Critical Apprehensions & Intemperate Discourses

Kip Manley, proprietor

Generation AI.

There’s a thing that sweeps through writerly social media from time to time these days, where someone or other points to the latest outrage due to generative AI, and goes on to swear they’ve never used generative AI in their works, and by God they never will, and invites any and all other authors who are and feel likewise to likewise affirm in mentions and quote-tweets and, much as yr. correspondent, Luddite that I am, would happily join in—dogpiling notions and general actions is so much more satisfying than dogpiling individuals—well: I can’t. Because I have used generative AI in the creation of a small but not unimportant part of my work.

Sort of.

Twenty three years ago, then: 10.47 UTC, on January 18th, a Friday: someone using the email address acosnasu@vygtafot.ac.uk made a post to the alt.sex.stories.d newsgroup. The subject line was, “Re: they are filling inside cold, over elder, near heavy ointments,” and here’s how it began:

One more plates will be glad wide jars. Other thin lean tickets will love hourly behind yogis. Georgette, have a rude poultice. You won’t change it. Well, Ronette never judges until Johnny attempts the poor goldsmith daily. As sneakily as John orders, you can look the unit much more angrily. There, cans talk beneath sweet markets, unless they’re bitter.

It continued in that vein for another 830-some-odd words—the output of a Markov chain: a randomly generated text where each word set down determines (mostly) the next word in the sequence. —Index a text, any text, a collection of short stories, a volume of plays, a sheaf of handwritten recipes, a year’s worth of newsletters, an archive of someone’s tweets or skeets or whatever we’re calling them these days, make an index, and, for each appearance of every word, note the word that appears next. Tot up those appearances, and then, when you want to generate a text, use the counts to weight your otherwise randome choices. Bolt on some simple heuristics, to classify the words as to parts of speech, set up clause-shapes and sentence-shells, where to put the commas and the question-marks, then wind it up and turn it loose:

The sick walnut rarely pulls James, it opens Zachary instead. We converse the sticky egg. If the bad jackets can fill undoubtably, the younger film may cook more evenings. She might irrigate freely, unless Kathy behaves pumpkins to Marian’s game.

Now, comparing a Markov chain to ChatGPT is rather like comparing a paper plane to a 747 but, I mean, here’s the thing: they both do fly. Given the Markov’s simplicity, it’s much easier to see how any meaning glimpsed in the output is entirely pareidolic; there’s no there there but what we bring to the table—even so, it’s spooky, how the flavor of the source text nonetheless seeps through, to color that illusion of intent. Given how simple Markov chains are. (ELIZA was originally just 420 lines of MAD-SLIP code, and she’s pulled Turing wool for decades.) —Anyway: somewhere around about the summer of 2006, casting about for something to conjure a spooky, surreal, quasi-divinatory mood, I hit upon the copy I’d squirreled away of that post from four years previous and, after a bit of noodling, wrote this:

The offices are dim. The cubicle walls are chin-high, a dingy, nappy brown. Jo doesn’t look at the plaques by each opening. Warm light glows from the cubicle to the right. “No,” someone’s saying. “Shadow-time’s orthogonal to pseudo-time. Plates? They’re gonna be glad wide jars again. Yeah. The car under the stale light is a familiar answer, but don’t run to the stranger’s benison – there is nothing in the end but now, and now – ”

Now, I haven’t been able to identify what originating text might’ve been so enamored of “glad” and “jars” and “benison” and “ointments,” but it’s hardly as if it’s the sum total of everything ever shelved in the Library of Congress; it’s not at all as if anyone blew through more power than France to calculate those initial weights; generating that original post twenty-three years ago didn’t light up an array of beefy chips originally designed to serve up real-time 3D graphics in videogames, burning them hot enough to boil away a 16 oz. bottle of water in the time it takes to spit out a couple-few hundred words: but. But. If someone asks whether I’ve ever used generative AI in the creation of my work, I can’t in good conscience say no. —Heck, I even went and did it again, in a callback to that particular scene, though I don’t seem to have kept a copy of the originating post for that one. It’s everywhere out there, this prehistoric gray goo, this AI slop avant la lettre, if you know where to look; weirdly charming, in a creepily hauntological sense. All those meaning-shapes, evacuated of meaning.

But, well. See. That’s not all.

