Language is the house of being. In its home human beings dwell. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home.
—Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” 1946
In his 2006 book Radical Hope, the philosopher and psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear writes about what it is like to live through a period of profound cultural upheaval. His subject is the last chief of the Crow nation, Plenty Coups. Not long before his death Plenty Coups, who survived to see his tribe confined to a reservation by the U.S. government in 1884, told the story of his life to a white writer, Frank B. Linderman. Lear was “haunted” particularly by an author’s note at the end of Linderman’s biography, where Linderman explains that he was unable to get Plenty Coups to speak about anything that had happened after the buffalo were killed off and the Crow were moved onto the reservation. “When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground and they could not lift them up again,” he told Linderman. “After this nothing happened.”
What could those words have meant to Plenty Coups? And what could they mean to us? This is what Lear spends the rest of Radical Hope exploring, above all by seeking to understand the concepts that animated the Crow’s understanding of a good or honorable life, and then tracking what became of those concepts after that kind of life was no longer possible for them to live. For Lear, the experience of Plenty Coups manifested “a peculiar human possibility”: the possibility that one could live to see one’s own cultural values become not just decadent or debatable but unintelligible.
So far, much of the criticism of artificial intelligence, and especially of large language models, has focused on material effects: widespread job losses, environmental impacts due to energy and water usage, and the exacerbation of economic inequality (possibly leading to a “permanent underclass”). Such effects are no doubt potentially devastating for the people directly affected by them—those living next to data centers, white-collar office workers—but it is striking how far such critics are from contending with the aspect of the technology that ought to be most disturbing to those of us who write and think about culture: its potential to undermine the concepts and practices that make it possible to have coherent ethical discussions over things like the environmental impact of new technologies or economic inequality in the first place. This prospect can nevertheless be felt in the coining of new pejoratives for contemporary culture—“slop,” “enshittification,” “the great zombification”—some of which predate AI but are multiplying in its wake. Such terms surely seem hyperbolic to some, but in at least one respect they merely hint at the most troubling possibilities. Indeed, our contention is that, if we fail to think through and delimit the role of AI in our lives, we risk undermining the intelligibility of our own guiding cultural concepts, and thus initiating a period in our own society of which it may someday be possible to say that “nothing happened.”
●
In their conflict with the whites the Crow faced the threat of extinction, but Lear’s interest was less in the physical fate of the tribe than in the prospect of cultural eclipse, which might take place even if the tribe’s individual members survived. Plenty Coups had grown up at a time when the Crow were fighting desperately for their survival against other tribes, especially the Sioux. But during his childhood, as Lear puts it, “things were still happening” to Plenty Coups. The Crow had the concepts to understand and respond to the possibility that they might be conquered by the Sioux and other neighboring tribes. What these concepts could not do was help them comprehend, let alone prepare for, what eventually transpired in their dealings with the whites.
As an example, in the first chapter of Radical Hope, Lear describes the cultural practice of “counting coups.” “Counting coups,” he tells us, was a way of tallying the number of times a Crow warrior managed to achieve various prized objectives, such as striking an enemy fighter with his bow or “coup-stick,” taking an enemy’s weapons while he was still alive, stealing a horse that had been tied down in an enemy’s camp and so on. But such acts all lost their meaning once the Crow moved to the reservation, where tribal warfare was outlawed and stealing the horses of a neighboring tribe, for example, became a matter for local police. There were still, in this period, young Crow who used the term counting coups, but the telos of their society had been effaced so radically that its relationship to previous usage was largely symbolic.
This did not mean that things stopped “happening” to the Crow in a literal sense: Plenty Coups himself married and moved to the reservation while continuing to advocate for his people, including by testifying multiple times before Congress. But none of this kept him from describing the period as one of fundamental stasis. As the concepts that had previously organized their lives eroded, so did the Crow’s capacity to act, collectively and personally, in ways that carried meaning for them beyond that of furthering their survival.
This is the aspect of the Crow’s experience that fascinated Lear. In turn, his focus on the fragility of ethical concepts offers us a criterion for being able to judge how AI is reshaping our own cultural life, quite aside from its effect on electricity costs and employment. To be sure, our pluralistic and polarized modern societies have nothing like the internally coherent set of beliefs and practices that framed life for the Crow of Plenty Coups’s youth. Yet it would be a mistake to conclude from this that we share no ethical concepts in common, and therefore that our way of life is invulnerable to the kind of incoherence that befell the Crow.
