Thoughts on Berry (Autobiographical and Otherwise)

I

Wendell Berry—Kentuckian, farmer, poet, novelist, environmentalist, pacifist, patriot, Christian, agrarian, and to my mind most importantly, essayistic thinker about all of the above—passed away at the age of 92 on August 31. Writing about those thinkers who have influenced me upon their passing is a long-standing (and long-winded) blog tradition of mine, but when it comes to Berry, I cannot reflect solely upon what learned from his thoughts; rather, I have to reflect upon how his writing of those thoughts came, over the decades, to be inscribed in important ways upon not only my own thinking, but my own sense of self. So this reflection is not simply about Berry, but about my reading of him, and where that reading led me, and how I carried it with me when I was being led otherwise.

II

During the 57 years when my life on earth overlapped with his, I had the opportunity to actually talk with Berry only once, at a Front Porch Conference in Louisville, KY, in 2019. I stood in line, while Berry—then 85 years old—graciously sat and waited on us all, wanting to grant to as many as possible the opportunity to look into his eyes, shake his hand, thank him for his inspiring writings and his prophetic example, and perhaps engage him in some idea or question. The photo of my meeting with Berry suggests that I was attempting the latter, but if I did, I have no memory of what I asked or what he said in reply. But in at least one crucial sense, the content of our brief exchange really doesn’t matter.

As I would hope any open-minded reader of Berry’s careful and weighty words would realize, for him the proper end of any relationship among or communication between people ought to be wholeness. Our work, our associations, our lives ought to serve to critique, and help create conditions wherein as many as possible may overcome, the competitive divisions which surround and hurt us: as he described them at the end of his magisterial The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture, “industrial uniformity” schools us to believe that “competition invariably results in the triumph of the best,” with the result that “body and soul, man and woman, producer and consumer, nature and technology, city and country are thrown into competition with each other,” a divisiveness which can only end with “the exhaustion of both.” The key to any such critique and overcoming of this imposed competition is, very simply, affection: to attend to, to learn from and listen to, to care for, the other; to “look and see” (as the poetic documentary of Berry’s life was titled) all that which is around us, in all its particularity and locality. Thus to simply be in the presence of one another, to treat them as part of one’s whole, is at least as important, and far more comforting, than whatever it is we may tangibly present to one another while sharing that presence. (And that “one another” is not restricted solely to the human, of course.)

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

(“The Peace of Wild Things,” 1968)

III

I think I first became aware of Wendell Berry thanks to Phillip Lopate’s 1994 collection The Art of the Personal Essay, which I still have an original copy of sitting on our bookshelves at home, and in which Lopate included Berry’s essay, “An Entrance of the Woods.” At that time in my life—newly married, newly graduated from Brigham Young University, partly shaking off and partly re-constituting the political and religious conservatism which I’d been raised within and which the Utah Mormon culture of BYU made mostly normative, all while working at a newspaper and a Sears call center and trying to decide between journalism or academia as a career—I loved nothing more than personal essays. I’d tried my hand at that form a few times in student publications; my voice was a pretentious one, but I hoped if I read more and wrote more, I’d improve. (That hope has probably not been entirely fulfilled.)

I especially loved essays that presented writers encountering nature—though the red rocks and desert canyons of the Colorado Plateau and the La Sal mountain range never moved me as they did other famed regional writers like Edward Abbey (whose Desert Solitaire I was ambivalent about) or Terry Tempest Williams (whose then-new book Refuge I admittedly adored). The previous summer I had interned in Washington DC, and while driving out there, after visiting my fiancé and her family in Michigan, I had passed through some hilly farmland in south-central Pennsylvania, with red barns nestled among wooded hills and small streams, and I thought I’d never seen anything so beautiful. I don’t think I made the agrarian connection then—I’d grown up surrounded by wheat and alfalfa fields in Spokane, Washington, hauling hay bales and milking cows by hand, but it would be another decade, more or less, before I began to intellectually reconnect with that learning. Still, I know that Berry’s simple description of a weekend he spent in the Kentucky woods, sometime around 1970, passing under beech and poplar trees and through thickets of ferns and rhododendron, listening to the hoots of nuthatches and the buzzing of insects, planted a seed in my mind which never left.

Lopate, in his introduction to the essay, called Berry’s writing “upright,” “Puritanical,” and “Biblical”; “he rarely shows humor,” he added, “or even irony; but then, saints are rarely funny, and Wendell Berry, in his lifelong efforts to protect the earth’s ecological balance, is something of a saint.” I think I always was, and still am, too doubtful to manage much sternness myself. But perhaps that is one reason why Berry’s words stuck fast.

