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Temptations of Tyranny
Rod Dreher’s conflicted support for President Trump illustrates a broader crisis among intellectual conservatives who fear the "soft totalitarianism" of liberal institutions yet embrace the hard authoritarianism of executive overreach. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s political thought, the essay contends that true freedom is preserved not through charismatic leaders but through the multiplication and decentralization of citizen power. Revitalizing democracy, it argues, requires stubborn, local acts of collective governance rather than the dangerous temptation to concentrate authority in a single figure.04-27-2025
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AI Devouring Human Culture
Roger BerkowitzYuval Harari offers another, more dismal, take on the rise of AI. We need to learn to master AI before it masters us. Harari calls upon world leaders to rise to the challenge of AI: to master it and make it useful for us, while limiting its capabilities to destroy the humanity that gave it life. Harari sees the real danger from AI in its ability to consume our human culture.
03-25-2023
The Crack Where the Light Comes In
Roger BerkowitzJaron Lanier is “the godfather of virtual reality.” Always one of the most original thinkers on technology, Lanier takes on the recent obsession about Chat GPT and other “large language models” by arguing, provocatively, that AI does not exist: .”My attitude is that there is no AI. What is called AI is a mystification, behind which there is the reality of a new kind of social collaboration facilitated by computers. A new way to mash up our writing and art.”
03-25-2023
The Conspiratorial Mind
Democracy requires trust. Living together requires that we agree on some basic facts and beliefs about the world. For Arendt, the path to the common world is through politics, through talking with others. The institutions of politics—be they town halls, debating societies, congresses, or courts—are designed to bring a plurality of people together—each with their own ways of seeing the world—and encourage them to see something new that is common, that they share. But what about when the fundamental trust that allows such institutions to function fails? Phil Christman explores our snowballing sense that the “wrongness is pervasive.” At this moment of wrongness, we turn to conspiracy theories and paranoia that makes the exploration of a common world with others well nigh impossible. If you want to understand the conspiratorial mind of our moment, Christman is an able guide.03-19-2023
Should I Stay or Should I Go
Roger BerkowitzI’ve been reading and teaching Hannah Arendt’s Jewish Writings in the Arendt Center’s Virtual Reading Group. Making my way through the 600 pages of Arendt’s writing about Jewishness, antisemitism, zionism, exile, and being a stateless refugee was a thrilling reminder of the profoundly personal experiences that informed so much of Arendt’s political and theoretical writing. Above all, it is a reminder how deeply Arendt felt the fact of her being a Jew and how central that sense of Jewishness was to her self-understanding. I was reminded of that sense while reading David Stromberg’s personal essay about his emigration to Israel and his present wrestling with the question of whether he should stay or go.
03-12-2023
The Human Story
Roger Berkowitz
The Crisis of the humanities is one of those perennial crises that pops up every year, every decade, seemingly every century. In the last decade, there are now one-third as many as English majors as there were a decade ago and nearly 20% fewer students are taking humanities courses as were 10 years earlier. Nathan Heller sets out to ask why the humanities are in crisis.
03-12-2023
Equity Language Guides
George Packer argues that the proliferation of “Equity Language Guides” is a misguided attempt at salvation, one with negative consequences. The guides are being issued by colleges, non-profits, and corporations. They are largely lists of banned words often with suggested replacements.03-05-2023
Academic Freedom in Florida
Roger BerkowitzOn the very same day that Florida Governor Ron Desantis was coming to speak at Palm Beach Atlantic University, the university put a beloved and experienced Professor’s teaching contract on hold because of complaints about his teaching about racial justice. The professor, Samuel Joeckel, has been teaching his racial-justice unit for twelve years without issue.
02-26-2023
Le Wokism in France
Roger BerkowitzThomas Chatterton Williams explores the strong French disdain for American woke ideology, and finds that both the American and the French approaches are lacking.
02-26-2023
The New Human-Machine World
Roger BerkowitzHenry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt and Daniel Huttenlocher have an important essay in which they argue that ChatGPT represents the potential of artificial intelligence “to transform the human cognitive process as it has not been shaken up since the invention of printing” and the enlightenment.
02-26-2023