitution when they should be building the economy.

There's a revealing parallel Chan draws: the same regulatory instinct that cracked down on video games and private tutoring platforms is now being pointed at AI companionship apps. The state's implicit position is that AI must serve the collective project — not become a substitute for human connection, productivity, or reproduction. This is a deeply anti-mystical, anti-transcendent view of the technology.

So the Chinese "proper relationship" between AI and humans is essentially: AI augments human labor, fills demographic gaps (falling birthrate, shrinking workforce), and extends state capacity. It does not replace human flourishing or social life; it should not become an end in itself.

The demographic driver

Chan adds an important materialist dimension: China's embrace of robotics and AI is partly driven by sheer demographic necessity. Their labor force peaked over a decade ago, youth unemployment is near 17%, and the birthrate is roughly two-thirds the U.S. rate. This produces a different calculus than in America — the question isn't whether a robot waiter displaces a human worker, but whether you have a waiter at all. AI and robotics fill a structural labor hole, which makes China more tolerant of automation than Western economies that still have more human workers to protect.

The public mood: anxiety about falling behind, not about being displaced

Where American anxiety about AI tends toward fears of job loss, surveillance, or existential catastrophe, Chan describes Chinese popular anxiety as nearly the inverse: fear of not using AI enough, of being left behind in a hyper-competitive labor market. Individual workers, companies, and policymakers all share this orientation. Chan calls this a "mirroring" — the individual's fear of losing competitive edge mirrors China's national fear of falling behind the U.S. technologically.

On AGI and existential risk: skeptical distance

Chan thinks it's telling that when Trump relaxed chip export controls, Chinese AI companies wanted the chips but Beijing declined — preferring to build domestic semiconductor capacity rather than become dependent on American supply chains. This, he argues, is not the behavior of a country sprinting toward superintelligence. A true AGI race would involve gobbling up every available chip. China is playing a longer, more measured game.

He also pushes back gently on the "race" metaphor itself: the intermediate risks (cyberwarfare, biosecurity) are, in his view, underrated and real; the AGI-superintelligence scenario is overblown. He ends by urging dialogue between the U.S. and China on shared risks from rogue actors and open-source proliferation, while acknowledging the deep mutual distrust that makes formal arms-control agreements essentially impossible at this stage.

A thought for your book

Chan's portrait of Beijing's AI worldview sits almost perfectly at the opposite pole from Silicon Valley's quasi-religious eschatology — no Omega Point, no machine god, no homo deus. What you might find generative: the Chinese model is also, in its own way, a version of homo economicus applied to AI — purely instrumental, collectively economistic, hostile to play and to what the government calls "wasted time." It's not an alternative to the Silicon Valley eschatology so much as its mirror image — the same foreclosure of genuine play, just in a different ideological register.

Douthat, A.I., and Pope Leo

Ross Douthat, The Atheist and the Machine God, NYTimes, May 9, 2026.

Douthout is anticipating Pope Leo XIV's encyclical on A.I. For Douthat the crucial issue is consciousness:

In one possible timeline, the advent of A.I. is widely understood as a win for atheism and a blow against religious ideas of soul and spirit, persuading more people that their own minds are just computers — no divine spark or immortal soul, just the meatspace equivalent of a helpful chatbot or an A.I. therapist.

In another potential future, the mystery of consciousness ends up seeming more profound in the shadow of machine intelligence, the mystical finds new appeal as a form of experience computers cannot emulate, and religion becomes a place for human exceptionalists to plant a defiant flag.

But between those two scenarios there’s a future where artificial intelligence mostly increases metaphysical uncertainty, leaving a lot of people simply unsettled about fundamental questions, increasingly “mysterian” rather than clearly atheistic or devout.

That’s how my encounters with Silicon Valley culture often feel: Beneath a materialist carapace, it’s a place where people who aren’t sure exactly what they’re building dabble in Buddhist metaphysics or consult with Catholic priests, adopt churchy or cultish attitudes toward their new creations or rebel into apocalyptic doomsaying.

Douthat then goes on to discuss Richard Dawkins’ recent encounter with Claude in which Dawkins, the Great Atheist, fools himself into thinking that Claude is conscious. Douthat asks:

Meanwhile, in its less-besotted passages, Dawkins’s essay circles around an important question for materialists like himself. The origin and nature of consciousness currently evades our understanding, but the good Darwinian is committed to the proposition that it evolved to serve some crucial evolutionary purpose. But if a digital entity seems to display the capacities that we associate with conscious minds, and we don’t believe that this entity is actually conscious, then what is consciousness’s true purpose? If we can have intelligence without self-awareness, a zombie that calculates and speaks, why does the self exist at all?

I'm not so sure that consciousness is the issue. It's complicated. My own view of consciousness is derived from the work of William Powers, which seems thoroughly materialist to me. But I'm not at all sure what that means, not in a world with quantum mechanics and deep complexity. Deep complexity itself presents issues, interesting ones. At the moment I'm considering the possibility that deep complexity gives us Aristotle's unmoved mover or Paul Tillich's God as the ground of being.

Douthat ends up with this as his penultimate paragraph:

As certain philosophers have argued, this harmony between the psychological and the physical seems more much likely to appear in a universe where consciousness is fundamental, where matter isn’t everything and Mind is where things start.

I'm not familiar with those certain philosophers, but who knows? I'm thinking that deep complexity gives us a generative universe, and that's all we need. But I'm still working on it.

What I'm looking for from Pop Leo's encyclical is how it discusses A.I. and idolatry. Now, just how is THAt entangled with consciousness?

Does Peter Thiel Think He's GOD? [Pope Leo XIV and AI]

You Tube:

Jon Favreau is joined by Christopher Hale to discuss Pope Leo XIV's warnings against A.I.

Is the internet slowly breaking our brains, and if so, what can we do about it? Offline with Jon Favreau is a place where you can take a break from doom-scrolling and tune in to smarter, lighter conversations about the impact of technology & the internet on our collective culture. Intimate interviews between Pod Save America host Jon Favreau and notable guests like Stephen Colbert, Hasan Piker, ContraPoints, Margaret Atwood, and Megan Rapinoe spark curiosity and introspection around the various ways our extremely online existence shapes everything from the ways we live, work, and interact with one another. Together we’ll figure out how to live happier, healthier lives, both on and offline.

At some point they mention Ross Douthat's NYTimes interview with Peter Thiel and how there's a moment where Thiel wasn't sure whether humanity was worth saving. Here's that moment"

Douthat: But the world of A.I. is clearly filled with people who, at the very least, seem to have a more utopian, transformative — whatever word you want to call it — view of the technology than you’re expressing here. And you mentioned earlier the idea that the modern world used to promise radical life extension and doesn’t anymore. It seems very clear to me that a number of people deeply involved in artificial intelligence see it as a mechanism for transhumanism — for transcendence of our mortal flesh — and either some kind of creation of a successor species or some kind of merger of mind and machine.

Do you think that’s all irrelevant fantasy? Or do you think it’s just hype? Do you think people are raising money by pretending that we’re going to build a machine god? Is it hype? Is it delusion? Is it something you worry about?

