Greg Sanders

Critique: The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis (Chapters 1&2)

This is a fascinating and sometimes frustrating book. Lewis is writing with a range of Christian premises baked in through, which is not a problem for me but will turn off some readers. Unfortunately, the price of admittance also includes a few pages of defensive homophobic writing that is not simply wrong in my view, but fails to meet a standard of respect that I expect from modern social conservative writers I disagree with but find worth reading. I won’t bother to engage that section; however, I think Lewis also too frequently neglects the distaff portion of his audience and exhibits a failure of curiosity about classical female friendship that I think leaves his chapter on friendship incomplete and in one portion badly undercuts his analysis. This is all the more vexing as I’ve recently been reading Until We Have Faces, where he got some aspects of those friendships right years before he wrote this book. With that said I found Lewis an insightful writer, witty without being flashy and too wise to settle for most easy answers. Finally, I had the delightful experience of reading along with Kate and Monica; anything clever or insightful likely drew inspiration from one of them but any thoughts that fall flat I claim full responsibility.

He begins with a charming introduction that lays out his idea of need-love and gift-love. The former referring to the pull side of love for exemplified by infants with gift love being a range of acts of compassion and affection graciously shared even when full reciprocity is not possible. Most connections can involve both flowing both ways. Initially he was planning to focus more on this dichotomy but he found it introduced complication after complication. He sets of these concepts well and disabuses readers of the notion that there’s anything to be desired by the absence of a need for love.

The next chapter looks at liking and loves for the sub-human loves. Of a multitude of possible examples, he chooses nature and country. One interesting observation is that those most expert in a topic are not always those that you might wish to spend one’s time with; a horticulturalist may be so caught up in interesting plants as to distract from a larger walk, which is doubtless a charge that can be prosecuted against me on some of my favored topics. In considering patriotism, he identifies three key ingredients. First is love of home, the place and the way of life which includes this interesting passage.

Note that at its largest this is, for us, a love of England, Wales, Scotland, or Ulster, Only foreigners and politicians talk of ‘Britain’. Kipling;s ‘I do not love my empire’s foes strikes a ludicrously false note. My empire!

Lewis argues that any love (save that of God) can become a demon if overly elevated but praises the love of home and argues it should be highly compatible with the understanding that others love their own home in much the same way. His second ingredient is an attitude to the country’s past. He’s more skeptical of this, noting rightly that “the actual history of every country is full of shabby and even shameful doing. The heroic stories, if taken to be typical, give a false impression of it and are often themselves open to serious historical criticism.” He suggests that for this love the past is best engaged as a saga, ideally out of school, and with emphasis on inspiration and not to confuse it with textbook fact.

He then turns to the more dangerous ingredients, the third is a belief that one’s own country is better than all others.  This can lead to believing one’s nation has special rights and duties. Lewis is hardly an ardent anti-colonialist here, but notes “our habit of talking as if England’s motives for acquiring an empire (or any youngster's motives for seeking a job in he Indian Civil Service) has been mainly altruistic has nauseated the world.” That is an expression of duty and those that emphasize rights over duties can be even worse. He goes on to briefly critique the potential excesses of overly associating one nation’s cause with righteousness, in ways that fit with standard realist critiques of idealism.

I would be interested, and can perhaps find elsewhere, a more direct discussion by Lewis of American patriotism. His third and fourth ingredients surely show skepticism of American exceptionalism. That said, I do think creedal civic nationalism better fits in the first two category and can be far more welcoming to the immigrant and binding to a larger community than a love of home alone. Similar to the ingredient of one’s nations stories, I think creedal commitments are healthiest when seen as aspirational and that one’s country has often failed to live up to them even if we hope to have progressed closer. Having recently listened to a discussion of David Campbell’s Writing Security, I’d say Lewis does not just describe but constructs a form of patriotism here that does not align with how I’d describe and construct it as an American. However, I like his normative evaluation here and I find it useful in considering mine own love of country and its risks.

My next post in this series will look at the first of his four loves - affection - before the main event, my argument that Lewis understands friendship too narrowly by focusing on only a single dimension.

Review: No Such Thing as an Easy Job

Happily, this novel by Kikuko Tsumura is an easy read. I’d picked it up for the Argo’s Japan Book Club and the sales copy succinctly lays out the premise:

A young woman walks into an employment agency and requests a job that has the following traits: it is close to her home, and it requires no reading, no writing, and ideally, very little thinking.

The book tells the tale of five jobs, each weird, none well paying, though some coming with health insurance. The variety is key: none of the jobs outstayed their welcome for me and the book stuck the landing in drawing out to look at the protagonist's larger life and why she may have been seeking those easy jobs. On the whole a gentle read, not hugely incisive nor revolutionary but feeling true to life, albeit a heightened and sometimes magical version of it. That said, some passages still have bite:

‘It says here that you cited personal reasons as grounds for leaving.’

‘That’s right.’

I’d read on the internet that it was okay to cite ‘personal reasons’ for a whole host of circumstances. Even when submitting a full-blown resignation, the article informed, good old ‘personal reasons’ would see you through a majority of cases. Whether you’d had a boss who’d made barbed comments about you at a half-hourly rate, or you’d been blamed for the disappearance of a document mentioned on the job sheet that had never existed in the first place, or your colleagues had spread horrible rumors about you, or you’d been held responsible for ruining a business deal tat had fallen through after you’d refused to go drinking with some gyt at the client company – whatever your particular situation might be, ‘personal reasons’ was your man.