[I]t has seemed to me for years now that the doings of men no longer occur within nature, but that the natural places which the human economy has so far spared now survive almost accidentally within the doings of men. This wilderness of the Red River now carries on its ancient processes within the human climate of war and waste and confusion. And I know that the distant roar of engines, though it may seem only to be passing through this wilderness, is really bearing down upon it….No. Even here where the economy of life is really an economy—where the creation is yet fully alive and continuous and self-enriching, where whatever dies enters directly into the life of the living—even here one cannot fully escape the sense of an impending human catastrophe.

(“An Entrance to the Woods,” 1971)

IV

In the years that immediately followed that first exposure to Bery, I read fewer essays by him. Actually, I just read fewer personal essays in general; I had chosen the academic route, and so was mostly reading those scholars that my discipline (political philosophy) had canonized, writers and thinkers whose primary goal was to try to understand and express the insights of their research and the research of others—the texts, the surveys, the data both anecdotal and analytic. Whereas the essayist, on the other hand, is trying to understand and express themselves, and only through their own thinking struggle with the world around them. A graduate education in the social sciences and the humanities forms one to be always conscious of the interpretability, the unfolding character, of research; no one, by definition, can have an entirely definitive take on any given argument or idea. Hence there is a suspicion—or at least there was in the teaching I internalized during those years—of the essayist, of the first-person voice, of any attempt to overcome specialization with a sweeping conclusion, whether humbly or sternly expressed.

So it perhaps was predictable that it wasn’t until I was finished with my PhD and was leading my family on a difficult sojourn through different universities—a journey that in our case took us entirely to various small towns and cities, one year in northern Mississippi, three years in northeastern Arkansas, another year in west-central Illinois, always with the looming fear that I’d made a poor choice and that years of higher education would lead to endless wandering rather than a place where we could put down roots, raise our children, and be part of a community (and those words themselves reveal how much I was already disposed towards Berry’s most fundamental concerns)—that I started reading Berry’s introspective, searching essays again, this time with somewhat different eyes. My education in political ideas—the philosophical communitarianism of the ancient Confucians, the German romantics, and Charles Taylor; the democratic republicanism of the Anti-Federalists, the American Populists, and Sheldon Wolin; the Christian egalitarianism of the radical Reformation, Catholic social justice teaching, and John Milbank—took on a different hue as I would ride walk or my bike to campus (financially, we always had to be, and remain today, a one-car family), past cheap suburban developments, past stands of loblolly pines or sugar maples, past fields of rice or soybeans, all while thinking about Berry’s words, and their unflashy, relentless insistence upon humble, local, ecological, agrarian truths. My professional and personal sense of my own vocation and person shifted, and then shifted again, during these years; Berry’s writings were hardly alone in shaping me during the early to mid-2000s, but his influence on my development at that time was far from the least consequential factor.

The collection of Berry’s essays that I have probably gone back to the most in the two decades since that time of re-engagement is almost certainly Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community. I probably first picked it up in 2002 or 2003. Berry’s introspective—but never solipsistic—application of a Christian and agrarian localism in this volume to hard questions about urbanism, sexual mores, international trade, pacifism, environmental policy, and Biblical interpretation makes it, I think, one of the most influential statements of his overall worldview. Interestingly though, I have to say that the essay from this volume that arrested me most when I first read it was on a topic which nominally had the least of any of them to do with any personal or professional thinking I was doing at the time, or have since: “The Problem of Tobacco.”

I’ve never smoked and have no real sense of smoking’s appeal. This is primarily a result of my religious commitments as a Mormon, but it’s not only that; I’ve never drank coffee either, yet as long as I can remember I’ve found the aroma of coffee quite pleasant, so it’s not as though I’m incapable of recognizing the value of something I’m outside of. (One of my fondest memories from the summer of 1999 when my wife and I and our oldest daughter, then just three years old, were living in Germany while I worked on my dissertation was a sunny day spent wandering in the city of Mainz, during which we came upon a biergarten in a park, one filled with jovial Saturday imbibers, and decided to order some apple juice and settle in; I knew full well that a teetotaler like myself could never fully partake of their social camaraderie, but I could enjoy and appreciate its virtues all the same.) Still, for a religiously committed opponent of tobacco to find insight in an elegiac argument over the necessary passing of the productive—if poisonous—world of tobacco farming that was central to Berry’s whole history was, if nothing else, strange.

