On this claim, first:

“Given those incentives, using AI on an assignment is simply the predictable response of ordinary people to the situation they are in. A student who declines to use AI while suspecting half the class is using it isn’t just being honest; she is unilaterally disarming in a battle. That is a heroic demand to make of a nineteen-year-old. A system whose integrity depends on lots of people being heroes is not a good system.”

Looking at the incentive structure is important. Let’s consider the whole of it, though, all the way down to basic human motivations. Avoiding effort and discomfort is one of our strongest basic drives, and studying/writing essays requires a lot of effort which causes a lot of discomfort. It is no wonder college students, who mostly haven’t yet developed discipline and time management skills, look for an easier way out when a major project looms on a deadline that seems impossible (because they haven’t managed their time well).

Paying attention to these basic facts of psychology can help us see that one way to stem cheating is to help students learn time management and project management. I try to do that in my classes by making essay assignments due in small bites, with my feedback at each stage to shape the next step, spread out over the semester. It doesn’t fully eliminate cheating, but it at least emphasizes the point of writing assignments — to develop analytical and communication skills, and to be in scholarly dialogue.

I’ve noticed that students are already increasingly rejecting AI, anyway — my high schooler and her friends, for example, think AI is stupid and wouldn’t go near it. So, I’m not concerned that the refusal to use AI will be merely unilateral.

There also isn’t a battle that unilateral disarmament would be conceding defeat in. The vast majority of students are not attending or planning to attend elite colleges. Even most of the ones who are, are not planning to try to get into graduate school. The vast majority of jobs these students apply for won’t even ask about their grades, so long as they have the degree and more importantly the skills. The myth of academic ultracompetitiveness is one we unnecessarily help perpetuate every time we talk about it as if it were a real thing, as if it existed everywhere, as if playing in that sandbox is the way to career and life success. It isn’t.

At the regional state university where I teach, students often would like good grades, but that in itself isn’t why most of them are there. Some of them, probably even most of them, want an education. Or at least, they want the jobs that an education can get them. Some of them mistakenly think that getting the credential is all they need to get the job, and those are the ones who are more willing to cheat and short cut their learning in every way they can (see psychological incentives, above). For them, part of what we can do is help them understand that it is not the credential that matters to employers but the learning the credential is meant to certify they have. If they have the credential but not the learning, that will become very clear to employers and they won’t keep jobs even if they get them.

Consider students who wanted to go to elite colleges but didn’t get in. (Those places have ridiculously high rejection rates, so even very good students don’t get in.) These students end up at other colleges where they get an excellent education (indistinguishable from what the so-called “elites” offer) — which is partly to say, the mania for good grades and elite colleges is WAY overblown. We harm young people and society itself every time we focus on the 4% of students who attend that small set of institutions. The real action in higher education is taking place at community colleges and non-flagship state universities, where the VAST majority of students attend. There, grades-mania is much less of a thing.

Those institutions are also where most online education is taking place, too, to tie this to another point in the essay that inspired this comment.

For what it is worth, I think the tools to solve the online cheating problem, and the AI cheating problem in general, won’t be the surveillance tools mentioned in the essay that inspired these comments. Students already find ways to get around Lockdown Browsers. AI monitoring of video feeds will have their exploitable flaws, too.

Another option — one I feel incentivized towards as a professor, given the lack of tools and institutional support that would be needed to actually know that all the work a student turns in is truly their own — is to simply grade “straight” without worrying about whether the essay is AI or not. If there is rampant AI use, the rate of excellent grades will go way up. That’s totally fine with me. Then perhaps society will finally stop thinking that grades mean anything significant, and the incentive to cheat will defeat itself.

The upshot of inevitable AI cheating that I can’t stop is that now I shape my courses towards students who do want to learn, who do want to embrace the struggle, rather than trying to reach everyone. The students who actually learn the material will perhaps end up with similar grades to others who cheat, but grades don’t matter and in the long run — in life, graduate school, employment — the students who do actually learn will have a massive advantage over those who can prompt but not understand or critique AI outputs. THIS is the message we need to try to get through to students if we want to decrease AI cheating. (That last point is related to a piece I wrote last year, The Tragedy of Becoming Post-Human: Mobile Devices, Gen-AI and the End of Reading.)

And for those who persist in cheating, well, let them. They are diminishing their own knowledge and capacity for deep thought, which will lead them to bad career and life outcomes, and that is already a harsh and tragic penalty. Whether people take advantage of the opportunities and privileges available to them is largely their own business.

Just to be clear, when I encounter a clear case of cheating, whether AI or other, I do fail the student on the assignment and report them to Student Conduct, as always. I just don’t go to extra lengths to try to catch or prevent all AI cheating.

I’m not against systemic barriers to cheating, of course. Society should be looking to create incentive structures that minimize the number of students who fall through the cracks in this way, that is, who persist in cheating against their own interests. Along these lines, the EU requiring AI companies to watermark their outputs, California requiring AI labels on images and videos to prevent deepfakes and propaganda, and similar efforts, are the way forward. Constant surveillance is unlikely to be accepted, never mind the fact that pursuing that path would put unacceptable demands on land use for data centers, on water, on energy, on pollution, etc.

Last night I happened upon an Instagram story about the first author whose name we know, a Sumerian princess and high priestess from more than 4,000 years ago. She wrote hymns and poems, and signed the cuneiform tablets on which she wrote them with more or less the equivalent of this: “I, Enheduanna, did this.” I might start having my students sign off their essays that way to emphasize the point that turning in an assignment is equivalent to claiming that it is your own work.

(Ironically, there is scholarly debate about whether Enheduanna really wrote all the things attributed to her, or whether she or later scribes simply added her name to things written by others.)

While you are here, please share this article and subscribe to this feed. It helps a lot, and I appreciate it.

Subscribe now

Share

Here’s that other piece mentioned above, too: The Tragedy of Becoming Post-Human: Mobile Devices, Gen-AI and the End of Reading

You want a college degree. Trust me, you do: People with degrees earn (on average, over the course of their working lives, and depending on which economist you ask) between $0.5 million and $1 million more than people with only high school diplomas. Plus, even in hard economic times people with college degrees experience much lower rates of unemployment than those without. In the recent Great Recession, the unemployment rate for people in their early 20s who did not have a college degree was almost triple that of the rate for people the same age with college degrees. (Keep in mind that both lifetime earnings and unemployment rates do vary by field of employment—social workers and electrical engineers are at either end of the spectrum.)

While it is hard to predict such trends, some job market analysts have suggested that the average person in college today will have seven careers before they retire—not different jobs in the same field, but jobs in seven different fields of employment. Whether the number is seven, two, or twenty, the point is that your major in college is not the whole story of your working life.

Similarly, economists predict that most of the “jobs of the future,” especially the fields of greatest growth, are jobs that don’t even exist today. Consider the dot-com boom: in 1970, no one would have predicted the rise of Internet companies in the 1990s. In 1990, no one could have predicted the existence of, let alone the huge importance of, companies such as Google, Facebook, Apple and Twitter in the 2000s. So we should expect that the hot jobs 20 years from now won’t be in fields we can even imagine today.

Another important factor is that the demographic shift related to the aging of the Baby Boom generation means that employers are losing/are about to lose a huge number of their most experienced employees to retirement. Employers are no longer interested in taking someone fresh out of college with no work experience and training them to be good employees. For one thing, employers need to replace their “star" experienced employees, not their junior employees. For another, employees switch companies much more often now than they used to—for employers, the investment in training someone who is just going to go work elsewhere is not worth it.

Where does that leave you? How can today’s college students prepare for these workplace realities?

Except in a few rare fields, your college major doesn't matter. Of course you can't be a nurse without a nursing degree or an accountant without an accounting degree, but in almost all fields people from many different majors find success. What matters to their success is not so much their discipline-based knowledge but the other skills, knowledge and experience that they bring to the table.

You may get your first job out of college based on your major and your personality. You will get your next job(s)—or your future promotion(s)—based on the additional value you can demonstrate beyond the basics that got you in the door. Most of the time that will have to do with your skills in:

• written and oral communication

• research and analysis

• a general ability to learn complex material on your own and apply it to solving real-world problems

• working effectively under minimal supervision

• working in teams/getting along with others

• making good decisions in situations that are filled with ambiguity and uncertainty

• project management

• innovation and problem solving

• global understanding

• getting along/emotional intelligence

• leadership skills

One way to conceptualize this is to think of someone who only knows their major as deep but narrow—you could represent that with a capital letter ‘I’. Someone who also has the skills listed above might be represented as a letter ‘T’, with boundary-crossing skills enabling them to reach outside the narrow confines of a single discipline and work with others in different areas. Those skills are not specific to any given major, so it makes sense to represent them as perpendicular to disciplinary knowledge. Given the letter analogy, it isn't surprising that this model is called "The T-Shaped Professional."

Various writers have been thinking about the model of the ‘T-professional’ and have supplemented it with additional components. For example, people who are deep in one discipline but knowledgeable about others (so-called “Renaissance people”) are able to bridge gaps and make connections that others might not have seen. This type of transdisciplinary thinking is important in the knowledge economy and hence gets added to the ‘T’. Some analysts have divided up all fields of economic activity (and hence employment) into thirteen “systems” (energy, transportation, logistics, education, healthcare, communications, agriculture, water, waste, finance, industry, built environment, governance/law). While you might work in one system you will be able to add much more value if you are familiar with at least one additional system: systems interact with each other.

So, one way to think about your career is to decide where you want to uniquely place yourself at the intersection between major discipline, systems, and special skills. Someone who majors in health, knows the water system and has a special skill for communicating with the public could be especially valuable in decreasing the prevalence of water-borne disease in the developing world. Someone who majors in political science, understands the energy system and has skills in research could be a government consultant on energy policy. And so on. This is where your creativity can help you define your own “job of the future” that does not exist yet.

One of the myths about college majors is that to work in business you need a business degree. While it is true that most entry-level positions in business are held by people with business majors, most of the management positions (especially senior management) positions are held by people who majored in other academic areas, often the liberal arts or humanities. Philosophy majors, for example, are actually extremely successful in business (despite the jokes and stereotypes) because of their skills in critical analysis and persuasive communication. The explanation usually given is that those non-business majors do a better job of developing the thinking, writing, analytic and other skills that are crucial to success at the highest career levels.

Another way to think about all this is that the employees of the future are probably humanities majors with technical skills and experience, or people from technical fields with humanities experience.

The truth about majors, then, is that you should study something you love and intentionally develop (and document!) boundary-crossing skills that will make you valuable to any employer. Do so by:

1. Using your general education courses to develop the skills and knowledge that fill out your ‘T’.

2. Approaching your group assignments in class in a different way (as an opportunity to learn to solve problems in teams).

3. Keeping a journal (or diary, or blog) so that you are constantly writing and developing your writing skills.

4. Reading broadly, and not just what is assigned in class.

5. Doing an internship to get employment experience and to try out fields in which you might be interested.

6. Studying abroad and taking classes to build your knowledge of our global society and how to work with people who are different than you.

7. Taking a statistics class—understanding data and writing effective reports is key in many fields today.

8. Getting involved in clubs and student organizations to develop your leadership skills, build your network, and practice working in teams.

9. Volunteering for causes you care about to develop your skills, your network and your work ethic.

Keep notes for yourself about stories and experiences during your time in college that you can tell during interviews—stories about how you helped a team gel and solve an important problem; how you learned to be an excellent writer; how you acquired leadership skills through your involvement with a club; how you applied your academic knowledge to solving a real world problem during a volunteer experience; how you developed your intercultural competence through courses, on-campus events or study abroad. Work part-time in the same job for at least one year while in college so that you have work experience and employer references.

There are never any guarantees, but if you do these things you will have an excellent chance—a much, much better chance than if you don’t do these things—of finding a satisfying and productive career with opportunities for advancement and the possibility of making a real difference in the world.

If you have a useful tip for college students or college graduates, please leave a comment.

Disclosure Day is definitely a Spielberg film. Tight structure, well shot, some action sequences that don’t necessarily make sense, alien technology so advanced it seems to be magic, mystery and wonder, plus some loosey-goosey “philosophical” themes and “big questions.”

Disclosure Day is one of the summer of 2026’s big films, released in mid-June. It has done well at the box office and is a modest critical success. It is no E.T. or Close Encounters of the Third Kind (though that spirit lingers in the background), but it is a decent movie overall.

You could argue that anything in science fiction is philosophical to some degree. Some offerings more explicitly so than others, and with a great deal of variation in quality, of course. The philosophy in Disclosure Day is occasionally visible at the surface. Unfortunately, all we get is superficial treatment of it. I’d say the philosophical and theological thought is close to the level of triteness we saw in the movie Contact (where it was almost silly).

A former Catholic novitiate exists in the story only to clumsily pose the philosophical question of the movie: Whether people who already believe in superior beings won’t just transfer their worship onto the aliens, or give up faith altogether, when they have proof of intelligent alien life. Her mother superior isn’t worried about it at all.

The notion requires a pretty simplistic account of religion and belief. Though, to be fair, since we already see real people worshiping aliens at Roswell and Stonehenge, maybe it isn’t overly simplistic after all.

As Jack Jenkins points out for the website Religious News Service, “Religious groups [are] more prepared for aliens than you think”: The existence of intelligent beings from other planets is not really much of a concern for most human religions.

You might recall that Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) was burned at the stake by the Catholic Church for persisting in heresies including denying the divinity of Christ, denying the Trinity, and denying transubstantiation. He had a lot of other fringe beliefs, too, including reincarnation or the transmigration of souls, pantheism, Copernican heliocentrism, and the idea that stars were other suns with their own planets and likely other beings like us.

Christian theologians have proposed a variety of positions about the theological status of intelligent aliens, including:

(a) They are not “fallen” (didn’t eat the apple and so don’t need Christ’s salvation and exist in a state of purity and bliss like the Garden of Eden);

(b) If they are fallen, they each have their own divine saviors (from the same God);

(c) all created beings fall and so Christ sacrifices himself on every planet; or

(d) the aliens are fallen and need to hear Christ’s message, so we have to send missionaries.

There are a lot of other options in addition to the ones listed here. Disclosure Day doesn’t get into any of them.

There is also the option of a “barren” universe where somehow humans are so special that this is the only planet in the entire universe where an infinite God points his attention. A universe barren of intelligent life becomes extraordinarily implausible when you stop to do the math: There are about two trillion (10¹²) galaxies in the visible universe (and likely way more outside our causal horizon); each galaxy has 1-100 billion (10⁹-10¹¹) stars; each star might have 10-ish (10¹) planets on average, though perhaps if we only focus on the habitable zone around a star there might be an average of 1 planet per star that can support intelligent life (10⁰, or maybe it is 10^-4: the details hardly matter). That’s somewhere in the range of 10²³ planets capable of supporting intelligent life, and 13 billion years of the universe so far for that life to develop. Even if the calculation is off by a factor of a million, that is still an unimaginably large number of planets capable of being homes to civilizations like ours.

Thus is the excellence of God magnified and the greatness of his kingdom made manifest; he is glorified not in one, but in countless suns, not in a single earth, a single world, but in a thousand thousand, I say in an infinity of worlds. (Bruno 1584, On the Infinite Universe and Worlds)

If the career choice had been available to him, I think Bruno could probably have avoided death by becoming a science fiction author.

In Disclosure Day, the lead character played by Emily Blunt “experiences something” after looking into the eyes of a cardinal and then is able to “just know” about people by merely looking into their eyes. She seems to be able to “recall” events in their lives more quickly than they can, and has deeper access to their inner psychology than they do. This appears from the outside to be a miracle of prophecy. So, when someone from a crowd tries to pray to her, it isn’t much of a surprise. Blunt’s character quickly runs away, shouting, “I will not be anyone’s object of worship!” or some such nonsense. (Even a good actor can’t make a line like that work.)

Both Blunt and Josh O’Connor do excellent jobs overall, making the movie watchable, engaging, and fun, despite its philosophical and theological shallowness. Whereas Blunt’s character’s powers include clairvoyance and the ability to use some alien technology without being killed by it like nearly everyone else is, O’Connor’s character can see the math of the universe and hence (?) can translate what the aliens are saying. What’s a greater miracle than their alien-given abilities, though, is that there weren’t two able American actors available to take these roles (both are Brits who do competent American accents for the film).

A question for Spielberg, if he is reading: If the aliens have such awesome technology that they can give humans farsight, mind control, and other powers, why couldn’t they simply use a version of Google Translate to communicate with us?

As a movie, Disclosure Day is worth seeing. As a philosophical inquiry, it leaves a lot to be desired.

This book is out of print and expensive on the used market but worth chasing down if you are interested in the scientific, theological, and philosophical ideas connected to the possibility of alien intelligences:

Michael J. Crowe, The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 1750-1900. Dover, 2011 (first published 1986 by Cambridge University Press).

Share

Subscribe now

Did your professor ask you to use peer reviewed journal articles in your essay for a university class? This piece helps you understand what exactly that means, why you have to do it, and how to do it well.

A journal is a serial publication. “Serial” means that new issues appear one after another, periodically. (These are also sometimes called “periodicals” for obvious reasons, though that term is most often used for non-academic serial publications such as newspapers and magazines.) Typically, academic journals are published quarterly (sometimes monthly or annually). Within each issue of the journal are articles, or individual essays. To use an analogy to a streaming show, we could say that the journal is like the show, an issue is like a season, and an article is like an episode. That analogy is not perfect though, since streaming shows often have the same team of writers for a whole season, whereas each article appearing in a journal has a different author (or team of authors). Journals are often organized into “volumes,” too, which typically contain all the issues in a given year.

Journals are published for academic experts in a particular field or subfield (normally graduate students and professors in that subfield). This means journal articles emphasize rigor, precision, evidence, and arguments, and they do not shy away from being technical or using specialized language. That can make them less accessible to people who are not already experts in that subfield. Besides taking classes in that subfield, the way to become an expert in a subfield is to read a lot of its journal articles. Expect to struggle at first when you try to read journal articles, but know that that is an expected part of the learning process. One thing you are learning is how to learn difficult material on your own.

In many respects the kinds of essays you are asked to write in university, especially in your major subject toward the end of your degree, are meant to emulate the content and style of articles published in journals. No one expects you, as an undergraduate, to be able to write an essay that could really be published in an academic journal, but that is the ideal or aspirational goal to have in mind. (This is analogous to learning to be good at a sport by trying to play like a professional sports role model: You can improve your basketball game by trying to shoot three pointers like Caitlyn Clark, but it is not very likely, and not at all expected, that you will really perform at that level. The trying is the valuable thing.)

A “peer reviewed” journal is one in which the editor does not choose which articles to publish by themselves. Instead, researchers (or teams of researchers) write an article and send it to the journal asking if it can be published there. The journal editor then sends submitted articles to two or three experts in the subspecialty of the article. Each expert returns a “referee report” to the editor—essentially, an expert evaluation of the article under consideration. On the basis of the referee reports and their own judgement, the editor decides whether to publish the article.

Most often, journals use a “blind review” process where neither the author(s) nor the reviewer(s) know who the other is. This is meant to promote objective evaluations, prevent professional resentment, and avoid reviewers unfairly promoting the work of their friends (or punishing the work of their non-friends).

The experts reviewing articles submitted to journals are informally called “referees”; officially, they are known as “peer reviewers.” Normally only people who are experts in a field, professors or advanced graduate students in that subject, submit articles for consideration, so the reviewers are their “peers” in that they are also professors in the same specialty. (By the way, this is very different from a magazine or newspaper, where the editor will either direct a staff writer to cover a certain topic or event, or where an independent writer pitches the editor a proposal for an article idea in advance of writing it, and the editor denies, conditionally approves, or approves the pitch. Often editors of those sorts of publications shape or even significantly re-write the piece after it has been submitted and approved. In an academic journal, editors make almost no changes to the pieces submitted after they pass the peer review stage.)

The point of peer review is to ensure that the quality of the articles published in academic journals is high, and that the information in them is therefore reliable. Getting an article published in a peer reviewed journal is a sign that the article has met professional standards. The article becomes part of the official record of knowledge in that field. Note that “meets professional standards” is not the same as saying that every peer reviewed article is guaranteed to be correct: Many topics and results remain subjects of debate because experts sometimes disagree with each other, and new information may be discovered later that overturns a previously published result. In fact, many journal articles modify, correct, or extend the results published in previous journal articles. So, don’t be afraid to be critical of what is in the peer reviewed journal articles you use for your essays: If you can find good arguments for why a published piece is wrong, that is a significant feather in your cap. The review system is also imperfect: (very occasionally) fraud, plagiarism, and bad results can sneak through. As a system by and for fellow professionals, it relies on the people participating in the system behaving according to professional norms. (You are also learning those professional norms by not plagiarizing, citing properly, and so on.)

When you are writing essays for a university class, it is important to choose articles from journals that specialize in the topic of the class. For example, it sometimes happens that philosophy articles get published in surprising places like business or economics journals. Often, that is because the articles were rejected by philosophy journals and the standards are lower in those other fields (or perhaps just at that particular journal). That is a sign, though not a guarantee, that the quality of the article is lower. To avoid complications and to maximize the reliability of the information you are using, it is better to stick to journals that are specifically in the field you are writing about. (So, don’t use a Psychology or Sociology journal in an essay for a Philosophy class, and vice versa.)

When you go to your university library’s web page, you will see a search bar with a few buttons beside it. Hit “Advanced Search” (or whatever that library calls it) and you will see that there are many different ways to shape your search. For example, you can select “articles,” “published in English,” “in a certain date range,” etc. Then you can specify the concept or topic you are looking for, either in the subject, title, or anywhere in the text.

There is a bit of an art to doing a good search, partly because you have to interpret and sift the list of results that you get. At some universities, some of the articles in your search results will be marked “Peer Reviewed.” That certainly helps, but it is not enough by itself. For example, while I was writing this piece, I did a search for “utilitarianism,” and the first seven results were marked peer reviewed but were either not in English or not from philosophy journals. So I refined my search using the search tool (on the left of the screen at my university), switching “Sort by” from “Relevance” to “Newest First” and by selecting the check boxes next to “written in English” and “Philosophy” in the drop down menus, and then hitting “Apply Filters” at the bottom. After that the results seemed to be just the sort of thing needed for the assignment I had given to my class.

The next task would be to browse through the search results and find ones that fit the topic and thesis of your essay. Note that you should not simply take the first results in the list: They might not be the best for your particular essay. Give yourself enough time so that you don’t have to rush this article selection stage. You might spend a couple of hours or more reading abstracts, skimming papers, and trying other search terms before you land on sources that best for your project.

A strategy that often works well for Philosophy essays is to find two or more journal articles that refer to or debate one another: Your own essay can then be about deciding which side has the better case. One way to identify connected articles like that is to find an article on the right topic and then look up some of the sources it discusses. When you are on the page for a given article, especially on the page at the journal itself, you will sometimes see a “cited by” list, and that can be similarly useful.

You can always ask a librarian for help shaping your search—that is one of their main functions.

Christian apologist/“philosopher” William Lane Craig popularized a version of the Cosmological Argument known as the Kalam Argument. It is named after a school of medieval Islamic scholars who developed it.

Recently [Edit: as I originally wrote in 2023], some theist-bros (I can’t think of a better name for them—apologisters? God’s fanboys?) have reacted strongly and badly to a black atheist woman’s critique of their favorite argument for the existence of God on X-Twitter.

The uniformity and formulaic nature of their replies—in both content and vitriol—made me curious what was going on. It was almost universal among the commenters, and they wouldn’t let go of it even when I pushed back with good arguments.

The Kalam Argument is a version of the Cosmological Argument. It asks, what caused the whole of the cosmos to come into existence (not any one part of it)? Its answer is that there is an Uncaused Cause that brings the universe into existence, and this Uncaused Cause (aka First Cause, Unmoved Mover, etc.) is God. The God of Christianity, they assume.

Twitter’s @BeatTheCult asked, “If everything has a beginning then when did God begin?” In a subsequent tweet, she clarified that this was in response to the Kalam Cosmological Argument. (I missed this at first; I thought she was just referring to the base version of the Cosmological Argument.)

The God’s Rabid Response Team claimed that this is stupid; the worst possible response to the Kalam Argument. (They sometimes compounded their rude dismissiveness with sexism and racism. It kind of felt like a version of gamergate. The theobros have a lot of work to do on their modes of interaction and their attitudes. But let’s focus here on the theological arguments.)

Why were they all giving the same response, and why were they all treating this challenge as stupid, the worst possible response to the Kalam argument?

The answer to the mystery of this formulaic response—and its vitriol—appeared immediately in a Google search [Edit: Ah, the good old days when AI hadn’t ruined those]: Almost all the hits on “Objections to Kalam” are titled things like “The stupidest objections to the Kalam argument” or “Atheists’ worst objections to the Kalam argument”! There is apparently an industry, sparked by WLC himself in his debates if I’m reading the tea leaves right, of trying to undercut atheist objections to the argument with stock responses. It is a remarkable example of group think. The theobros are ready to pounce when they see the trigger words and then they parrot the same responses. The vehemence and rudeness accompanying it can only be explained by over-confidence arising from not having grappled enough with the real intellectual issues. If they had, they would know that all apologetic arguments are very susceptible to critique; in fact, most philosophers agree that they fail.

Like other versions of the Cosmological Argument, the Kalam Argument relies on applying the notion of causality to facts about the universe, especially the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and then forbidding an infinite regress of causes. (“Infinite regress” means a chain of steps that goes back and back to infinity without stopping.) These are two points at which Cosmological Arguments are especially susceptible to critique, as I have written about here.

The Kalam Argument differs from the “base model” Cosmological Argument in that it is considering the moment of the origin of the cosmos as a whole, and not a stepwise backwards walk through the chain of causes from something now to a First Cause. Rather, Kalam is focused on the whole of the order of nature coming into existence (not any specific thing that happens or exists within the order of nature).

The problem with the theobros’ formulaic response to the “What caused God?” objection is that it misses the point by assuming what is to be proved. God is eternal, they say, and therefore does not fall under the Kalam’s first premise, “Of the things that come into existence, a cause brings them into existence.” God, they claim, doesn’t need a cause because God doesn’t come into existence.

This is pure bluster, of course. The aim of the Kalam, like all versions of the Cosmological Argument, is to prove the existence of God. You can’t avoid an objection to such an argument by assuming that God exists and has specific characteristics—that’s the very thing that the argument is trying to prove! Perhaps there are other arguments to support the claim that God exists and is a necessary, eternal being who caused the universe. But if those other arguments work, then we don’t need the Kalam Argument! And if those other arguments don’t work, then it is obviously a viable question to ask why we should think a First Cause exists at all.

There are other problems with the Kalam Argument, too. One it has in common with all of Aquinas’s Five Ways, namely the identification of the First Cause as God, specifically the Christian omni-God. There is nothing in any of these arguments to support the idea that the First Cause is a theistic god, let alone a specific theistic god. Many commentators would say that if these arguments were successful, all they would prove is that there is some cause of the universe—we can’t know anything else about that cause from these arguments, so they don’t support any particular religion. In some ways, these arguments seem more compatible with deism than theism. Plus, Kalam and other Cosmological Arguments assume that the universe had a beginning out of nothing, and that is something we just do not know. It is perfectly possible that the universe, or the metauniverse in which our universe arose, is eternal. It is also possible that we are simply wrong to take a concept like causation, which we learn from studying an already existing universe, and apply it to a supposed state in which there is nothing in existence.

In short, the Kalam Argument is just as susceptible to critique as the rest of the apologetic arguments, and asking what caused the thing that caused the universe, or why we should think that a First Cause exists, is a perfectly sensible thing to ask. The correct answer is, “No one knows.”

In Douglas Adams’s comic science fiction novel, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, one alien civilization believes that the universe was sneezed out of the nose of the supreme deity, whom they call the Great Green Arkleseizure. (You think it’s a universe; it’s snot.)

You say, “Kalam!”

I say, “Gesundheit!”

Share

Subscribe now

This incoherent feedback from Wordle Bot is the most frustrating thing about NYT’s Wordle game:

There was only one possible solution left — and this wasn’t it. (XXXXX is a valid guess, but it’s unlikely to be a solution based on what I’ve learned from playing Wordle.) But there’s still only one solution remaining. You should solve the puzzle on your next turn.

<screams in philosopher> It is logically contradictory to say there is only one possible solution, and at the same time say there is more than one valid guess.

A “valid guess,” on any reasonable interpretation of that phrase, just means a possible solution. For something to an unlikely solution is for it to be a possible solution. In an organization like the NYT that cares about good writing, it is surprising that this phrasing has lasted so long.

What it comes down to, I gather, is that the set of words that can be word of the day in Wordle is smaller than the set of all five-letter English words. But for Wordle Bot to know that, it has to have a dictionary of all five-letter words. Just use that dictionary to select words of the day. Or, if there is some reason not to do that, then don’t allow the guess! If “BESIT” is not actually a possible solution, treat it like “BEXIT” and don’t allow it to be submitted as a guess. That’s an easy fix in the programming.

Anything else makes Wordle a silly “gotcha” game that isn’t fair because it punishes those who do not have insider knowledge of the list of Wordle-allowable words of the day (as opposed to the English-allowable five letter words). The way things are now is exclusionary, and pointless, and makes the game less fun.

I’m sure the Wordle list is published somewhere, but I don’t want to look it up: I play because I like words and reasoning, not because I want to memorize some idiosyncratic list.

At a minimum, NYT ought to change the wording of the Wordle Bot feedback for these kinds of cases so it isn’t incoherent. It could be replaced with, “Bummer: That is a five-letter English word, but it isn’t in the restricted list of those five-letter English words from which we pick words of the day. (Ha! Sucker!)” Or, you know, something like that.

While we are at it, Wordle Bot’s way of scoring guesses on “skill” and “luck” seems broken to me, too. Mathematically, it is true that given a specific word of the day and the letters eliminated so far, some words guessed next will pare down the possibilities more efficiently than others. But that is a judgement Wordle Bot makes already knowing the solution, which of course the player doesn’t know when making their guess. From the players’ point of view, ignorant of the solution, what they want to know is whether the guess on average leads to a more efficient solve across every Wordle-allowable word of the day. Calculating it relative to the specific word that happens to be the solution on that day is unhelpful when a player is looking for feedback to improve their strategy.

The mistake Wordle Bot is making here is analogous to poker analysis that judges a play based on the outcome of a specific hand. That is, it is like saying a play was a good play because it led to winning this time, even though that outcome might be very unlikely based on the actual probabilities at the start of the hand.

For example, drawing to an inside straight in Texas Hold ’Em is almost always a bad play, since typically you have to bet or call a larger percentage of the pot than your percentage chance of hitting that straight. This means that in the long run, playing that way guarantees you will lose money. Drawing to an inside straight is a bad play precisely because it always has negative expected value, even if it sometimes wins.

So, saying that a poker hand was “well played” because it won this time is simply incorrect. Poker players mock that kind of judgement by calling it “results oriented.” What really matters to good play are process-oriented or strategically sound judgements. You can control how you play, but you can’t control your luck, so what happens in this or that case doesn’t matter since luck has its biggest impact in the short run. What matters is how your strategy performs in the long run, where skill washes out luck.

This is the final installment in my series of philosophical commentaries on season one of “Pluribus.” To read the whole series (seven posts including this one) start here.

Contains spoilers for the entirety of season one, especially the finale.

This week, Rhea Seehorn won the 2026 Critic’s Choice award for Best Actress in a Drama Series for her portrayal of Carol Sturka in “Pluribus.” It is a well-deserved win.

Share

I’m with Manousos: The Joined are not human, even if they are made of humans.

The Joined seem to have incorporated the memories and knowledge but not the personalities of humanity. The personalities are all replaced with the same pleasant but vacuous one. Maybe we should call it a persona rather than a personality, anyway. It isn’t that having an individual personality is definitive by itself of being human, but that is certainly part of the equation.

Carol and Manousos don’t get along when they first meet, not even agreeing to the conditions of their parley let alone on the facts and their plans. A major point of contention is that they disagree about the humanity and moral value of the Joined.

C: They’re still human beings.
M: They’re not human.
C: They are, they’re just different…. They are not evil. They wouldn’t even kill an ant.
M: And isn’t it evil to value a man the same as an ant?

Manousos conducts experiments on the Joined, using something Carol discovered, namely that the whole hive overloads and goes into seizure when one of them is confronted with loud, angry yelling. There’s still no explanation of why that happens, but Manousos proves that the radio signal he detected is disrupted during the seizure.

Then, while his target is having a seizure, he tries to talk to him as an individual, to recall him to his self, as if will could overcome the biological change wrought by the virus: “Rick, I know you are there. You come back. You can do it. Remember.”