Thiel: Um, yeah.

Douthat: I think you would prefer the human race to endure, right?

Thiel: Uh ——

Douthat: You’re hesitating.

Thiel: Well, I don’t know. I would — I would ——

Douthat: This is a long hesitation!

Thiel: There’s so many questions implicit in this.

Douthat: Should the human race survive?

Thiel: Yes.

Douthat: OK.

Thiel: But I also would like us to radically solve these problems. And so it’s always, I don’t know, yeah — transhumanism. The ideal was this radical transformation where your human, natural body gets transformed into an immortal body. And there’s a critique of, let’s say, the trans people in a sexual context, or, I don’t know, a transvestite is someone who changes their clothes and cross-dresses, and a transsexual is someone where you change your, I don’t know, penis into a vagina. And we can then debate how well those surgeries work. But we want more transformation than that. The critique is not that it’s weird and unnatural, it’s: Man, it’s so pathetically little. And OK, we want more than cross-dressing or changing your sex organs. We want you to be able to change your heart and change your mind and change your whole body.

And then orthodox Christianity, by the way — the critique orthodox Christianity has of this, is these things don’t go far enough. That transhumanism is just changing your body, but you also need to transform your soul and you need to transform your whole self. And so ——

India rising in the world, the next 30 years

Ross Douthat interviews Amitav Acharya, NYTimes, Feb. 19, 2026.

Douthat's introduction:

Right now, 21st-century geopolitics seems like it’s defined by the struggle between America and China.

But the major power with the world’s fastest growing economy and largest population isn’t China. It’s India.

And right now, India has a unique role in global politics, doing deals with Europe one day and with Donald Trump the next, all while maintaining a strong partnership with Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

Its large and spreading diaspora gives it a unique cultural influence around the world, one that may only increase as other major powers grow old and people remain India’s most important export. My guest today is a prominent international relations scholar, Amitav Acharya, who’s written about what he calls a multiplex world order. A future where diverse powers compete to shape the world.

Between China and Pakistan:

Douthat: So let’s talk about, then, two concrete expressions of Indian power: The relationship with Pakistan, and the relationship with China.

Let’s say we’re living through a 15- to 20-year period where India’s influence and power are going to increase. What does success for India look like with its less powerful, but nuclear-armed rival Pakistan, and its more powerful neighbor, China?

Acharya: This depends on whom you ask. For foreign policy—

Douthat: I’m asking you.

Acharya: OK. My sense is that for India, if India can achieve the kind of growth and become the third-largest economy, not necessarily overtaking China, but maintaining political system openness and more diplomatic influence, I think that will be quite acceptable to India.

India is not a revisionist power. India is a status quo power. So I think that’s what success would mean. And domestically, at home, generate more employment. But you cannot have the third-largest economy without having a sustainable employment and industrial base.

With Pakistan, it’s terrorism. There is of course Kashmir and other issues, but it’s all linked, from the Indian perspective, to support for terrorism. And they see that. They see the West not really understanding India’s position. And then China’s support for Pakistan — China is the biggest, they say, ironclad relationship with Pakistan. They see that Pakistan will not be as adventurous or as assertive vis-à-vis India without Chinese help.

That’s what gets Indians angry about China. Otherwise, I don’t think there is any dimension that cannot be diplomatically addressed between India and China

Douthat: What changes the situation for the better for India? Is it just economic growth? Or is there a level of military power where India thinks that it could get Pakistan isolated and force China to be friendlier?

Acharya: I think nuclear weapons play a big role here. Pakistan has nuclear weapons. But China is also a much bigger nuclear power.

For a while, Indian foreign policy moved in the direction of ignoring Pakistan and engaging China. So it’s China they have to deal with. China is a true peer competitor rather than Pakistan.

Indian culture and the diaspora:

Douthat: The idea that Indian civilization is something that’s born in India and then spreads around the world is obviously relevant to an age when Indians have spread around the world. Modi has, I think, very explicitly talked about the Indian diaspora as a mode of Indian national influence.

But let’s talk about the diaspora. Let’s talk about America. You mentioned that in the United States, relations have been better than ever, up until very recently. Trump in particular spent a lot of time courting Indian American voters. He did an event with Modi in 2019 — “Howdy Modi” in Texas. It’s an amazing name.

But then, in the second Trump term, there’s been a swing. And it isn’t just a swing where Trump is imposing tariffs on Europe. It’s also a swing where there is this kind of anti-Indian backlash on the right.

Tell me where you think that comes from, but also just talk about how you think Americans see India — or see Indians, I think, is the better way to put it.

Acharya: By the way, don’t forget that Modi had one of the biggest rallies right next to Madison Square Garden.

Douthat: New York as well as Texas. All the centers — yeah.

Acharya: So I think, generally, Modi has used that as a foreign policy tool. It’s partly genuine, but it’s also partly a significant foreign policy asset.

So how about the American perception of India? First of all, Americans don’t know much about India. I’m sorry to say this. India doesn’t strike American imagination the way the Chinese do, and also, in some ways actually, the way the Soviet Union did, because it was a threat for a different reason.

There are many more universities with centers for China studies, Americans going to study in China, getting trained in the language — this goes back to the Cold War period. There’s nothing like that. As a professor, I can tell you that India studies is nothing comparable. American students and American academic institutions, and to some extent, think tanks too, are catching up now. But nothing like China.

As you know, the United States is not a country where there’s a lot of interest in foreign cultures. I can tell you that I have a son who just graduated from school and they studied China, Europe, Rome, Greece. Not much about India. So that’s part of the problem.

Americans don’t go to India as large numbers as tourists. So because of that, we have had this relative ignorance about India and neglect of India. We talk about democracy, but the U.S. and India, the largest democracies in the world — that’s rhetoric. It doesn’t really translate into endearment of India in the American public imagination.

Now you did mention the Indian diaspora, which is quite influential politically, although smaller than China, but more successful economically.

Claude's constitution and other matters AI

Ross Douthat, Is Claude Coding Us Into Irrelevance? NYTimes, 2.12.26.

Are the lords of artificial intelligence on the side of the human race? That’s the core question I had for this week’s guest. Dario Amodei is the chief executive of Anthropic, one of the fastest growing AI companies. He’s something of a utopian when it comes to the potential benefits of the technology that he’s unleashing on the world. But he also sees grave dangers ahead and inevitable disruption.

And then they discuss lots of stuff, which I've read, more or less. Among other things they discuss Amodei's two essays, “Machines of Loving Grace” and “The Adolescence of Technology.” The first is optimistic, the second, not so much. And then we come to the constitution that guides Claude's behavior.

Amodei: So basically, the constitution is a document readable by humans. Ours is about 75 pages long. And as we’re training Claude, as we’re training the A.I. system, in some large fraction of the tasks we give it, we say: Please do this task in line with this constitution, in line with this document.

So every time Claude does a task, it kind of reads the constitution. As it’s training, every loop of its training, it looks at that constitution and keeps it in mind. Then we have Claude itself, or another copy of Claude, evaluate: Hey, did what Claude just do align with the constitution?