Yet I found insight aplenty in the essay nonetheless. Through his imagined dialogue between himself—a tobacco farmer who has given up smoking and was looking to eliminate that indefensibly addictive and unhealthy crop from his livelihood while still holding on to policies and practices which would enable traditionally tobacco-dependent Kentucky farming communities to survive on their own terms—and an opponent of the crop—one who, like most of those (myself definitely included) that routinely fall into fierce opposition to (or, sometimes, enthusiastic embrace of) any number of scientific or social phenomena without any tactile knowledge of the local world which that phenomena impacts or within which it is nestled, had given no thought whatsoever as to what is to become of tobacco farmers—Berry modeled for me not only how one should engage with those whose actions seem morally appalling, but also spelled out practical examples of what trying to bring localist and agrarian sensibilities into contemporary disputes ought to involve (collective decision-making, fierce market resistance, small-scale democracy, ecological humility, economic and social justice, and more). The fact that, as I later realized, the essay also anticipated the self-destructive political anger of its author’s own people 30 years before it came to irrational fruition was simply icing on the cake:

“I see you are still clinging to the idea of an agricultural economy of diversified small farms that produce for local markets and local consumers.”

“Yes, I’m still clinging to it. I want people to eat. I want them to have, as dependably as possible, a local supply of good food. I want their food budget to support a thriving population of local farmers. That way, the land will thrive.”

“And you see the tobacco farmers as necessary to that?”

“I see all farmers—all that are left and, I hope, some more—as necessary to that. Tobacco farmers are farmers and among the best of them; their know-how is a great public asset, if the public only recognized it. They are farming some very good land. They should be growing food for the people of their region, the people of neighboring cities—or they should have a viable choice of doing so. The people who so eagerly condemn them for growing tobacco should be just as eager to help them find alternative crops. It is wrong to condemn people for doing a thing and then offer no alternative but failure. A person could get mad about that.”

(“The Problem of Tobacco,” 1991)

V

In 2006, through some combination of perseverance and God’s grace and random luck, we found ourselves a home at last—Friends University, a small Christian liberal arts college in Wichita, Kansas, where we’ve lived ever since. Save for one visit to Friends’s surprisingly (to me) wooded campus just west of the city’s downtown for an interview, I had no personal knowledge of Kansas before moving here; I’d only ever driven across it on I-70. My assumption upon arrival was more formed by Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie (a book and series worth revisiting, I later decided) than any actual data; I assumed the majority of my students would be arriving with rural backgrounds, or at least from agriculturally connected families and communities. That assumption was, it turned out, wrong more often than not.

While there were (and still sometimes are) notable exceptions, the Friends University student body was, and has become more so over the two decades I’ve taught here, every bit as disconnected from and specialized away from the communal and agrarian aspects of American life as that of any other group of 21^st-century suburban Americans. So within a few years of my arrival, I began to strive to make more whole what I was teaching, what I was reading, the life I and my family were living, and the environment we were part of—specifically the city of Wichita, a surprisingly (again, to me) diverse mittelpolitan region of middle-size, a slow- (or barely) growing city that stands unconnected as the regional center of south-central Kansas, dependent upon industries that it has very little financial ability to prevent being taken advantage by, and surrounded by fields of sunflowers and grain sorghum, by nestled gullies crowded with Osage orange and black locust, and by long, flat, bike-friendly horizons of, as John Denver sang, windy wheatfields of gold under blue summer skies. With all this in mind, I started to innovate beyond the courses in American government, comparative politics, and constitutional law I’d been hired to teach.

I assigned students chapters from Berry’s The Unsettling of America and Citizenship Papers as part of inquiries into the history of government policies regarding conservation, nutrition, and health; I started taking students on trips to visit with farmers, ranchers, butchers, gardeners, and anyone else attempting to nudge our food system towards greater sustainability; I picked up and developed untaught courses on social justice and Christian environmentalism, aiming to explore with students what the Bible can teach us about the stewardship, redistribution, and communal importance of land. Most importantly, I discovered The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, a little over an hour north of Wichita, and began to make yearly visits there with my students. We listened to presentations on agricultural policy, climate change, and the history of Black farmers in America; we visited TLI’s labs and experimental farm plots to learn about the development of kernza and other perennial crops; we were able to meet such famed authors as Naomi Klein, Bill McKibben, and Eric Schlosser—and on a couple of occasions, we heard from Berry himself. In weaving his ideas into my classes I found myself, for the first time, reading more of his fiction, understanding more about how Berry’s ideas, outside the strict form of the essay, reveal a flexibility and adaptability, especially in regards to intimate questions of identity, sexuality, and spiritual belief, something that far more of my students found central to their young lives than they did Berry’s insistence upon local or agrarian knowledge. Through all this time, I was still learning from the man.

