Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

I Overnight mass conversions to the cause of African American rights are a rare phenomenon in America, and, even so, a recurrent phenomenon, and ultimately a world-changing phenomenon. The classic instance took place in 1854 in Boston. An escaped slave from Virginia named Anthony Burns was arrested and held by United States marshals, who prepared to send him back into bondage in Virginia, in accordance with the Fugitive Slave Act and the policies of the Franklin Pierce administration. And a good many white people in Boston and environs were surprised to discover themselves erupting in violent rage, as if in mass reversion to the hot-headed instincts of their ancestors at the glorious Tea Party of 1773. Respectable worthies with three names found themselves storming the courthouse. Amos Adams Lawrence, America’s wealthiest mill owner, famously remarked, “We went to bed one night old-fashioned, conservative, Compromise Whigs & waked up stark mad Abolitionists.” John Greenleaf Whittier experienced a physical revulsion: I felt a sense of bitter loss, — Shame, tearless grief, and stifling wrath, And loathing fear, as if my path A serpent stretched across. Henry David Thoreau delivered a lecture a few weeks later under the scathing title, “Slavery in Massachusetts,” in support of blowing up the law: “The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free.” And in upstate New York, the businessman John Brown, taking the fateful next step, declared that “Anthony Burns must be released, or I will die in the attempt,” which sounded the note of death. Burns was not released. John Brown went to Bleeding Kansas, where the note of death produced the Pottawatomie Massacre in 1856, and thence to Harper’s Ferry and everything that followed.   A second instance took place in March 1965, this time in response to a police attack on John Lewis and a voting-rights march in Alabama. The event was televised. Everyone saw it. And the furor it aroused was sufficiently intense to ensure that, in our own day, the photo image of young Lewis getting beaten, though it is somewhat blurry, has emerged as a representative image of the civil-rights revolution. It was Lyndon Johnson, and not any of the business moguls or the poets, who articulated the response. Johnson delivered a speech to Congress a few days later in which, apart from calling for the Voting Rights Act to be passed, he made it clear that he himself was not entirely the same man as before. “We shall overcome,” said the president, as if, having gone to bed a mere supporter of the civil rights cause, he had waked up marching in the street and singing the anthem. He went further yet. In a speech at Howard University, he defined the goal, too: “not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact, and equality as a result,” which inched his toe further into social democratic terrain than any American presidential toe has ever ventured.   And, a week after the Voting Rights Act duly passed, the violent note of the 1960s, already audible, began to resound a little more loudly in the Watts district of Los Angeles, prefiguring still more to come over the next years — violence in the ghettos, and among the police, and among the white supremacists, and eventually on the radical left as well. All of which ought to suggest that, in the late spring of 2020, we saw and perhaps participated in yet another version of the same rare and powerful phenomenon: an overnight conversion to the cause of African American rights, sparked by a single, shocking, and visible instance of dreadful oppression, with massive, complicated, and, on a smaller scale, sometimes violent consequences.  During the several months that followed the killing of George Floyd, which occurred on May 25, 2020, close to eight thousand Black Lives Matter demonstrations are reported to have taken place in the United States, in more than two thousand locales in every part of the country. Many of those demonstrations must have drawn just a handful of people. Then again, a protest parading under my own windows in Brooklyn in early June filled eight lanes