Consider our concept of “merit.” Merit might be compared to counting coups for the Crow in the sense that it is fundamental to our society’s capacity to determine what is worthy of honor or shame. Of course, the question of who and what deserves public praise and reward—whether in the form of money, fame, attention or status—is hotly debated, along with the role that merit should play in society more generally. (Are we a meritocracy? Should we be?) These debates underscore the central role that the concept of merit continues to play in our idea of what constitutes a good life. But the so-far unchecked spread of LLMs and associated technologies, which frequently advertise how easily they can be used to pass off a machine’s work as one’s own, does not represent a new way of contesting the role or distribution of merit; it represents a threat to the concept’s intelligibility.
The closest we have come to grasping this problem is in complaints about how LLMs have enabled “cheating,” which is indeed a serious issue for teachers and prize-committee judges. But this is only one way everyday uses of AI will tend to corrode the distinction between work done primarily by a machine and the kind of work that those of us educated before LLMs understood to be worthy of taking pride in as our own. In a world where young people grow up being inundated with offers from machines to complete (or “collaborate on”) every conceivable task, to insist on doing many kinds of work oneself will soon be no different than choosing to use a typewriter today—a hobbyist’s predilection.
Merit is not our only cultural concept that is vulnerable in this way, but it is an instructive example. If the Crow’s central practices revolved around the values of being a strong and courageous warrior, our modern, liberal societies are all committed on some level to the idea of freedom—the idea, that is, that people should be able to decide, at least to some degree, their own fates. Merit is one of the names we give to our ability, both institutionally and interpersonally, to recognize and judge the relative worth of the uses people make of their freedom.
Other concepts such as authenticity, expertise and deliberation are central to our cultural life in a similar way; and all are threatened by the notion, implicitly advanced by AI’s most enthusiastic early adopters, that all that matters about an output—be it a string of code, a college essay, a military target or a love letter—is whether it “works.” At first, it might seem like the main hazard in such cases is a moral one (say, how easy it will become to engage in fraud and misrepresentation), but there is something more at stake. As discussed in our previous issue, one of the reasons modern liberal societies struggle to articulate a positive vision of the good life is because of their commitment to allowing their citizens to deliberate among themselves between different ideals and beliefs. Technological efficiency has long been one consideration among others in such deliberations, but critics have always warned it should not be treated as just another competing value system. The potential of AI to compromise the very concepts through which we hold ourselves and others responsible for our words and decisions shows why. If we fail to insist that certain kinds of decisions—whether in personal, political or professional contexts—must come from human beings, words like fraud, authenticity and deliberation will cease to mean anything we might recognize today.
We can only begin here to trace the possible effects of such transformations, but consider, for instance, what would remain of our concept of romantic love if we could no longer explain why it matters that an expression of affection is composed by the person professing it, not an LLM trained on a couple’s mutual correspondence. Or how we could educate our children if we could no longer hold them, on pain of hypocrisy or incoherence, to any of the standards of effort and integrity that shaped us. “I am trying to live a life that I do not understand”—with these words another member of the Crow tribe, the medicine woman Pretty Shield, explained to Linderman what it was like to raise her children on the reservation, after the characteristic activities that used to constitute the Crow’s idea of the good life had become unintelligible. If it is hard for us to imagine this happening to us, Lear makes clear that it was hard for the Crow, too—and he shows why it is in our interest to try anyway.
●
There was no way for Plenty Coups to stop—or even to slow—the cultural devastation of his people. But Lear observed that he was able to help his people live well—or as well as possible—through such a period. By strategically collaborating with the whites, Plenty Coups helped the Crow avoid the worse fates that befell other Native tribes and gave them the chance to eventually fashion new cultural rituals, some of which maintained a connection to their previous practices. But what Lear calls Plenty Coups’s “radical hope” was not about helping his people optimize their lives on the reservation. It lay rather in his ability to poetically imagine, in words and in a series of dreams about the “fierce storm” that was coming, how his people might, in some unimaginable future, be once again able to occupy a way of life that was recognizably their own.
Intellectuals and writers can learn from the Crow’s example, as we attempt to weather our own technological “storm.” We should not waste energy on futile forms of resistance, and we would do well to follow Plenty Coups’s advice to pay attention to the changes happening around us. This means, among other things, listening carefully to others—including those who believe AI has made their lives more enjoyable, productive, fulfilling and even intellectually stimulating.