Of all the perspectives my engagement with Berry’s writings have opened up to me, I think none are as important as helping me see the terrible mistake of confusing the vital, and virtuous, role that natural limits play in our lives, with what he condemned in his collection The Art of Loading Brush as the “doctrine of inevitability,” a notion that he (I think rightly) labeled just “a poor excuse for…economic and technological determinism.” To seek that wholeness which hopefully characterizes a life lived in settled and sustainable integration with one’s local community and environment, will obviously involve an acceptance of limits—such a resolution requires seeking some contentment with, to paraphrase Berry’s friend and founder of The Land Institute Wes Jackson, the “genius of the place.” But that seeking does not mean, and must not mean, accepting as natural those progressive expectations (embrace the carbon economy and the corporate rat race!) and those competitive presumptions (because, as Margaret Thatcher famously insisted, there is no alternative!) which go by the guise of “realism,” but functionally are just positional tools that serve to establish what Berry sneeringly called, in perhaps his angriest poetic passage (which is also, perversely, part of one of his Sabbath poems), “the objective.”

Even while I dreamed I prayed that what I saw was only fear and no foretelling,
for I saw the last known landscape destroyed for the sake
of the objective, the soil bludgeoned, the rock blasted.
Those who had wanted to go home would never get there now.

I visited the offices where for the sake of the objective the planners planned
at blank desks set in rows. I visited the loud factories
where the machines were made that would drive ever forward
toward the objective. I saw the forest reduced to stumps and gullies; I saw
the poisoned river, the mountain cast into the valley;
I came to the city that nobody recognized because it looked like every other city.
I saw the passages worn by the unnumbered
footfalls of those whose eyes were fixed upon the objective.

Their passing had obliterated the graves and the monuments
of those who had died in pursuit of the objective
and who had long ago forever been forgotten, according
to the inevitable rule that those who have forgotten forget
that they have forgotten. Men, women, and children now pursued the objective
as if nobody ever had pursued it before.

The races and the sexes now intermingled perfectly in pursuit of the objective.
The once-enslaved, the once-oppressed were now free
to sell themselves to the highest bidder
and to enter the best paying prisons
in pursuit of the objective, which was the destruction of all enemies,
which was the destruction of all obstacles, which was the destruction of all objects,
which was to clear the way to victory, which was to clear the way to promotion, to salvation, to progress,
to the completed sale, to the signature
on the contract, which was to clear the way
to self-realization, to self-creation, from which nobody who ever wanted to go home
would ever get there now, for every remembered place
had been displaced; the signposts had been bent to the ground and covered over.

Every place had been displaced, every love
unloved, every vow unsworn, every word unmeant
to make way for the passage of the crowd
of the individuated, the autonomous, the self-actuated, the homeless
with their many eyes opened toward the objective
which they did not yet perceive in the far distance,
having never known where they were going,
having never known where they came from.

(From “Sabbath Poem II,” 1997)

VI

For a man whose intellectual and artistic and personal focus was so concentrated, Wendell Berry’s writings contained multitudes. This was, I think, as I review the monument of words he built over so many decades, the most Christian thing about his legacy. In the same way that believers like myself take seriously the words attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of John—“Jesus then said to the Jews who had believed in him, ‘If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free’” (John 8:31-32, Revised Standard Version)—this reader of Berry, at least, sees in the discipline he elaborated upon and exemplified an invitation to an anarchic (which is different from an individualistic) freedom. To identify with and embrace that which is local to oneself obviously limits one’s choices, but it also potentially frees one, even if only partly, from the burden of the exploitative systems modernity has placed upon us and the world’s resources, and opens up paths of affective connection that, too often, the competitive expectations and divisions of modernity interfere with.

To conclude with an argument from my own training, the perspective which Berry’s writings help us see is an example of the second of Michael Walzer’s two types of communitarian argument: “The liberal ideology of separatism cannot take personhood and bondedness away from us,” but “does take away the sense of our personhood and bondedness,” with political and economic systems built upon the presumption of, even a celebration of, that deprivation. Berry’s whole life’s work was, very simply, to do the opposite: to help us see that which is present to us, and to enlist us in a struggle against all that makes difficult, or disdains the possibility of, connecting with, and breaking bread with, and dwelling alongside, and being entirely open to, whatever is locally our own. What, in the end, could be more holistic than that?