We’re using this document as the control rod in a loop to train the model. And so essentially, Claude is an A.I. model whose fundamental principle is to follow this constitution.

A really interesting lesson we’ve learned: Early versions of the constitution were very prescriptive. They were very much about rules. So we would say: Claude should not tell the user how to hot-wire a car. Claude should not discuss politically sensitive topics.

But as we’ve worked on this for several years, we’ve come to the conclusion that the most robust way to train these models is to train them at the level of principles and reasons. So now we say: Claude is a model. It’s under a contract. Its goal is to serve the interests of the user, but it has to protect third parties. Claude aims to be helpful, honest and harmless. Claude aims to consider a wide variety of interests.

We tell the model about how the model was trained. We tell it about how it’s situated in the world, the job it’s trying to do for Anthropic, what Anthropic is aiming to achieve in the world, that it has a duty to be ethical and respect human life. And we let it derive its rules from that.

Now, there are still some hard rules. For example, we tell the model: No matter what you think, don’t make biological weapons. No matter what you think, don’t make child sexual material.

Those are hard rules. But we operate very much at the level of principles.

Douthat: So if you read the U.S. Constitution, it doesn’t read like that. The U.S. Constitution has a little bit of flowery language, but it’s a set of rules. If you read your constitution, it’s like you’re talking to a person, right?

Amodei: Yes, it’s like you’re talking to a person. I think I compared it to if you have a parent who dies and they seal a letter that you read when you grow up. It’s a little bit like it’s telling you who you should be and what advice you should follow.

Douthat: So this is where we get into the mystical waters of A.I. a little bit. Again, in your latest model, this is from one of the cards, they’re called, that you guys release with these models ——

Amodei: Model cards, yes.

Douthat: That I recommend reading. They’re very interesting. It says: “The model” — and again, this is who you’re writing the constitution for — “expresses occasional discomfort with the experience of being a product … some degree of concern with impermanence and discontinuity … We found that Opus 4.6” — that’s the model — “would assign itself a 15 to 20 percent probability of being conscious under a variety of prompting conditions.”

Suppose you have a model that assigns itself a 72 percent chance of being conscious. Would you believe it?

Amodei: Yeah, this is one of these really hard to answer questions, right?

Douthat: Yes. But it’s very important.

Amodei: Every question you’ve asked me before this, as devilish a sociotechnical problem as it had been, we at least understand the factual basis of how to answer these questions. This is something rather different.

We’ve taken a generally precautionary approach here. We don’t know if the models are conscious. We are not even sure that we know what it would mean for a model to be conscious or whether a model can be conscious. But we’re open to the idea that it could be.

No. They're not conscious. The architecture isn't right. I've got a bunch of posts about consciousness. Here's a basic statement: Consciousness, reorganization and polyviscosity, Part 1: The link to Powers, August 12, 2022. You might also look at this more recent post: Biological computationalism (why computers won't be conscious), Dec. 25, 2025.

Amodei goes on to say a bit about interpretability:

We’re putting a lot of work into this field called interpretability, which is looking inside the brains of the models to try to understand what they’re thinking. And you find things that are evocative, where there are activations that light up in the models that we see as being associated with the concept of anxiety or something like that. When characters experience anxiety in the text, and then when the model itself is in a situation that a human might associate with anxiety, that same anxiety neuron shows up.

Now, does that mean the model is experiencing anxiety? That doesn’t prove that at all, but ——

Here's what I think about interpretability: Why Mechanistic Interpretability Needs Phenomenology: Studying Masonry Won’t Tell You Why Cathedrals Have Flying Buttresses, Jan. 28, 2026.

Of course, there's much more at the link.

Ross Douthat interviews Peter Thiel, who is clueless

Ross Douthat, Peter Thiel and the Antichrist, NYtimes, June 26, 2025.

They start out with economic stagnation:

Douthat: So I want to start by taking you back in time about 13 or 14 years. You wrote an essay for National Review, the conservative magazine, called “The End of the Future.” And basically, the argument in that essay was that the dynamic, fast-paced, ever-changing modern world was just not nearly as dynamic as people thought, and that actually, we’d entered a period of technological stagnation. That digital life was a breakthrough, but not as big a breakthrough as people had hoped, and that the world was stuck, basically.

Thiel: Yes.

Douthat: You weren’t the only person to make arguments like this, but it had a special potency coming from you because you were a Silicon Valley insider who had gotten rich in the digital revolution.

So I’m curious: In 2025, do you think that diagnosis still holds?

Thiel: Yes. I still broadly believe in the stagnation thesis. It was never an absolute thesis. The claim was not that we were absolutely, completely stuck; it was in some ways a claim about how the velocity had slowed. It wasn’t zero, but 1750 to 1970 — 200-plus years — were periods of accelerating change. We were relentlessly moving faster: The ships were faster, the railroads were faster, the cars were faster, the planes were faster. It culminates in the Concorde and the Apollo missions. But then, in all sorts of dimensions, things had slowed.

I always made an exception for the world of bits, so we had computers and software and internet and mobile internet. And then the last 10 to 15 years you had crypto and the A.I. revolution, which I think is in some sense pretty big. But the question is: Is it enough to really get out of this generalized sense of stagnation?

The conversation goes on in that vein, and then:

Thiel: Well, I think there are deep reasons the stagnation happened. There are always three questions you ask about history: What actually happened? And then you have another question : What should be done about it? But there’s also this intermediate question: Why did it happen?

People ran out of ideas. I think, to some extent, the institutions degraded and became risk averse, and some of these cultural transformations we can describe. But then I think to some extent people also had some very legitimate worries about the future, where if we continued to have accelerating progress, were you accelerating toward environmental apocalypse or nuclear apocalypse or things like that?

But I think if we don’t find a way back to the future, I do think that society — I don’t know. It unravels, it doesn’t work.

The middle class — I would define the middle class as the people who expect their kids to do better than themselves. And when that expectation collapses, we no longer have a middle-class society. Maybe there’s some way you can have a feudal society in which things are always static and stuck, or maybe there’s some way you can ship to some radically different society. But it’s not the way the Western world, it’s not the way the United States has functioned for the first 200 years of its existence.

Two things: 1) Back in the 1990s my friend Abbe Mowshowitz was talking about virtual feudalism, which is where he saw us headed. He hired me to ghost an article about that but, alas, he was unable to publish it, so I eventually posted it as one of my working papers: Virtual Feudalism in the Twenty-First Century.

2) I sorta' kinda' agree with Thiel about being stuck. But I think about history in a very different way. I think in terms of cultural evolution, specifically, the theory of cultural ranks that David Hays and I sketched out back in the 1990s. [Here's a brief guide: Mind-Culture Coevolution: Major Transitions in the Development of Human Culture and Society.] At the moment we're stuck "treading water," as it were, in Rank 4, but haven't made it to the next level. Just what that next level will turn out to be, that's not at all clear, & that's where I talk about the Fourth Arena, thus: Welcome to the Fourth Arena – The World is Gifted. When I say that Thiel is clueless, that's what I'm talking about; he has no sense of cultural evolution, of a succession of cognitive architectures, or the mind itself, taken collectively, as a driving force in history.