At the same time, from a cultural or intellectual perspective, an honest appraisal of the worst-case scenarios with regard to AI may not admit of even Plenty Coups’s “radical” brand of hope. However tragic the Crow’s experience was, from the outside it remains possible—if disputable—to view the end of their culture as part of the cost of progress, a brutal sacrifice of a particular way of life made on the long march toward a more liberal and technologically advanced society. Indeed, AI’s proponents often deal with objections to the technology by alluding to such “trade-offs” in the past. But the analogy is misleading. To the tech founders who speak gleefully of human beings as the “ultimate resource,” or applaud the “merge” of man and machine in our posthuman future, humanity itself is the primitive tribe that must be sacrificed for some greater—though almost comically underspecified—good. In this vision, it is not this or that set of ethical concepts that must be overcome for the sake of progress, but the allegedly limited faculties of intellect, imagination and practical reasoning—faculties that are the preconditions for our having shared ethical concepts at all.
Things have not yet come to such a pass. This means it is still worth engaging in public discussion about the proper uses and domain of LLMs, especially as relates to education, social life and decision-making—as has belatedly begun to happen with smartphones and social media. Even more important is to create and protect spaces that allow people to read, write and discuss ideas without the encroachments of AI or any other digital technology. Whether on college campuses, where some are imposing codes of conduct around AI use in hopes of transforming their classrooms into “intentional communities, like communes or religious orders,” as the poet Dan Chiasson has proposed, or in wider public life, where programs like the Matthew Strother Center for the Examined Life invite adults to join no-tech reading groups in the Catskills, such spaces will remain, as they always have been, a self-evident good for those who occupy them. Yet it would be a mistake to view them only as scholarly sanctuaries, where a select few pore over the fossilized concepts of a defeated civilization. In response not only to the evangelists of posthumanism but also to a more pervasive despair about the ability of our words and actions to make things happen, these spaces must double as training grounds for the guardians of human language, thinking and imagination. For the “radical” task before us is not to hope that something resembling our concepts and practices will reemerge in the distant future; it is to do whatever remains in our power to preserve them in the present.
Image credit: Typewriter 2 silkscreen print display in the Andy Warhol Museum. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (Alamy)
In his 2006 book Radical Hope, the philosopher and psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear writes about what it is like to live through a period of profound cultural upheaval. His subject is the last chief of the Crow nation, Plenty Coups. Not long before his death Plenty Coups, who survived to see his tribe confined to a reservation by the U.S. government in 1884, told the story of his life to a white writer, Frank B. Linderman. Lear was “haunted” particularly by an author’s note at the end of Linderman’s biography, where Linderman explains that he was unable to get Plenty Coups to speak about anything that had happened after the buffalo were killed off and the Crow were moved onto the reservation. “When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground and they could not lift them up again,” he told Linderman. “After this nothing happened.”
What could those words have meant to Plenty Coups? And what could they mean to us? This is what Lear spends the rest of Radical Hope exploring, above all by seeking to understand the concepts that animated the Crow’s understanding of a good or honorable life, and then tracking what became of those concepts after that kind of life was no longer possible for them to live. For Lear, the experience of Plenty Coups manifested “a peculiar human possibility”: the possibility that one could live to see one’s own cultural values become not just decadent or debatable but unintelligible.
So far, much of the criticism of artificial intelligence, and especially of large language models, has focused on material effects: widespread job losses, environmental impacts due to energy and water usage, and the exacerbation of economic inequality (possibly leading to a “permanent underclass”). Such effects are no doubt potentially devastating for the people directly affected by them—those living next to data centers, white-collar office workers—but it is striking how far such critics are from contending with the aspect of the technology that ought to be most disturbing to those of us who write and think about culture: its potential to undermine the concepts and practices that make it possible to have coherent ethical discussions over things like the environmental impact of new technologies or economic inequality in the first place. This prospect can nevertheless be felt in the coining of new pejoratives for contemporary culture—“slop,” “enshittification,” “the great zombification”—some of which predate AI but are multiplying in its wake. Such terms surely seem hyperbolic to some, but in at least one respect they merely hint at the most troubling possibilities. Indeed, our contention is that, if we fail to think through and delimit the role of AI in our lives, we risk undermining the intelligibility of our own guiding cultural concepts, and thus initiating a period in our own society of which it may someday be possible to say that “nothing happened.”