Last year, for the day job, I took part in a panel discussion on “Ethical Lawyering and Generative AI.” We needed a slide deck to step through, as we explained to our jurisprudential audience the laity’s basics of this stuff that was only just then beginning to fabricate citations to cases that never existed, and a slide deck needs art, so I, well, I turned to whatever AI chatbot turducken Edge was cooking at the time (Copilot, which sits on ChatGPT, with an assist from DALL-E, I think, for the pictures)—I was curious, for one thing: I hadn’t messed around with anything like this for a half-dozen iterations, at least—back when you’d upload a picture and give it a prompt, “in the style of Van Gogh,” say, and a couple-five hours later get back an artfully distorted version of your original that, if you squinted generously in the right light, might be mistaken for something Van Gogh-adjacent. If I were to opine on this stuff, and advise, I really ought to have tinkered with it, first, and hey, I’d be doing something useful with the output of that tinkering. And but also, I wanted that slickly vapid, inanely bizarre æsthetic: smartly suited cyber-lawyers stood up by our bullet points, arguing in courtrooms of polished chancery wood and empty bright blue glass, before anonymously black-robed crash-test dummy-looking robots—we made a point of the fact that the art was AI-generated, pointing out inaccuracies and infelicities, the way it kept reaching for the averagest common denominators, the biases (whenever I asked for images of AI-enhanced lawyers, I got male figures; for AI-enhanced paralegals, female. When I asked for images of AI-enhanced public defenders? Three women and a man). It all served as something of an artful teaching moment. But: and most importantly: no artist was put out of a job, here. There was no budget for this deck but my own time, and if it wasn’t going to be AI-generated art, it was going to be whatever I could cobble together from royalty-free clip-art and my own typesetting skills.

I don’t say this as some attempt at expiation, or to provide my bona fides; I’m mostly providing context—an excuse, perhaps—for what I did next: I asked Copilot to generate some cover images for the epic.

—Not that I would ever actually begin to think about contemplating the possibility of maybe ever actually using something like that as an actual cover, dear God, no. I shoot my own covers, there’s a whole æsthetic worked out, making them is very much part of the process, I’d never look to outsource that. But generating the art for the deck had tweaked my curiosity: I get the basic idea of how it is that LLMs brute-force their generation of sloppy gobs of AI text, but I can’t for the life of me figure out how that model does what it does with images, with picture-stuff—the math just doesn’t math, I can’t get a handle on the quanta, it’s a complete mystery—and who isn’t tantalized by a mystery?

(I mean, set aside just for a moment the many and various ethical concerns, the extractive repurposing of art on a vastly unprecedented scale, without consent, the brutal exploitation of hidden human labor in reviewing and organizing and classifying the original sources, and reviewing and moderating and tweaking the output, the vast stores of capital poured into its development, warping it into a tool that consolidates money and power in hands that already have too much of both, the shocking leaps in energy consumption, the concomitant environmental degradation, the incredible inflation of our abilities to impersonate and to deceive—set all of that and more aside, I mean, it’s pretty cool, right? To just, like, get an image or four of whatever you want? Without bothering anybody?)

So I asked Copilot to generate some cover images for the epic:

Thus, the sick walnut, as it opens Zachary instead. Not terribly flattering, is it. I asked Copilot, I asked ChatGPT, I asked DALL-E to show me its take on my work, and this is the best it can bother to do?

That’s the premise of the promise these things make, after all, or rather the promise made on their behalf, by the hucksters and the barkers, the grifters and con artists sniffing around the aforementioned vast stores of capital: that there is a there, there; that what sits there knows everything it’s been shown, and understands whatever you tell it; that it can answer any questions you have, find anything you ask for, show you whatever you tell it you want to see, render up for you the very idea you have in your head—but every clause of every statement there’s untrue.

This idea, that I have in my head, is actually a constellation of ideas worked out in some detail and at great length in a form that, by virtue of having been publicly available on the web (to say nothing of having been published as eminently seizable ebooks in numerous vulnerable outlets) has always already been part of any corpus sliced and diced and analyzed to make up the unfathomably multi-dimensional arrays of tokens and associations underlying every major LLM: thus, the sum total of any and all of its ability to “know” what I point to when I point. Those pictures, then—the cover images I asked it to, ah, generate: image-shapes and trope-strokes filed away in whatever pseudo-corner of those unthinkably multi-dimensional arrays that’s closest, notionally speaking, to the pseudo-spaces made up by and enclosing the tokens generated from my books, and arranged in what’s been algorithmically determined to be the most satisfying response to my request: thus, a bathetic golden hour steeped through skyscraping towers (some rather terribly gothic, a hallmark of the Portland skyline); an assortment of the sectional furniture of swords and sword-shapes and roses and birds; a centered, backlit protagonist-figure, all so very queenly (save the one king—Lymond? Really?)—the two more modern, or at least less cod-medieval, reach for a trick that was de rigueur for a while on the covers of UF books, and numerous videogames, where the protagonist is stood with their back to us, the better to inculcate, it was thought, a sense of identification, of immersion, and also in some cases yes at least to show off a tramp stamp. There’s something queasily akin to that murmurous reunion of archetypes noted by Eco, but these clichés aren’t dancing; they’re not talking, not to each other, certainly not to us; they’re not even waiting. Just—there, in their thereless there.