Two things to point out here. The first is that Manousos believes that the individuals who have been assimilated still exist and can be recovered. When Star Trek’s Captain Picard is assimilated by the Borg, he is eventually freed and becomes himself again (with some residual PTSD). I’m not convinced this is going to work with the Joined. I bet a new virus will have to be designed, to undo whatever the first one wrote into our DNA.

The second thing to note here is that Manousos doesn’t think it is wrong to experiment on the Joined, even if it causes them harm, since they are not human. Carol fires a shotgun over his head to make her point that she thinks it is wrong to harm them. Clearly, though, Manousos’s discovery of the radio signal is going to be a key to future plot developments in season 2.

The Joined’s biological drive to not cause harm, and to promote happiness among certain intelligent creatures, seems to not be accompanied with a drive to prevent all harm. In other words, they treat not causing harm differently than preventing harm. For example, they let Diabaté act in shallow ways that harm his own dignity, they don’t stop Manousos from attempting to cross the Darien Gap — and they give Carol an atom bomb.

This idea is counterbalanced by the fact that they medevac Manousos when he is about to die, they want to save Zosia when Carol is interrogating her on truth serum, and they prevent Carol from accidentally blowing herself up with a grenade (though not with fireworks, since they aren’t close enough to intervene at the time). So, preventing some extreme harms does seem to be part of their drive. The Joined seem to want to prevent the deaths of the unjoined. But they don’t seem overly concerned about preventing their own eventually dying off of starvation. (How to square this with the way they wanted to save Zosia isn’t clear to me.)

Then there is the Joined’s attitude to causing good. They are intentionally doing whatever they can to make Carol and the unjoined happy, although this seems to be an interim measure. They won’t violate autonomy to make the unjoined happy, except when their “biological drive” insists that the unjoined must be forced to join. This will again be a major issue in season 2.

The Joined don’t seem to be able to weigh and balance goods of different kinds. But at the same time, they don’t seem to have a view like Kantian deontology, for example, where there’s a principled difference between the “perfect” duty not to harm and the “imperfect” duty to prevent harm or provide aid to others. Kantians think that perfect duties must always be followed, and imperfect duties must be followed when it is possible/reasonable to do so. (Another reason to think the Joined are not Kantians is that Kantians include respecting autonomy in the list of perfect duties that can never be violated, even for very good reasons.)

Picking apples and harvesting wheat are certainly less bad than letting humanity starve out, right? And where does this put us with the Joining itself causing nearly a billion deaths? This isn’t just a utility calculation, where a small harm is allowed because it is overbalanced by the great good that results, since they don’t think this way about picking fruit vs. the survival of the species.

All this seems like a philosophical complaint against the writers, but maybe the correct attitude is that the writers have succeeded in constructing an “alien” ethics, utterly different than ours, inscrutable with our assumptions, capabilities, and theories.

Socrates thought that no one does evil willingly, because everyone chooses what they believe to be good. When we are incorrect about what is good, we do wrong things. In other words, moral mistakes derive from cognitive or epistemic mistakes. When you know more, you make different choices. To do good requires knowing what is good.

Do the Joined know what is good? The virus does not give them direct propositional knowledge (knowledge of statements like “killing plants to eat them is wrong”). Rather, the Joining seems to show them that being Joined is better than being unjoined, that completely avoiding killing is better than harvesting fruit, that spreading the Joining as far as possible is good, etc. Either the Joining changes their intuition, or their judgment, or their access to information. By the end of season one, it isn’t clear which it might be.

The fact that the Joined (The Others, as the show sometimes calls them) are not human does not necessarily change our moral obligations towards them, however. There are plenty of non-human animals that deserve our moral consideration. If you think that sentience, consciousness, ability to use reason, ability to feel pleasure, or some other mental characteristic is what gives a being moral standing, then the Joined certainly have it. In fact, it is plausible to think that in the scale of moral being, the Joined entity is more morally significant than humans, or that killing the Joined is a worse moral crime than a genocide against humanity. Even if you accept that, however, there’s still the point that our self-defense, their having committed serious crimes, and their not respecting other moral beings’ autonomy, are reasons why we could be justified in harming or killing the Joined.

The scene in which Carol and Zosia get a couple’s massage explains that each body that is part of the Joined feels its own pleasure. The rest of them can access knowledge of any body’s feelings. Being aware of billions of experiences at once would be overwhelming, so they don’t pay attention to everyone else all the time, though they are able to selectively attend when needed. This makes it seem the Joined are less like a hive mind, and more like a corporate mind. (The Geth from the Mass Effect video game series are like this, for example.) But what this scene shows, and what the truth serum scene also shows, is that individual bodies in the Joined do (or can, in some cases) experience individual pain and unhappiness.

The Joined are more rational, consistent, and principled than the people out of whom they are composed. The Joined contains everyone — MAGAts, religious extremists, philosophers, and literally insane people included. It would be impossible for all of those folks to have reached rational consensus, even if they suddenly all had the same information. So, even if you believe in the wisdom of crowds, this suggests the personality change (and the consensus of opinion) is not due merely to the merging of minds. Given the lore of the show, we can’t attribute the personality change to sharing of information. There wasn’t enough communication bandwidth or processing time for everyone to agree. So, it must be part of the virus itself.

The Joined refer to themselves as “we”. (Zosia has a hard time, conceptually she says, using “I”, though she sometimes succeeds in doing it, perhaps mostly when she is trying hardest to manipulate Carol.) The hive mind “we” is common in science fiction. Recall ST:TNG’s, “We are the borg. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.” But there’s a philosophical burr in my saddle: Wouldn’t a true hive mind be an “I”?

Carol tries being happy with shallow pursuits on her own. She tries being happy with Zosia. A lot of it is good, but in the end, it is unsatisfying because it is fake. This is the thesis of The Matrix, too, and of Nozick’s “The Experience Machine,” both of which claim that experientially indistinguishable lives can be differently preferable. They assert that real (as opposed to fake) experiences are preferable even when they are experientially (especially, hedonistically) inferior. An aside: Anecdotally, philosophy teachers have noticed that in the last decade or so, there has been a cultural shift in attitudes about Nozick’s Experience Machine. It used to be that almost no one would want to live in the Experience Machine, but recently few students have taken that position. I blame science fiction for normalizing the concept of virtual reality.

The superficial life is not the kind of thing Carol hoped it was, at least. She wanted, and for a while thought she had, real connection with Zosia. Then Zosia tells Carol that the Joined love Manousos the same as they love Carol, and that they are going to assimilate her in a month. Not only do they not love Carol individually, they don’t even respect her individuality enough to preserve it despite Carol’s wish that it be preserved. That’s not the romantic devotion Carol’s ego was looking for.

(Another aside, this time on timelines: In the show, Carol and Zosia take their romantic trip only about seventy days after Helen’s death. Sure, it is party desperation, partly manipulation, but still that seems rather too quick after losing your life partner, not to mention the whole world, to be interested in romantic attachment. With the entity that killed your spouse and the rest of the world, no less!)

The Joined are faking it in all their interactions with the unjoined. We see this at the end of the casino scene: When Diabaté leaves after his poker fantasy, the folks who were cheering him on, and even the ones “having fun” in the rest of the casino, go blank and walk away. They were merely acting. The whole thing was an illusion for Diabaté’s sake.

We see this again in an especially stark way at the beginning of the final episode of season 1. After the young Peruvian woman is infected, the play-acting that had been going on around her, imitating village life and traditions, simply stops and everyone walks away, abandoning the settlement. The young Peruvian woman (well, the shell that was her and is now a terminal of the Joined) unlocks the goat pen and lets the animals wander away as she is leaving herself. Nothing that was there was real or valuable to the Joined, except as tools for placating/manipulating the unjoined.

Carol: “If you loved me, you wouldn’t do this.”
Zosia: “We have to do this because we love you.”

You can imagine this exact conversation between a sadistic torturer and their victim. Or between a daughter and mother when the mother is about to perform genital mutilation on her daughter. Or between a parent and needle-phobic child when the parent is making the child get a vaccine that is actually for their own good. Which is the problematic part of this whole setup. The Joined would say the same thing if they were wiser than us and paternalistically benevolent, deluded but honestly intending to do good, or lying and evil. The show so far makes it impossible to know which it is. But as I said at the beginning of this post, I’m with Manousos, though not for his religious reasons: I would do whatever it takes to undo the Joining. To my mind, the Joining is equivalent to a massacre, occupation of the planet, and enslavement of the remaining population by the aliens. Not resisting them would amount to being complicit in the worst crimes against humanity ever committed.

Ultimately, feeling personally slighted by the Joined, Carol concedes the same point to Manousos, setting up season 2: “You win. We save the world.”

There’s still lots more philosophical content in and inspired by “Pluribus” that could be explored more deeply. For example:

· Racism and white savior syndrome – perpetrated or commented on by the show?

· Can bad people do good?

· Colonialism, alien invasion, and cultural imperialism

· Do the aliens have the right to infect the whole galaxy with their idea of what is good?

· Is humanity worth saving?

· What makes something human? What makes something a person/morally valuable?

· Is ending the Joining a genocide? Is it justified anyway?

· Is Diabaté a utility monster?

· If, as season 1 seems to say, the meaning of life is togetherness and relationship, then why can’t Joining be the ultimate togetherness?

· Parfit style divisions and mergers of the self to make other selves; personal identity, memory, and so on.

· The duty to resist oppression.

But I’ll leave it here for now. I’ll come back to it for season 2. The current best guess on that, sadly, is late 2027 or early 2028!

I know you want to “join” my Substack. Please subscribe. I promise I have no nefarious motives and am not an agent of any alien species.

Subscribe now

Share

[This post contains spoilers for “Pluribus” season 1, episode 8, “Charm Offensive.”]

In episode 8, not much happens. Again. While I sometimes find myself impatient with the show’s pace and worry that it is because there is not enough “there” there, I can accept it as an artistic choice.

Episode 8 mostly follows Carol and Zosia after their reunion. The episode is called “Charm Offensive” and it seems to me that both sides are trying new tactics. Carol is still adding to her whiteboard list of things she knows about the Joined, this time reminding herself, “They. Eat. PEOPLE.” No one could forget that, of course, so this is a message to the audience that although Carol has seemed to be getting friendly with the Joined, she hasn’t wavered in her plan to find a way to undo the Joining. She says as much to Zosia near the end of the episode.

Carol stays over at one of the Joined’s sleep communes, then later back at her house “sleeps with” Zosia, a development that we saw coming for most of the season and which seemed too predictable. Except that it isn’t clear who’s zoomin’ who, as Aretha Franklin sang: Both sides seem to be thinking they are manipulating the other.

Meanwhile Manousos wakes up in a hospital somewhere in Panama, still very sick but determined to get away from the Joined. He holds one at scalpel-point while demanding another print him an itemized bill for the medical care they gave him. Eight-thousand-and-some dollars, the bill says, “+ one ambulance,” added in red marker because he needs a vehicle to continue his journey.

Four scenes in this episode give us new information about the Joined hive mind. Carol and Zosia go for a hike and see a train from a high cliff. Zosia appears not to know that Carol loves a train horn. As soon as Zosia learns it, the train sounds its horn. So, the Joined don’t know everything, or at least each of them doesn’t know everything. In explaining how she communicated to the train driver, Zosia says it isn’t like conscious knowledge, more like a feeling. (I’m not sure that is enough to do some of the things the Joined have been able to do, like flying a jet with no previous experience, but okay as the official story.) The virus apparently activated an existing potential to utilize electromagnetic fields produced by a body for communication. Kind of like the “humans as batteries” explanation in The Matrix, that can’t possibly work, but take it as true for the sake of the story.

They go for a couples massage, and Carol get Zosia to explain that the massage is individually pleasurable to her, and that everyone else is aware of everything that is happening, but that they can’t pay attention to it all or it would cause them to go crazy. So, it sounds like each person could know the details of any given experience anyone is having, but they generally don’t attend to all that information. (There would have to be a sorting mechanism, a catalog or data server, or something equivalent, or else how could someone find a fact they needed in the moment among seven billion other minds? It hasn’t been addressed to this point how the hive mind deals with disagreement: After all, people in the Joined had very different, even incompatible, beliefs and attitudes before the Joining. How did they come to a consensus?)

Later, back at Carol’s house, Carol tries to get Zosia to use the pronoun “I” instead of saying “we” all the time. It turns out to be difficult for her: Even though the Joined want to make Carol happy by fulfilling her requests, Zosia trips on that one several times. Once Zosia starts using “I”, and once Carol gets her to say what her personal favorite ice cream flavor is, leading to a precious childhood memory, Zosia seems to glitch, as if she is struggling between a personal self and a hive self. But then she says, “You are going to have a visitor.” Cut to Manousos dressing his wounds and getting back on the road. Roll credits.

The fourth scene where we learn more about the hive mind was earlier in the episode when Zosia and Carol use a telescope to view Kepler 22, the star from which the virus code seems to have originated. This leads to a conversation that confirms that the Joined don’t know anything about the aliens — don’t and probably can’t know the aliens, because they are just too far away. Zosia also reveals that the Joined have an urge to share the “gift” with other intelligent civilizations in the galaxy.

This is not entirely unreasonable from a scientific point of view. Viruses getting integrated into a genome are already responsible for a lot of evolution, including human evolution. (Greg Bear’s Darwin’s Radio is one science fiction take on this scientific fact.) So, it makes sense that a virus could give us new biological abilities and even new biological drives. Though, to be fair, most insertions are neutral, and those that are deleterious and get selected against, so they don’t end up as permanent additions to the genome.

But two things don’t make sense with this: The first is that evolution (or a virus) cannot transmit propositional knowledge — birds and some other animals pass on “genetic knowledge” about how to build nests in certain styles, for example, or how to do a mating dance. The Joined seem to have gained both propositional knowledge about facts, and attitudes about values. For example, they adopt strict vegetarianism, not to mention the belief that the virus is a gift and not a curse. The second is that while it makes sense that Earth-viruses can affect Earth-genomes, it doesn’t make sense that aliens more than six hundred light-years away, beyond the possibility of communication, could know what an Earth-genome is like, let alone design a virus for insertion into the genome of the dominant species only, when they have no idea what our genetic code is like or whether we even exist.

The explanation must be that something like the theory of panspermia is correct, and it includes a kind of necessity that an intelligent species of a certain kind will eventually arise in every evolutionary environment. Panspermia is the theory that life originated elsewhere in space, and was spread to Earth — and presumably the rest of the galaxy, so that we should expect there to be life everywhere.

The aliens from Kepler 22b might have been responsible for spreading genetic material to Earth. Though in that case it was a lucky guess, billions of years later, that beings like us would exist and infect ourselves. Or we and they might be common products of some other species who seeded the galaxy. Or the Keplerians have figured out that there is a physical process that delivers/guarantees the creation of DNA and RNA on suitable planets.

Earlier in the series, Carol draws an analogy between the Joined and the awful people who tried to steal her personhood at a “conversion therapy” kids’ camp. The Joined do seem to have an evangelical streak: They want to convert all humans, and now we learn they want to pass on the “gift” to other civilizations in the galaxy.

This goes very much against the “Dark Forest” theory of science fiction author Liu Cixin, where civilizations throughout the galaxy avoid giving signs that they exist so that other more advanced civilizations won’t come and destroy them, and they make a point to snuff out other nascent intelligent life they do detect, so those planets never grow to be a threat to them. Perhaps the virus is a way to pacify and eliminate potential threats. Or perhaps the Keplerians really do have something valuable that they want to share with every possible intelligent species.

That’s the trouble with evangelizers. They are most often motivated by the belief that they know the truth, and that this truth is a great boon to everyone, so they feel compelled to spread the idea. But, as we know on Earth, even when sincere, religious evangelizers are often deluded, or simply wrong, about the supposed knowledge they want to spread. This must be so: There is at most one true description of the supernatural, and therefore at least most (if not all) attempts to convert people to a new religion are attempts to convert them to a false religion.

But let’s say the Keplerians do know the actual cosmic truth and benevolently want to share it with us and every other intelligent civilization. What is that truth?

So far, the show has only told us a little about it. In a previous post, I mentioned that the Joined are similar to the Jains in their desire to avoid killing. When I wrote that post, I didn’t think about the possibility that the Joined might actually have the same explanation for their nonviolence as the Jains. Now I wonder if that works as a motivation for the Keplerians. Let me explain.

