Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

It’s strange, how life can sometimes mimic literature. Consider the story of Jonathan Keeperman, which in crucial ways recalls American Pastoral. Like Philip Roth’s novel, it is a story of how mad ideas can take hold when history unsettles familiar normative coordinates, and when children confront a more dimly lit world than the one faced by their fathers. Even some of the basic details are reminiscent of American Pastoral. Jonathan Keeperman’s father, Fred, came into the world in 1948 at Brooklyn’s Maimonides Hospital and spent his early years in Brownsville. The family-owned a candy store on Pitkin Avenue, and soon Fred was immersed in the “colorful cast of characters who inhabited the immigrant Jewish community into which he was born,” as his obituary put it. (He died two years ago.)  The family moved to the eminently Rothian town of Metuchen, New Jersey. Fred joined his high school’s varsity wrestling team, and this in turn won him an athletic scholarship to Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. There he met his future wife, Rita, a Galesburg local and Catholic-school grad “who taught Fred how to bale hay and put a cow back in the barn,” per the obit. After graduating college, Fred became first a special-ed teacher and then a junior-high vice principal.  In 1976, ambition beckoned him to the Bay Area. He went into business with his uncle and finished an evening law degree. Eventually, the family made its forever home in a cul-de-sac in Moraga, a lush, quiet suburb of San Francisco. Fred ran his own small law office, where Rita would serve as the business manager. On the side, he coached sports and led the local education foundation and baseball association, among other civic groups. Fred and Rita Keeperman, in short, enjoyed a full measure of the stability and social capital which were the boomers’ historical inheritance but which would elude later cohorts. Jonathan Keeperman was born in Moraga, the third of Fred’s four children. He earned a master’s degree in creative writing at the University of California, Irvine, and would teach as a non-tenured lecturer at the same institution for more than a decade, from 2009 until 2023. During his time at Irvine, Keeperman honorably defended the free-speech right of the campus Republicans to invite an obnoxious speaker, and helped to lead efforts to organize his fellow itinerant instructors under the auspices of the American Federation of Teachers. Writing that instructors “make up the highest percentage [of adjuncts] among all the disciplines in the system,” Keeperman told California Teacher, an AFT publication, in 2016 that “we wanted to look at the labor practices from campus to campus.” He complained of the low pay, the arbitrary power wielded by administrators, and the insecurity that defined the careers of adjuncts. In doing so, Keeperman channeled the anxieties of the educated precariat, which were to propel millennial socialism and the movements associated with Bernie Sanders and, a little later, the Squad. Yet Keeperman’s radicalization in those febrile years ran in a different direction than might have been expected from someone of his background. Unlike Merry, Seymour “The Swede” Levov’s daughter in American Pastoral, who swerves to the radical left — all the way to the Weather Underground — in opposition to the Vietnam War, Fred Keeperman’s son has emerged as one of the stars of the “dissident right”: a loose constellation of pseudonymous intellectuals and social scenesters who promote a combination of IQ-based eugenics, the worship of strength, and lifestyle self-help.  Roth’s Merry directs her (literally) explosive rage against America’s postwar military-industrial establishment — a discrete and familiar bogey for boomer progressives. But Keeperman and his cohort, the dissident right, identify a more fundamental force as the oppressive enemy: democratic egalitarianism, with its supposed denial of human difference, its general tendency to cut down the high to succor the low. They blame it for pervasive censorship and the H.R.-department quality of modern social life; for the snuffing out of excellence and the “disequilibrium afflicting the contemporary social imaginary,” as Keeperman has written.  The dissident right would bury the mildly egalitarian brand of conservatism that in the last century made its peace with equal human dignity, even seeking to extend it to