So. All a bit embarrassing, really—but, to embarrass, it must have power; that power, as is usually the case these days, is found in the bullshit of its premise. I asked for cover images, but that wasn’t what I wanted; what I wanted was, I wanted to see, just for a moment, what it might all look like to someone else, outside of my head—but without the vulnerability that comes from having to ask that someone else what it is they think. That promise—our AI can do that for you—that’s intoxicating. And if it had worked?

But it didn’t, is the thing. Instead of that validating glimpse, what I got was this, this content, this output of the meanest median mode, this spinner rack of romantasy and paranormal romance julienned into a mirepoix, tuned a bit to cheat the overall timbre toward something like Pantone’s color of whatever year—oh, but that metaphor’s appallingly mixed, even for me, and anyway, they don’t really do spinner racks anymore.

747s, paper planes, the thing is that ChatGPT, LLMs, generative AI, it’s all more of a flying elephant, really, to extend the simile, and most folks when they think about it at all seem to be of the opinion that it doesn’t matter so much if it can’t loop-the-loop, or barrel roll, look at it! It’s flying! Isn’t that wild?

Thing is, it can’t so much land, either.

It’s a neat parlor trick, generative AI; really fucking expensive, but kinda sorta pretty neat? And I’d never say you can’t use it to make art, good art—I’ve seen it done, with image generation; I’ve done it myself, in my own small way, with the free-range output of Markov chains. But there’s a, not to put to fine a point on it, a human element there, noticing, selecting, altering, iterating, curating, contextualizing—the there, that needs to be there, knowing, and seeing, and showing what’s been seen. And to compare these isolated examples, these occasional possibilities, with the broadband industrial-scale generation of AI gray-goo slop currently ongoing, is to compare finding and cleaning and polishing and setting on one’s desk a pretty rock from a stream, with mountain-top removal to strip-mine the Smokies for fool’s gold.

So, there you have it: why I’m not likely to ever ask ChatGPT as such for anything ever again; why I might still mess around with stuff like Markov chains. But entirely too much faffing to fit into a tweet. Are we still calling them tweets even if they aren’t on Twitter anymore? We should still call them tweets. One of the many tells of Elon Musk’s stupidity is walking away from a brand that strong, I mean, Jesus. Like renaming Kleenex.®

While units globally tease clouds, the tags often learn towards the pretty disks. We talk them, then we totally seek Jeff and Norm’s strong tape. Why will we nibble after Beryl climbs the inner camp’s poultice? We comb the dull pear. I was smelling to attack you some of my clever farmers. She may finally open sick and plays our tired, abysmal carpenters within a mountain.

—Filed 7 days ago to Indulgences; Comment.

The Railway Bridgeman.

On a lonely string of camp cars
The lonesome bridgeman stays
After leaving his family and home
He starts out counting the days

With Monday and Tuesday made
There’s Wednesday and Thursday you know
Say we’ve made these all in succession
There’s four hours Friday to go

Suppose then it rains through Friday
Of course we must shack all day
And then we must stay over Saturday
Or else we cut our pay

So our time this week with our boys and girls
Is twenty-four hours shy
We never have time for all their games
Until again it’s goodbye

We leave there with Mother’s kindness and care
And back to our camp cars again
We start counting the days of another week
And trusting this time it won’t rain

So if we get these days as they come
We’ll be checking off Friday at eleven
And catch the first train headed for home
For there is our earthly heaven

—F.G. Manley
Sunday, January 28, 1940

—Filed 15 days ago to Indulgences; Comment [1].

Metropolitan boomerang.