●
In their conflict with the whites the Crow faced the threat of extinction, but Lear’s interest was less in the physical fate of the tribe than in the prospect of cultural eclipse, which might take place even if the tribe’s individual members survived. Plenty Coups had grown up at a time when the Crow were fighting desperately for their survival against other tribes, especially the Sioux. But during his childhood, as Lear puts it, “things were still happening” to Plenty Coups. The Crow had the concepts to understand and respond to the possibility that they might be conquered by the Sioux and other neighboring tribes. What these concepts could not do was help them comprehend, let alone prepare for, what eventually transpired in their dealings with the whites.
As an example, in the first chapter of Radical Hope, Lear describes the cultural practice of “counting coups.” “Counting coups,” he tells us, was a way of tallying the number of times a Crow warrior managed to achieve various prized objectives, such as striking an enemy fighter with his bow or “coup-stick,” taking an enemy’s weapons while he was still alive, stealing a horse that had been tied down in an enemy’s camp and so on. But such acts all lost their meaning once the Crow moved to the reservation, where tribal warfare was outlawed and stealing the horses of a neighboring tribe, for example, became a matter for local police. There were still, in this period, young Crow who used the term counting coups, but the telos of their society had been effaced so radically that its relationship to previous usage was largely symbolic.
This did not mean that things stopped “happening” to the Crow in a literal sense: Plenty Coups himself married and moved to the reservation while continuing to advocate for his people, including by testifying multiple times before Congress. But none of this kept him from describing the period as one of fundamental stasis. As the concepts that had previously organized their lives eroded, so did the Crow’s capacity to act, collectively and personally, in ways that carried meaning for them beyond that of furthering their survival.
This is the aspect of the Crow’s experience that fascinated Lear. In turn, his focus on the fragility of ethical concepts offers us a criterion for being able to judge how AI is reshaping our own cultural life, quite aside from its effect on electricity costs and employment. To be sure, our pluralistic and polarized modern societies have nothing like the internally coherent set of beliefs and practices that framed life for the Crow of Plenty Coups’s youth. Yet it would be a mistake to conclude from this that we share no ethical concepts in common, and therefore that our way of life is invulnerable to the kind of incoherence that befell the Crow.
Consider our concept of “merit.” Merit might be compared to counting coups for the Crow in the sense that it is fundamental to our society’s capacity to determine what is worthy of honor or shame. Of course, the question of who and what deserves public praise and reward—whether in the form of money, fame, attention or status—is hotly debated, along with the role that merit should play in society more generally. (Are we a meritocracy? Should we be?) These debates underscore the central role that the concept of merit continues to play in our idea of what constitutes a good life. But the so-far unchecked spread of LLMs and associated technologies, which frequently advertise how easily they can be used to pass off a machine’s work as one’s own, does not represent a new way of contesting the role or distribution of merit; it represents a threat to the concept’s intelligibility.
The closest we have come to grasping this problem is in complaints about how LLMs have enabled “cheating,” which is indeed a serious issue for teachers and prize-committee judges. But this is only one way everyday uses of AI will tend to corrode the distinction between work done primarily by a machine and the kind of work that those of us educated before LLMs understood to be worthy of taking pride in as our own. In a world where young people grow up being inundated with offers from machines to complete (or “collaborate on”) every conceivable task, to insist on doing many kinds of work oneself will soon be no different than choosing to use a typewriter today—a hobbyist’s predilection.
Merit is not our only cultural concept that is vulnerable in this way, but it is an instructive example. If the Crow’s central practices revolved around the values of being a strong and courageous warrior, our modern, liberal societies are all committed on some level to the idea of freedom—the idea, that is, that people should be able to decide, at least to some degree, their own fates. Merit is one of the names we give to our ability, both institutionally and interpersonally, to recognize and judge the relative worth of the uses people make of their freedom.
Other concepts such as authenticity, expertise and deliberation are central to our cultural life in a similar way; and all are threatened by the notion, implicitly advanced by AI’s most enthusiastic early adopters, that all that matters about an output—be it a string of code, a college essay, a military target or a love letter—is whether it “works.” At first, it might seem like the main hazard in such cases is a moral one (say, how easy it will become to engage in fraud and misrepresentation), but there is something more at stake. As discussed in our previous issue, one of the reasons modern liberal societies struggle to articulate a positive vision of the good life is because of their commitment to allowing their citizens to deliberate among themselves between different ideals and beliefs. Technological efficiency has long been one consideration among others in such deliberations, but critics have always warned it should not be treated as just another competing value system. The potential of AI to compromise the very concepts through which we hold ourselves and others responsible for our words and decisions shows why. If we fail to insist that certain kinds of decisions—whether in personal, political or professional contexts—must come from human beings, words like fraud, authenticity and deliberation will cease to mean anything we might recognize today.
