This is a fascinating story in The Atlantic on the scholarship (and, inevitably, politics) of “experiential relativity” — the hypothesis that human emotional and affective experience differs dramatically, perhaps almost incommensurably, between times and places, and that only in globalized Enlightened modernity do we take for granted that, say, “sadness” or “pain” is the same everywhere and always. (Indeed, something like this is a core presupposition of globalized Enlightened modernity.) Two notes:
Gal Beckerman does pretty well, I think, with the philosophical and historical issues at play, but there is at least one howler: “The universalism that Boddice [the profiled scholar] mistrusts is a relatively new concept in human history. It comes to us from the Enlightenment. The presumption that all people share a common nature was dreamed up by European intellectuals sitting in their salons.” No, this presumption most proximately comes to us from the New Testament, interpreting the Old Testament datum of humanity created “in God’s image” (Gen. 1:26) by way of the classical humanism expressed in, say, Terence’s dictum, as “God hath made of one blood all the nations of the earth” (Acts 17:26). Yes, there is a signature Enlightenment refraction of this. No, they did not “dream it up.”
One wonders what the late Alasdair MacIntyre, with his interest in the incommensurability of traditions, would have made of this.
In Exodus 33:12–13, Moses famously pleads with the LORD to not abandon Israel after her apostasy with the golden calf — but he pleads in a curious manner:
See, you say to me, ‘Bring up this people,’ but you have not let me know whom you will send with me. Yet you have said, ‘I know you by name, and you have also found favor in my sight.’ Now therefore, if I have found favor in your sight, please show me now your ways, that I may know you in order to find favor in your sight. Consider too that this nation is your people.
And what are the LORD’s ways, which he grants that he will show Moses? Verse 14: “My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.”
But Psalm 95 reveals the consequence of the wilderness generation hardening their hearts when the LORD’s presence is among them:
For forty years I loathed that generation and said, ‘They are a people who go astray in their heart, and they have not known my ways.’ Therefore I swore in my wrath, ‘They shall not enter my rest.’
There remains, then, a rest for the people of God — as the writer to the Hebrews remarks; a rest into which the wilderness generation failed to enter, but (as he infers from the later composition of the Psalm) which further generations also did not achieve. The LORD is the rest-giver, and that rest comes with His presence.
So it is striking to turn to St. Matthew’s Gospel and reread those well-loved words of Christ: “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”
If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and, though they discipline him, will not listen to them, then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his city at the gate of the place where he lives, and they shall say to the elders of his city, ‘This our son is stubborn and rebellious; he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton and a drunkard.’ Then all the men of the city shall stone him to death with stones. So you shall purge the evil from your midst, and all Israel shall hear, and fear.
— Deuteronomy 21:18–21
“To what then shall I compare the people of this generation, and what are they like? They are like children sitting in the marketplace and calling to one another, ‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge, and you did not weep.’ For John the Baptist has come eating no bread and drinking no wine, and you say, ‘He has a demon.’ The Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, ‘Look at him! A glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ Yet wisdom is vindicated by all her children.”
— Luke 7:31–35
And… the very next passage in Deuteronomy is the law of the hanged man, quoted by St. Paul in Galatians 3.
The superscription of Psalm 51 links that most famous and gut-wrenching of repentance Psalms directly to David’s sin concerning Bathsheba and Uriah. Verses 1–17 are relentlessly first-person singular, with one English translation containing thirty-two instances of I, me, my, and so forth. Verse 4, “Against you, you only, have I sinned, and done what is evil in your sight” — a stumbling block for contemporary readers, who are here inclined to wonder, “Hasn’t David sinned against Bathsheba and Uriah, too?” — represents a radical narrowing of focus such that David’s sin is, at least for the moment of this Psalm, entirely viewed from within a single I-Thou relation. David reflects that God “will not be delighted in sacrifice, or I would give it; you will not be pleased with a burnt offering.” Rather, “a broken and a contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.” (He has learned well the lesson which his predecessor failed to grasp.)
Then the Psalm concludes on a completely different note, seemingly in a completely different voice: “Do good to Zion in your good pleasure; build up the walls of Jerusalem; then will you delight in right sacrifices, in burnt offerings and whole burnt offerings; then bulls will be offered on your altar.” What is the deal?