It suddenly occurred to me, what it was that’s been niggling at the back of my brain, as I’m reading about the 150-year-olds drawing Social Security, and the Are You Alive project, the blithe destruction of unutterably necessary public goods, laboriously built over painstaking generations, depended upon by hundreds of millions, including, yes, themselves—even that bedrock gospel of revanchists, that all the fierce resistance they’re (finally) facing, now that they’ve taken their masks off, in the town halls, outside all those Tesla dealerships, that all of it must be astroturfed, fake, bought and paid for with bottomless Soros funds, how could there possibly, after all, we won! We finally won! We have a mandate! The mandate! —What’s been bugging me, trying to surface itself in and amongst all this, turns out to have been the memory of something it was that Donald Rumsfeld, long may he burn, once said, on the occasion of our second Bush-led invasion of Iraq:

The images you are seeing on television you are seeing over, and over, and over, and it’s the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it 20 times, and you think, “My goodness, were there that many vases? Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?”

If one saves a single life, it’s as if one saves an entire world, as the mishnah goes, but the worlds of the lives of these right-wingers, these Dogists, these Trumpists and Seven-Mountaineers, these Republicans, they’re so bounded, so ruthlessly efficient so as to maximize the return on their investments, so thereby solipsistically incurious, and thus so very, very small, that there’s just no room left in them to contemplate the notion at all of the possibility of three hundred and forty-one million, five hundred and thirty-eight thousand, three hundred and fifty-nine others, each their own entire utterly other world—despite the fact the tools they now have at their disposal allow them to reach out and wreck each and every one, at scale.

The neat thing about cryptographic government (which is actually much easier than it sounds—we’re talking a few thousand lines of code, max) is that it can be connected directly to the sovcorp’s second line of defense: a cryptographically-controlled military.

A few thousand lines of code. —My goodness, are there that many people? Is it possible there are that many people in the whole country?

—Filed 87 days ago to Squawkbox; Comment.

A Critique of Pure Tolerance.

This, then, is their target; this their priority; this is what terrifies them, beyond all reason:

West Ada School District administrators have instructed a teacher that she must remove two signs from her classroom out of concern that they “inadvertently create division or controversy,” the district told the Idaho Statesman.

[…]

Inama told the Statesman that she was particularly confused because administrators had hung signs across the school with a similar message that read, “Welcome others and embrace diversity.”

When discussing the “Everyone is welcome here” sign, the district told the Statesman that it was not the message that was at issue, but rather the hands of different skin tones on the poster.

It’s—impressive?—that, in their eagerness to justify such an unjustifiable position, the district eagerly trips into full-throated racism (they actually said, “While ‘Everyone is welcome here’ is a general statement of being welcoming, concerns arose around the specific visual presentation of the signs in question and whether they aligned with district policies on classroom displays,” but look at that poster up there: the only thing specific as to the visual presentation is, in fact, those differing skin tones; the Oregonian drew the correct inference)—but look at the other poster they demanded be torn down, over there: what, specifically, is there, visually, to take issue with, about the presentation of that?

It’s not the presentation at all. It’s the message. —There are those in this world who do not believe that everyone is welcome here, or important, or accepted, or respected, or valued, or equal; seeing posters every day that insist otherwise is, if not an open insult, then at least a constant irritation; such individuals will, ironically enough, not feel welcome in a room displaying messages of such a universal welcome; their anodyne naïveté, rendered logically impossible, becomes offensive, and so must be removed.

This ineluctable logic has proven implacably useful to revanchist griefers: we can all agree that everyone should be welcome (thing about what’s anodyne? Everyone likes it); therefore, anything that might make anyone feel unwelcome ought to be minimized, ostracized, erased: anything, then, that might make, say, someone invested in the notion that this nation was once great, someone who might, perhaps, be distressed, by the notion that such greatness depended on horrible crimes and terrible wrongs, such a one must never be confronted with any evidence to the contrary, lest they feel themselves unwelcome, and so. And it works the other way, as well: any inkling that the world might be however slightly improved, made even an inch more great than it is at this moment, now, here, is a notion that this world is not already great, is not already good, thus risking the discomfort of those who think it was, it is, it always must have been, and since that would make them feel unwelcome—well. Minimize. Ostracize. Erase. —This dynamic explains so much of what’s happening, of late, from the destruction of science to the demolition of libraries to the denial of vaccinations: to suggest this world might somehow be improved is to deny it’s not already, has not always been, in how it’s arranged and disposed, is not yet great, has never been the best of all possible, which would make those so invested feel—unwelcome. And so.

—I mean, it’s also the racism, and the misogyny, the viciously violent, hideous hate. But note the nasty illogic demanded, the repellant claims that must be made, the futures that are foreclosed, whole worlds of possibility destroyed, unmade, to satisfy these terrible, stupid demands.