And yet, my ‘personal reasons’ didn’t seem to be landing too well with Mrs Masakado.

I’ll weakly recommend the book; it delivers on the concept and is a brisk read, which is certainly not guaranteed in a meditation on burnout. That said I was just as glad to have gotten it from the library, as I don’t think I’ll need to reread and don’t have anyone whose hands I think I’ll be pressing it into.

But why is there no such thing as an easy job? For that you’ll have to read past the spoiler cut.

Review: Rights of the Reader

Daniel Pennac's Rights of the Reader was recommended to me in part because I’ve been dissatisfied with the pace of my reading for some time. I found it an interesting exploration of why young people in particular may be alienated from reading and how they might be wooed back:

You can't make someone read. Just as you can't make them fall in love or dream. . . .
You can try of course. "Go on, love me!" "Dream!" "Read! Read! Read, goddamit I'm telling you to read!" 'Go to your room and read!"
What happens next?
Nothing

So, I'm the sort of weirdo that was not at all alienated by how we typically do English classes. I did sometimes run behind: I embarrassingly faked my way through To Kill a Mockingbird, not because I was blocked directly; I'd just fallen behind and lost track of the assignment.

But one of my fondest memories of English classes, I believe 9th grade, was to write a more critical book review. I'd initially suggested a Xanth book and my teacher, kindly but wisely, suggested I could find something more demanding. I went with the adaptation of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Film adaptation novels are hardly the highlight of sci fi canon but it was still a good moment for looking at some pulp more critically.

But while I don't even recall my line of argument in my essay, I remember my excitement at discovering compilations of critical reviews. People deeply engaging with texts, over thinking in their way, but in polished form.

Pennac’s focus is elsewhere. He convincingly argues that we should be reading aloud more when cultivating a love a reading. He argues said love can be lost when going from reading to kids to "and now you can read on your own, get on with it." He tells stories of engaging the words rather than making it an analytical assignment. He quotes Flannery O'Connor:

If teachers are in the habit of approaching a story as if it were a research problem for which any answer is believable so long as it is not obvious, then I think students will never learn to enjoy fiction.

I feel like the book is missing a typology of different and not mutually exclusive reasons people enjoy reading, though I think the book does well to focus on those most alienated, even if this limits the degree it speaks to my own reading rather than that of younger people I hope to encourage.

After the cut, I’ll cover his 10 rights and how I’d modify them for what I want for myself.

Contemplating a world disrupted by AI

I’ve been reading a lot and playing around a little with ChatGTP and Bing, guided by some helpful guest speakers at work. On the whole, I’m a curmudgeon, though not for reasons related to my sci-fi fandom or comp sci degree. Instead, I am leery as a reader because I do think these large language models (LLM) value answers but not thoughtful or factually correct writing. More selfishly I’m also risk averse and setting aside larger fears I do think it will be disruptive to my  field and others reliant on writing.

But there’s no running from automation. I think this effect will be mitigated by real constraints on time to read. Quality and trustworthy writing is more rewarding for readers at the same time cost, though I imagine this will strengthen winner take all dynamics and the importance of brands as the internet faces an ever growing tide of copycat mass-produced writing.

My biggest challenge as a scholar is the way LLM default to breaking the chain of custody for primary sources and ideas. This is a bit like wanting to identify the source tree for an individual bite of apple sauce, though Bing at least is experimenting in being able to cite. I think Tim Hickson does a good job of unpacking a range of issues in the AI art domain. One point that stood out for me is that Adobe’s generative art program and the Stable Diffusion music generator are explicitly limited to sources where they have rights due to public domain or arrangements with creators.

The scholarly dynamics for research and theory are different from art, although there are elements of both thinking and craft to unpack. I am glad not to be a teacher in this environment, because I find Paul Musgrave and Alan Jacob’s arguments persuasive and depressing. At the same time, I do think Dan Nexon is right to experiment with what the tools can and can’t do as well as thinking about how the demand for writers will change in each field.

So what are the opportunities and where does it add the most value? Starting with the big picture, there’s already more written material produced constantly than any of us will ever have a chance to read and moreover writing is a favored form of human expression that people make sacrifices to engage in. Same for visual arts and music. That said, customization is key; there are lots of places where people want middling writing or art: all sorts of promotional materials, a summary which zeroes in on a certain element of a large corpus of writing, a picture of your roleplaying game character. Quality is nice in these cases but a 33 percent solution at your finger tips could greatly increase demand.

In my work, I see three areas that are particularly promising:

• Low grade translation to identify promising documents. Credit to my colleague Alexander for this idea, but searching and summarizing documents with low fidelity can help us identify where to engage humans for high fidelity work. Timothy Lee recently wrote on how AI is changing the field of translation.
• Supervised categorization is not new to LLM, but may ease the utilization of large text fields in the process. This may enable myself and colleagues to put more work into defining taxonomies and adjudicating border cases and less work on easy but numerous calls.
• Search and summary within a particular corpus, in particular budget and oversight reports or policy documents or contract descriptions. Here AI may be able to do some scouting and I could then use that to inform my subsequent engagement with the primary sources.

All three cases involve existing applications of machine learning and other software tools. That said, open source tools such as those provided by the creepily named HuggingFace mean I can potentially be creating and refining my own tools rather than relying on third party services. But whether I make or buy I think these uses all help me engage primary sources rather than replacing my engagement.

So readers, is there anywhere you’re experimenting?