The Marginalian
The Marginalian

The Relationship Between Comedy, Democracy, and AI

By Maria Popova

The Relationship Between Comedy, Democracy, and AI

“Humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds,” Viktor Frankl wrote in recalling the role of humor as a lifeline to sanity and survival in the Holocaust.

Humor is a fundamental human freedom: To laugh is to protect ourselves from all that dehumanizes us — tyranny and transactionalism, captivity and commodification. Humor is also fundamental to free societies, to freedom of thought, to democracy: To laugh together is to harmonize our deepest humanity.

Because humor is the art of surprise, it exists beyond the reach of — and is an antidote to — the artifices of predictive computation we mistake for intelligence.

In her altogether fantastic manifesto for breaking free from the prison of predictive technologies, Carissa Véliz argues that humor thrives in the same “spaces of indeterminacy” where creativity and innovation also thrive. (“Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know,’” the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska observed in her magnificent Nobel Prize acceptance speech.) With an eye to the emotional attunement of sharing laughter, Véliz considers the relationship between humor, democracy, and AI:

Our sense of humor is a dialogue, and when we delegate the conversation to AI, we lose the personal relationship with another human being. Democracy itself is a conversation. If we give up our seat at that table and give it to an AI, we will lose our voice.

Comedy is not inconsequential for democracy. Comedy sets the tone for freedom. It gives us courage. A documentary about comedy clubs in war-torn Ukraine reminds me that humor is not a luxury; it’s indispensable. “When I went to Sarajevo to a film festival,” Cleese says, “people were talking about the early ’90s, when Yugoslavia was falling apart. Sarajevo is down in a valley, and the Serbs were up in the hills throwing shells down, and telescopic snipers were shooting people crossing the street. And they told me that they had found an underground car park, had turned it into a cinema, and they would show comedies, including Monty Python, and they would laugh. When they came out, an hour and a half later, they felt better. Nothing had improved. But they were better able to deal with their situation.” Comedy can be an ally in our challenge to defy the odds.

Humor, like creativity, works by defying expectation. It is a felicitous violation of the norm. Societies thrive and progress by continually challenging the norm, the given, the status quo. Every revolution, every change in regime, is the story of turning the old order from terrible to laughable.

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Marianne Moore on the Three Elements of Persuasive Writing

By Maria Popova

Marianne Moore on the Three Elements of Persuasive Writing

Several years ago, rummaging through the archives of the Academy of American Poets, I came upon a box labeled “Ballots 1950” — the record of the secret vote by the chancellors the year the Academy’s prestigious fellowship was awarded to E.E. Cummings, catapulting him into renown. The voting process is a black box — no one outside the Academy ever finds out who else is in the running and by how much the winner wins.

Leafing through the ballots, one other name appeared over and over, so much so that I was impelled to count.

Marianne Moore had lost by one vote, never knowing how close she had come. It would be many more years until, at 77, she was finally awarded the fellowship.

Long before that, before she won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award (sharing a table with Rachel Carson at the ceremony), Moore had set down her views on writing in a series of essays later collected in the out-of-print gem Predilections (public library). Pulsating through them is a reckoning with the impossible task of the writer — to weave tapestries of truth and meaning from the tenuous thread of words on the ramshackle loom of language.

Marianne Moore (Photograph: George Platt Lynes)

In an essay titled “Feeling and Precision,” Moore writes:

Feeling at its deepest — as we all have reason to know — tends to be inarticulable. If it does manage to be articulate, it is likely to seem overcondensed, so that the author is resisted as being enigmatic or disobliging or arrogant.

How we name what we feel is not so much a matter of our writing style as of our style of being, because in order to articulate something we must first apprehend it and we apprehend every smallest thing with the whole person — with the frame of reference that is our entire life, the sum of our experience and memory. When “one of New York’s more painstaking magazines” asked Moore to distill her poetic style into a formula, she fought back the “dictatorial” reflex to quip:

You don’t devise a rhythm, the rhythm is the person, and the sentence but a radiograph of the personality.

