Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

Teach your tongue to say: I do not know, lest you be duped. Talmud Berachot 4a The phrase “Joshua Katz,” as it is ground down and churned out by the national rumor mill, refers not to one character but to many. He is a conniving fiend; a wronged and saintly genius; a bitter man who has responded terribly to genuine mistreatment; the perpetrator of abuse; the victim of abuse; a valorous defender of independent thought; a sad sack manipulated by a powerful puppeteer named Robert George; a befuddled but well-meaning and brilliant professor, and so forth. It took me several months to notice that all of these Katzes refer to the same man, and still longer to recognize that the name, as used in public discourse, is not a name at all but a rallying cry. The rumors that are think-pieced about Katz do not reflect any serious empirical consideration about what exactly unfolded at Princeton the summer of 2022, though that is their purported subject — but of course that is not what they are intended to do. His name is a speech act, a token, a shorthand, a move in a game. How someone invokes “Joshua Katz” depends entirely on where that individual’s stands on trends that have little directly to do with the man. Ignorance is a primary fuel of opinion. Joshua Katz, a classicist, made tenure at one of the most prestigious universities in America when he was just thirty-six years old. That is not why I know his name, though it is among the reasons that the implosion of his academic life was an affair of national significance. (Our country’s pathological obsession with the glitteriest members of the Ivy League — provincial ecosystems that bear little resemblance to anything beyond their hallowed walls — is among our more embarrassing fixations.) Eighteen years after he received Princeton’s President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching, and fifteen years after he made tenure, Katz was ruthlessly fired!, or he was canceled!, or he was justly punished!, depending on which team you play for and how invested you are in your membership in the league. Katz is among the many citizens whose private catastrophes have been seized upon and treated something like a theatrical drama in which certain breeds of nauseatingly political Americans assume their customary positions and rehearse their familiar scripts. Scavenging the relevant search engines and piecing together a timeline of the Katz affair after the fever has broken has been a fruitful, if bizarre, anthropological project. At a distance, the earnest hysteria and sanctimonious outrage of all the opiners seems not only ridiculous but also hollow, as if none of these pontificators really cared about this particular drama, except as an opportunity to model the Right (or Left) View of it. The name that I give to this style of participation in public debates is priorism, because it comes with a handy framework, an a priori intellectual and even cognitive filter, into which each successive news cycle or morsel of cultural gossip is smoothly fitted. Priorism is a brutish substitute for interpretation; unlike priorism, responsible interpretation awaits facts, considers developments, and suspends judgment for the duration of inquiry while it resists the impulse to extrapolate wildly from bits and pieces. The primary objective of interpretation is to yield understanding, whereas priorism yields only a comforting sense of belonging and a hackish confirmation of an established worldview. Evidence that contradicts its framework is simply ignored or discarded or mocked, and in this way priorists are never thrown into crisis. Theirs is a phony kind of certainty. They, or at least the clever ones among them, are not exactly liars. They tell selective truths, edited accounts, absorbing what is useful and strong-arming it into their system. The spirit that moves even their true opinions is not the spirit of truthfulness but of conformity. Priorism, no matter of which ideological variety, offers its members the armor of a sympathetic, validating community. They are never discomfited, they are never alone, they are only ever affirmed. This, incidentally, is why priorism has these days become a promising career path. The national theatrical production called “Katz,” like the ones that preceded it, is, among other things, tedious, no matter the pitch in which the lines are recited, because we have all heard all this before. And further, the more familiar the opinion, and the closer it clings to the script, the warmer its reception: community, and its cheap praise, is guaranteed. The primary mode of its expression is regurgitation. (Re-tweet!) Our discourse is made up of a million platitudes, and these platitudes are repeated endlessly by the very people who purport to be, and are feted for being, our brightest. How do we manage to stay awake through each performance? Katz does not appear to be a dazzling individual. Among the oddities of this tale is that he can command national attention at all. It is generally agreed upon that he has an enigmatic, rapacious, and sharp mind, and a captivating energy which sometimes obfuscates his lack of more obvious charms. If ever he possessed charisma, it is not evident now; he is, judging from the essays he has churned out about the terrors of cancellation and the cowardice of his former friends, a bitter man. (It is 2023 — we are connoisseurs of cancellation, and we know the difference between a dignified pariah and an embittered one.) It was surprising to learn that, before the crisis began, long before I ever heard of him, Katz basked in the adoration of the entire Princeton student body. He has a quality rating of 5/5 on ratemyprofessors.com, and 100% of students said they would take his classes again. One respondent on that site gushes that Katz was “a reason to come to Princeton.” Another effused, “Don’t graduate without taking a class from Katz. He is not only brilliant but dynamic and interesting as well… Will know each person in his 100-person lecture personally.” And another: