Internet round-up: the Psmiths on class; Harper’s on Oklahoma universities; Leiter on ChatGPT

My favorite Substackers have reviewed Paul Fussell’s Class and applied its principles to today’s political landscape (and other things).

I get the vibe they’d read Class before.

If you haven’t read Class, you really ought to.

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From Harper’s’s “Weekly Review”:

Lawmakers in Oklahoma introduced a bill mandating that every state college erect a statue of [Charlie] Kirk in a “highly visible and easily accessible” plaza that bears the activist’s name.

The bill is here.

Just one more example of politicians trying to control what colleges say.

Kirk may have debated on campuses, but he wasn’t a faculty member or even a degree earner. And his work wasn’t scholarly. It didn’t try to adhere to the standards of any guild of experts.

I’d hope that no professional academic would wish to flaunt him as a symbol of what colleges and universities do.

Then again, a lot of schools are happy to put up statues of their football players. The state doesn’t even have to enforce that.

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Brian Leiter posts about how a colleague of his got a chatbot to write an “alarmingly competent” philosophical essay.

“How much trouble are we [academic philosophers] in?” Leiter asks.

I’ve never seen any undergraduate writing with the chatbot’s precise style, but (*shudder*) I’ve seen lots of PhD- and journal-level prose just like it.

So, yes, we philosophers – or, at least, those who aspire to a livelihood based on the production and evaluation of scholarship – are in big, big trouble. Because, with just a little input, robots can do those tasks now (or, if not now, soon). Not superlatively well, but well enough to impress the profession’s gatekeepers.

Worse: readers of philosophy are in trouble, and have been for some time, because so much scholarship makes the grade even though it sounds like it rolled off a conveyor belt. The prose is undistinguished, and stock “-isms” (contractualism! particularism!) are opposed or combined almost mechanically.

R.I.P. Charlie Kirk

My two cents.

I’m sorry he was murdered, of course. It’s an awful thing, and I can’t imagine that the social repercussions will be good.

Before he was killed, I barely knew about Charlie Kirk. I knew his name and that he was associated with the political right. I didn’t know about his specific views or his way of conducting himself.

I believe I once watched some minutes of a video in which he debated college students. But I don’t remember what was said.

(I don’t spend much time listening to the pundits. For example, I may have been the last person in the United States to become aware of Tucker Carlson and Rachel Maddow. And no, I don’t know if those two pundits are meaningfully comparable; my point is just that I ignore famous talking heads from both sides.)

I didn’t know any details of Charlie Kirk’s personal life: that he was only thirty-one, that he was married and had young children, that he was close to Donald Trump, etc.

I still know little. I know even less about the young man who is thought to have killed Kirk.

Why am I writing, then? I guess to make the (obvious) point that most of us have nothing worthwhile and non-obvious to say. Lamenting is good, because a life has been taken and human life is sacred. But how many of us can responsibly attempt more than that? I’ve noticed a disturbing number of people on social media – friends of mine – issuing or sharing calls to arms. Calls to, like, hunker down with one’s family and one’s guns; or to join in fighting a civil war that, allegedly, already has begun. Which all seems dangerously overblown, especially since the average person can’t be trusted to have understood (a) Charlie Kirk, (b) his killer, or (c) his many and varied admirers and critics. Because I recognize that I understand so little about (a)–(c). And because I see other friends – Ecuadorians who know less than I know about U.S. politics – posting about Charlie Kirk. (Their condolences are unobjectionable; their hagiographic pictures and language are not.) Which makes me think, maybe people are opining because it’s a bandwagon to climb onto. (Which, arguably, I’m also climbing onto, hoisting myself up a little more surreptitiously than most.)