 

An Argument about Teaching, Technology, and Being a Tool-Using (and Tool-Consuming) Species

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Joel Mathis, a fellow Kansas writer and friend, recently reflected on joining what may be something of an anti-AI bandwagon, and what it may mean for him professionally. Those who know me know that I’ve been on the bandwagon for a while (I don’t continue to use a flip-phone and occasionally wear a t-shirt celebrating the Butlerian Jihad—“Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind”—from the Dune legendarium for nothing.) As a teacher, I’ve converted most of my essay-writing assignments into in-class Blue Book journaling assignments (which, of course, had never truly disappeared) over the past two years, and I’m mostly happy with that change. But with the start of the fall semester, with many of my fellow academics sharing their thoughts about how, or to what degree, their lessons plans are (or are not) incorporating the incredible advances in artificial intelligence, I figured I ought to think through and put down my position about it all as well. Thus, the following long statement, which I included at the end of all my course syllabi this year.

 A Manifesto on AI

In this course, you are strongly urged, and assignments are designed to require you, to avoid ALL use of generative AI tools (that is, those which generate usable images, summaries, or written statements in response to prompts) insofar as your reading and writings assignments are concerned. Let me explain why.  

Your education here at Friends is likely made possible by, and guided by, several things: parental support and expectations, athletic or artistic or academic scholarships, social pressure, personal or religious motivations, and more. I would like to add one more element to the mix: the ideal of humanitas. It is because I, as the instructor for this class, take this ideal seriously–and I want you to take it seriously too–that I am imposing the rules regarding AI mentioned above.

The term humanitas goes back to ancient notions about education, focusing on how a person can become a responsible, virtuous, independent human being. It is the origin of the word “humanities,” which includes history, literature, philosophy, language, and what are sometimes referred to as “the liberal arts.” Over the millennia, the notion of humanitas has been revived and re-interpreted many times. In this class, the ideal stands behind what is taught in the sense that I believe that one of the core elements of being a responsible, virtuous, independent human being is understanding the nature of, and the operations of, our shared civic life. Gaining that understanding, however, will be undermined if you make use of AI tools to avoid the assigned reading, or to avoid the struggle of communicating what you have learned from your reading in written assignments, because the kind of understanding relevant to both the liberty and the liberality of the humanities in a practical and a practiced one.

Reading AI-generated summaries of the assigned reading is therefore NOT an acceptable way to prepare for class or to engage the class material. This class isn’t about providing you with information to regurgitate. It’s about getting you to closely read and wrestle with hard questions asked by the text: questions that have challenged people for thousands of years, and questions that are (or ought to be) central both to how you conduct your private life and to how we organize civic life. Relying on an auto-generated summary of a text inevitably leads one to miss out on details of the thought processes that led the author to put their conclusion the way they did, and thus to miss the opportunity to think alongside the author’s arguments and to critically interrogate them. 

Using generative AI tools to create all or part of your writing assignments is also, therefore, NOT an acceptable to way to demonstrate your engagement with the class material. Class writing assignments are not busy work. They are there to force you, through the labor of choosing words and connecting sentences, to figure out not only how to communicate the understanding that you have come to of whatever author or problem you have been asked to study, but also exactly what your understanding of that author or problem actually is. A civic environment of responsible, virtuous, and independent people will be one filled with inevitable disagreement and discovery; developing the skill of communicating, through writing, one’s own understandings is essential to being able to both engage with disagreements and learn from others’ (and one’s own) discoveries.

AI tools are obviously of enormous benefit in all sorts of practical fields, and learning how to make use of them in certain research contexts may well be vitally important to your professional future. Just academically speaking, while using AI tools to answer specific research questions, build research bibliographies, or check research citations has some real limitations, developing the skills necessary to do so will likely soon be as routine an expectation as knowing how to use Google Docs or Word. But for this semester, in this class, you are invited, as unusual as it may sound, to take the ancient ideal of humanitas to heart. Here, you will be expected to wrestle with terms and concepts, and to learn to discuss them and write about them, without too much reliance upon powerful technologies which can do, seemingly more quickly or comprehensively, things which you already have—or already have the need to develop—the ability to do. I hope you will embrace this expectation and gain from it.