And yet a personality can write with more or less persuasion — that is, write more or less well — depending on what the person brings to the writing. In another essay from the collection, Moore identifies the three psychological elements necessary for persuasive writing: “humility, concentration, and gusto.” A generation after Mark Twain assured his friend Helen Keller when she was accused of plagiarism that “substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources,” she writes:

Humility… is armor, for it realizes that it is impossible to be original, in the sense of doing something that has never been thought of before. Originality is in any case a by-product of sincerity; that is to say, of feeling that is honest and accordingly rejects anything that might cloud the impression.

Illustration by Mimmo Paladino for a rare edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses

By “concentration” Moore means a kind of discipline — annealing the essence of the sentiment by cutting away all superfluous explanations, elaborations, and distractions of stylistic posturing, being maximally truthfully in the most minimal way possible. Observing that there is always a “helpless sincerity which precipitates a poem” and that a good poem is always “a concentrate,” she writes:

Concentration — indispensable to persuasion — may feel to itself crystal clear, yet be through its very compression the opposite… I myself would rather be told too little than too much.

Long before we had the language of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, of finite and infinite games, Moore uses a lovely word, now dusty, for that peculiar private zeal propelling all creative work with its twin dynamos of discipline and deliverance: “gusto.” Echoing Rachel Carson’s abiding advice on writing — “If you write what you yourself sincerely think and feel and are interested in,” she had counseled a young writer, “the chances are very high that you will interest other people as well.” — Moore offers:

Gusto thrives on freedom, and freedom in art, as in life, is the result of a discipline imposed by ourselves. Moreover, any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others.

She maps the fundamental relationship between the three:

Humility is an indispensable teacher, enabling concentration to heighten gusto.

When creating in integrity with these three values, it ceases to matter how the work is received because the process of locating and articulating the truth as you feel it, the world as you see it, is its own reward. In what may be the best advice I have encountered on how to orient to your own work, Moore writes:

There are always objecters, but we must not be sensitive about not being liked or not being printed… The thing is to see the vision and not deny it; or care and admit that we do.

Complement with Walt Whitman on how to keep criticism from sinking your soul and Mary Oliver’s advice on writing, then savor the moving story of how Marianne Moore saved a rare tree with a poem.

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The Generosity of Selfishness: C.S. Lewis on How to Be Interesting

By Maria Popova

The Generosity of Selfishness: C.S. Lewis on How to Be Interesting

Our lives are defined not by what we have but what we give — on what and whom we spend our energy and time, how we share our material possessions and our mental powers, what we do with our gifts. “Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you,” Annie Dillard wrote in contemplating the nature of creativity. “You open your safe and find ashes.”

Paradoxically, the ability to give hinges on the ability to receive: You must be rested in order to labor, taking the repose it takes to recharge your vital energies; you must be interested in order to be interesting, taking the world in with a greedy curiosity that absorbs its beauty and strangeness in order to metabolize it into meaning.

C.S. Lewis (November 29, 1898–November 22, 1963) offers a wonderfully counterintuitive perspective on our notions of generosity and our ideas about what it means to be interesting in his memoir Surprised by Joy (public library).

C.S. Lewis

With an eye to the ideal structure of the creative life, he writes:

It is a life almost entirely selfish. Selfish, not self-centred: for in such a life my mind would be directed towards a thousand things, not one of which is myself. The distinction is not unimportant. One of the happiest men and most pleasing companions I have ever known was intensely selfish. On the other hand I have known people capable of real sacrifice whose lives were nevertheless a misery to themselves and to others, because self-concern and self-pity filled all their thoughts. Either condition will destroy the soul in the end. But till the end, give me the man who takes the best of everything (even at my expense) and then talks of other things, rather than the man who serves me and talks of himself, and whose very kindnesses are a continual reproach, a continual demand for pity, gratitude, and admiration.