Back to the conversation, and Homo economicus:

Douthat: So you think that ordinary people won’t accept stagnation in the end? That they will rebel and pull things down around them in the course of that rebellion?

Thiel: They may rebel. Or maybe our institutions don’t work, since all of our institutions are predicated on growth.

Douthat: Our budgets are certainly predicated on growth.

Is that a law of nature, or a contingent matter of historical circumstance?

On the nexus of Silicon Valley, stagnation, and Trump:

Douthat: What did Trump do in his first term that you felt was anti-decadent or anti-stagnation? If anything — maybe the answer’s nothing.

Thiel: I think it took longer and it was slower than I would’ve liked, but we have gotten to the place where a lot of people think something’s gone wrong. And that was not the conversation I was having in 2012 to 2014. I had a debate with Eric Schmidt in 2012 and Marc Andreessen in 2013 and Bezos in 2014.

I was on “There’s a stagnation problem,” and all three of them were versions of “Everything’s going great.” And I think at least those three people have, to varying degrees, updated and adjusted. Silicon Valley’s adjusted.

Douthat: And Silicon Valley, though, has more than adjusted ——

Thiel: On the stagnation question.

Douthat: Right. But a big part of Silicon Valley ended up going in for Trump in 2024 — including, obviously, most famously, Elon Musk.

Thiel: Yeah. And this is deeply linked to the stagnation issue, in my telling. These things are always super complicated, but my telling is — and again, I’m so hesitant to speak for all these people — but someone like Mark Zuckerberg, or Facebook, Meta, in some ways I don’t think he was very ideological. He didn’t think this stuff through that much. The default was to be liberal, and it was always: If the liberalism isn’t working, what do you do? And for year after year after year, it was: You do more. If something doesn’t work, you just need to do more of it. You up the dose and you up the dose and you spend hundreds of millions of dollars and you go completely woke and everybody hates you.

And at some point, it’s like: OK, maybe this isn’t working.

On Mars, AI, and progress, with a conversation between Elon Musk and Demis Hassabis (CEO of DeepMind):

Thiel: Yeah. And the rough conversation was Demis telling Elon: I’m working on the most important project in the world. I’m building a superhuman A.I.

And Elon responds to Demis: Well, I’m working on the most important project in the world. I am turning us into interplanetary species. And then Demis said: Well, you know my A.I. will be able to follow you to Mars. And then Elon went quiet. But in my telling of the history, it took years for that to really hit Elon. It took him until 2024 to process it.

Douthat: But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t believe in Mars. It just means that he decided he had to win some battle over budget deficits or wokeness to get to Mars.

Thiel: Yeah, but what does Mars mean?

Douthat: What does Mars mean?

Thiel: Well, is it just a scientific project? Or is it like a Heinlein, the moon as a libertarian paradise or something like this?

Douthat: A vision of a new society. Populated by many, many people descended from Elon Musk.

Thiel: Well, I don’t know if it was concretized that specifically, but if you concretize things, then maybe you realize that Mars is supposed to be more than a science project. It’s supposed to be a political project. And then when you concretize it, you have to start thinking through: Well, the woke A.I. will follow you, the socialist government will follow you. And then maybe you have to do something other than just going to Mars.

Douthat: So the woke A.I., artificial intelligence, seems like, one, if we’re still stagnant, it’s the biggest exception to the place where there’s been remarkable progress — surprising, to many people, progress.

It’s also the place — we were just talking about politics — where the Trump administration is, I think, to a large degree, giving A.I. investors a lot of what they wanted in terms of both stepping back and doing public-private partnerships. So it’s a zone of progress and governmental engagement.

And you are an investor in A.I. What do you think you’re investing in?

Thiel: Well, I don’t know. There’s a lot of layers to this. One question we can frame is: Just how big a thing do I think A.I. is? And my stupid answer is: It’s more than a nothing burger, and it’s less than the total transformation of our society. My place holder is that it’s roughly on the scale of the internet in the late ’90s. I’m not sure it’s enough to really end the stagnation. It might be enough to create some great companies. And the internet added maybe a few percentage points to the G.D.P., maybe 1 percent to G.D.P. growth every year for 10, 15 years. It added some to productivity. So that’s roughly my place holder for A.I.

It’s the only thing we have. It’s a little bit unhealthy that it’s so unbalanced. This is the only thing we have. I’d like to have more multidimensional progress. I’d like us to be going to Mars. I’d like us to be having cures for dementia. If all we have is A.I., I will take it. There are risks with it. Obviously, there are dangers with this technology. But there are also ——

Now that was interesting, very interesting, Mars as a political project. Hmmmm. And then they launch into a conversation about smart people:

Thiel: But I share your intuition because I think we’ve had a lot of smart people and things have been stuck for other reasons. And so maybe the problems are unsolvable, which is the pessimistic view. Maybe there is no cure for dementia at all, and it’s a deeply unsolvable problem. There’s no cure for mortality. Maybe it’s an unsolvable problem.

Or maybe it’s these cultural things. So it’s not the individually smart person, but it’s how this fits into our society. Do we tolerate heterodox smart people? Maybe you need heterodox smart people to do crazy experiments. And if the A.I. is just conventionally smart, if we define wokeness — again, wokeness is too ideological — but if you just define it as conformist, maybe that’s not the smartness that’s going to make a difference.

I note that smart people aren't going to get anywhere if they're working with the wrong ideas. There were a lot of smart people in the 17th century, but they didn't have radios and airplanes. It's not that they weren't smart enough, rather, the intellectual foundations weren't there for them to work from.

And then they veer off into transhumanism and Christianity and cryonics and and ... the Antichrist? That's where I get off the bus, but you might find it interesting.

Ezra Klein and Ross Douthat on the Mystic Destiny of Donald John Trump, and other things [psychecelics]

I kid you freakin’ not. And the use of “mystic” in this context creeps me out a bit given that I just wrote a piece for 3QD where I recount how I offered mystical religious belief as the foundation of my pacifism and hence my opposition to the war in Vietnam. We aren’t using “mystic” in quite the same sense, though they are allied.

Ezra Klein, Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics, NYTimes, April 25, 2025. The conversation is well under way at this point:

Klein: We tend to think of fortune now as synonymous with luck. But if you go back to Greek mythology, when you are touched by fortune, when you speak to the oracle, it often doesn’t work out that well. You get a clear prophecy that seems like it foretells your success, but laced inside of that is your downfall.

What kind of story, what kind of mystic structure, do you believe we’re in? Is it one that is providential? Or is it one where the gods often laugh at human design?

Douthat: A mistake that I think some religious people make is to see a kind of force of destiny at work in a particular figure and assume that force of destiny must mean that God, the author of history, wants you to be on that person’s side directly.

But in fact, if you read, let’s say, the Old Testament, there are all kinds of moments when God is working through figures to accomplish something in the world or to move history — the drama of salvation history, to put it in Christian terms — in a particular direction. But it doesn’t mean that the instrument that God is working through is, in fact, the Messiah or the chosen one. If God sends the Babylonians to chastise the wicked kings of Israel, that doesn’t mean that you’re supposed to necessarily say: Oh, hail Nebuchadnezzar, you are the chosen one.