The Jains avoid violence not merely because it causes harm to other beings, but because causing harm to other beings harms the one doing the harm. Causing harm to oneself in this way prevents ascension to higher levels of being, and delays achieving the goal of existence, namely eventual release from the cycle of death/rebirth and its inherent suffering. The Jain path to liberation involves always telling the truth, nonviolence, vegetarianism, respect for life, compassion for others, and fasting. Sound familiar?

So, here’s a possibility: Perhaps the Keplerian virus is an “enlightenment pill.” New Agers in the 1960s and 70s hoped for enlightenment through chemical means, and here are the Keplerians with the substance that actually does it. The Joining relieves suffering of all kinds in the immediate present. It leads to peace, equanimity, happiness, community, and knowledge; all the things you might have wanted from your hippy commune.

Jainism might be the wrong analogy. You could see the Buddhist idea of “no self” in the merged conscious of the Joined — there’s a We made of transient processes, but no I. Or you could see the Joining as mirroring or anticipating the Hindu notion of merging into cosmic oneness.

On this explanation, it isn’t a tragedy that the Joined human race will eventually starve out, since it thereby achieves liberation from the karmic cycle and the souls of the dead could go on to a higher state of being. (That’s not part of the lore of “Pluribus,” but it would fit with what we know so far.)

On this explanation, Carol and Manousos are wrong to try to avoid joining. They are making a mistake, trying to preserve a state that only leads to suffering, and traps them (and everyone else) in the cycle of death and rebirth.

Just one more episode left in this season! I’m guessing that most of the lingering questions will not be wrapped up. Subscribe so you don’t miss the next post in this series.

Subscribe now

Was he right to cut off his old friends because their political and moral opinions were so different than his own? Or would it have been better to stay friends and continue to try to reason with them, attempting to change their minds over the long term?

The question of how to handle significant moral and political disagreements is a key to our own personal moral development, and crucial to living a virtuous life. And the question could not be more relevant given the current U.S. political climate. How we answer regarding friends and family has implications for how we should interact with other members of society, too.

Arizona State University philosopher Nathan Ballantyne advocates bridging political divides and radical disagreements by using curiosity and intellectual humility in “Setting Down the Microphone While Your Opponent Speaks”. He was inspired to write that piece because of a clash with a friend in the aftermath of the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

I do very much agree with Ballantyne’s idea of approaching disagreements, especially between friends, with curiosity first. Truly hearing someone is almost always a route to insight and connection. In normal situations, this seems the best way to approach differences of opinion.

In the case of a figure such as Charlie Kirk, though, I wonder whether the calculus needs to include additional factors. Here is what I mean. Kirk advocated positions that are objectively reprehensible: Misogyny, racism, homophobia, white supremacy, religious nationalism, covid disinformation, etc. (See this, this and this for examples.) To say that such views are objectively reprehensible is to say that they are views no one should hold. Those views are factually and morally wrong — objectively wrong not just because they cannot be justified, but because they can be definitively shown to be based on false claims and bad arguments, not to mention that they result in harmful outcomes.

If someone espouses reprehensible views, is it wrong to associate with them? Or put it another way: Should I be the kind of person who associates with someone like that?

Kirk’s stance of open engagement was merely a rhetorical strategy, as far as I can see. You cannot really be an advocate of radical freedom of speech and also think people should not be allowed to exercise other more important freedoms (being able to vote and have it counted equally, or choosing who to love, where to live, what religion to practice, whether to work or have a family, what clothes to wear, and so on).

So, I do not give Kirk much credit for his stance on open debate, in the same way I do not congratulate advertisers for their manipulative techniques. You can cover a lot of sins with a veneer of civility or by saying you favor free speech — and Kirk did.

Given this, my impulse is to insist that people who admire Kirk should know better: They are morally at fault for admiring his “style” given that the contents of his opinions are objectively reprehensible. And if they say they did not know he held reprehensible positions and yet still admire him after learning that he did, that is even worse.

This was why I was disappointed when Gavin Newsom announced that he admires Kirk and wants to continue his work. Newsom meant the part about free speech and open dialogue between people who disagree politically, but you cannot admire that part of Kirk while ignoring the fact that what he used his free speech to do was to advocate for regressive, unconstitutional, hateful, and immoral positions. I was similarly disappointed when Ezra Klein wrote that, “Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way” — a claim Nathan Robinson demolished in this piece in Current Affairs, precisely on the grounds that Klein ignores Kirk’s reprehensible views.

It is difficult to adopt a stance of curiosity towards anyone, even a friend, who is deeply morally wrong in this way. It is also, I think, blameworthy for the friend, or anyone, to let themselves be fooled by rhetoric that is so transparently sophistical.

Sometimes being a true friend requires doing difficult things, including telling your friend they are wrong. This is dangerous since they probably will not listen, and it is also likely to damage or end the friendship. Maintaining connection may be more likely in the long run to lead the friend to the light.

And, fair enough, everyone is wrong sometimes, even badly wrong, and we all deserve the chance to learn, to change our minds, to make amends, to become better people. I would certainly prefer my friends to tell me when I am making a mistake, rather than simply cutting me out of their lives.

The question is whether — or rather, under what conditions — we have a duty to a friend to stick with them despite their serious mistakes. Finding the line where we should cut off a friendship, instead of trying to coach/cajole them over the long term, is hard. But that line exists. I do not think having a positive opinion about Kirk is automatically over that line, but it is close; the details of what the friend believes about Kirk will matter, as will how they react when they learn the facts. (Being a Steven Miller or Nick Fuentes fan would for sure be over that line.)

I first encountered this kind of issue in my own life a couple of decades ago, albeit at second hand, when my then-girlfriend decided to maintain a friendship with someone she had known for years who had been sent to jail for child sexual abuse. Personally, I would not stay friends with someone like that — as I recall, he pleaded guilty and there was no doubt he had done it. But my girlfriend insisted she had a duty of friendship to stay friends with him. Abandoning him would only make him worse (not just worse off) by depriving him of support without which, she thought, his moral rehabilitation would have been impossible. She saw both the duty itself and the probability of a better outcome (for him, for society) as reasons to maintain the friendship. She refused to see him as an irredeemable lost cause.

Although this sort of behavior is not uncommon among Christians (those who visit the incarcerated, minister to drug addicts, etc.), my girlfriend was not religious: She did it purely out of her understanding of the ethics of friendship and her belief in the inherent value of human beings, regardless of any heinous things they might have done. I presume there was a line where she would have ended a friendship with someone, some moral depravity too far beyond the pale to countenance even for the sake of humanity. But hers was much farther away than my line.

It is my impression that some Christians build relationships with the disadvantaged out of their sense of religious obligation, though I suppose they may later also acquire genuine feelings of friendship towards some people they originally were aiming to convert … er, I mean, help. Much of the time, though, it seems they are merely to trying to earn their fellow congregants’ (or God’s) approbation, not doing the thing for its own sake. The people for whom the good deed is supposedly done become a kind of tool for the performance of morality, a performance done for the sake of increasing the status of the wannabe (seen as) do-gooder.

My gut tells me this is what was going on when Charlie Kirk’s widow, Erika, proclaimed at his memorial ceremony, mere days after his shocking death, that she forgave his assassin. It was either a saintly gesture or a calculated manipulation. I know nothing at all about Erika Kirk except that she is the kind of person who would marry a person like Charlie Kirk. But I do know that many Christians feel a kind of peer pressure (sometimes are even subject to a sort of brainwashing), that leads them to publicly proclaim they forgive those who trespass against them, whether they truly forgive them or not. It can be a kind of self-delusion, a kind of self-aggrandizement, or a conditioned response.

One reason I would not stay friends with a child abuser, in addition to simply not wanting to associate with someone with such values, would be solidarity with the victims. One could say that in forgiving her husband’s murderer, a wife fails in a duty of loyalty to her husband, which is presumably even stronger than the duty to be in solidarity with strangers who are victims of crimes. But maybe it was merely a move calculated to prevent runaway political violence and retaliation. It did thankfully have that effect, at least.

Then again, maybe the point is that everyone deserves support, victims and perpetrators alike. I am not convinced, though.

Consider this analogy. One way of conceptualizing the ethics of self-defense is to say that in virtue of attacking someone else, the attacker effectively gives up their own rights not to be harmed or killed. Since those rights are no longer in play, the defender is not wrong to harm or kill the attacker during the attack. (A parallel case can be made about defensive wars.)

Are there other acts (or beliefs) that amount to effectively giving up the right to continued friendship and its advantages? I think there are, though I cannot specify exactly what the conditions would be. To take an extreme example to make the point that these limits do exist, however, imagine someone who sincerely believed the best course of action was to instantly murder half of all living creatures (snap!). That person would thereby have given up all moral claims: We would be in the right to do anything at all to them necessary to prevent the atrocity they were about to commit.

One way of understanding Christianity is as denying this conclusion, at least from God’s point of view: You do not deserve forgiveness, but God will forgive you anyway. Christians offer to forgive those who trespass against them in an effort to be Christlike — although, strictly speaking, in Luke 17:3-4, Christ only says that we should rebuke those who sin against us, and forgive them if they repent (genuinely apologize and change). Forgiving your spouse’s murderer when they have not repented is “Christlike” (if sincere) in the sense that it is “supererogatory,” a philosopher’s word that means going above and beyond your duty, doing something no one would think is morally required yet which is still morally good.

Approaching significant disagreements with curiosity is fraught, too, because of the likelihood of your curiosity not being met with a similar empathy and openness. This can happen in several ways. Your attempt to be curious can simply be rejected. Or accepted but not reciprocated. Or someone can fake curiosity without seriously considering changing their views. Or perhaps they listen only to try to trap you in a “gotcha.”

Or, as with Charlie Kirk, the curiosity or civility turns out to be a ruse — it is not intended sincerely but rather is just another tool of manipulation. At least, that is my interpretation of what I know about him. (Others seem to agree. Though maybe there were really two Charlie Kirks. Then again, maybe he was a “Southern Gentleman” in the sense of being two-faced: Fake-nice to your face, vicious behind your back if you are the wrong kind of person.)

Anyway, it strikes me that Kirk did not genuinely want to create common ground with people who have different moral and political views. He was not truly open to debate, since he only debated undergraduates, not people fully educated on the issues and experienced in debating. He was taking advantage of people and situations for clips and views. What Kirk wanted, what he hoped to achieve through his various organizations and affiliations, was ultimately to impose his extremist views on everyone. His gestures toward free speech and open debate were intended to convince or motivate his fans by displaying a veneer of reasonableness and civility which they could latch onto as laudable. In fact it is neither reasonable nor civil to imply that transgender people should be beaten or killed, or to foment fear and violence against Blacks and other minorities, or to assert that Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and other non-Christians are enemies of America.

The metaphor of leading someone to the light, although it has since been co-opted by religious folks intent on converting people to their particular religion, appears in an entirely non-religious context in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave (in a dialogue called The Republic, written about 375 BCE). According to the allegory, most humans are utterly deluded, believing only falsehoods about the way things are. The wise person, through education and effort, can escape the bonds of error and eventually see things as they really are. When those who have seen the light return to the cave and try to educate others, they are dismissed, mocked, and misunderstood. Trying to lead someone to the light will, then, often involve dragging them against their will to see things in a different, better, way.

I have always felt the Allegory of the Cave was too self-congratulatory. (“Look at us philosophers, we are the only ones who know the truth! Others are deluded sheeple!”) Even so, there is something to it. It points out that we humans often form false beliefs — whether because of misperceiving things, misinterpreting evidence, incorrect or misapplied concepts, a lack of information, biases we are unaware of, or bad reasoning. Tradition plus a lack of imagination is a terrible combination.

Only education and effort, spurred on by a dedication to see things as they are and not as our biases or desires make us want to see them, can mitigate these errors. We may never fully escape these errors, but only in this way is it possible to get knowledge. Only in this way can we hope to become moral.

The steadfast dedication to searching for the truth (rather than stubbornly thinking you already have the truth), is the crucial piece here. Without it, we might put forth effort to reinforce already-held beliefs instead of finding better ones. Without it, we might become highly educated in dogmas that bear little relation to the way the world is.

Socrates famously hated the Sophists, a group of teachers of oration whose goal was not to get to the truth but to train their students to be able to persuade a crowd, whatever the position in question. The source of Socrates’s contempt for the Sophists was precisely that they were not honest inquirers. They used effort and education corruptly, merely to shape the opinions of others without caring whether the opinions were true or good. In other words, the Sophists aimed to influence or manipulate rather than to convince or enlighten. We are familiar today with the Sophists’ spiritual descendants: public relations officers, advertisers, lobbyists, pundits, politicians, and podcasters (okay, fine: not all podcasters).

What if you are not friends but merely in society with someone with whom you disagree, what are your duties of discourse then? Or to ask it another way, are your duties toward fellow denizens parallel to your duties towards friends? Is denizenship relevantly similar to friendship, such that we owe certain mutual duties? (I chose “denizen” — “one who lives permanently in a place” —instead of “citizen” because I mean to refer to all members of society, not just those with full legal status. Citizenship is merely a legal construct. It does not pick out any real feature of people, of societies, or of the world, and it is often employed as a weapon to exclude and oppress.)

One way friendship and denizenship differ is in the fact that friendship involves a mutual emotional connection on an individual level. At most, denizenship implies a common love of, or duty towards, country. Insofar as countries are made of individuals, this implies a kind of trickle-down impersonal concern for fellow denizens.

But there are other respects in which denizenship and friendship are more strongly analogous, including relations of mutual dependence and support. That is, we cannot get by in friendship or in society unless we can rely on each other to follow the law, respect one another, support one another, pursue justice for one another, and so on. In friendship, these duties of mutuality are personal; in denizenship, they are impersonal. But they still exist. In fact, these duties of mutuality seem to be what makes civilization possible in the first place.

So probably we should, at least much of the time, under most circumstances or in most kinds of cases, engage political differences through openness and curiosity. But if the analogy between friendship and denizenship holds in this way, there are probably cases where we should not. Again, where to draw the line?

I think the key consideration with fellow denizens — the people with whom we are in society — is this: If someone holds opinions that undermine the very possibility of society or civilization, then you do not have to treat them as you would people who hold ordinary opinions. If someone proposes to kill, enslave, harm, or oppress others, that is comparable to the attacker in the self-defense example self-erasing others’ moral obligations towards them.

So, when people are actively trying to harm you or others, or when they are trying to overturn democracy and the rule of law, you are not required to use empathy and curiosity and humility in interactions with them. Calls for more civility in American politics often fail to acknowledge this. Calls for unity and bipartisanship are often insincere in that they fail to note that one cannot — one should not — find common ground with someone whose fundamental beliefs and behaviors involve oppressing people or advocating for their eradication.

If someone sincerely gives up reprehensible beliefs, then of course now you can try to find common ground with them and bring them into the warm embrace of a free and open society. Friends and denizens should help each other see the light.

The problem of knowing for sure that an opinion is reprehensible is an obstacle to drawing lines correctly and behaving in the right ways, whether with friends or denizens. It is possible, after all, to have (or think you have) good arguments and evidence, then turn out to be wrong.

And, of course, religious and political extremists often claim the others they vilify are the ones destroying the country and causing harm. You might despair that this is a brute clash of worldviews, an unbridgeable fundamental disagreement. Fortunately, it is easy to see through such claims when they are disingenuous, mere rhetorical tricks, and based in falsehood.

How do I know that, say, Kirk’s opinions and not mine are the reprehensible ones? Let me count the ways.

Any time you find yourself defending misogyny, racism, homophobia, transphobia, or any other position that involves oppressing, hating, harming, or denying freedoms to anyone, you are probably in the wrong. Why should you get more freedom than anyone else? Why should you be free to choose what to believe, who to love, how to dress, where to live, or how to live, while they do not? Any us/them dichotomy used for rhetorical purposes is suspect; we are a we.

When someone insists they do deserve more freedom than others, or that someone else is less worthy and therefore deserves less freedom, they normally try to justify it with religion: God does not want other people to do x, y, or z; God does want me to do a, b, and c. But when you dig into these claims, the evidence to back them up is weak to non-existent.

For example, the New Testament does not say anything at all about abortion, let alone demand an aggressively absolutist anti-abortion attitude. The passages of the Bible normally invoked to justify homophobia do not actually mean that. And so on. (On these sorts of topics, I recommend Dan McClellan’s The Bible Says So, which I reviewed here.)