I am not usually one for speculative text-critical historical reconstructions, but in this case these last two verses (18–19 in ETs) sure seem like a later supplementation to an originally shorter text. And if that is the case, it must be said that the editors have not tried very hard to disguise the addition. There is no attempt to inhabit David’s point of view, or even make many explicit verbal links. Indeed, the underlying plot of the appendix seems quite different than the underlying plot of the main Psalm. So one wonders if the discontinuity is, in fact, the point. The “seam” in the text draws the attentive reader’s eye, and sets him or her thinking on how one tragic situation — David’s adultery with (and abuse of power over) Bathsheba, compounded by his murder of Uriah — may illustrate, elucidate, or analogize the situation of Israel’s idolatry and subsequent destruction. One might hear, in the plea to “build up the walls of Jerusalem,” an echo of the post-exilic situation of Ezra and Nehemiah, in which right sacrifices have long ceased because the Temple and the walls have been destroyed. I imagine there are many fruitful connections to draw.
This leads me to one further point of canonical interest. Many of the Prophets (Hosea, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel in particular) develop the metaphor of Israel as God’s unfaithful wife, with the exile coming as long-overdue punishment for her adultery. If I am right that in the appendix to Psalm 51 we are to hear a correlation with the exile, with David standing for sinful and punished Israel, this is one of the only examples I can think of in which the Biblical commentary on the exile flips that gendered dynamic. Instead of a (variously) promiscuous or easily-seduced woman, Israel is here cast as — in the person of David — an abusive, murderous man.
Note: Hand over heart, I substantially drafted this post — including its core conceit — long before reading Josh Brake’s latest Substack post. No plagiarism here!
I have two sorts of problems with “AI” in general and Large Language Models (LLMs) in particular. One is the (infinitely ramifying) ethical problem. LLMs are built on deception. They are not human (and not “alive”), do not possess human cognitive faculties, and cannot “know” anything in the ordinary human sense of that word, and yet their model is built on — after vacuuming up an enormous amount of human-created linguistic “content” — mimicking human cognition and knowledge to such an effective degree that you spend all your time relying on GPT-4o or what have you, rather than other human beings. I take this to be a fairly straightforward form of deception, and because of the incommensurability of truth and falsehood, this first problem to be the most fundamental. What does constantly being deceived, and constantly self-deceiving, do to a human being? In what ways are we damaging, and might further damage, ourselves by using such a false tool? (See also: Mammon.) But that’s for another post.
The principles of scientific forestry [TC: planting a single “crop,” in evenly-spaced rectangular grids, in place of the old ecologically diverse forests] were applied as rigorously as was practicable to most large German forests throughout much of the nineteenth century. The Norway spruce… became the bread-and-butter tree of commercial forestry. Originally [it] was seen as a restoration crop that might revive overexploited mixed forests, but the commercial profits from the first rotation were so stunning that there was little effort to return to mixed forests… Diverse old-growth forests, about three-fourths of which were broadleaf (deciduous) species, were replaced by largely coniferous forests in which Norway spruce or Scotch pine were the dominant or often only species. In the short run, this experiment in the radical simplification of the forest to a single commodity was a resounding success… the negative biological and ultimately commercial consequences of the stripped-down forest became painfully obvious only after the second rotation of conifers had been planted… An exceptionally complex process involving soil building, nutrient uptake, and symbiotic relations among fungi, insects, mammals, and flora—which were, and still are, not entirely understood—was apparently disrupted, with serious consequences. Most of these consequences can be traced to the radical simplicity of the scientific forest. … Apparently the first rotation of Norway spruce had grown exceptionally well in large part because it was living off (or mining) the long-accumulated soil capital of the diverse old-growth forest that it had replaced. Once that capital was depleted, the steep decline in growth rates began.