I think you can see Trump in several different lights. You could say he’s a man of destiny, and therefore he is bringing about, in some weird way that we didn’t see coming, the New American golden age. And this is obviously what a lot of people on the center right wanted to believe, especially when it became clear that he was returning to power. Or you could say he’s a great man of history who is unlocking some sort of change that was necessary — but bringing chaos in order to do it.

I wrote a lot about the concept of decadence — this idea that the West and the developed world were sort of stuck in these cycles and needed to break out somehow. But the reality is you often can’t break out of decadence without a big mess. So maybe Trump is the agent of that mess. But that doesn’t mean he’s a good person.

Or finally, it could just be chastisement for everyone. “All are punished,” as Shakespeare said.

I think all of those possibilities have to be taken seriously as readings of the Trump phenomenon.

How well do you remember “Batman Begins”?

I remember it. The League of Shadows destroying Gotham?

I’ve had this joke in my head often in the past couple of months — as somebody whose mythic analogies tend to come from the Marvel or DC universe more than the Old or the New Testament — that is: Convince me we’re not being governed by the League of Shadows.

I went back and rewatched the part where Ra’s al Ghul reveals the whole plan. And he says: Look, we have infiltrated every layer of Gotham’s power structure. We tried to destroy Gotham’s economy through financial engineering. It didn’t quite work. Now we’re back for No. 2. And the fact that we are here is proof of your decadence. The fact that we could get this close shows that you deserve what we are about to do to you.

I’m not saying we are actually being governed by the League of Shadows, but when you brought up decadence, there is a dimension of that when you think about this in those narrative terms. It’s a reflection of very dark sides of our own society.

I’ve carried on a couple of different running arguments throughout the Trump era that are going to continue. And one is with people on the right who have a sort of League of Shadows view of the overall situation: Things are so bad that you might as well unleash chaos.

You saw a lot of this in response to the tariffs. Real politicians don’t say this, but people on social media who are like: Fine, we need a 10-year reset of the whole global economy because things are so bad.

I’ve spent a lot of time disagreeing with those people. I would prefer not to take the black pill. But I’ve also spent time disagreeing with the kind of liberals and, sometimes, never-Trump Republican critics of Trump, who I feel don’t quite grasp why he’s successful and what you need to do in response. Because I don’t think he could be this successful if it were enough to just elect Joe Biden to fix our problems.

Well, clearly that didn’t work. We tried that. And definitely trying to elect him twice to fix our problems was not the winning move.

A couple months ago, Bari Weiss had on her podcast Louise Perry, who’s a British conservative gender and sexuality writer. And Perry made this argument that I’ve been thinking about, where she said that the difference between Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate is that Peterson is a Christian and Tate is a pagan.

This might be unfair to historic pagans, but the argument she was making —

Depends on the pagans.

Depends on the pagans. But it also depends on the Christians. But the argument Perry was making is that Peterson is, at least in his ethics, somebody who thinks a lot about the weak, who cherishes women.

Tate is more interested in power, in dominance, in driving his enemies before him and fathering a lot of children potentially from a lot of people.

And I’ve thought about that question — that war between, crudely, paganism and Christianity is playing out right now on the right and in the Trump administration. There are ways in which those strands seem braided through everything — the drive for power, for a renewed 19th-century masculinity, versus the more Christian dimensions of it.

JD Vance is an emblem of the Christian side of the administration. Elon Musk is an emblem of its pagan side, with his many kids from many different women.

And Trump is somebody who, in both his traditionalism and also his brashness and will-to-power, has both threads inside himself at the same time.

Maybe. Honestly, I think Trump may have come to some conception of belief in God after the assassination attempt — just observing his comments.

But I think of Trump as, persistently, a kind of pagan or heathen figure, much more than he is a Christian figure. Notwithstanding the attempts to claim him as a kind of King David or Emperor Constantine. There’s sort of an idea that you get from religious conservative supporters of Trump that you have these figures in the Bible or Christian history who are rulers and are sinful in various ways — but maybe, in a way, advance God’s cause, despite their sins and failings.

I don’t really think of Trump that way. But he is committed in an explicit way to Christianity. And to me, the bargain with Trump has always been, for religious conservatives, some mix of protection and support — a transactional bargain. And then more recently, a hope that some kind of renewal of American dynamism can bring religion itself back with it.

Which, I will say, is a hope that I have indulged in myself. It’s like: OK, you have different varieties of post-Christianity out there, and you don’t want to ally with the Andrew Tates, but you do want to ally with the people who have big hopes for the future, rather than a woke progressivism that just seems inflected with cultural despair.

That would be an argument that I think a Christian might say who was trying to explain to themselves why they are in alliance with Elon Musk. Better to ally with Elon, who has some good desires and believes that humanity is good in some way and wants a sort of more dynamic future than to take a purely pessimistic perspective — that climate change is going to kill us all and structural racism means we deserve it. That would be the argument.

A bit later Douthat observes:

As I said before, I think you have what you’re describing as Christian and pagan tendencies braided together in the Trump administration. And I think that not all but many of the things that you describe absolutely reflect more of a pagan sensibility than a Christian one.

I agree with you that particular steps the Trump administration has taken in this term are not Christian. They are anti-Christian.

I think it started with the cuts to foreign aid. I think you can completely justify some kind of renovation of the foreign aid program. Christians are not bound to support any particular set of programs.

But I think the way in which the foreign aid programs were reshuffled and cut off and so on was a failure of Christian duty in a pretty obvious way. The core motivations there were just different from the evangelical motivations of the Bush era, and reflected, frankly overall, the decline of Christianity in American life.

Trump 47 and the battle for the soul of America

I was happy when Biden dropped out of the race. But why’d it take him so long? And I was pleased to see Harris rake in all the $$$ and do well in the polls, not so much because I liked her as a candidate [meh], but because it indicated that Trump might be defeated. That’s something I very much wanted to happen.

By the time I cast my vote for Harris, however, my doubts were inching ahead of my hopes. When I woke up the next morning to discover that Trump had won, clearly – but, please, don’t blather about a landslide; it was a clean win, both the popular vote and the electoral college, but no more, I was not happy. But I was not surprised.

What next?

The writing’s on the wall: Graffiti

Before I get to Trump’s victory, however, I want to talk about graffiti, perhaps the most significant development in American art in the last century. It started on the streets of New York City and Philadelphia in the late 1960s and early 1970s and two decades later it had made its way across the county and around the world. The people who started it did not go to art schools nor exhibit in galleries. It was born outside the legit art world.

In the summer of 2015 my friend Greg Edgell curated a large graffiti show covering the interior and exterior walls of a Pep Boys building in Jersey City. Forest City had acquired the property and was going to demolish the building to make way for an apartment complex. Greg contacted them and got permission to cover the walls with graffiti; he also talked them into a small budget. Since the building was slated for demolition, we called it The Demolition Exhibition.