And even if the Bible does express some moral/political stances (patriarchy, misogyny), why should we accept the Bible as correct in those places? The Bible does not ban slavery, either, and that means at least some of the time the Bible is obviously wrong. (A few Christian nationalist extremists have recently been trying to bite this bullet and insist that slavery is not wrong, but that just shows how vile and corrupt their position is, not to mention how hopeless Biblical literalism is.)

We know a lot more than the ancients who wrote these religious texts. We do not have to take everything they said as…well, gospel. Plus, until someone can prove which religion is true, there is no objective reason to prefer any religious tradition over any other. And proving that is something we will never be able to achieve. Plainly, there is no evidence that convinces everyone that any one story of the divine is uniquely correct: People have been debating the topic for thousands of years and there are still hundreds of mutually incompatible religions, with new ones popping up all the time.

The upshot, then, is that appeals to religion to attempt to justify oppression, harm, and denying freedoms to others, can never succeed. Such attempts might seem to succeed within a religious community that shares the same principles and preconceptions, but these attempted justifications are not generalizable or widely persuasive. They are no basis for law and government.

How does this help us determine which views are reprehensible and worthy of being shunned? We can take it as given that any view that advocates harming or oppressing someone else is, on its face, morally wrong. It would take a strong justification to overcome that presumption.

We do sometimes encounter situations where good reasons override ordinary moral presumptions: For example, in eminent domain cases when the government takes someone’s property in order to achieve some public good, the harm to the property owner is justified — but only if there is a very good reason to do it, and the person harmed is proportionally compensated. Killing in self-defense is another example of how it is possible for good reasons to override an ordinary moral presumption.

Above I argued that religious justifications for harming or oppressing others will never succeed. Sometimes people looking for non-religious justifications offer factual claims to attempt to back up their reprehensible opinions. For example, that women are too emotional for political office, that blacks are less intelligent, that white people are intellectually or culturally superior, that gay marriage will destroy the fabric of society. Every single serious empirical investigation into such claims has shown they are false. Maybe someone could come up with an adequate justification to back up attempts to dehumanize vulnerable groups, but I seriously doubt it. At the very least, that justification is not yet available. A lack of justification for those claims entails that any position based on those claims is therefore also unjustified.

That means that opinions to the effect that we should harm or oppress others have no justification, neither religious nor factual. These views are reprehensible precisely because they involve serious harms to others and they are held without adequate justification. People who hold such reprehensible views have, in virtue of holding those views, given up any claims to friendship or denizenship, because they are trying to undermine the very possibility of civil society.

An objection to the position I have been arguing for here is that it would stagnate debate and solidify differences of opinion into permanent divides, which is not what our already-polarized society needs. But this is not quite right. Ostracization is a well-known social mechanism. Those who transgress against a culture’s highest principles have suffered this, or worse, for thousands of years. While it is a punishment that may eventually lead someone to reflect and change their mind from a reprehensible position, it also serves as a deterrent to others. It says this is a line we do not cross; this principle unifies us, it does not divide us. Moreover, there are few opinions that are reprehensible in the way required to lead to the kind of ostracization I’m talking about. We know that when we believe something that causes or implies serious harm, we will be shunned, and that other beliefs are open to vigorous discussion and critique from others. Combined with a steadfast commitment to seeking the truth, these principles are exactly what are needed to defend society from conmen and extremists.

There is a “more flies with honey” aspect of approaching disagreement with curiosity. If a mind can be changed, this is the way to do it. It was, after all, the method Socrates himself used, asking questions until people led themselves to the light.

However, in the same way folks on the Internet do not owe you an education on social justice just because you entered a comment thread about it, your duty to try to sway people who express incorrect moral and political opinions is not absolute.

Duties of friendship and denizenship do involve responsibilities to enter into discourse with people who hold different opinions, and those conversations will probably be more productive if conducted in non-adversarial ways, with intellectual humility and curiosity and a dedication to finding the truth. Probably, we have a duty to call out reprehensible opinions, telling friends and denizens alike when they are making these moral mistakes. We should do this if we care about those people, or about society. Simply abandoning people to bad ideologies is not going to make the world a better place.

That said, if people persist in their reprehensible views after they have heard earnest attempts to explain why they are wrong, there is not much left to do. These are not “agree to disagree” situations. These are not “live and let live” kinds of cases. We cannot have a society with people whose beliefs, and the actions those beliefs imply, undermine the very possibility of society, or mutual safety, or freedom. Of course, we must be absolutely rigorous with ourselves in making sure we are not making mistakes about our own positions, or theirs. We should not assume we are always morally in the right. There are, though, some very simple cases: Anyone who believes in harming someone, denying them freedoms, or who advocates the eradication of people or groups, can be safely presumed to be holding a reprehensible position. If they attempt to justify their position with appeals to religion or to other metaphysical ideas that cannot be rationally universalized, or with false or dubious empirical claims, we can be even more sure they are wrong.

For friends, then, the line we were looking for may be beliefs that undermine the very possibility of friendship (dehumanization, denigration, intent to harm, etc.). For denizens, the line may be beliefs that undermine the very possibility of society.

In his 1945 book, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Karl Popper said there was a Paradox of Toleration, namely that a tolerant society must be intolerant of the intolerant to avoid being undermined. That’s the right result but the wrong framing. There is no paradox. The principle of toleration was never about permitting everything, or about absolute freedom of belief and action. The point of toleration is to prevent unjust harms — harms such as oppressing people on the basis of false claims about them, or because they have merely different tastes, or follow lifestyles different than ours, or have inconsequentially different cultural practices. It is perfectly consistent with this principle to disallow other opinions that are objectively harmful.

The position advocated here is not a license to cut people off for trivial reasons like mere disagreements, insults, or lack of reciprocation. Navigating such conflicts is an ordinary part of friendship. We owe duties of connection and conversation to friends and denizens alike, albeit to different extents. With denizens, part of being in a democratic society is working together to try to figure out the best way to live, and that comes with disagreements that we need to negotiate or make peace with.

And even if a friend or denizen holds reprehensible views, you are never required to cut them off. It is just an option that is allowed to you. It is a way to protect your own dignity, self-respect, and peace, while signaling to the other person that they have committed a serious transgression. Staying in curious conversation with someone who holds reprehensible views is a kind of supererogation. It is good for them, and for society, if you succeed in bringing them into the light, but you have not failed if they never come around. Each of us is responsible for our own beliefs, and whatever consequences may follow from them.

People are not loveable only when they have correct moral, political, and factual opinions. Good thing, too: All of us are, inevitably, wrong about a great deal. That is just part of the human condition. It is one reason we need to work together in societies. But some opinions will get you shunned. Repent, make amends, change, then we can welcome you back into the circle.

Share

Subscribe now

[This post contains spoilers for “Pluribus” season 1, episode 7, “The Gap.”]

In episode 7, we follow two stories. In one, we see the Paraguayan from the self-storage lot make his way toward Carol. And, in the other, we see Carol trying to live with the knowledge that she has gathered about the Joined and about the other members of the unjoined.

None of it is good, especially since Carol is utterly alone, so she is only going through the motions: Demanding a fancy dinner with all the best dishes from her favorite dates with her now-dead partner, playing golf on a fancy course by herself, breaking high rise windows for fun, replacing the police cruiser she’s been driving with a fancier car, setting up vast firework displays in the cul-de-sac in front of her house. It is all just fiddling to prevent going crazy with boredom, loneliness, and lack of purpose. It doesn’t work.

During one of these firework displays, a huge mortar tips over and launches directly at Carol. She sees it, she knows it is going to explode and kill her, yet she doesn’t even flinch as it zips by inches from her head. Carol is so depressed she is willing to die.

The next scene we see her in, she paints a message to the Joined on the cul-de-sac’s asphalt, knowing they are watching with satellites: “Come Back”. The following day Zosia returns. Carol falls into her arms, weeping in complete surrender as the credits roll.

It occurs to me that Carol’s isolation is probably a commentary on what we all went through during covid lockdowns. Ironically, the alien virus actually does give everyone the equivalent of a 5G chip implant. If you are a conspiracist who thinks covid was bioengineered, the story of how the alien virus was made and spread also “rhymes” with that.

Carol has given up, it seems, but Manousos refuses to. The writers are, at the very least, trying to establish that Manousos is an upright, determined, and ethical person who won’t compromise with evil, even if he is unpleasant. He drives his car as far north as he can, stopping to siphon gas from cars parked along his route, always leaving cash under the windshield wipers to compensate, so that he is not stealing.

But who would he be stealing from? Is he assuming that the people who have been converted into drones will eventually be individuals again (or that they still are, even if they don’t know it), and that rules about property and ownership will have been taken to have been in force throughout the whole fiasco? What is money worth without the backing of governments?

His moralism seems dubious, or at least the symbols the writers use so he can act out his moral convictions seem a bit clumsy. In an apocalypse, anything you need to do or take to survive is fair, especially when there is no one else to claim them. And if the world does get restored, that will have happened through Manousos’s and Carol’s actions, so no one newly freed from the hive mind will resent Manousos for taking a bit of gasoline in order to save the whole human race.

Right before he enters the Darien Gap (that dangerous and roadless 60 miles of swamp and mountain between Panama and South America), the Joined earnestly beseech Manousos to not hike the Gap. They’ll give him a lift to Carol, no problem. This is too dangerous.

Manousos doesn’t trust them. He won’t collaborate with them by accepting their assistance. This leads to the stand-out scene of the episode, where he tells the Joined:

“Nothing on this planet is yours. Nothing. You cannot give me anything because everything you have is stolen. You don’t belong here.”

Then, before walking into the dangerous wilderness, he defiantly pours gasoline on his beloved car and burns it. It is an act of resistance and rebellion, a middle finger to the Joined, asserting that individuality and choice still exist, that the car is his to love and destroy, not theirs.

The show has been making an intentional habit of repeating sayings to the point that they get a bit annoying. There’s the voice message Carol hears every time she phones the Joined, of course, and we see Carol getting bored of the message, too. Then Manousos repeating cheesy lines from old cassette tapes for learning English. And, as he is trekking through the Gap, he practices his greeting for when he meets Carol: “My name is Manousos Oviedo. I am not one of them. I wish to save the world.”

It has the same rhythm (and similar accent) as, “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die,” from The Princess Bride, one of Rob Reiner’s most beloved movies. (May his memory be a blessing. The reference was intentional, though the timing could not have been.)

Manousos’s trek through the Gap does not go well. His self-sufficiency is not enough; just like Carol’s isn’t either. The final scene we see him in, he is dying of a horrible infection acquired from a gruesome injury foreshadowed in the conversation before burning his car. The Joined arrive by helicopter to airlift him to safety. The acting is deliberately ambiguous: Is he rejecting or embracing the help when he waves his arm at the helicopter’s searchlight?

Here is Part Six (covering episode 8) in this series. Thanks for reading! If you know someone who likes science fiction, or philosophy, please share this with them.

Share

Back in the day, I used to get my fair share of chili peppers on RateMyProfessor.com, before the developers (wisely) removed that feature. I’m about to turn 55, though, and I might have let myself go a bit.

You know. There was that whole pandemic thing: Netflix, video games, never leaving the house, UberEATS, discovering Tony’s Chocolonely. Vuori joggers are so comfy, who needs to wear real pants? It wasn’t that big a deal to size up from L to XL Fresh Clean Threads black t-shirts. With the buttery soft, form-flattering shirt off, however, Rocket’s jibe at Fat Thor isn’t far from the mark: I do look a bit like melted ice cream.

This looming significant birthday means I want to start taking myself a little more seriously — looks, health, style, grooming, the whole deal. The problem is, I have literally no idea what to do or where to start.

So, I asked X-Twitter’s Grok AI: “I’m a 55-year-old white male. How do I become a zaddy?”

A “zaddy,” for the other middle-aged men who haven’t kept up with pop culture, is an older man who is fashionable, charismatic, and attractive. His relaxed confidence and rizz are a big part of his attractiveness. Think “daddy” with some “zing”. Think a slightly younger Most Interesting Man in the World. Think — damn him for setting a zaddy standard no one else can meet — Pedro Pascal.

Speaking of rizz, whenever I make risotto, I call myself The Rizzler. My thirteen-year-old stepdaughter’s reaction of horror and disgust is nearly the best part of the meal. Do zaddies have to give up dad jokes? Are there zad jokes? This is a new genre worth exploring. Wait — do zaddies even get to eat risotto?

But back to my AI-guided self-improvement. I have no illusions: I’m probably not going to become a zaddy for real. I’d settle for dad-bod-with-some-style-and-nice-hair. But without aspirational goals, we probably aren’t going to get very far.

Grok’s advice looks good, though I’d divide it into three categories: Things I can do immediately, things that will take some time and effort, and things that might be impossible to fully achieve.

Among the things I can do immediately, Grok tells me to dress my age: Polished, not try-hard. Fair, though I’m not sure that is specific enough to be helpful. A signature scent — now that sounds actionable. Not Eau du Pizza and Beer, you say? Drat. But I’d bet most people who swoon for Pedro have never sniffed him, so a signature scent is probably not going to be the key.

On the “requires effort” front, Grok says, “Eat well and exercise.” I mean, wow, these billion-dollar data centers are really bearing fruit.

In the “is it even possible” category, Grok says becoming a zaddy means being comfortable in your own skin, having confidence and charm without arrogance. I’ve been working on that for at least 45 years, so I’m not sure it is reasonable to expect any sudden transformations.

Likewise, Grok says charisma comes from demonstrating genuine interest in other people through active listening and empathy. But studies show that even empathy training workshops only produce a moderate change, roughly comparable to making a 5’7” man one inch taller. If you are 5’7” that probably sounds excellent, but I am 6’2”. (See above re: arrogance.)

As a philosopher, I can’t help but wonder whether I should even try to become a zaddy. Is it the kind of thing you can do, or is zaddihood (zatherhood?) more like a je ne sais quoi some people just have?

More importantly, is zaddihood a morally acceptable goal at all? I mean, should middle aged men really be trying to make themselves more attractive to young women? The fallout of the #metoo era suggests it is a question worth pondering, at least.

Certainly, my wife didn’t like the idea, which she first understood as me attempting to become a sugar daddy. I think being a sugar daddy merely requires money and a capacity to put up with bratty behavior. Anyway, I have no desire for a second divorce, so that’s not what I’m aiming at.

So what is it I want to achieve, or be? Yes, even 55-year-olds are still trying to figure out what they want to be when they grow up.

This questioning and pondering, I recognize, is a procrastination technique. Procrastination is one of my most highly developed skills. Are zaddies procrastinators? On this point, Grok is less helpful.

There’s evidence that AI use leads to cognitive decline, so relying on Grok might not be the best strategy. I don’t want to end up a well-dressed memory care patient. I guess I’ll go read some back issues of GQ instead. Or maybe I should just go to the gym.

[spoilers]

In episode 5 of “Pluribus”, the Joined “need space” from Carol after she almost killed her handler Zosia by trying to force her, with help from a truth serum, to divulge the method for undoing the Joining. The Joined give Carol the ultimate passive-aggressive silent treatment and evacuate the entire city, leaving Carol utterly alone.

They won’t even answer the phone, instead telling her via recorded message, “our feelings for you haven’t changed,” but she needs to leave messages to ask them things. Trash pickup is by drone, leading to a slapstick moment and an indication that the Joined are not infallible (or even that smart—surely one among them is a better drone pilot?).

It occurs to me that whenever Carol makes a phone call in this show, it is almost always on a landline. (In her house, at the hospital, in the hotel in Vegas; the exception might be the phone on the plane, but even that one is wired, not a cell phone. The Paraguayan answers a landline in his house.) Given that most of humanity is now communicating without any technology, this is at least symbolic if not a plot point that will be resolved later.

While looking for signs of life in the city, Carol notices many empty milk cartoons, and no other trash, after the evacuation of Albuquerque. She feels like it is a clue to something nefarious and decides to investigate. In a cold storage facility attached to a dairy, Carol finds a lot of food left behind. The episode ends on a cliffhanger, with Carol lifting a plastic sheet in the cold storage and seeing something that leaves shock and disgust on her face. At first, I hoped it was an alien, but instead it is a “Soylent Green is people!” kind of reveal.