To apply the analogy: Maybe, just maybe, you can implement LLMs without too many problems in the first generation, among a population of adults who have already been educated. Their values have already been formed; they have already learned to read and write and think critically. (This already concedes far too much to the “AI” boosters, but for the sake of the argument, we will not pause overlong.) Perhaps they really could achieve the stunning productivity growth which we are constantly promised (though so far the results don’t seem great!). But even if that were true, can you expect those gains in the second generation, among children who are still being educated? Or would you rather expect systemic failure to ever form values, to learn critical thinking, essential reading comprehension, and basic writing skills? The adults who received pre-LLM educations have an existing store of cognitive and intellectual capital on which to draw as they encounter and learn to use LLMs. But children who never experience education without LLMs will never have the chance to develop that capital.
Furthermore, the broader environment in which this “first rotation” is encountering LLMs is not remotely the same as that in which the “second rotation” will encounter them. Indeed, the environments are being treated as if they are the same, when they should be different. My local school district is now integrating “AI” into primary and secondary education, because “universities and employers will expect AI literacy” — what tool is easier to learn to use than a natural language chatbot? Now, the workplace may appropriately demand certain kinds of efficiency from adult workers, and LLMs may just prove their usefulness in such cases (though in my view the jury is still out). Education, by contrast, should be inefficient, frictional, resistive. The mind is like a muscle: in order to grow, it must be repeatedly stretched to the limits of its capacity. The LLM chatbot is the ultimate anti-friction, super-efficient (except in, you know, water and energy) machine, which promises that you will never encounter resistance ever again; with the new “reasoning” modules, you’ll never have to think for yourself again. The implications for education hardly need to be spelled out.
Scott continues:
As pioneers in scientific forestry, the Germans also became pioneers in recognizing and attempting to remedy many of its undesirable consequences. To this end, they invented the science of what they called “forest hygiene.” In place of hollow trees that had been home to woodpeckers, owls, and other tree-nesting birds, the foresters provided specially designed boxes. Ant colonies were artificially raised and implanted in the forest, their nests tended by local schoolchildren. Several species of spiders, which had disappeared from the monocropped forest, were reintroduced. What is striking about these endeavors is that they are attempts to work around an impoverished habitat still planted with a single species of conifers for production purposes. In this case, “restoration forestry” attempted with mixed results to create a virtual ecology, while denying its chief sustaining condition: diversity.
I leave the resonances between this virtualized ecology and the state of education today as a trivial exercise for the reader.
(Scott’s remarks here of course have many parallels. Ivan Illich makes a remarkably analogous argument, with respect to medicine, in the opening of Tools for Conviviality; and Michael Polanyi offers a structurally similar observation about the Enlightenment “critical movement” that sought to banish belief from knowledge: “its incandescence had fed on the combustion of the Christian heritage in the oxygen of Greek rationalism, and when this fuel was exhausted the critical framework itself burnt away.”)
The first sequence of feasts in Leviticus 23 — Passover/Unleavened Bread (vv. 4–8), Firstfruits Offering (vv. 9–14), and Weeks (vv. 15–21) — maps to the sequence of Christological events from Passion through Resurrection to Pentecost. The Gospels, and St. Paul (1 Cor. 5), of course spell out the Passover/Passion connection. But what I hadn’t noticed before is the Firstfruits Offering. This offering, less familiar perhaps than Passover and Unleavened Bread, is a wave offering of a single sheaf of the firstfruits (probably of the barley harvest) “that you may be accepted” (v. 11), and accompanied by an ascension offering of a male lamb a year old with (unleavened, of course) bread and wine (vv. 12–13). No bread may be consumed before this offering is brought (v. 14). And this offering takes place on “the day after the Sabbath” (v. 11) during Unleavened Bread: that is, on the first day of the week. On Resurrection Day — well, Christ rises as the firstfruits of those that had fallen asleep. Meanwhile, Weeks marks the ingathering of the firstfruits of the (probably wheat) harvest, seven weeks later; at Pentecost, the Spirit descends to gather in the firstfruits of the Church, harvested from all nations.