A Debate over Being Human

Michael Austin, an old friend of mine and another academic, currently the provost at Snow College in Ephraim, Utah, shared a very contrary perspective in a two-part essay of his, humorously subtitled “How I Learned to Stop Worrying about Skynet and Love ChatGPT.” It starts with him confessing that, though an “Enlightenment humanist” at heart, someone whose most important work of scholarship presumes a worldview into which AI probably has no place at all, he had, as a university provost, “a professional responsibility to implement both classroom AI policies and curricular guidelines.” And so he, being the brilliant pragmatist I’ve always known him to be, dove into the latest pedagogical literature, and figured out a way to integrate AI tools into the teaching of the liberal arts, a way that he found both personally fulfilling and filled with intellectual potential. As he concluded his essay:

When AI extends our ability to do things that were previously beyond our reach, it also requires us to acquire new competencies to turn those possibilities into finished work. When teachers understand this, and when students grasp what they can actually accomplish with the help of AI models, classroom assignments can become a gateway to releasing human potential, unlocking knowledge locked away by limitations AI can help us overcome.

As a longtime writing teacher, I am quite sure that AI will be the end of the thesis-driven five-paragraph essay assignment. I do not mourn its loss. Five-paragraph essays do not occur in the wild, and thesis statements were never anything more than rhetorical training wheels. Teachers who still give such assignments deserve the AI-generated drivel they will almost certainly receive.

But look what we can now put in its place. How about a final assignment to write a full-length opera or a symphony, or a history of a nearby town? With AI, freshman English students might create a graphic-novel version of Moby-Dick or Great Expectations. Or how about a full video version of The Iliad or Dante’s Inferno? AI can help students do things like this.

I don’t begrudge my friend’s enthusiasm (AI enabled him to achieve his long-abandoned goal of being a political cartoonist, after all). And like him, when it comes to teaching essay writing, I also don’t feel the need to mourn any particular pedagogical form, or really any particular teaching instrument. But unlike him, I look at the idea of giving my students—especially beginning ones—AI-dependent assignments and incentives in the name of encouraging them to produce whole histories or symphonies, or create whole videos or graphic novels, as an approach that misses the very foundation of a liberal arts education.

At its heart an education in the human arts and sciences involves, I think, a very present, very embodied, very non-automated engagement with art, ideas, and the written word. To fail to go through an educational formation characterized by such interpersonality is to be diagnosed by a doctor who never actually sees or speaks with you, or to eat a meal prepared by people who never actually handled the dough, the meat, or the vegetables. Obviously, such formational or educational—or diagnostic or nutritional—processes are not entirely all or nothing, entirely black or white. As a college professor, I’ve long since made my grudging peace with (though thankfully I’m still mostly available to avoid) distance and online learning as an unfortunately necessary compromise, thanks to the undeniable good of increasing access on the one hand and dealing with the challenge of affordability on the other. Similarly, we’ve all found ways to accommodate speaking to a nurse on the phone or cooking with canned food from a grocery store. Still, when you talking about as important an ideal as humanitas, I think the reflections and warnings of such thinkers as diverse as Amy Gutmann (who presented education as involving participatory social reproduction) or Michael Polanyi (who presented education as depending upon tacit exchanges between the teacher and student) or John Dewey (who presented education as a “continuing reconstruction of experience”), or Martin Heidegger (who presented a “real or genuine education” as reflexively engaging students in those practices and understandings wherein they already dwell) need to be taken to heart. Whatever compromises the rival goods of our heavily technologized world require of us, AI-enabled steps away from carefully helping students construct and make responsible, virtuous, and independent use of those cognitive and cultural competencies already present in their lives would be, I think, a failure of teaching.

Michael and I ended up going back and forth about this issue at some length. Initially our dispute focused on the issues of scale—it is one thing, he correctly observed, to restrict the use of AI tools in a particular classroom in the name of maintaining an environment of closed and close instruction, something that may be, depending on the circumstances and the pedagogical aims of the teacher, perhaps even admirable. (Michael, to his great credit, has regularly taught classes at Central Utah Correctional Facility—a prison, in other words—and admits that the controlled reading and discussions possible in such environments allow for some superb educational outcomes). But one professor’s preferences, he insisted to me, can’t speak to the needs of an entire institution, especially one dealing with state mandates in regards to the integration of AI into teaching practices. I don’t disagree with any of that; as I emphasized in my manifesto, I was speaking to my students solely about “this semester, in this class.” I freely admit that I am developing this argument solely with my own particular instructional stewardship in mind.

But before long our argument had become one of fundamental assumptions about what it means to become an educated human being. Michael took the position that, since human beings are, evolutionarily speaking, essentially tool-making animals, to make the project of education one that requires, in the name of some humane ideal, the exclusion of whatever tools happen to be part of the world we and our students actually inhabit is actually “profoundly anti-humanistic.” My position was, to say the least, quite different.