This is confirmed in episode 6 when Carol records a video tour of the facility to send to the other members of the thirteen unjoined, in which she shows butchered and wrapped human remains being stored next to fruits and vegetables. Just before calling to have the video picked up and distributed, she realizes she doesn’t trust the Joined to pass on the message. She remembers that Diabaté is at the Westgate Hotel in Las Vegas, so she decides to drive to see him. (That’s about an eight-and-a-half-hour trip from Albuquerque under normal circumstances; somewhat shorter with absolutely no traffic, one assumes. We never see Carol stop for gas, but I guess the Joined have left the gas stations operational for her.)

Carol is sure that her information will make the rest of the unjoined turn against the Joined. But when she tries to tell Diabaté, the moment is anticlimactic: She finds out the other eleven already know, and don’t much care. It turns out that since the Joined won’t kill any living thing, they are forced to seek calories and nutrition where they can, and the 100k humans who die each day are part of the mix. (“HDP” for “Human-Derived Protein” is a nice bit of 1984-style euphemism.)

The Joined claim (here, and in previous episodes) to abide by a very strong Do No Harm principle. It reminds me of Jain priests, who sweep the ground in front of themselves as they walk, to avoid killing even insects. The Jains eat plants, of course, despite their strong principle of non-violence; there is no way not to eat something. The principle of non-violence among the Jain is, interestingly, to avoid doing violence to oneself: Harming others harms oneself, and this prevents achieving release from the cycle of death and rebirth. The philosophical justification for eating plants is that it is the best way to do the least harm possible in pursuit of release from rebirth.

The Joined go farther than the Jains, being unwilling even to harm plants by harvesting fruits. Though they are willing to eat windfall. As I’ve said in other posts in this series, the Joined (or the show writers) are apparently inconsistent about this: The Joined were quite willing to harm humans in order to force them all to join. This is a harm insofar as it is a violation of autonomy (there was no informed choice), and also a harm in that the Joining itself caused about ten percent of humanity to die. If the Joined had an absolute Do No Harm principle, they wouldn’t have done either of those things.

Given that the joined were willing to force Carol to join — not just without but against her autonomous choice — it is very strange that in episode 6 the Joined now say they won’t forcibly harvest the stem cells from Carol that would be necessary to make her Join. If Carol’s explicit denial of permission to harvest her stem cells binds the Joined, why doesn’t her explicit denial of permission to be Joined also bind the Joined? The paternalism justification for forced Joining discussed in the previous post would work equally well for forced harvesting of stem cells. So far, it doesn’t make sense.

One option for why it doesn’t make sense is that the hive mind of the Joined is not a mind of unanimity: It is unlike a hive with a queen, in that each unit is a thinker. Then, “the” opinion of the Joined is something like an average, or is negotiated among them, or is the result of a vote, or something like that. Given that the Joined contains all moral philosophers, and given that moral philosophers often disagree with each other, perhaps it is to be expected that the Joined’s moral opinions are not self-consistent. (Thanks to Tom Cochrane for a comment on the previous post in this series that sparked this thought.)

Share

One of the philosophical questions lurking behind episode 6 is this one: Is it unethical to eat dead humans? While we in the West tend to think eating dead humans is wrong as a voluntary practice, this has not been the case in every human civilization. In any event, we don’t usually blame people in emergency situations who have to resort to cannibalism (or, as John Cena calls it in a delightful cameo as his Joined self, anthropophagy). For the Joined, eating people is also a last resort, a way to slow the inevitable starvation of the Joined, given that they won’t even harvest plants for moral reasons.

The argument against killing and eating people is just the argument against killing them. What about bodies that are already dead?

“Eew, that’s gross,” is not a moral argument against eating the dead, though it is plenty motivation enough for most people to avoid it.

The fact that cannibalism can be unhealthy — Papua New Guineans who ate their dead often ended up with a horrible prion disease they called Kuru — is also neither a moral reason nor a decisive reason not to do it. After all, we eat plenty of things that are unhealthy, even things that will eventually kill us, and we don’t generally think that doing so is immoral.

Vegan and vegetarian objections to eating meat are normally not about the eating of the meat itself, but about not being complicit in or benefiting from the killing and suffering of agricultural animals.

One could construct an argument against cannibalism on the basis of a principle of “the sanctity of the dead,” but this won’t be convincing. A dead body cannot be harmed. One way or another, every dead body is going to be digested — by bacteria and worms, or by something larger first.

Another version of the sanctity of the dead argument could be a “respect” for the dead argument. For example, dead bodies aren’t really morally significant, but out of some sort of extension of the moral specialness of being human, we agree to not to eat each other’s bodies, in the same way we agree not to desecrate each other’s graves. This seems a bit too precious, if you ask me, more like a way to avoid having to confront our own mortality, so I don’t think it adequately grounds a moral rule against eating human remains.

You could perhaps say that the decisions of a person before they died should govern how their body gets treated after death, a kind of extension-by-courtesy of the principle of self-ownership and autonomy. Most people don’t make an explicit statement of their choice to not be eaten after they die. Perhaps that simply goes without saying in our culture, and someone would have to “opt out” and explicitly allow themselves to be eaten after death in order to override the presumption it is not allowed.

In movies and TV, at least, we sometimes seem to think that a person’s final wishes become promises on the part of the person they tell the wishes to. This could be either because the person agrees to (promises to) fulfill the dying wish, or because a final wish binds the hearer just in virtue of it being a dying wish. I don’t give much credence to the latter option. Perhaps there is, though, an implicit “and don’t eat my body” attached to every final wish by default.

Besides not being definitive (there are some kinds of posthumous wishes it would be immoral to carry out), neither the posthumous autonomy explanation nor the promise explanation lines up with how we evaluate cases of emergency cannibalism. Most who get eaten in that circumstance haven’t said, implicitly or explicitly, “Go ahead and eat me if it is the only way to stay alive,” and yet the ones who resort to cannibalism are usually not morally blameworthy for doing so anyway.

If this analysis is right, there doesn’t seem to be a good reason not to eat dead human bodies. The complaint against the Joined can only be, “That’s icky,” or, “We don’t do that kind of thing around here.”

A final consideration is this: Our moral rules bind individual humans. The Joined, while composed of human bodies that were formerly individual humans, are something different than the sum of their parts. Human moral rules probably don’t all apply to non-humans, which the Joined definitely are. Aliens, for sure, have different moral rules than we do. I don’t remember right now who gave this example of how absolute moral rules can be relative to circumstances, but if we were made of metal, then throwing knives at each other would no longer be immoral. (Google’s AI said it was Terry Pratchett, but I doubt that.)

Next up, Here’s Part Five in this series on philosophy in the show “Pluribus.”

As for the history of life that evolutionary biology describes, there is really strong evidence from multiple, independent lines of evidence. For example: comparative anatomy, embryology, virology, cladistics, fossil evidence, DNA evidence, biogeography, etc. (Here’s a page that summarizes some of that evidence for evolution: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK230201/)

The evidence of these fields, individually and especially taken together, make it very clear that evolution by natural selection is a real thing. The theory of evolution by natural selection unifies all these initially-unconnected phenomena into a single body of evidence, which the theory explains. It is worth noting that in science the ideal is to be able to come up with a theory which unifies many disparate-seeming phenomena under a single set of precise and empirically successful explanatory laws. Few scientific fields have achieved this ideal better than evolutionary biology.

Even more simply, evolution by natural selection is inevitable given very ordinary facts about the world:

1. We know that offspring tend to resemble their parents (heredity).

2. We know that offspring in a given generation are mostly similar to each other but have differences between them (variation).

3. We know that some differences confer a reproductive advantage on individuals in a given environment, increasing the frequency of those characteristics in subsequent generations. (That is, some individuals have variations that make them able to outcompete others in their generation for scarce resources in the environment. This means they are more likely to reproduce, and thus their hereditary characteristics are more likely to be passed on to subsequent generations.)

4. Add billions of years, and small differences can accumulate into large differences. (Besides the obviousness of the basic principle, we can see this in the fossil record, in DNA, in artificial selection, in natural populations, etc.)

Heredity, variation, competition and selection, plus time. That’s the heart of Darwin’s account. If you doubt it, which part do you doubt? And what’s your evidence to support the doubt? Mere denialism carries no weight.

As Darwin pointed out, humans can and do mimic the activity of natural selection with artificial selection, or the breeding of plants and animals. Look up the history of dogs, cows, corn, wheat, and most other agricultural products and you will see how humans have caused species to vary over time via selective breeding (which mimics the process of competition and selection).

The evidence described above makes it clear why the claim that evolution is “just a theory” is not just false but silly. There are two other points to make on this topic, as well.

First, “theory” in science doesn’t mean “mere opinion” or “unsupported speculation.” Rather, a theory in the scientific sense is an organized body of knowledge, typically with an explanatory and predictive aspect.

Second, scientists name things like Darwin’s theory of evolution, the atomic theory, the theory of gravity, the laws of thermodynamics, the uncertainty principle, etc., without intending to thereby mark any epistemic distinction or category with the label they use. We could just as well have called them Einstein’s law of relativity or the theory of quantum uncertainty or Snell’s principle. Sometimes there is something intended about the level of generality (theories are usually “broader” than hypotheses, laws, and constants), but this is inconsistent in the history of science. The key point is that the label is never an indication of how probable the thing is given the evidence. That’s always a question of evidential analysis. And the evidence for Darwinian evolution is very strong — so strong, it would be irrational to doubt it.

It is true that geological processes over billions of years have obscured the evidence of how and when exactly life began. But the fact that the details of the origin of life are somewhat uncertain does not mean that it is unlikely as a general claim that life arose in the way natural science suggests, or that the principles are in doubt. We have reasonable explanations of how it happened, examples of precursor steps happening, an understanding of the chemistry that would bring it about, and so on.

Something we don’t emphasize enough is that the available evidence shows it to be much less likely that life had some supernatural origin than that it occurred naturally. There’s essentially no plausible evidence for religious claims about the origin of life and the cosmos, while there is a huge body of evidence for natural science. That huge body of evidence does not include any examples of, and does not need, the intervention of the divine to make anything work. To invoke Laplace’s phrase, we have no need of that hypothesis. Moreover, religious claims about cosmology, the origin of life, the origin of humans, and so on, are all falsified by the available empirical evidence. Biblical literalism is impossible because the Bible is literally false.

Besides, it would be surprising (don’t you think?) if a collection of texts written thousands of years before the rise of science made a correct guess about the origin of life.

BUT (an important point) there’s actually no conflict between religious belief and science unless one adopts an extremist, literalist (aka fundamentalist) interpretation of a few religious texts. Biblical literalism has been the minority view throughout the history of Christianity, though there have been a few brief periods (e.g., Galileo’s Italy, perhaps the US now) when some people have insisted on Biblical literalism. Given that the Bible contains so many outright contradictions (both internally, and with known facts about the world), this is a losing strategy.

Theists can avoid shooting themselves in the foot and looking ridiculous by simply adopting a reasonable, commonly held view, namely that religious texts sometimes need to be interpreted as metaphorical. This is why evolution is no threat to Christianity, even though evolution definitively shows there cannot have been an original pair of humans who could have “fallen” and needed a savior. Many religions already adopt this position on the metaphorical nature of Scripture as doctrine: Judaism, Roman Catholicism, most Protestant denominations, Buddhism, and many more, all accept that the theory of evolution is a correct account of the biological world over billions of years, and that that fact doesn’t undermine anything about their respective religions.

Something fun to consider: In physics, we sometimes find systems that show a particular unique sequence of causes and effects, which means that once we know the laws and initial conditions, we can accurately predict future states. Or, if we know the laws and current conditions, we can reliably reason backwards to earlier states. Not all physical systems are like this, however: Sometimes we can only project so far before the conclusions become uncertain. These indeterministic systems are of various kinds: emergent, chaotic, incomputable, stochastic (i.e., fundamentally probabilistic). For indeterministic systems, we either cannot make good predictions at all, or we can only make them up to a certain level of probability. This probability can be of several kinds: It can represent a lack of knowledge on our part (with a true determinism really occurring in the world, but beyond our knowledge), or it can derive from the world itself being fundamentally probabilistic (e.g., in quantum systems).

Inference problems in evolutionary biology are harder than in the deterministic branches of physics for several reasons. Among them, much of the evidence for evolutionary biology is “gappy” or incomplete. (A very small percentage of life is ever fossilized, and a small percentage of that is ever studied.) We cannot study historical evolution through controlled experiments. (We can experiment on current populations, but the changes are usually so slow we cannot get the full picture that way; to get fast changes, we need to artificially select instead of letting nature take its course.)

And even if we could solve these evidentiary challenges and we were able to reconstruct some ancient state of the environment, if we ran it forward from there, evolution would not follow the same path it took to get us here. That’s because evolution is sensitive to what we might call “mere accidents.” Given the vagaries of weather, food supplies, mating success, whether a tree falls on you before you reproduce, etc., any given reproductive sequence is going to have a very low probability. Another way to say that is that the difference between the life and death (or reproductive success) of a single organism might be very small, yet the effects following from it living or dying might be very large over geological timescales.

The ancient human we call “mitochondrial Eve” is a perfect example of this. She was very probably very similar to all the other females in her group at the time, but through various accidents of fate, all humans now alive are her descendants. Somehow, all the other females alive at the time had evolutionary trees that dead-ended. That was a contingent result that could have been otherwise. Which means that if we started evolution again from the time mitochondrial Eve was born, the history of humanity would turn out quite differently because the accidents of fate would be different.

Despite the limitations and difficulties mentioned here, the evidence for evolution by natural selection is very strong indeed. It is certainly not “just a theory” in the sense of “an unsupported speculation.” We know the fact of evolution happened, we have a good understanding of the principles that govern it, and we have quite a good broad understanding of the path of evolution.

If you are a biologist or a philosopher of biology who can help me make this post better, I’d be grateful if you would tell me how to change it.

Maybe I’m missing something, but to me the first eleven minutes of episode 4 of “Pluribus” are not terribly interesting. I found myself fast-forwarding thirty seconds at a time, looking for bits of action or even plot amid the brooding. We see the last member of the Thirteen, a Paraguayan who seems to have been misanthropic even in the before-times. He is holed-up in the “bunker” of his fenced-off storage facility, systematically checking HAM radio frequencies and finding nothing. A Joined abuela driving a Volkswagen leaves him a meal on a small table outside the gate; he knocks it to the ground in an act of defiance, then breaks into his clients’ storage lockers until he finds some canned dog food to eat.

The idea here, it seems, is that the only valid response to the sort of situation the Paraguayan finds himself in — world taken over, everyone assimilated or killed, and he’s next — is resistance, even if futile. To interact with or accept help from the Joined is to be complicit with them. Freedom or death. He hangs up on Carol when she tries to phone him, assuming it is another attempt at contact by the Joined. (It seems likely he and Carol will later find ways to connect that will allow them to challenge the Joined, since the story is trying so hard to keep them apart now.)

Meanwhile, Carol is finding herself increasingly emotionally enmeshed with her handler, Zosia, in complex ways she doesn’t want. The more they interact, the more she feels connected to Zosia. It is not irrelevant to this process that Zosia was picked as her handler because she looks like the romantic lead in the lesbian version of Carol’s latest fantasy romance book — the one she wouldn’t let herself publish. As Carol remarks to herself in a truth-serum aided scene so the audience can see what she is thinking: “She is so goddamned fuckable.” This attraction is something Carol doesn’t seem to have control over, pointing to the limits of human freedom and the ways in which we are predictably manipulable. How can we make truly free choices if our preferences themselves are outside our control in the first place?

An aside: Carol’s unwillingness to publish the lesbian version of her romantasy book is very much out of touch with current sci fi, fantasy, and romance, where LGBTQ+ is currently very fashionable (emphasis in many cases on the +, i.e., sex with aliens and elves, often pluribus, if you know what I mean).

Carol learns that the Joined can’t lie. But they won’t tell her everything, either. (Kind of like they won’t kill, not even insects, except when they kill millions of people to become Joined.) Carol asks whether undoing the Joining is possible; Zosia’s evasive non-answer tells Carol that it is possible. To get more info out of Zosia, she tries a truth serum, testing it on herself first.

This moral refusal to lie is very non-Utilitarian, challenging that interpretation raised in the second post in this series, of why the Joined feel they must make the Thirteen Join. Utilitarians are happy to accept that sometimes lies promote overall happiness (even though they try to construct reasons to think that, in all but extreme cases, truth-telling promotes the most happiness). Usually, it is Deontologists who are thought of as the ones who have hard rules about never lying, not even when doing so would lead to better outcomes.