We can only begin here to trace the possible effects of such transformations, but consider, for instance, what would remain of our concept of romantic love if we could no longer explain why it matters that an expression of affection is composed by the person professing it, not an LLM trained on a couple’s mutual correspondence. Or how we could educate our children if we could no longer hold them, on pain of hypocrisy or incoherence, to any of the standards of effort and integrity that shaped us. “I am trying to live a life that I do not understand”—with these words another member of the Crow tribe, the medicine woman Pretty Shield, explained to Linderman what it was like to raise her children on the reservation, after the characteristic activities that used to constitute the Crow’s idea of the good life had become unintelligible. If it is hard for us to imagine this happening to us, Lear makes clear that it was hard for the Crow, too—and he shows why it is in our interest to try anyway.
●
There was no way for Plenty Coups to stop—or even to slow—the cultural devastation of his people. But Lear observed that he was able to help his people live well—or as well as possible—through such a period. By strategically collaborating with the whites, Plenty Coups helped the Crow avoid the worse fates that befell other Native tribes and gave them the chance to eventually fashion new cultural rituals, some of which maintained a connection to their previous practices. But what Lear calls Plenty Coups’s “radical hope” was not about helping his people optimize their lives on the reservation. It lay rather in his ability to poetically imagine, in words and in a series of dreams about the “fierce storm” that was coming, how his people might, in some unimaginable future, be once again able to occupy a way of life that was recognizably their own.
Intellectuals and writers can learn from the Crow’s example, as we attempt to weather our own technological “storm.” We should not waste energy on futile forms of resistance, and we would do well to follow Plenty Coups’s advice to pay attention to the changes happening around us. This means, among other things, listening carefully to others—including those who believe AI has made their lives more enjoyable, productive, fulfilling and even intellectually stimulating.
At the same time, from a cultural or intellectual perspective, an honest appraisal of the worst-case scenarios with regard to AI may not admit of even Plenty Coups’s “radical” brand of hope. However tragic the Crow’s experience was, from the outside it remains possible—if disputable—to view the end of their culture as part of the cost of progress, a brutal sacrifice of a particular way of life made on the long march toward a more liberal and technologically advanced society. Indeed, AI’s proponents often deal with objections to the technology by alluding to such “trade-offs” in the past. But the analogy is misleading. To the tech founders who speak gleefully of human beings as the “ultimate resource,” or applaud the “merge” of man and machine in our posthuman future, humanity itself is the primitive tribe that must be sacrificed for some greater—though almost comically underspecified—good. In this vision, it is not this or that set of ethical concepts that must be overcome for the sake of progress, but the allegedly limited faculties of intellect, imagination and practical reasoning—faculties that are the preconditions for our having shared ethical concepts at all.
Things have not yet come to such a pass. This means it is still worth engaging in public discussion about the proper uses and domain of LLMs, especially as relates to education, social life and decision-making—as has belatedly begun to happen with smartphones and social media. Even more important is to create and protect spaces that allow people to read, write and discuss ideas without the encroachments of AI or any other digital technology. Whether on college campuses, where some are imposing codes of conduct around AI use in hopes of transforming their classrooms into “intentional communities, like communes or religious orders,” as the poet Dan Chiasson has proposed, or in wider public life, where programs like the Matthew Strother Center for the Examined Life invite adults to join no-tech reading groups in the Catskills, such spaces will remain, as they always have been, a self-evident good for those who occupy them. Yet it would be a mistake to view them only as scholarly sanctuaries, where a select few pore over the fossilized concepts of a defeated civilization. In response not only to the evangelists of posthumanism but also to a more pervasive despair about the ability of our words and actions to make things happen, these spaces must double as training grounds for the guardians of human language, thinking and imagination. For the “radical” task before us is not to hope that something resembling our concepts and practices will reemerge in the distant future; it is to do whatever remains in our power to preserve them in the present.
Image credit: Typewriter 2 silkscreen print display in the Andy Warhol Museum. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (Alamy)
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.