I agree that human beings are, evolutionarily speaking, tool-making and tool-using entities. But why does it therefore follow that attempting to construct a learning environment that explicitly rejects the employment of any particular set of contemporary tools which humans have invented is unhuman? That would imply that any construction of the human—and, I would say, of the humanitas ideal as well—has to be solely centered on the evolutionary process itself. But that is simply not the case. Human beings are tool-using animals, yes, but they are also dialogic, discerning, distinguishing, debating animals. The whole history of human civilization may not be reactionary and Luddite in character, but throughout the history of human civilization there have nonetheless been innumerable instances of resistance to, reconsiderations about, and reform of our tools and the processes that have been or are being constructed through and with them. Sometimes we construct forms of intercourse and learning and development that are consciously, even aggressively, progressive in that they seek to transcend the forms that came before. But sometimes we also construct forms of intercourse and learning and development that purposefully embrace what are understood (sometimes, I would argue, correctly) as the accomplishments and virtues of previous forms and therefore strives to preserve them.

For example, I doubt anyone who lives in the wake of the Enlightenment can believe that the restrictive Chinese imperial examination system was the peak of human educational development—I sure don't. But by the same token, it’s not as though those 1000+ years (which gave the world Luo Guanzhong’s Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the poetry of Li Bai, and the development of Neo-Confucianism) were all "anti-humanistic.” So while I am happy to acknowledge the validity of many of the criticisms of the pedagogical choices I and others are making, to so firmly stipulate the evolutionary and cognitive centrality of relying upon tools so as to label the decision to reject AI as a learning tool (and thus the decision to pedagogically control its role within the classroom) as therefore anti-human goes, I think, several steps too far. It is as much a humane reality to seek new tools for engaging with art, ideas, and the written word, as it is to decide that some tools inherently disrupt the practices necessary to understanding, and to therefore avoid them.

Tools and Technology, Within and Without

I’m comfortable with the position that I’ve taken—which, it’s worth noting, is completely independent of perhaps even more immediate environmental and ethical and apocalyptic arguments against the normalization of AI in schools (and our lives generally). But Michael wasn’t wrong to push me very specifically about tools and their place in education—or indeed, just developing the competencies that I would consider essential to the project of humanitas in the first place. Plato attacked writing, after all, as a tool that would disrupt the memorization and orality he understand as essential to learning. Would I attack wearing eyeglasses because they are a hack, a short-cut, an augmented engagement with art, ideas, and the written word?

I think it’s possible to come up with a distinction between AI and eyeglasses that doesn’t just depend upon the later having been present and in ordinary use throughout human societies for a millennium, while machine-learning models, the core of artificial intelligence, are—depending on your definition—less than 50 years old. Among other things, I believe one can rigorously defend the construal of this distinction as being between a tool that the individual uses to do a thing the person has learned how to do (using eyeglasses in order to better see the paper or the screen upon which one is drawing or using software to construct comic strip panels) and a tool that the individual uses to do a thing that the individual has explained to the tool how to do for them (explaining to ChatGPT, perhaps through an admittedly demanding and potentially engaging and creative learning process, exactly how do draw or construct comic strip panels). But this distinction, like any distinction made in reference to human processes of educational development, will likely always have to be subject to regular reconsideration. As, for example, I’ve reconsidered—if not entirely changed my mind about—GLP-1s.

Listening to a discussion about GLP-1s (Ozempic, etc.) conducted by Ezra Klein a few months ago is what put me on the path of n at least partial reconsideration of these even-newer-than-AI technologies, pharmaceuticals that control appetite and otherwise “hack” certain receptors in our brain. Originally, I was profoundly critical of these drugs; I was deeply, philosophically, hung up on the idea that there is something essential to our ability to think and reason and feel as human beings that cannot be extricated from our spatially and socially embodied experiences. Consequently, I was just plain suspicious of technological interventions into our embodiment for the sake of exercising some kind of control over it, partly because such "control" seems to me an attempt to actually escape the labor of our embodiment, to instead statically align it with some given set of utilitarian advantages or procedural expectations or economic demands or cultural preferences rather than anything actually ongoing and human. Nearly two decades ago I pontificated about this, comparing using marijuana to elective cosmetic surgery, the former positively and the latter negatively. At the time a friend of mine pushed back against that framing, using nearly the exact same eyeglasses example—would that tool be a "technological intervention"?—that Michael used on me. I thought I could make that distinction at the time, and I still think I can make it today—but the surety of that distinction is not beyond ongoing debate.

