Another medley of short thoughts
Christians and the clock, progressives and teenage pregnancy, AI and the end of the world, and the Tower of Babel America
This is definitely a post some may disagree with in part or in whole. I would actually love your comment if that is you.
Christians serving the clock
To make a related comment really about how we work, I have noticed that many Christian institutions also “serve the clock” in how we run ourselves, because we believe that to do otherwise would be a mark of laziness, and we correctly don’t want to be lazy people. But we might ponder if, in doing so, we are really buying in to yesterday’s worldliness. Conservatism sometimes does mean clinging to yesterday’s mistake even as we resist tomorrow’s. Ideally we’d reject both of course.
Let me give you two examples of how my thinking has changed with age. One, I have increasing sympathy for the idea that many Americans actually work too much (although it is “too much” because of what our work environments look like.) I was listening to Andrew Heaton’s podcast recently, and he talks about visiting Eastern Europe, and about how some folks there look at the US and Britain and see a people who work an absurd number of hours. Why, when would you ever see family and friends if you work that many hours? Heaton said that the US imagines itself to be a family-centric culture - no, we are actually are work-centric culture. Is that we want? (And again, it would not be so much of a concern except that the work many people do isolates them from family completely for a substantial fraction of their life. That is at least somewhat a post-industrialization development in human history.)
Second, as this applies to schooling… I have also come to think that maybe we formally school children for too many hours as well. Perhaps like you, I probably used to mock the public schools for closing when just a little snow fell - “lazy bums!” - and maybe that is part of it for them. But lately I tend to think… get a decent snowfall, let the children play. That’s a good thing for them too. And similarly I think my present students are pleased that I don’t assign very much homework. I’ve said before that Carl Trueman mentioned last ACCS meeting that one of the struggles of young people today is that they don’t know what friendship is supposed to look like1, and one of the reasons they struggle to know what friendship is supposed to look like is because we schedule their time from sunrise to sunset and they don’t have time to just be friends with people. So let’s leave some time for friendship.
Babies and forgiveness
I think this is probably true (especially the part about progressives now being more horrified by teenage pregnancy than conservative Christians). Christians would have an initial “well you shouldn’t have done that” response that very quickly moves into “but it’s still a miracle and a gift, let’s love you and the baby”. (Our concern about people not having children period probably does also reduce our emotional opposition to teenagers having children, frankly.) On the flip side, I would hardly be the first person to notice that when you sin against progressive ideology, there is no forgiveness for you, not ever. (Didn’t get vaccinated and then got sick, for example? There is only more scorn for you.)
The filthy public domain
This is a concern I have become more sensitive too now having a daughter… which does make you wonder to what extent “the people who make the content and/or rules don’t have any children themselves” explains this change. Yeah, you could be accidentally exposed to filth almost anywhere now.
Give you one more strange comment here - the university dining hall near our home (where we sometimes have dinner, yes) recently stopped having trays to carry your plates and cups as part of some kind of eco-measure. Well, that does make it harder on you if you’re also trying to escort a kid around and help them. Probably they didn’t even think about that. Kids are often an afterthought or neverthought in the modern US.
It doesn’t have to end the world to be reckless
The Bankless podcast had an interesting interview recently with a guy who thinks AI is literally going to result in the extinction of the human race. He paralleled it to nuclear weapons in a sense (potential to end all human life), except that it was always obvious to everyone that nuclear weapons were tremendously dangerous. The CEOs paying for AI just see it as a gold-producing machine, and it will continue to be a gold-producing machine until (in the guest's opinion) it becomes powerful enough to extinguish the human race. He also paralleled it to laundry detergent - here is a very helpful thing in limited doses, but imagine if you knew that, if enough laundry detergent were gathered in one place (and the parallel is to GPU computing power), it would destroy the planet. Good luck gaining a hearing (“don’t you understand Gain is dangerous!”).
But you needn’t be apocalyptic to be concerned, it can also just be a matter of “we are rapidly deploying software we do not understand, and it’s going to write stuff that sounds very convincing, and a fair amount of that stuff is going to be nonsense or actively harmful”. The chatbot that really just wants my phone number so it can send me a reminder about my dentist appointment, very little threat there. The “I will talk to you about literally anything” bot, well…
Babel America
And finally, tweets that make you raise an eyebrow.
The particular context was two girls who find they have affection for each other, and therefore conclude they must be lesbians, because that is the only framework the world has given them for understanding affection. True and serious friendship is not something the world teaches them.
As it happens, I just the other day read an essay by N.S. Lyons about C.S. Lewis ('The Abolition of Man') and a number of people who are called 'transhumanists' (but from months ago)-- I guess I had seen the term before but hadn't paid any attention. Good Lord, those people are seriously anticipating the day when human beings disappear altogether, replaced by what I guess is meant by 'AI': it was briefly frightening. It puts the 'anti-natalists' and associated nonsense into a different perspective.
[https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/a-prophecy-of-evil-tolkien-lewis]
Two thoughts on the "babies and forgiveness" section:
- In general, as I have heard a psychologist say, male perversion is in the domain of sexual activity, and female perversion is in the domain of reproduction. Is the "new puritanism" correlated with society becoming more female-centered?
- This "new puritanism" seems to me to be a relatively recent phenomenon. I am thinking of the "Saved!" movie of 2004, in which Christians were portrayed as the bigots, and the all-inclusive diverse crowd welcomed the pregnant teenager.