—Filed 99 days ago to Squawkbox; Comment.

Bubbles of Earths.

There were good reasons to disregard the technological details involved in delineating intercommunication between Terra the Fair and our terrible Antiterra. His knowledge of physics, mechanicalism and that sort of stuff had remained limited to the scratch of a prep-school blackboard. He consoled himself with the thought that no censor in America or Great Britain would pass the slightest reference to “magnetic” gewgaws. Quietly, he borrowed what his greatest forerunners (Counterstone, for example) had imagined in the way of a manned capsule’s propulsion, including the clever idea of an initial speed of a few thousand miles per hour increasing, under the influence of a Counterstonian type of intermediate environment between sibling galaxies, to several trillions of light-years per second, before dwindling harmlessly to a parachute’s indolent descent. Elaborating anew, in irrational fabrications, all that Cyraniana and “physics fiction” would have been not only a bore but an absurdity, for nobody knew how far Terra, or other innumerable planets with cottages and cows, might be situated in outer or inner space: “inner,” because why not assume their microcosmic presence in the golden globules ascending quick-quick in this flute of Moët or in the corpuscles of my, Van Veen’s—

(or my, Ada Veen’s)

—bloodstream, or in the pus of a Mr. Nekto’s ripe boil newly lanced in Nektor or Neckton.

—Vladimir Nabokov

It’s a terribly little thing, not even most of a sentence, and hardly the most unique of images: a world, a cosmos, this particular scheme of things entire, pinpricked in a tiny bubble, in the wine—but it’s such a specific image, specifically deployed (then heightened, and parodically degraded, in carbonated blood, and liquor puris), that now I can’t help but imagine the master excursing the hills above the Montreux Palace Hotel, a butterfly net in his hands, and a Barbara Remington painting reproduced on the cover of the paperback tucked away in his pocket.

“By all accounts, ’twas to give him line only,” said Amaury; “and if King Mezentius had lived, would have been war between them this summer. Then he should have been boiled in his own syrup; and ’tis like danger now, though smaller, to cope the son. You do forget your judgement, I think, in this single thing, save which I could swear you are perfect in all things.”

Lessingham made no answer. He was gazing with a strange intentness into the wine which brimmed the crystal goblet in his right hand. He held it up for the bunch of candles that stood in the middle of the table to shine through, turning the endless stream of bubbles into bubbles of golden fire. Amaury, half facing him on his right, watched him. Lessingham set down the goblet and looked round at him with the look of a man awaked from sleep.

—E.R. Eddison

—Filed 119 days ago to Paralitticisms; Comment.

#nodads jokes.

The thing, about Elon Musk’s inability to effectively deploy, or even, seemingly, to enjoy, humor:

He’s not trying to be funny, per se. It’s a show of power, not unlike stupidity: I can say anything, anything at all, he’s saying, and so long as it’s approximately humor-shaped, so long as it appears to be somewhere in the vague neighborhood of a joke, thousands upon thousands of people will laugh, because it was said by me.

This, of course, would be the actual function, the purpose, of dad jokes: because I am the patriarch, my jokes do not actually have to be funny to get you to react to them. But the thing about dad jokes is they’re almost always told with an awareness of and even an embarrassment at that purpose, even if it never manages to be articulated as such—there’s almost always an ironic detachment in the telling of them, and a knowing, groaning performance of disgust in the response.

But of course, Musk is a genius of this brave new age, and has no time for such niceties as reflection, or self-consciousness. Say the thing; bask. Open. Brazen. Naked. Ding an sich.

—Filed 135 days ago to Squawkbox; Comment.

We don’t stop here.

Well, the way they pick teevee shows is, they make one show. That show’s called a pilot. Then they show that one show to the people who pick shows, and on the strength of that one show, they decide if they want to make more shows. Some get chosen, and become television programs. Some don’t, and become nothing. She starred in one of the ones that became nothing.

Mulholland Dr. was originally intended or devised or dreamt up or at least pitched as a television series, a serial along the lines in more ways than one of Twin Peaks (as a for instance)—the film we got was cut together from and with additions made to what had originally been a pilot: a show for the people who pick shows, to see if more such shows would at all be what they’d want.

Turns out, not so much.