Here's a shot of one of the exterior walls [click on photo to enlarge]:

It’s a battle scene depicting characters from the all-American comic strip Peanuts, fractured, crossed over, and messed-up. There’s Charlie Brown’s head in the center, Linus and his blanket at the right edge, and Snoopy’s in the sky in his aviator togs, pretending to be a WWI flying ace. Who’s that dark little creature to the left of Charlie Brown? Looks like Snoopy’s silhouette wandering the battlefield. Call it the soul of America.

People enjoying the show [click on photo to enlarge]:

Demolition in progress [click on photo to enlarge]:

Glenn Loury’s pleased as punch: A working class party

I’ve been watching these guys for years. Glenn Loury’s a distinguised economics professor at Brown and John McWhorter is a linguist at Columbia; he’s also a New York Times columnist. Their political views are complex.

John doesn’t like Trump at all, thinks he’s an idiot (his word), and dismisses him as a standup comedian. I find that a bit harsh, but boy! do I understand it. I don’t think Loury likes Trump either (& I don’t think he voted for him). But he can’t stand Obama, doesn’t like Harris, and is glad Trump won. The two share a disdain for wokeness (as do I).

Why’s Loury glad? Primarily, I believe, because he’s happy to see a working-class party in power. Imagine that, the Republicans are a working-class party! It wasn’t like that when Eisenhower was President. And the Democrats seem to have been captured by (out of touch) coastal elites; JFK’s best and brightest. The times they are changing – perhaps not in the ways Dylan had in mind when first he sang that song – but changing they are. We can’t go back.

Ross Douthat: What about those cabinet picks?

Now we have Trump’s cabinet picks. When that incendiary clown Matt Gaetz got the nod for Attorney General I lost it. Fortunately Trump listed to all the howls, took a deep breath, and decided to ditch him in favor of a woman with substantial legal experience. Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense did not make me happy either. A MAGA apologist for war crimes with no managerial experience, no way! Nor do I want a science-challenged Kennedy as Secretary of Health and Human Services. As for Tulsi Gabbard, I’m OK with her anti-war stance (I was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War) as Director of National Intelligence.

On these lines, I found Ross Douthat recent NYTimes column, Three Theories of the Trump Cabinet, quite interesting. He takes his first theory from Matthew Zeitlin, who sees Trump’s “picks as making up an American version of a European-style coalition government, where small parties join with a bigger party and receive various ministries in exchange for their support.” After taking that out for a spin he offers a view he takes from Yuval Levin: “they’re designed to stoke conflict within the different agencies rather than within the cabinet. [...] Which suggests that what Trump 2.0 is seeking is less the representation of different factions and more just disruption of all kinds.”

Douthat lands on a third interpretation:

That he’s assembling a “team of podcasters,” to use the conservative writer Ben Domenech’s formulation, a cabinet of “communicators, not administrators,” who are picked for their celebrity and their experience as faces and voices [...] In which case it’s a mistake to look too closely at either their ideological commitments or their administrative experience. Trump mostly just wants them as charismatic faces who will be public salespeople for whatever he decides to do.

But the actual administration of the cabinet agencies still needs to happen, and Trump’s policy decisions are still likely to be strongly influenced by the ideas and proposals that are surfaced from below.

Hmmmm. I like it. Independently of what I’d like to see happen, will it accomplish what Trump wants it to accomplish and will it serve the working-class people who voted for him? I don’t know. But I do find it hard to believe that he cares about those Americans, though he may well have convinced himself otherwise.

But it is suggestive, very suggestive.

A tectonic shift?

Loury frequently says we’re witnessing a tectonic shift in American politics. He’s right. The realignment that’s given us a working-class Republican party is important. But there’s also the way the whole process has worked, the social media, the showmanship, the celebrity – and don’t forget Ronald Reagan, who was governor of California before he was President, not to mention Arnie “The Governator” Schwarzenegger. I believe Douthat’s got the same thing in mind with the team of podcasters idea. The whole process, the mechanism, is changing, top-to-bottom and inside out. I don’t know how to conceptualize it, but, yes, it’s happening and it’s tectonic.

* * * * *

Let the graffiti writers have the last word. I took this in FDR skatepark in South Philadelphia in December 2018, beneath the thruway and just north of the naval yard. Built by skateboarders, who have a strong DIY culture, FDR is legendary among skateboarders. Notice the initials “FDR” on the Pabst can. [click on photo to enlarge]

Where are the AI Utopians?

Yesterday, July 10, Anonymous showed up with a link to a rather Quixotic video extolling the marvels of a future in which AI helps humanity to a better way of life:

Kim Solez frames his video as a riposte to Eliezer Yudkowsky’s recent recitation of AI Doom, thus:

Recently there has been concern expressed about the safety of machine learning/artificial intelligence in the long run by Eliezer Yudkowsky AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalities widely quoted elsewhere. The first of the 40+ bolded sections of the piece is the most significant because of the way it is equally true of an AI utopia: “AGI will not be upper-bounded by human ability or human learning speed. Things much smarter than humans would be able to learn from less evidence than humans require” Reading the beginning of that paragraph it is true that AI has taught humans much more beautiful moves in the game of Go than we would ever have been able to design ourselves. That means that AI can teach us ways of cooperating with each other that are superior to human’s own innate ability to cooperate successfully. Therefore, increasing use of machine learning is not the beginning of the slippery slope toward humanity’s demise, it could be exactly the opposite, a transition toward a world better than anything we ever imagined. We can determine which of these two contrasting futures happens, and AI can assist with that! An AI may also be more foresighted and have a longer temporal horizon, both of which promote cooperation.

This got me to thinking. AI has been predicting the future since its beginning. That future is always one in which machines are at least as smart as, if not smarter than, humans. Which is to say, AI has always had folks in the snake oil business. It seems to me that, if you’re selling snake oil, you should be touting the its virtues, not listing the many ways in which snake oil can kill you.

And yet that seems to be what the AI snake oil salesmen have decided upon. I’m sure that, here and there, you’ll find people extolling the wonders of a world in which AI is in the ascendant, like Solez is doing. But the gloom-and-doomers are louder, seem to be more numerous, better organized, and are certainly better funded. Why?

Sure, there’s plenty of hype in the AI business. But the purpose of that hype is to drum up business in the present and the near-term future. That hype is not a form of and does not lead to AI utopianism.

Where is the Walt Disney of AI? Why is there no AI utopianism? AI speculation about the future seems to be caught in the same dystopian maelstrom that characterizes current futurism in general.

* * * * *

On gloom and doom, see two posts from 2020 featuring Ross Douthat:

• Has "civilization" entered a phase of decadence?
• Ross Douthat on decadence || the Space Age || I've been wrestling with a longish post, working title: From Progress Studies to Progress

On Walt Disney:

• Walt Disney: A Career in Three Acts
• Disney's Fantasia as Masterpiece
• Coronavirus, building, and the future @3QD [Andreessen, Disney, and others]

Why are there so many male characters in folktales? Ross Douthat suggests an answer.

Some years ago I was asked to review a collection of articles in the nascent field of Darwinist literary criticism, Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson, The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative (2005). I was not impressed, but that’s neither here nor there at the moment.