This is also why, Lewis intimates, the “thrill” of our greatest creative breakthroughs — those revelations that give us back to ourselves, out of which we give our best work to the world — is rooted in “self-forgetfulness”:

Only when your whole attention and desire are fixed on something else — whether a distant mountain, or the past, or the gods of Asgard — does the “thrill” arise.

[…]

Shut your mouth; open your eyes and ears. Take in what is there.

Couple with John Steinbeck on the art of receiving, then revisit C.S. Lewis on what we long for in our existential longing.

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Umberto Eco’s Antilibrary: Why Unread Books Are More Valuable to Our Lives than Read Ones

By Maria Popova

“It is our knowledge — the things we are sure of — that makes the world go wrong and keeps us from seeing and learning,” Lincoln Steffens wrote in his beautiful 1925 essay. Piercingly true as this may be, we’ve known at least since Plato’s famous Allegory of the Cave that “most people are not just comfortable in their ignorance, but hostile to anyone who points it out.”. Although science is driven by “thoroughly conscious ignorance” and the spiritual path paved with admonitions against the illusion of thorough understanding, we cling to our knowledge — our incomplete, imperfect, infinitesimal-in-absolute-terms knowledge — like we cling to life itself.

And yet the contour of what we know is a mere silhouette cast by the infinite light of the unknown against the screen of the knowable. The great E.F. Schumacher captured this strange dynamic in the concept of adaequatio — the notion that “the understanding of the knower must be adequate to the thing to be known.” But how do we face our inadequacy with grace and negotiate wisely this eternal tension between the known, the unknown, the knowable, and the unknowable?

That’s what Lebanese-American scholar, statistician, and essayist Nassim Nicholas Taleb explores in a section of his modern classic The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (public library) — an illuminating inquiry into the unknowable and unpredictable outlier-events that precipitate profound change, and our tendency to manufacture facile post-factum explanations for them based on our limited knowledge.

Taleb uses legendary Italian writer Umberto Eco’s uncommon relationship with books and reading as a parable of the most fruitful relationship with knowledge:

The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others — a very small minority — who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.

Tsudonku: Japanese for leaving a book unread after buying it, typically piled up together with other unread books. Illustration by Ella Frances Sanders from Lost in Translation: An Illustrated Compendium of Untranslatable Words from Around the World.

Eco himself has since touched on humanity’s curious relationship with the known and the unknown in his encyclopedia of imaginary lands, the very existence of which is another symptom of our compulsive tendency to fill in the gaps of our understanding with concrete objects of “knowledge,” even if we have to invent them by the force of our imagination. Taleb adds:

We tend to treat our knowledge as personal property to be protected and defended. It is an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order. So this tendency to offend Eco’s library sensibility by focusing on the known is a human bias that extends to our mental operations. People don’t walk around with anti-résumés telling you what they have not studied or experienced (it’s the job of their competitors to do that), but it would be nice if they did. Just as we need to stand library logic on its head, we will work on standing knowledge itself on its head.

Illustration from The Three Astronauts — Umberto Eco’s little-known vintage semiotic children’s book.

Noting that his Black Swan theory centers on “our misunderstanding of the likelihood of surprises” because we underestimate the value of what we don’t know and take what we do know “a little too seriously,” Taleb envisions the perfect dancer in the tango with knowledge:

Let us call this an antischolar — someone who focuses on the unread books, and makes an attempt not to treat his knowledge as a treasure, or even a possession, or even a self-esteem enhancement device — a skeptical empiricist.

Complement The Black Swan, which is fascinating it its totality, with astrophysicist Marcelo Gleiser on how to live with mystery in a culture obsessed with certitude, philosopher Hannah Arendt on how unanswerable questions give shape to the human experience, and novelist Marilynne Robinson on the beauty of the unknown.

HT Bobulate

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