Given that the Joined are a hive mind, it is a bit of an unlikely guess that a drug that acts on a “local terminal” will affect its ability to go against instructions from the “mainframe.” In other words, there isn’t a good reason to think it will work. But I suppose Carol has few other options. She doses Zosia against her will. (Maybe hive minds don’t have autonomy so this isn’t a moral crime? Or maybe it doesn’t matter if they do because they are trying to kill Carol’s individual self, so this is self defense?)

When questioned while drugged, Zosia resists but seems about to give away the information. Either her internal conflict or the conflict with the hive mind puts Zosia’s body into cardiac arrest. Hundreds of Joined encircle them, shouting “Please, Carol!” (Why so many? One witness would have been enough for a hive mind, no? Why not just let Zosia’a individual body die?) Carol eventually relents and lets them save Zosia’s body.

The Joined may not even have agency themselves. They are unable to lie. They don’t act for themselves. Individuals receive instructions from the collective and obey like drones, apparently without rest or any choice of what they do. (Fly this plane. Clean up these bodies. Fix the grenade damage to Carol’s house.) They have “biological imperatives” (programming from the alien virus) that they cannot resist. Their cheeriness seems ominously fake (as other commentators have said, Stepford Wife-like). There’s an argument that the collective is more like an AI than a mind or an individual.

There are interesting questions about individuality and self-identity when it comes to animals like bees and ants, where individuality is minimal to non-existent, and the hive (or its queen) is the biological unit of significance. (Orson Scott Card played with those notions in his Ender’s Game series. Other science fiction examples are the insects in “Starship Troopers,” and the race called the Geth in the “Mass Effect” videogame.) Individual worker ants, for example, hardly matter. They can be used up and discarded for the good of the colony. A solo ant cannot survive for long. They exist only for the colony, which exists only for the queen.

Is there a queen among the Joined? Perhaps the aliens? So far we are still in the dark.

Here’s Part Four in this series on philosophy in the show “Pluribus.”

Share

Episode 3 of “Pluribus” faced the issues about consent head-on, though nothing was resolved.

[spoilers]

“I’m fucked.”

That’s the main character, Carol, speaking with Zosia, her handler from the Joined — the hive mind that has taken over all of humanity except thirteen people.

Carol knows that they’re going to make her join the hive mind as soon as they figure out how to do it. She is going to lose her individuality, and she doesn’t have a choice about it.

The response is, “Sorry, Carol, we have a biological imperative.” If that excuse is a genuine defense, I bet some criminals would be eager to try it.

The Joined have this biological imperative in the first place because the code for a virus was sent to Earth by aliens from 600 light-years away, and once humans synthesized it and infected themselves with it (SMDH), the whole population acquired both the ability to become psychically joined and the impulse to make sure every human joins the collective. (Echoes of Borg philosophy, for sure.)

Then Carol responds with the point I made in my first post about consent in “Pluribus”:

“You people make no goddamn sense…. We want to make you happy, you say. Your life is your own, you say. And agency, I’ve got all this agency but, I mean, I guess I have agency just until I don’t.”

The chilling response is, “Carol, if you were walking by a lake and you saw someone drowning, would you throw them a life preserver? Of course you would.”

To connect back to my first post on “Pluribus,” where I remarked that the Joined had done the equivalent of flinging Carol in a dungeon while saying, “Hey, do whatever you want down there,” another carceral metaphor relevant here is institutionalizing people against their will, for their own good. “A rubber room and a straitjacket might feel like prison, but actually, it is freedom.”

The Joined, besides (or perhaps as part of) their biological imperative, appear to feel empathetic and paternalistic towards the unjoined: They see the unjoined as suffering, stunted, inferior, and want to “fix” them, “for their own good.” Maybe this is what the aliens thought about the human species, and why they sent the virus.

It is true that empathy and compassion are moral goods, despite what Kirk, Vance, Miller, et al(t right) try to tell us. And it is true that rendering aid to someone in need is a moral good, even a duty. Paternalism, though, is bad, because it doesn’t respect autonomy and free choice. You don’t get to impose your ideas of a good life on others who are fully competent, without their consent. And especially not against their informed consent.

Offering aid to someone in distress seems quite different, anyway, from forcing them to accept a kind of “help” that completely undermines — you could even say, destroys — who they are. If *I* am drowning, you don’t help *me* by turning me into a fish.

It remains unclear why the Joined bothered to give the Thirteen unlimited freedom and support in the first place. They could have just rounded them up and kept them in a holding area until completing the research needed to add the Thirteen to the Joined. (That’s just days or months away, Carol is told.) The Joined are proxies for aliens, and by sci fi tradition aliens are weird and incomprehensible, so maybe the show doesn’t need to explain.

The as-yet unresolved contradiction in the Joined’s attitude to the unjoined is this: The Joined say that they would do anything to make the unjoined happy. But, while not being forced to Join would make some of the unjoined happy (or, at least, it is their strong autonomous preference), they will not be allowed to not Join. The Joined seems to be thinking like Meatloaf: “I would do anything for [the sake of making you happy], but I won’t do that.” The making-happy is a stop-gap, second best, temporary measure in the meantime, until they can do the thing they think will really make the unjoined happy, namely becoming Joined.

If the Joined are Utilitarians, this attitude makes some sense. If the Joined are Utilitarians, then they conceive their moral obligation as being required to maximize happiness overall. In the short term, that means being solicitous towards the unjoined. Later, once the possibility of making them Join exists, the requirement is to make them Join, because then they will be even happier. Any temporary unhappiness at the prospect of becoming Joined will be replaced with the joy of being Joined.

This would also explain why the Joined don’t seem to care too much that nearly a billion people died when they “failed the update” delivered by the virus. The loss of future happiness from those people living out their lives unjoined is far outweighed by the happiness produced by the Joining: Billions of people in peace, harmony, abundance, and apparent happiness. (And maybe the hundreds of millions of deaths are not such a big deal in the Utilitarian calculus anyway, since most ordinary humans are barely happy or are unhappy to begin with.)

There’s a common objection to Utilitarianism that is similar to this set up. If enslaving part of the population would make the total happiness of society higher overall, it is morally required on Utilitarianism to enslave those people. Even though doing so makes the enslaved unhappier, that is not an immoral action according to the Greatest Happiness Principle, because the happiness gained by other people over-balances the unhappiness of the slaves. This outcome, critics of Utilitarianism say, shows that the theory is an incorrect account of morality: Slavery is bad in itself to a degree that it should never be allowed, the scenario doesn’t respect individual autonomy or freedom, and it privileges the collective over individual justice.

One (kind of unconvincing) response from Utilitarians is to say that the “violation of the principles of Justice” in this example creates a kind of “higher” unhappiness, such that the merely hedonistic (lower) happiness of a population enjoying the benefits of having slaves could never over-balance it. (If the GHP is the whole of morality, where do these supposed higher principles of justice come from?)

As the prime proponent of Utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill, said, if a satisfied pig doesn’t realize it is less happy than an unsatisfied but enlightened human, that is because it only knows its own side of the situation. In one speech, the Joined echo this sentiment nearly exactly. The Joined have been unjoined, and they recognize that being Joined is much better than being unjoined. So much better, in fact, that they are willing to override individual autonomy so as to rescue individuals from the terrible fate of individuality.

This adds a wrinkle to a point made above: Maybe, from the Joined’s or the aliens’ perspectives, because we lack the relevant knowledge, individual humans are not mentally or morally competent to make a choice about Joining. We don’t let children decide what medical procedures to have. When a parent or guardian makes medical decisions for a child, that’s not paternalism, that’s parenting. Maybe, in a similar way, being a good alien involves making decisions on behalf of intelligent but immature species like humans.

Of course, Carol cannot accept this (and it is a surprise that most of the other Thirteen don’t mind). We, the audience, can’t accept it either. It is likely (isn’t it?) that the happiness of being Joined is a delusion that comes from the same genetic programming that creates the other “biological imperative.” Once de-joined, the formerly Joined might realize how bad it was to be Joined and be happy to be unjoined again. They don’t know that side of the situation. But maybe they will be upset over what they have lost, instead.

Then again, maybe it is our genetic programming that incorrectly makes us think being individuals with minds of our own is such a great thing. More to come in Part Three.

I know you want to “join” my Substack. Please subscribe. I promise I have no nefarious motives and am not an agent of any alien species.

Subscribe now

You are either doing philosophy, or you are not. True, you can do it better or worse, on topics that require less or more background knowledge or technical expertise, or in shorter or longer forms. But unless you are doing philosophy, you are not doing philosophy.

To learn philosophy, you need to steep yourself in it. And just like when you dip an Easter egg into the dye, not much sticks at first. But the more times you dip in, and the longer the immersion, the more it colors who you are.

This is not quite the right metaphor because learning philosophy doesn’t happen just by osmosis: You have to be actively engaged in it. That is, you have to be actively engaged in doing something you don’t know how to do. Thinking about it. Wrestling with it. Trying stuff out. Getting it wrong.

This means that the early experience of philosophy can be entirely confusing, uncomfortable, disorienting, off-putting, and just plain hard. “This is stupid,” is a very common first response.

The tsunami of concepts, terms, and new ways of thinking you have to learn when beginning philosophy is often overwhelming. And you are forced to confront the fact that the conceptual framework you have learned up till now in your life needs to be radically changed, which is both psychologically and intellectually difficult.

Though, to be fair, a lot of things we learn, we learn by doing, and by doing them badly for a long time. This is not a fault, just a fact of life. Either you are making a table out of wood, or you are not. Either you are playing piano, or you are not. Either you are riding a bicycle, or you are not.

The “training wheels” for learning philosophy is something like a patient teacher who will give you background information, try to explain why the thing is interesting, model how to think through problems, provoke you to reexamine assumptions, and give you corrections and encouragement.

In my almost three decades teaching philosophy to university students, I’ve noticed a common phenomenon. Often, the first philosophy essay a student writes is gobbledygook — a mishmash of half-understood concepts and half-digested thoughts, jargon thrown around, and incoherent arguments. This, it turns out, is because they think that is what philosophy is supposed to be because that is what learning philosophy feels like. It is, in other words, a good thing. And the solution? Just keep going. Read more, talk more, write more, get feedback more.

I remind my students that there is a natural tendency in human psychology to reject or ignore things that are difficult or uncomfortable. When we feel this, we often tell ourselves we are not interested because the subject is not interesting. Sometimes that might be true. But with philosophy, millions of people have been studying these topics for thousands of years: There must be something to it. So, I encourage students to spend at least enough focused time on a new subject to figure out why someone else would find it interesting. Usually, by then they also start to find it interesting themselves.

Subscribe now

Unlike like algebra, for example, there is no common starting point or common path for learning philosophy. You don’t learn the numbers, then addition, then subtraction, multiplication and division, then negative numbers, fractions, and so on in an ordered sequence. There are many different places to start philosophy because there is no starting, only doing.

That means you can choose your first course or first book in philosophy based on other things that make it attractive to you. Does Intro to Ethics sound better, or Intro to Knowledge? Bioethics or metaphysics? Logic or Political Theory? Philosophy of Sex or Philosophy of Religion? You get to choose. Besides specific pieces of content, you’ll still learn the core philosophical skills of clarification and justification, evaluating and constructing arguments, drawing together disparate strands of thought to form a coherent explanation, and clear writing designed to prove a point.

Then, later, you don’t have to choose at all: One of the wonderful things about philosophy as a discipline is that it is so incredibly broad, and you can do it all. Besides the core subdisciplines of philosophy (logic, ethics, metaphysics, the theory of knowledge, history of philosophy), you can do “philosophy of x” for just about any x.

A historical approach to learning philosophy can be useful because the oldest views are sometimes the simplest, and the easiest to critique. Then you can follow the historical progression of thinking on that topic. You can see how people discovered conceptual problems in old views, tried to fix them with new views, and then see how the process repeated again and again, in an upward spiral of ever-better but always-improving accounts. This can help you see the breadth of possible approaches, which in turn can inspire your philosophic imagination.

(The skill of being able to imagine counterexamples, new problems, new potential solutions, and new ways to investigate them is one of the keys to doing philosophy well, even though we don’t really talk about it much. Maybe I’ll write about philosophical imagination in a future post.)

Whichever way you learn philosophy, when you catch that spark, when you begin to think in new ways and see the world in new ways, it is very exciting. It can feel like being initiated into a special club, that you know things almost no one knows.

Just remember that this is only the beginning, and that no one ever knows everything. Nearly every thought in the history of philosophy has been critiqued, so your thoughts are probably open to critique, too. The point is the quest, the long conversation, the joint effort to try to understand the beautiful and painful and confusing world we find ourselves in. Welcome aboard, and bon voyage.

Share

“Pluribus,” a new sci fi series about a global infection that turns the human population into a hive mind, debuted to strong reviews and immediately shot up to the #1 spot on Apple TV’s top ten shows list.

And thank goodness for Apple TV, while we are here: A lot of the best science fiction television is playing there these days. “Severance,” “Foundation,” “Murderbot,” and “Silo” are among my recent obsessions; “For All Mankind,” “Dark Matter,” and “Extrapolations,” also get good viewer ratings.

The acting in “Pluribus” is strong, production values are high, the cinematography is good (remarkable in spots), I’m engaged with the script but still confused. Our protagonist is not the most sympathetic character, it is true, but we see ourselves in her flawed humanity: self-doubt, self-loathing, compromising her values for a buck, disappointment with her till-now-actually-pretty-successful life, anger issues, determination to right a major wrong.

Share

Subscribe now

[spoilers]

At least now we know why Trump wanted Qatar to give him that new presidential plane: The old one was on loan to film “Pluribus.”

We don’t get to meet the aliens, but they are there and clearly know a lot about our biology and bumbling psychology. This despite the fact they live 600 light-years away — did they seed the Earth, is that how they knew how to reengineer us? Are they a hive mind and want us to join? Are they trying to make us docile, so it is easier to take over Earth? The first two episodes give no hints.

The aliens send a powerful, directed, repeating radio message that encrypts an RNA sequence. (As soon as the astronomers said, “The message is in base-4!” I knew it was a virus.)

Ever the curious idiots, humans spend millions of dollars to synthesize the virus, even though they don’t know what it does and even though at least some of them, surely, have read the story about the Trojan Horse. The humans inject the virus into increasingly larger animals until — surprise! — someone for no reason breaks protocol in a level 4 biocontainment lab and gets themselves infected, and then someone else breaks an even more important protocol and takes the infected person out of the secure environment. Hijinks ensue.

They don’t quite play it for comedy, but the first few human-to-human transmissions of the virus are from non-consensual full-mouth kisses. There’s no time to see how people react to being assaulted, because they go into seizures and look dead for a while before (mostly) waking up as happy drones. The virus makes humanity a hive mind (out of many, one — get it?).

Another early scene has “patient zero” licking all the donuts left out for the lab employees, thus ensuring that everyone gets non-consensually infected. (Practical question: If you saw someone having a seizure with a partially eaten donut in their hand, would you eat the next one?)

The violations of consent only keep getting worse, until they culminate in a scene where the sky is covered by a network of airplane contrails. The implication is that the equivalent of chemtrails spread the virus across the whole world, infecting the entire human population. The series writers are apparently aware that UV light at a plane’s cruising altitude would destroy a virus, so this scene is at night. They then conveniently ignore the fact that it would take months or years for small particles like that to eventually float down to Earth from such a height: By the next day, the whole world is infected. Everyone except the main character, Carol Sturka, and — as she learns from a White House news conference on TV directed specifically at her — just twelve other people around the world.

The Joined tell Carol (and the rest of the thirteen who are immune to the virus) that their lives are their own. This is more than a bit odd, given that they treated everyone who is now Joined as if their lives were not their own, with forced kisses and mass infections that erased their very selves. Not to mention the hundreds of millions who died when their brains “failed the update.” Those people didn’t get a choice at all, and no payoff. Plus, how can your life be your own if the whole world has been replaced with a hive mind? Everything that Carol might have chosen (improving relationships, publishing better books, etc.) is no longer available to her. It is like throwing someone into a dungeon and saying, “Hey, do whatever you want down there!”

The Joined seem to pity us for our handicap. (The viewer is implicated as one of the non-infected, of course.) The Joined say they are ready to do anything to make us happy. Why they would care at all is not really explained. If I had a hive mind, I’d spend my time with the billions of people there, not worrying about the thirteen who didn’t make it into the club. Ignoring the thirteen seems both a better strategy and more reasonable. (Or killing them? But it turns out that the Joined are nonviolent vegetarians — except when they kill hundreds of millions to steal the free will of billions.) It feels like there is something nefarious behind the Joined’s (sorry, terrible word) intentions toward the thirteen, so all this makes me think there is more to be revealed.