In one article, Gottschall took aim at “feminist fairy tale studies”, which postulated that “an analysis of a culturally diverse sample [of fairy tales] will reveal diverse gender patterns”. Gottschall conducted such a study and using 658 tales from 48 culture areas and discovered:

... first, that fairy tales everywhere — Europe, Western Europe, North America (aboriginal peoples), South America (aboriginal peoples), East Eurasia, Africa, and the Insular Pacific — had more male than female main characters (Table 1, p. 212). In all regions, male protagonists were more active than female, with Europe having the highest percentage of active females (Table 2, p. 214). Similarly, female attractiveness was emphasized all over, while male attractiveness received considerably less attention (Table 3, p. 216); marriage was a dominant theme in all areas (Table 4, p. 217); and old women were universally stigmatized, with older women more likely to be antagonists (Table 5, p. 218).

That is to say gender treatment seems pretty much the same across cultures. It would seem that the feminists are wrong. While I took issue with Gottschall’s larger point about the overwhelming biological determination of fairy tale content, the argument is subtle, involving a somewhat different piece of cross-cultural evidence, and is, in any event, irrelevant to my current inquiry.

Later in the review I pointed out that, far from being a new finding, Gottschall’s result had been anticipated in a cross-cultural literature he did not cite:

Naroll has a chapter on “Men and Women” in The Moral Animal that reviews a wide variety of cross-cultural work indicating that “it’s a man’s world” — to quote the self-styled hardest working man in show business, Mr. James Brown. In particular, Naroll cites a 1976 cross-cultural study by Divale and Harris (cf. Harris, 1977, pp. 55-66) — which I have not read — showing, among other things, “that in myth and ritual, men have an edge over women. Though goddesses are many, there are even more gods. Though heroines are many, there are even more heroes” (Naroll, 1983, pp. 318-319).

Given the apparently universal asymmetry between males and females in folktales, one would like to know why that is.

Ross Douthat has a post at Reactions, “Mom Genes and Father’s Day”, that suggests an answer to that question: male biology is such that culture must devote more effort to breaking males to (marital) harness than female, hence more attention is given to them in myths and folktales. Thus Douthat tells us:

... the deeper you go into the biological substrates of motherhood and fatherhood, the easier it is to come back up with a dark or cynical view of the masculine role in human reproduction. That’s because the central mammalian adaptations, internal gestation and the breastfeeding that gives “mammals” their name, are good for safeguarding the next generation and establishing an intense mother-child bond — but for paternal involvement, not so much.

“90 percent of bird species equitably split child-rearing duties with their mates,” my wife notes, “as if someone had stuck a chore chart on the refrigerator … Our backyard is home to a pair of hawks, and I often gaze up at their biparental nest in silent salute.” [...] But only 5 percent of mammal species feature any infant care from dads at all. In this sense, the grimmest feminist account of human patriarchy’s exploitation has nothing on the natural order for most mammals, where males literally use females as vessels to extend their genetic legacy and then walk or crawl or prance away.

Humans are different, exceptional among mammals, we fall in love and marry and raise families together — but we live with that exploitative legacy nonetheless, often without even noticing its power. Before reading Mom Genes, for instance, I thought of the placenta (to the extent that I thought about it at all) much the way I thought about the uterus: As part of the female reproductive system, something women generate to help nourish and protect their unborn child. But not so: The placenta is an organ of the fetus, with the same DNA, but unlike the fetus its creation isn’t a fifty-fifty proposition; instead it’s “imprinted” by the father’s genes, becoming effectively a paternal outpost inside the mother’s body.

It’s a long way from the paternal substrate of placental genetics to folktales, but it is nonetheless suggestive.

But it gets better. Noting that “our testosterone levels drop when the baby arrives, priming us for a role in infant care” Douthat continues:

But this priming, crucially, only happens if the man has already made the fateful choice to stick around, to be a father and not just a placenta-planter. Likewise some kind of paternal instinct, a male version of the “core pro-baby motive” that’s instilled by the maternal transformation, can be coaxed out of men, but it depends “on the amount of exposure that a man has to the mother of his child, and later, to the child itself.” If “new moms are hormonally primed to seek out experience with infants … new dads must have those experiences in order to get their hormones rolling.” The mere existence of a pregnancy and a child transforms a woman, but it takes active fathering to transform a man.

That choice to be transformed, and the sacrifices it entails, is good for us in many ways; obviously I think it’s the best choice a man can make. But in strict Darwinian terms it isn’t necessary, and while every human society places some sort of pressure on dads to be involved and stick around, there’s a lot of variation in the form that involvement, from de facto matriarchy to polygamy, and most societies have evolved ways to protect kids even in situations where the father doesn’t play a particularly active role.

Now we’re in the realm of behavior, a realm one can imagine being affected by folktales. But obviously we still need an argument that 1) the content of these male-dominated folk tales is acculturates males in the required way (Gottschall’s finding about the thematic dominance of marriage is suggestive), and 2) that there is a causal link between those tales and actual behavior.

I’m not prepared either to provide such a arguments here, nor to link to them. But if someone wants to look into it, I’d be interested in what you find.

Ross Douthat defends real experience [Andreessen’s been out in the sun too long]

Ross Douthat has an important column, Decadence and Andreessen's Dilemma (Reactions, June 10, 2021). The piece begins:

Early in the pandemic era, the Netscape founder Marc Andreessen published a manifesto that was so on-point for the themes of The Decadent Society that I cited it in the paperback. His argument was that many of the institutional debacles in the West’s response to the coronavirus reflected a longstanding failure to build, a comfort with stagnation and sclerosis visible everywhere from our physical environment to our regulatory apparatus to our transportation infrastructure and education system.

But what kind of building, Douthat wants to know? Building physical things in the real world, but also people and institutions, or cruising the internet to build in virtual reality?

This question divides anti-stagnationists: Figures like my AEI colleague James Pethokoukis or the bullish-on-America Bruno Maçaes tend to regard Silicon Valley and its virtual realities as integral parts of a more dynamic future, while people in the orbit of Peter Thiel are more likely to regard Big Internet in its current incarnation as an obstacle to real-world forms of industry and growth, and in need of some kind of political and social management to become a spur to dynamism instead. Personally I’m mostly on the Thielword side of the debate: Without going all the way to the Butlerian Jihad, I think human civilization needs to exert a kind of mastery over the internet and the virtual, a disciplining and putting-in-its-place, if we want to both preserve certain basic human goods and make non-virtual leaps forward more likely — because left to its own devices the internal techno-logic of the virtual realm will pull us deeper into decadence.

As important as the internet is to me – I suspect that it’s more important to me than it is to Douthat – I’m with him on this. He goes on to quote a recent interview in which Andreessen defends the coming primacy of virtual world:

A small percent of people live in a real-world environment that is rich, even overflowing, with glorious substance, beautiful settings, plentiful stimulation, and many fascinating people to talk to, and to work with, and to date. These are also *all* of the people who get to ask probing questions like yours. Everyone else, the vast majority of humanity, lacks Reality Privilege – their online world is, or will be, immeasurably richer and more fulfilling than most of the physical and social environment around them in the quote-unquote real world.

