Humanity, Stupidity, and Adversity

“Magnifica Humanitas.” Pope Leo XIV published his first encyclical this week, in which he lays out a theological anthropology and thinks through how this should shape our approach to AI. Stay tuned for a series of responses to this here at FPR: “The twentieth-century Catholic author J.R.R. Tolkien, in the words of a protagonist in one of his novels, described our responsibility in this way: ‘It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.’ The civilization of love will not arise from a single or spectacular gesture, but from the sum total of small and steadfast acts of fidelity that serve as a bulwark against dehumanization. For this reason, it is worthwhile pausing to reflect on some aspects of how we, each in our own way, can cooperate in building the civilization of love. Without presuming to exhaust this theme, I would like to propose five paths toward daily and public responsibility: the need to disarm words, building peace through justice, adopting the perspective of victims, cultivating a healthy realism and reviving dialogue and multilateralism.”

“Searching for God in Silicon Valley.” Avital Balwit, Chief of Staff at Anthropic, turns to G.K. Chesterton to try to make sense of the religious yearnings she finds in those building AI: “People sometimes ask whether the search is in tension with the work. I don’t think so. If anything, the work is what made the search urgent. I do not think religion is merely a tool. If I did, I would not be searching—I would pick it up and use it. I think it might be true, and that whether it is true is worth finding out. I pray. So far no one has answered, or at least not so clearly that my agnostic ears can undeniably hear it. But I am still listening. If there is a God, I hope he is watching San Francisco in the year of our Lord 2026.”

“Stupidity Is the Greatest Sin.” Peter Mommsen articulates the real good that small magazines can accomplish: “It’s exhilarating to see the power of small magazines to draw together an unlikely assortment of thinkers, readers, and doers into the kind of educational communities that Arnold envisioned. A few publications that have been doing this well are The Baffler, Comment, Commonweal, First Things, The Hedgehog Review, Jacobin, The Lamp, Local Culture, Mere Orthodoxy, Mockingbird, The New Atlantis, and The Point. Increasingly, small magazines like these are facilitating local gatherings of their readers in various towns and cities, to build community through face-to-face conversation.”

“This Little Village Is Home to a Conservative Icon’s Estate.” O.W. Root visits the Kirk Center in a small Michigan town: “At first it sounds odd that such a place would be hidden in such a small village that no one really knows. But after a while there it starts to make perfect sense. There is something intellectually centering about the small place. The little woods, the small village, the dining room table with pie and coffee, the quiet library with the low ceilings and tartan carpet. In our era of global connectivity and what appears to be an ever-speeding race to the anti-intellectual bottom, the collection of buildings on Franklin Street in Mecosta is a place of something brighter and crucial.”

“Thomophobia.” Mary Harrington charts the costs of losing scholastic categories, particularly the notion of formal and final causes: “We were all more or less okay without formal or final cause, when it was just stuff out there in the world. We might feel, intuitively, that it’s not quite right that a pig is merely atoms arranged pig-wise, and would not substantially differ (at least in the modern sense of ‘substantially’) were those atoms arranged deli-meat-wise. It’s not us being ­rearranged, at the end of the day. But what happens when the same logic comes for people? Are we just atoms arranged human-wise?” (Recommended by Adam Smith.)

“Children are Apprentices.” Niklas Serning and Nina Lyon propose that “the assiduous removal of hardships” is, in fact, inflicting trauma on children: “They are not upsetting or destabilising – quite the opposite, at least in the short term. They are well-intentioned attempts to make life easier, smoother, less distressing. But they do create adversity in the long run, as part of a pattern of overprotection that leaves children more vulnerable to the rough and tumble of ordinary existence outside the caring bubble of the family home.” (Recommended by Dominic Garzonio.)

“How Ben Sasse Raised Me.” Alex Sasse describes growing up in the Sasse household: “Over the course of my education, I’ve interacted with thousands of students from thousands of different backgrounds and observed a consistent distinguishing factor between kids who are well-adjusted problem-solvers and those who struggle with every hurdle: Did their parents teach them to be contributors, or consumers? Every single day of my childhood, my parents asked the same question at dinner. Not ‘What did you learn?’ but ‘Who did you serve?’”

“The Great Depopulation.” Derek Thompson talks with Jesús Fernández-Villaverde about why birthrates are declining, how this will affect economies, and what a shrinking population will feel like: “Japan right now is around 98 percent ethnically Japanese. If we wanted to keep the population of Japan constant in 200 years through immigration, in 200 years Japan will be 5 percent Japanese and 95 percent non-Japanese. This is not about bringing in a few immigrants. This is about changing your country. That country will not be Japan. You may say, ‘I’m perfectly fine. I’m not attached to the idea of Japan in the abstract.’ But I can see a lot of Japanese say, ‘This is not about being a xenophobe. This is not about being anti-immigrant. This is about not having a country anymore.’”

“If You Let AI Do Your Writing, I Will Come to Your House and Kill You.” Sam Kriss is doing the prosecutor’s work: “I’ve had enough. Which is why, from here on out, if I see you passing off an AI output as your own work, I am going to kill you. I will find out where you live and bash your head in with a crowbar, until the brains you decided not to use are dripping down the walls. This is not a literary device. This is not a comic bit. This is a highly credible real-world threat to do physical harm, punishable in America under 18 USC § 875(c) in the US and in the UK under section 16 of the Offences Against the Person Act.” (Recommended by Jason Peters.)

“American Homeschooling Is as Old as the Nation Itself.” Dixie Dillon Lane traces two competing trends in American education, one that centralizes and one that decentralizes: “The past 75 years, and the past 25 years especially, have not only witnessed this movement toward centralization, but have also been the setting for a tremendous resurgence of home education. That resurgence, in the form of the fascinating and astonishingly diverse practice we know as modern homeschooling, is a movement that demonstrates the staying power of the very old, very long-held American belief in local control and parental determination in education.”