Is St. John the Evangelist subtly hinting that he was present at the very beginning of Christ’s ministry in John 1? John the Baptizer is “standing with two of his disciples” (v. 35) when the Lamb of God walks by, and the two follow Jesus. One is Andrew, the brother of Peter (v. 40), but the other goes unnamed. Is this the Evangelist? If so, it helps make sense of some of the curious features of John 1. The dramatic action of the gospel begins with the Baptizer’s confrontation with the Pharisees’ emissaries, which one of his disciples would have been well-positioned to observe. But perhaps more significantly, the Prologue — otherwise a carefully crafted poem about the Logos who was in the beginning with God, who was and is Light and Life, who came into the world and became flesh to dwell among us — contains two prima facie odd interjections about John the Baptizer: that he was sent from God as a witness about the light, but was not the Light himself (vv. 6–8), and a part of that testimony about the Light’s preeminence (v. 15). If the Evangelist initially had a life-altering encounter with the Baptizer such that he became one of his disciples, then subsequently encountered Jesus of Nazareth and was sent to follow him at the Baptizer’s behest — this all makes sense of why, in his old age, as he was giving final shape to his own testimony that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, he and his followers still could not do without the Baptizer’s testimony. (There is also a point about the historical particularity of the Word becoming flesh: remove the specifics of John the Baptizer that intrude upon the Prologue, and it could resemble a passage of Platonic speculative theology.)
The question is still haunting me: Why is there no New Covenantal analogue to the Feast of Booths? Is it because the temporary dwellings and tabernacles and temples of the Old Covenant, made by human hands, have received their fulfillment in the Word who became flesh and tabernacled among us, the new Temple not made by human hands?
The Gospel always says: Yes, then No, and then Yes again — and Amen.
Yes. Christ wants you: you, exactly as you are, as who and what you are. What Christ wants is no less than everything you are and have. He wants the whole of you because He loves you: He loves you because He made you, and He made you because He loves you. There is nothing in you that prevents you from coming to Him. There is no better or worse time, no more or less fitting state. Whenever it is called “Today,” if you hear His voice, the command is the same: “Follow Me.”
No. What this means is that when you come, you cannot offer anything more than the whole of yourself, in simple, complete, and undivided submission. You contribute nothing yourself, for what do you have that you did not receive? No part of what you now are is worthy as it is. Nothing can remain unchanged about your life or within your being. There is no power within you, no performance you could deliver, no height of virtue you could reach, which could make up the difference between what you are and what you would need to be: it is not a finite quantitative lack, but an infinite qualitative difference.
Yes — and Amen. When you offer nothing less and more than the whole of yourself, Christ Himself will make you what you ought to be. He takes your sin and gives you his righteousness; he takes your heart of stone and gives in its place a heart of flesh. He removes the veil from your sight and teaches you the true spiritual law. He will instruct you in the way you should go, shine His lamp upon your path, and give strength to your weary feet. He will at first perfect your feeble efforts at obedience and in time give you full power to do His will. Only then you will know what it is to say, with the Apostle, “Indeed, I worked harder than anyone: yet not I, but the grace of God working within me.”
Subject for further reflection: Christ’s encounter with His two disciples on the road to Emmaus gives the paradigm for our worship. First, as they walk, Christ expounds Moses and the Prophets, “opening their minds” to understand how the Scriptures show it necessary “that the Christ should first suffer and then enter into glory.” Then, as they sit down to supper (“Stay with us!”), the Lord “opens their eyes” in blessing and breaking the bread, and they learn Who it was that unfolded the Scriptures to them: “Did not our hearts burn within us…?” The order is always thus: Hearing ushers us on to seeing; the Word guides us to the Table; the Scripture prepares us for Eucharist.
Questions the “historical method” might ask about the “laws of leprosy” in Leviticus 13–14: What was this disease, actually? The same as what we know as “leprosy” today or different? Multiple diseases? Surely the same pathogen does not affect humans and garments and structures — are these different sorts of molds? What is the cultural logic of hygiene that generates these regulations?
Questions a literary-theological approach might ask: Why is the leper who is “covered head to toe” in his disease pronounced clean? Why must the unclean leper dwell outside the camp? Why are the defilements of skin, fabric, and structure all referred to as “leprosy”? Why is the cleansing of leprosy accomplished through a sin offering and a burnt offering? What exactly is being “cleansed”? Why does it require a full-body shaving? What are the analogies between humans and houses? The significance of clean garments? How can one make atonement for a house?