Another friend of mine, Damon Linker, a fine writer who has struggled with some health concerns, recently reflected on his doctor-recommended use of this miraculous new technology, specifically Wegovy, which has helped him lose 55 pounds:

I learned to think about the world using categories of moral analysis descending from the traditions of classical philosophy and Christian theology. To speak very roughly, both view obesity as following from gluttony, which the first describes as a vice and the second describes as a sin. . . . To avoid the vice of gluttony one must practice and demonstrate the virtue of fortitude or steadfastness, which involves an act of self-mastery, the overcoming of one’s craving for the pleasure of eating for the sake of both the intrinsic psychological rewards of self-mastery and the consequential good of bodily health.

Looked at in these terms, my failure to lose more weight on my own, even after I learned about the threat my obesity posed to my cardiovascular health, was a defect. I was incapable of mastering my craving for the pleasure of eating. This is quite common, especially in our time and place, with its abundance of hyper-palatable and unhealthy processed foods. . . .

That’s where the Wegovy comes in. Suddenly a portion that would have left me craving more food left me feeling fully satisfied and not at all tempted by the thought of eating more. In fact, the thought of eating more made me feel vaguely ill. Which is just another way of saying that the drug removed my craving for more food—the very thing that needs to be overcome and mastered in order to resist the vice of gluttony.

This means that a world in which everyone who’s overweight or obese has access to a GLP-1 will also be a world in which this kind of self-mastery and self-overcoming no longer need to be cultivated. Is that a bad thing? I suspect it is. . . .

Those are the troubling thoughts that have come racing into my head these past few months when I’ve glanced, smiling, at my noticeably smaller self in the mirror.

Damon’s experience sat alongside Klein’s and the provocative discussion he had conducted about the human body and brain, about how the best way to understand GLP-1s is to see them in terms of a tool that intervenes in our own evolved programming, in my mind for weeks. It is undeniably the case that our industrialized and financialized agricultural and food production systems have ended up creating environments which are profoundly unhealthy for our bodies, and profoundly difficult for our evolved mental scripts to deal with. And when we think about that problem in a world characterized by questions about artificial intelligence, questions that force us to struggle with what we think we know about consciousness, about genetic inheritances, about our own ability to make decisions which distinguish ourselves from the tools we make, use, and bring into our lives, I’m just not sure we can avoid—or at least, I’m not sure I can avoid—acknowledging that we may not have a good grasp of what “self-mastery” today actually means. I am confident that I can distinguish between eyeglasses as a tool that enables individuals to seek mastery in tasks that they do and AI as a tool that enables individuals to seek mastery in getting a computer to do tasks for them. But am I just as confident that GLP-1s are a tool to avoid constructing virtues that we should be bodily striving to master? Might they instead be tools that enable individuals to pursue a mastery over the multitude of ordinary virtuous tasks that our gluttony-enabling and incentivizing world would interfere with? I’m not sure I’m convinced, but I genuinely wonder.

Stumbling Forward Technologically

The easy, and avoidable, rejoinder to this kind of meandering quasi-Luddism is pointing out that I wrote it on a computer (one of which, so far as I know, Wendell Berry still doesn’t own). I use a laptop, my wife and youngest daughter regularly use an e-bike, and I don’t go anywhere without my blood pressure medication and my Excedrin. I appreciate my arguments with my friends over technology, because being reminded of my own existence as a tool-using creature is a good thing. Among other things, it indirectly emphasizes to my thinking that my own creatureliness, and the humane and tactile work I hope to do in an embodied way in the classroom, is itself mediated by the intervening and augmenting technological tools that I unthinkingly (zuhandenheit, if we prefer Heidegger’s term) use every day. And this recognition leads to humility, some of which I hopefully express humorously.

For example, this semester I have embraced as a supplement in all my classes a new version of Turnitin, the ubiquitous plagiarism-spotting electronic paper submission system, called Turnitin Clarity. The idea behind this supplement is that I can, by requiring students to use this as their word-processing program for essays and response papers, police any AI use they might engage in (and distribute consequences accordingly). By letting them know all about this beforehand, my hope is that they’ll be incentivized to accept the ideals I’ve put in my Manifesto and avoid making use of any generative AI in their work. What will be the outcome of this restriction? I don’t know, but I’m anxious to see. The idea of using a technological innovation to stand in the way of another technological innovation may seem counterintuitive, and certainly in some cases it would be so (that’s where the in-class Blue Book assignments come in!). But as the new semester begins, I’m happy to attempt to make my way through all these challenges which stand in the way of achieving some kind of humanitas as best I can. What else can we do except continue to engage, assess, and re-assess as necessary? After all, wasn’t it the temptation to make use of tools that would allow us to skip over, even for seemingly excellent reasons, all this constant (yet constructive) work of technological (re)consideration which got us here in the first place?