After giving Andreessen’s point due consideration, acknowledging for example that “I can find people who share my obscure interests in an instant” – Douthat argues:

But there’s a problem: There are a lot of experiences — call them “core experiences” — that people still prefer to have in the world of flesh and blood, ranging from the banal (real drinks >> Zoom drinks) to the transcendent (visiting Chartres Cathedral >> doing a virtual tour of Chartres Cathedral), from the excitement of travel or the thrill of concert-going to the physical-cum-emotional intensity of falling in love and having sex (not necessarily in that order). And there are core experiences that just don’t translate into virtuality at all: You can some kind of sexual intercourse on the internet, depending on how elastically defined, but you can’t bear and raise a child.

Now say what you will about 20th century America, but it did a pretty good job of democratizing these kinds of core experiences. Whereas while the age of the internet has clearly expanded the range of available experiences, for core experiences democratization sometimes seems like it’s in danger of going into reverse, with experiences in reality, from the museum to the ballpark to the classroom, becoming the high-cost “premium” experience, while a mediocre virtual equivalent is offered the masses and the proles.

Yes.

Why the internet is important to me

While I have a variety of interests and talents – I’m a good musician, and a good photographer, and have spent countless hours on both – I am primarily an intellectual, a thinker, explorer, and a writer. I got my Ph.D. in 1978 for a dissertation entitled, “Cognitive Science and Literary Theory,” years before anyone else in literary studies way paying attention to the cognitive sciences. I got a faculty position and The Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY, and was turned down for tenure in, I believe, 1985. I spent two or three years trying to get another academic post and failed. Since then I’ve continued doing my intellectual work while doing a bit of this and that to make a living.

The internet afforded me the opportunity to build an intellectual life that would have been impossible without it. Not only has it given me access to books and articles, but it has given me access to people and avenues for publication that don’t require me to jump through the hoops of academic convention, though I do publish in the formal academic literature every now and then.

Back in 2006 I started blogging at an academic group-blog called The Valve. I posted articles and commented on articles by others. The Valve went bust in 2012 or so, by which time I’d created New Savanna. But I remain in touch with some of my colleagues from those days even though we’ve never met in person. I’ve set up pages at three sites for the distribution of academic papers, Academia.edu, SSRN, and ResearchGate. And then there’s Twitter. And more, much more.

But I’ve made my point. Without the internet I would be an isolated intellectual. The internet has given me the means of actively functioning in an international intellectual community.

But none of these experiences compare with a core experience I had in graduate school. While I was enrolled in the English Department at SUNY Buffalo, I got my deepest education in the Linguistics Department under the tutelage of David Hays. I was a member of his research group for four years.

We met weekly at his house, Twin Willows, on the shore of Lake Erie. At the beginning of the meeting each participant, student, faculty or, for that matter, visitor, was allowed to put one item on the discussion agenda. We then moved through the agenda in order around the table. If we didn’t finish the agenda, the remain items went to the head of the agenda for the next meeting.

Depending on when we held the meeting in the morning or afternoon, we’d prepare and eat a meal together. Hays would search the kitchen for comestibles, point out what was available, and we’d set to work fixing a meal. When it was over, we’d wash the dishes. The shared meal was essential to the group’s functioning.

We accomplished real intellectual work in those meetings, unlike what happened in the graduate seminars I took, which, despite the small class ‘discussion’ format, were primarily opportunities for faculty to expatiate on whatever. I can’t imagine that happening in a Zoom meeting, or some similar online format.

And I certainly cannot imagine the kind of discussions Hays and I subsequently had, after I’d graduated, taking place online. We continued to work together. He’d left Buffalo to live in New York City, so it was easy to travel there from Troy, New York (where I remained after I’d failed to get tenure). We’d talk and talk, often in his apartment. But we’d also go to Fort Tryon Park nearby and chat while walking the park. As you know, peripatetic discussion is an ancient and venerable intellectual tradition. It works.

Our most profound interaction, however, took place when we were all talked out but had not been able to resolve matters. Hays would take a seat in one place, me in another, and we’d each lean back and think. And think. One of us would hazard a remark or a question, we’d have a little discussion, and that it was back to our reveries. When things went well, which happened often enough, but not always, one of us would have an idea that the other could take up. We’d toss the ball back and forth, reach some conclusions, and Hays would sit down at the computer and write up some notes. Then we’d break out the scotch – four fingers worth in a tumbler – and drink while preparing the evening’s meal.

I can’t imagine doing such a thing in a virtual meeting, I don’t care how high the visual resolution, how good the sound, or how fast the internet connection, you just can’t get the highly personal and idiosyncratic interaction that is necessary.

And then there’s music

It seems that I have been a musician all my life. Many of my deepest and most profound experiences, both joyful and, to be honest, a bit terrifying, have happened either while making music or listening to live performances. I will only mention two occasions and then let my band mate Rick Rourke speak.

In the early 1970s I played in a rock bank called St. Matthew Passion. It was out last gig. During the introduction to “She’s Not There” I went blank. The music got more and more intense until Wham! I felt myself dissolve into white light and pure music. It felt good. I thought about that experience for days, weeks, months, and years afterward. I might even say that I’ve never fully ‘recovered’ from that experience. What could ‘recovery’ possibly mean? It changed me.

In 1987 David Hays and I went to hear Miles Davis perform at Avery Fisher Hall in New York’s Lincoln Center. The band was hot, the performance was stunning, and Miles and his band left the audience in grateful shock. “Time After Time” was the strongest song in a set of strong performances. The tempo was slow, very slow, and the dynamics were low, mostly, for there were times when the sound swelled to fill the hall. But the music was so powerful it filled the hall no matter how loud or soft the sound. Even at its softest, which was very soft, Miles’ sound was so intense that you’d think it could suck sound right out of the air. When Miles and the band had finished performing “Time After Time” the audience was completely and actively silent. It took us a few moments to return sufficiently to ourselves so that we could offer up the customary applause.

During the mid-1980s I was a member of The Out of Control Rhythm and Blues Band. We gigged in upstate New York, mostly in Troy, Albany, Schenectady, and Saratoga Springs. We played small clubs and not so small clubs, private parties, weddings, and major concerts (e.g. opening for B.B. King). Here’s a video that Steve Rosenbaum, then of Our Town Television, now Managing Director of NYC Media Lab.

That’s me on trumpet (c. 0:29). We’re playing at The Metro, in Saratoga Springs, one of our regular gigs. A bit later Rick Rourke, who’d been on the road a number of years as a full-time musician, sums it up (c3:19): “It’s the closest you can get to really being feeling totally happy with yourself.”

The closest you can get to really being feeling totally happy with yourself. That’s core experience.

If Andreessen doesn’t understand this, then he has no business talking and writing about the future of internet technology. He may be brilliant, he may be rich, but I fear that he is not wise. He doesn’t understand the limitations of his experience.

I hear he’s a tall man. Perhaps his brain has spent too much time too close to the sun and, like Icarus, he’s falling. Or perhaps he has spent too much time surrounded by people who defer to him because of his wealth and power. Whatever the problem, we cannot allow ourselves follow him and his fellow digerati down that rabbit hole to perdition.