I don’t see how we get out of this. There is nothing truer that can be said of this time. It is a perverse measure of its truth that we have been inundated with books and bromides that purport to show the opposite, that have hit upon the way out, the solutions, or better, the solution, the formulas for the miracle, all the how’s and all the why’s. How can so many people understand so much and so immediately, when so many of our torments are so unfamiliar? Isn’t anybody stunned into silence anymore? So many words, so many numbers, so many “frames.” They are fortifying, I guess, and we certainly need strength. Let every-one come forward in the dark with their light. But I don’t see how we get out of this, not yet. The empty streets of the covid nights are so candid in their desolation. They are thronged with the people who are not there. They provide a peculiar serenity, in which one can be alone with one’s fear, and take it for a walk. Philosophers since Seneca have known that fear and hope are twins. They are alternative ways of interpreting the opacity of the future. If hope were rational, it would be redundant. Hope picks up where reason leaves off, like changing guides at the frontier. Hope is the best we can do with uncertainty. It is an image of happiness that cannot quite be dismissed as an illusion. If it cannot be proven, neither can it be disproven. Its enchantment lies in its cognitive limitation. It comes to an end with knowledge. One of the characteristic errors of the American debate is to mistake the homiletical for the analytical — preaching for teaching. The objective of moral and social thought is not uplift. And as every religious person knows, castigation, too, can be experienced as uplift. It warms the heart to be told that we are all sinners, doesn’t it? Drop a coin in the charity box on the way out, you miserable excuse for finitude, and recover your contentment. It was never really damaged anyway. Of course this high-level complacency is abundantly found among the secular as well. They, too, like a warm sensation of their own shortcomings, as long as you do not overdo it. They, too, are lifted up by the sound of sermons, as in the editorial “must”: “We must restore trust.” Yes, we must! For many years I travelled around the country, like an itinerant preacher, chastising American Jews for their ignorance of Hebrew, which is their language even if they cannot speak it. I was received cordially almost everywhere I went. But I became suspicious of this cordiality: after all, I had come to discomfit them. And on the occasions when I did discomfit them — as when, after one of those lectures, a woman came up to me and testily said, “Sir, that was a wonder-ful presentation, but I did not feel affirmed!” — I smiled politely and triumphantly. (Actually, what I said to the woman was this: “Madam, I did not come all this way to affirm you.”) But those occasions were rare. The futility of my efforts was owed to the tragi-comic fact that feeling bad makes some people feel good. Criticism assures them of their meaningfulness, which is really all they seek. “I don’t see how we get out of this.” Thank you for your honesty. It is not nearly as disagreeable as our circumstances. If hope and history ever rhyme, in accordance with the poet’s wishes, it will be a soft rhyme, a weak rhyme, a half-rhyme. I don’t see how we get out of this. The country is poisoned. There is contempt everywhere; contempt and certainty. There are also wonderful people doing wonderful things for the weak and the needy and the scorned — a national plenitude of local kindnesses; but all these practices of solidarity have not yet altered the character of our politics and our culture, or banished our furies. Not just yet. The rampaging passions — otherwise known as populism — have not yet exhausted themselves. Perhaps it is just a matter of patience, except that patience is in ideological disrepute and was long ago retired by our technology. The greater the suffering, the greater the dream of redemption. An apocalyptic is a man in extreme pain. He can imagine only an extreme cure. He is not concerned that he may cause pain to end pain. He hurts that much. But must the magnitude of the cure always be commensurate with the magnitude of the pain? What if there are cases in which the only genuine relief is gradual relief? This is insulting to the sufferer, who expects that his view of his suffering to be definitive. Yet our compassion, our love, does not require that we agree with him. A person in pain knows only one thing, but he will be saved with the help of people who know more things. For example: a person in pain hates time, which is abolished by the immediacy of his torments. He lives (to borrow Robert Lowell’s piercing word) momently. A person in pain experi-ences time as an eternity. (In this way he resembles a person in ecstasy.) But time may be his ally, insofar as it is the only condi-tion of his healing. Recovering from pain is a way of returning from eternity to time. Or, more practically, of taking concrete and steady and reasoned steps. Of course there are sufferers who do not have time on their side. When we discover this about physical ills, we call it tragedy. But we have no right to invoke tragedy about social ills. The tragic sense connotes a certain helplessness about circum-stances, or more precisely, about other people’s circumstances. It promotes resignation. But whereas it may be legitimate for me to resign myself to my troubles, it is not legitimate for me to resign myself to your troubles. I can surrender myself, but
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence