Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

Horror — like beauty, passion, and all states in extremis — confounds the habits which regulate the human mind. Before articulation — which is to say, before the experience or the witness of horror is transformed from something beyond our ken into a verbal artifact manufactured by reason or insight or prejudice or all of these things — we are alone with something unlike the materials we are able to know. When we are in shock we remain fixed before the horror without the means to investigate it, such that the time that a human mind is forced to spend with inhuman action is discomfitingly distended. A terrible alchemy preserves the horror which yields a pure, uncomplicated, and correct pain — the pain of considering horror squarely, without evasion or escape. Some acts should not be metabolized and smoothly fitted into ordinary life. But the human mind resists shock; shock must be melted like ice in the sun. What do we do with what we have witnessed? How do we alter it so that it fits inside the boxes which order our imaginations? Whoever manages articulation first secures a strange power. The race out of horror into language is a power race. First-speakers have the job of first and forever transforming what could not be absorbed. That lucky winner, whose haste is more often a symptom of unintelligent compulsion than it is of reason and wisdom, sets the conditions for everybody else’s confrontation with the horror. At least, everybody unlucky enough to have to think about the horror at all. Thanks to these “first responders,” whatever the intellectual quality of their response, the rest of us are granted the gift of mediation. And if we later attempt to unknit the mediation and gain a more immediate relation to the horror, we will find it is no simple emancipation.  But not all horror is seen, and some horrors are seen more than others, and of those some remain alive in public consciousness for longer stretches. The ones that remain alive the longest are corrupted beyond recognition, corrupted the most. They feel nothing like the precipitating horror which catalyzed the fascination. They have been interpreted and put to use. Once horror is described it becomes what we call it, and slips further and further away from what it is. On October 7, 2023, the entire world was enlisted into a new era of discourse about horror, in which atrocities of this order were perpetrated in the Middle East, recorded on cameras, and shared around the globe along with “analysis” that hardly rose above a snarl, every day for over a year. For over a year an enormous subsection of the human population has participated in or at least witnessed and been degraded by this poisoned discourse. After the sun set on the evening of October 7, the locus of the horror migrated westward. Now the images of mutilated bodies depict Palestinians instead of Israelis. And the discourse remains every bit as degrading.  Over the past year many Palestinians and Israelis have howled that their people are brutalized and the world is silent. It is a profoundly human cry no less stirring for being patently untrue. Is there any other sliver of land in the world about which the global population is less capable of silence? And while we type and glance and glance away, we gauze the horror in verbal and visual buffering. Thus, for example, when an American reads the phrase “the rapes perpetrated by Hamas on October 7,” she does not mentally resuscitate the horror. Instead, dependably, her mind moves to the arena of political discourse in which horrors of this kind are debased by conversion into talking points and dogmas and slogans. She does not smell smoke and blood or shiver at the recollection of a woman’s splayed naked body and a face burned so badly she can hardly make out its features. Too many headlines, talk shows, late night hosts, speeches, op-ed pieces, podcasts, tweets, and heated or fortifying conversations come between her and the thing itself. She is protected by language and time. Words do the work of balm even when we would prefer that they did