That Hideous Strength: The contrast of the enormous cosmic battleground filled with fantastic players against the extraordinarily ordinary humanity of Mark’s decision emphasizes the importance and beauty of humanity. This is the point C.S. Lewis wanted to make: that humanity is something too important and too beautiful to let “scientific progress” destroy.
Yesterday, Ace posted this piece, parts of which are remarkably reminiscent of themes in an 80-year-old book by C.S. Lewis:
"AI" Is Not the Future I Was Promised. Kind of the Opposite, Actually.
I came across this a couple of weeks ago: A woman on reddit asked "does using AI (as a fake "boyfriend") make you want to date men less?
Love and marriage are themes of Lewis' book.
Late last year, a woman sued the company who made a chatbot which she claimed encouraged her son to commit suicide.
Who needs humans?
If you missed Ace's piece or want read the whole thing to see if it really fits in with C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy, remember not to comment on old threads. Ace's piece is full of examples of unsuccessful uses of AI, and some successful uses. What are your plans for using this technology?
An aside while we're on the subject of chatbots,
Think about the tragic mistake we made by allowing social media to embed itself so deeply into childhood. We're about to make the same mistake, much faster, with chatbots for young children. Let's press pause.
Once again, we are talking about assigning chatbot tutors to kids and even babies here. The babies seem to love it most of the time. This alarms me. How about you? Who programs these chatbots for babies?
Two books that have turned eighty years old
That Hideous Strength
Below, an M.D. recommends a video from three years ago in which Andrew Klavan discusses his reactions to reading That Hideous Strength. More than a book review - - it includes thoughts about the death of European civilization at the end of World War II, "the greatest civilization ever to exist on the face of the planet", and mentions interesting literary developments during and after the great wars. (Reading list tips for regular Reading Thread participants are plentiful). Dedicated readers might also want to pick up a print copy of this book, as the C.S. Lewis estate is making noises suggesting they may not publish it again, partly due to "gender issues".
That Hideous Strength is the last book in C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy. Klavan describes the Space Trilogy as part of the Christian-themed literature produced around the end of WWII which was a response to some of the fiction of H.G. Wells and others, expressing the ideas of "Scientism", or the idea that science is the way to truth, "or as we call it today, Fauci" is the way to truth . . .
About the time Andrew Klavan was creating the video above, Walter Kirn wrote this about Artificial Intelligence:
and he has connected it to That Hideous Strenght.
CS Lewis believed that we write not to explain things, but to understand things. The writer goes to the blank page to crack a puzzle that matters to him. This is why streaming slop and AI art feel so empty: there is no artist behind the scenes trying to figure something out
You can hear Walter Kirn and Matt Taibbi discuss the book here starting at about 1 hour and 45 minutes, If you're okay with some plot reveals from the book.
Animal Farm
That Hideous Strength is more usually associated with 1984 and Brave New World than with Animal Farm, which was published closer in time to it. I have never really thought about the fact that Animal Farm came out around the end of WW II, when Stalin was maybe still sort of our "friend".
Daniel Greenfield: The book that the Communists wanted to kill is more relevant than ever.
No conservative critic of the Left could summon the sense of outraged betrayal that Orwell, a socialist, brought to his attacks on the Communist perversion of his ideals and in the process, he created witty biting anti-slogans such as “Four Legs Good, Two Legs Better”, “War is Peace” and “Freedom is Slavery”. All of those satirical anti-slogans remain more relevant than ever even long after the passing of the USSR because the reality in front of our eyes is constantly in conflict with the ideological mass propaganda being presented to us by our version of the party.
The 80th anniversary of the publication of Animal Farm passed almost without notice on college campuses where Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto is the most assigned political work and in a culture where ‘Equity’ took the book’s sardonic corruption of equality from satire to reality.
Orwell, a fierce opponent of the Soviet Union, had his journalism relentlessly censored by British Communists and their fellow travelers, forcing him to resort to fiction, first Animal Farm and then 1984. The direct inspiration for Animal Farm had come from ‘The Adventures of the Little Pig’ a pre-war children’s book published by the ‘Left Book Club’ to indoctrinate children into anti-capitalism as the little pig grapples with various threats embodying rapacious capitalism.
The Adventures of the Little Pig!
Weekend
To be honest, most of this week’s news was pretty bleak. The positive highlight was probably Taylor Swift’s and Travis Kelce’s engagement, but somehow that didn’t lead to a lot of memes. Beyond that, the news featured vigorous attempts by the dishonest press to blame the victims (the U.K.) or inanimate objects (the U.S.). But I don’t think many were fooled.
So it may be a little somber, but nevertheless, herewith The Week In Pictures:
Music
Hope you have something nice planned for this weekend.
This is the Thread before the Gardening Thread.
Last week's thread, August 23, You can think about the future riding on Amtrak in California
Comments are closed so you won't ban yourself by trying to comment on a week-old thread. But don't try it anyway.