Like the “Matrix” character who prefers the illusory steak over real life, one of the thirteen unjoined is perfectly happy to take advantage of what the Joined tell him they want for him, even though it is all fake and unearned. He gets a gaggle of models to join him on Air Force One (which he just asked for, and the Joined just gave him), along with pilots, fuel, ground crew, luxurious food and drink, and everything else he wants.

I could see this character, Koumba Diabaté, implementing a kind of Ring of Gyges arc: In Plato, Gyges finds a ring of invisibility and starts using it to do the things he wasn’t able to do while being seen to do them. Diabaté may have been a playboy/hedonist before the Joining, but after, now that there’s no one to restrict his behavior, he certainly intends to make the very best of things. He pursues his personal self-interest with gusto, and no concern for anyone else.

Lucky for him, the Joined are all too happy to be used as his sexual playthings. Here again is another problematic case of apparent lack of genuine consent. Their lives (the people who are Joined) are not their own, apparently: The body verbally assents, enthusiastically participates, and so on, but it is not the individual whose body is in question who is consenting, rather it is the whole of humankind in a hive mind. It is as if a culture decided for individuals what they were allowed or required to do. The body that until a few days ago belonged to/was an individual who is now erased, that same body is now just a tool or vessel for carrying out the wishes of the collective, which apparently include fulfilling the base desires of Mauritania’s Zaphod Beeblebrox.

Carol objects, kind of, but since she doesn’t care about and is suspicious of all the Joined, she doesn’t stop it. But isn’t the reason to undo the Joining precisely to prevent this kind of abuse of individuals, so people can make their own choices? Maybe Carol believes that the “units” of the Joined aren’t individuals so it doesn’t matter, but still thinks that they should be restored to being individuals? I guess it is no surprise that we don’t have intuitive moral scripts for this sort of situation since it isn’t one we have ever encountered. Anyway, Carol apparently realizes she is lonely and wants some semblance of personal contact from her personal contact to the Joined, or something, and stops her from leaving with Koumba at the very last second.

The show seems to tell us that the lack of freedom, the lack of individuality, is a compromise worth having in order for there to be perfect peace and safety. (It reminds me a bit of the post-9/11 era, when people told us it was worth giving up on freedom and privacy for the sake of security.) But in this case, freedom or peace for whom? And to what end? And why do the aliens want that?

You could say that the show presents a complex, nuanced, and ambiguous account of consent. But it seems just as likely that it is presenting a contradictory, inherently inconsistent, and confused account of consent. We’ll see!

Here’s a link to the Part Two in this series on philosophy in “Pluribus.”

A fun etymological fact (or, at least, an etymological fact, depending on your feelings about such facts) is that the spelling “consentual” is an informal back-formation from “consent,” but the correct spelling, “consensual,” is from the Latin consensus (aka agreement), from which we also get the word “consent.”

Share

Since the end of October 2024, I have read 51 books and written 123,000 words.

This is not a humble-brag. It is a straight-up brag. It is good to celebrate one’s own accomplishments, something I haven’t done enough of in my life. I didn’t have a party when I got tenure, or when I published my first book, or when I got married the second time. Those were mistakes. I’m trying to learn, and to structure my life better to meet my own goals. That’s really the point of this post.

I’m a guy in my mid-fifties with a family, a sailing addiction devotion, and a full-time teaching load. It would be easy to tell myself I don’t have time to read and write, and, as a tenured full professor, I certainly have no external pressure to do so. I could coast to retirement, then sail off into the sunset.

But as one does in one’s fifties, I was thinking about what I want my life to be in the time I have left (roughly 12,000 days according to my optimistic interpretation of a longevity calculator). I realized that I had unfulfilled writing ambitions.

Thinking about when I do a lot of writing, I realized that it is when I do a lot of reading. Even if I’m not planning on writing anything, almost as soon as I crack a book I start having ideas and pull out a notebook. So, I needed to read more in order to write more.

My set-up at home wasn’t great for reading. The lighting near my couch is poor and not really fixable given the geometry of the living room, and it is hard to take notes while sitting on the couch. My office chair is uncomfortable for long sitting (don’t believe the Secret Lab hype, my friends, I regret it!). Thinking back to grad school I remembered a ratty old green armchair I had picked up second (probably third or fourth) hand, and which I did a lot of reading in. I needed something like that.

So, a year ago, I bought a small brown leather recliner. It made my office a little too crowded, but immediately paid dividends. I suppose at first I was using it a lot out of the excitement of having newly acquired it. But I managed to sustain that pattern, and here I am a year later. I watch a lot less TV, play fewer video games, and waste less time on the Internet. (I tried at first to avoid napping in the armchair, but that didn’t last.)

I wish I had made the purchase years ago. This is your prompt to think about how you could restructure your situation to make it better, even in a small way, and go do it.

But it turns out, mobile devices and artificial intelligence bots are instead making us post-human in the opposite sense, devolving us into beings that are much less than we could have been without them. As a species, we may soon look back on our human phase with fond nostalgia. At least, until we devolve so far that we can no longer remember this period of history, nor read the books that would remind us of what we will have lost.

When it comes to individuals, we could ask: How much screen time is too much? Which uses of AI and other technologies hurt more than they help? Parents already do this for children, and increasingly people who want to thrive or perform at high levels (not necessarily the same thing but lump them together for this purpose) are limiting their own device time.

We know that overuse or even the wrong timing of the use of devices with screens can cause sleep and mood problems. We know that overuse of social media has worsened psychological and physical well-being for many. We know that watching 30-second clips of videos and scrolling 280-character feeds has not just shortened but obliterated many people’s attention spans. Social isolation and lack of connection, partly explained by keeping our heads in our phones, are at epidemic levels. Algorithms have made political polarization and tribalism markedly worse, and they have contributed to all kinds of radicalization (from Q-Anon to ISIS, incels, and Christian Nationalism).

Partly because of the disintegration of attention, partly because of continual distraction by shorter/more easily digestible/literally more addictive forms of content, reading has fallen off a cliff. Apparently, few college students have ever read a whole book. From my experience teaching college, it seems that many students never read anything at all.

Now, things are even worse than they were a couple of years ago thanks to the rise of generative AI. (I still hate that term: LLMs are completely unlike what the term “AI” used to refer to, namely real thinking by artificial beings.) Many students are resorting to ChatGPT for every writing assignment and for all studying.

A few professors are even grading with AI, too, raising the possibility that soon, student-owned AIs will merely be trading digital signals with professor-owned AIs, completely undermining the point of education and leaving us much worse off as individuals and as society. The ultimate AI ouroboros — or more aptly, humanity circling the drain.

That might sound funny, but it is actually a tragedy. Learning to write well means learning to think well. Learning to write requires reading — a lot. And reading is the best and fastest way to acquire information, skills, and perspective on the world. Cell phone use has led to a massive decrease in reading, and therefore in writing, and gen-AI is only accelerating the decline.

As a culture, we are giving up on the best and most powerful tools of self-improvement and life enrichment we have ever had as a species, and replacing them with things that make us much worse as thinkers, doers, and humans.

I suspect that we will soon learn that just as early childhood overexposure to screens leads to bad outcomes, too-early exposure to AI will be similarly stunting. The difference will be that “too early” for extensive use of AI will be “before college” —maybe even “before graduating college.”

Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah is more sanguine in his Atlantic piece, “The Age of De-Skilling” (Oct. 26, 2025; Kwame Anthony AIppiah, amirite?). He argues that not all de-skilling is bad: Almost no one knows Morse code, celestial navigation or even how to hand-wash clothes these days, but communication, transportation and the cleanliness of our clothes has never been better. More importantly, freed from the mundane tasks that required those skills, we now do other things. At least nominally or possibly, some of those other things are better or more fulfilling uses of our time.

The question then becomes whether the de-skilling caused by the rise of AI leads to outcomes we should think are better overall. So far, the jury is out; until they report, we should be a lot more careful than we have been. Clawing back skill loss is always much harder than not losing it in the first place.

Reading is very weird when you stop to think about it. Visually discerning little shapes that are combined together and then ascribing meaning to them to communicate across space and time — faster than speech and longer than memory — is an odd thing for us to do. We didn’t evolve to be able to do it, since there is nothing in nature that is truly analogous. Reading is a hacking of human potential, where we deliberately reshaped some natural potentials so as to be able to do entirely new things.

The development of reading, and especially its application in mass education, are obviously some of the most important events in human history. Reading is at least indirectly responsible for most of the advances of science, technology, and culture of the last few hundred years.

Given that reading requires pushing our natural potentials beyond where they would normally take us, it is no wonder it takes years to help children learn to read. It is no wonder that reading is sometimes painful. Yet without reading and mass education, modern society simply would not exist.

Now we find ourselves in a position where the technology we were able to invent as a result of creating our culture of reading, could well undermine our ability to continue to think at the same level.

This is not an inevitable outcome. We can choose not to fall into this trap. Humans invented thermonuclear weapons capable of ending society altogether, but we also have managed not to use that technology. Deciding not to use AI should be an easier ask, even though the risks of using it might not be as immediately evident.

Escaping the AI trap will take leaders at the federal and state levels, plus academic administrators, to make the right choices and implement the right policies.

A recent example of what not to do comes from my own university system. The California State University system’s central administration decided by fiat earlier in 2025, without consulting faculty, the twenty-two campuses in the system, or the nearly half-million students it serves, to enter into a commercial partnership to make the CSU “the first and largest AI-powered university system.” This was a bad move not just because of the way it was implemented without consultation, but even more because it undermines the very purpose of higher education. And it is a move that weirdly contradicts how California high schools are entirely banning cell phones at school. I would much rather have seen an “AI-Free Universities Act” than the policy the CSU did choose.

The AI hypesters have made it seem like students need to be taught to use AI in college or they will fall hopelessly behind. That seems obviously untrue to me. The way AI is used now, in its barest infancy, will not be how AI is used in five or ten years. Besides which, it doesn’t take that much to learn to write good AI prompts. The AI hypesters didn’t learning prompting in school. In fact, a person who has a broad education, who has been taught solid critical and creative thinking skills, and who is a good writer, would be able to learn the skill of prompt writing quite quickly, either in the workplace or on their own. YouTube has all kinds of tutorials on the topic. One video that calls itself a “master class” on AI prompt writing is less than nineteen minutes long. We don’t need to undermine all of higher education for a skill that can be explained in nineteen minutes.

In “Why Even Basic AI Use is So Bad for Students” (New York Times, Oct. 29, 2025) philosopher Ana Berg from the University of California, Irvine, laments these facts, too. But on a hopeful note, Berg also points out that many students still do want to read and think in long form. We should not abandon them to the giant looming maw of the post-human gen-AI era, as too many educators, administrators, and AI gurus seem eager to do. Resisting AI in education isn’t being a Luddite, it is holding steadfastly to the best of what makes us human, insisting on the very point of the humanities and of liberal education in general. Once students are properly educated, they will be in a position to use AI most effectively, or to decide not to use it all. We should be leading the technology, not the other way around.

Mary Harrington points out in “Thinking is Becoming a Luxury Good” (NYT Opinion, Jul. 28, 2025), that “Longform literacy is not innate but learned, sometimes laboriously.” This means, in part, that it takes deep and sustained effort and coaching to become especially skilled in longform literacy, and this means students who have teachers, schools, and parents who insist on longform literacy are much more likely to achieve it. Today, insisting on longform literacy is more important than ever, because as a society we are already losing that skill and the rise of AI threatens to accelerate the decline. Making sure students are excellent thinkers and writers before they start using AI extensively will be a key to ensuring that future generations don’t lose some of the best parts of being human.

The IRS says it will no longer enforce the Johnson Amendment. This is the law, passed by Congress in 1954, that says churches cannot maintain their tax-exempt non-profit 501(c)(3) status if they use their church to endorse political candidates, telling their members how to vote. You were supposed to create a Political Action Committee to do that sort of political activity. The law hasn’t changed. The IRS hasn’t enforced it, though, even when churches tried to goad them into doing so. Instead, now, the IRS conceded, as a response to being sued, that pastors endorsing candidates from the pulpit is not a violation of the law. Specifically, what is allowed according to the settlement agreement (yet to be approved by the judge) is “speech by a house of worship to its congregation in connection with religious services through its customary channels of communication on matters of faith, concerning electoral politics viewed through the lens of religious faith.” This is obviously against what the law intends, but the legal settlement means the law will now never be enforced. It may seem like a small thing (de facto, churches have been doing this with impunity for decades). But it is officially telling churches it is okay to break the law, in a way that violates the First Amendment. Churches who do this should look carefully into their consciences: This is really still a violation of a law, whether enforced or not. And legal or not, it is still the wrong thing to do, morally and politically. It is true that many churches (see esp. the scamvangelists) do not particularly care about doing what is right, so they won’t be bothered by this fact. Note that this move by the IRS is explicitly a Christian Nationalist move, since they are still not allowing secular non-profits to endorse candidates.

The Supreme Court ruled in favor of “parents rights” (code for “allowing religious extremists to avoid educational content they don’t like”) and gave parents the right to opt their children out of any classroom instruction that involves LGBTQ+ themes on religious grounds. Here the parents are allowed to exercise their rights, by harming/stunting minor children, which seems like a bad trade to me.

The “Big Beautiful Bill” tried to strip funding from Planned Parenthood — a barely-veiled attempt to impose an anti-abortion religious view by removing funding from a group that performs some abortions. But federal money already does not fund abortions by Planned Parenthood. A judge in July blocked that part of the law and restored Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood for its preventive care and sexual health work.

Trump, in a speech to a group of CEOs, said this: “Is there an atheist in the room? Any atheists? I don’t think so. I wouldn’t want to raise my hand if I were. You’d be in big trouble.” A president endorsing the idea that it is bad or socially unacceptable to be a non-Christian is off-the-charts insane. Christians barely make up 60% of the U.S. population (though they vote at higher rates than other groups). They certainly don’t own the country. And the Constitution explicitly defines the U.S. as a non-religious nation.

Speaker Mike Johnson published an opinion piece on X-Twitter which redefines freedom of religion in a way that is contrary to the meaning of the Constitution’s First Amendment. He starts from some fairly ordinary claims but then twists things so he lands on the conclusion that while government telling religion what to do is bad, religion telling government what to do is good. It is pure bullshirt, just another attempt to make it easier for Christians to impose their views through laws.

The Department of Homeland Security published a recruiting ad with an explicitly religious message in its voiceover, a quote from the Old Testament supposedly read by a soldier: “I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?’ I said, ‘Here am I, send me.’” The video is of a U.S Customs and Border Patrol crew in full tactical gear riding in a helicopter on the way to a nighttime covert operation along the border wall. From the militarization of border protection, to trying to make martial violence against immigrants seem cool and manly, to implying that defending the USA is a religious mission, the whole thing is disgusting.

Employees in the federal government are now officially allowed to proselytize at work. The Office of Personnel Management, which is responsible for the HR functions of the federal government, released a memo to this effect in the last week of July. It invoked Trump’s executive order to eliminate (supposed) “anti-Christian weaponization of government” as a justification, also mentioning Constitutional protections of freedom of speech and freedom of religion. This is, of course, a terrible policy. Since it even allows supervisors to try to convert their underlings, the policy opens all kinds of concerns about undue coercion and abuse of power. It creates the possibility of in and out groups at work, weird social pressure, and lots of uncomfortable and unnecessary conversations that will steal time from and distract workers from doing the work of the federal government. The policy of course does not specifically limit the permission to proselytize to Christians, but since Christianity is the one religion that seems to be most aggressive about converting people, the policy in effect is a pro-Christian policy. The potential antidote is for non-Christians to be just as loud at work in trying to get people to give up Christianity. That will be ugly in the short term, but perhaps it will get folks to realize that the workplace is the wrong place for religious activity.

Earlier in July, OPM said federal workers are allowed to seek permission “to work from home or adjust their hours to accommodate religious prayers.” This is another policy biased in favor of religion: Other reasons, including other reasons of conscience, are not given equal treatment.

In ongoing Christian Nationalism news, Americans United, the ACLU and other groups are challenging creeping Christian Nationalism in court. The filed five cases in just five weeks—and indicating that “creeping” is not really the right word anymore. It is more like a sewage pipe whose leak is only getting worse with time.

Share