But that original pilot is available via the Internet Archive:

The quality’s not stellar, but it’s worth watching. At an hour-and-a-half (just enough time for a two-hour movie premiere, with commercials), it’s an hour shy of the film’s runtime, but a large part of the story’s largely there, scenes playing out much as they do in the film, some cuts here, some extensions there, an extra scene with Robert Forster’s laconic anti-Cooper cop, a phone call with a procrastinating writer whose dog, Murph, is mysteriously menacing, there’s some different musical cues, perhaps the most notable difference: some brashly atonal percussive stings adjacent to the Castigliane brothers; the director, Adam, tools up to the corral at the top of Beachwood Canyon to the drum solo from “Take Five”; there’s a stab at a light-hearted theme for Betty, all tremulous strings and tinkling piano, best perhaps left behind—but, nonetheless, the basic beats play out as they do in the film, right up to the discovery of Diane Selwyn’s body, Rita’s attempt to cut her hair, “Let me do it,” and then the revelation of the blond wig in the mirror: “You look like someone else.” There’s no Club Silencio, and there’s no Winkie’s, though there is the dumpster behind the Winkie’s, and the figure behind the dumpster, far more melancholic, almost placid, than terrifying, sat there, waiting, as the pilot ends.

Not so different insofar as that goes, and yet completely different, because of the context, because of how it’s situated, because of the haunting expectations that cling to it, the mighta beens and what would theys. —A television show, a series, a serial, of which this might’ve been the first installment, it’s episodic, it continues, it’s therefore open-ended, expansive, not elusively claustrophobic, not hermetically sealed, not done-in-one, not—a film. We would have gotten more—but with the terrible foreclosure of the film’s ending, it’s tantalizingly impossible to make any kind of a guess as to much of what any of that more would’ve been.

More behind-the-scenery of the movie industry, sure; more to limn the shadowy armature of power stretching from Mr. Roque and the Cowboy through the Castigliane brothers, and all those unknown, unseen phone callers to the bumblingly competent Joe Messing; director Adam Kesher would’ve been more of a co-protagonist with Betty and Rita—but Rita probably wouldn’t’ve been Camilla, and Betty almost certainly wouldn’t’ve been Diane. The tension of that sort of doubling and reveal, that’s not a long-haul sort of mystery. There’s a necessary finality to it, that just doesn’t fit in a serial shape.

And I really don’t know how Naomi Watts’ incandescently saccharine performance would’ve worked in weekly installments, without that counterbalance. Her audition—closer to the end of the pilot, rather than the middle of the film—suggests a direction, of course, but the plucky kid detective, at once Laura Dern and Kyle McLachlan, becoming in her own way very much like the woman who stumbles, injured, from the woods, is a very different story than the one in which the pluck turns out already to have stumbled, on her own, and no detective anywhere in sight.

I like a continuing story. There’s something about a soap opera that’s fantastic because it just keeps going and going. Theoretically, you can get very deep in a story and you can go so deep and open up the world so beautifully, but it takes time to do that.

—Filed 140 days ago to Paralitticisms; Comment.

The sin of empathy.

“Do not commit the sin of empathy,” he exhorts us, this mustachio’d Utahan; “This snake” (referring to a photograph of the Right Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde)—

This snake is God’s enemy and yours too. She hates God and His people. You need to properly hate in response.

She is not merely deceived but is a deceiver. Your eye shall not pity.

As a bit of bait, his exhortation did the trick: ten thousand replies, ten thousand retweets, four point seven thousand likes, two and a half thousand bookmarks, twenty-one point nine million views, as of this morning, to the extent those numbers mean anything anymore. And certainly, I now know far more about Ben Garrett, Deacon, candidate for Elder, and podcast co-host, than I ever would’ve intended otherwise. Screenshots have washed up at Bluesky, racking up thousands of likes and retweets of their own; people will gawk at the Nazi bar’s grafitti. “Commit the sin of empathy,” these pass-alongs exhort in turn. “It’s actually the most important emotion of all.” “If your religion says ‘Do not commit the sin of empathy’ you chose the wrong religion.” “Google search ‘The Sin of Empathy’ and you’ll see Evangelicals using it unironically.” “Probably time to talk about fascism and moral inversion huh.” —Which, leaving aside for the moment the all-too-real shortcomings of dunk culture, is all well and good—fuck him up socrates, as Darryl once said—except, I mean, for one fundamental flaw—

Empathy is a sin.

Oh, not the way he means it, this aspiring patriarch, this amateur demonologist. He’s a misogynist fascist, lashing out at a woman in a position of traditionally male power, a woman who’d recently dared to embarrass his chosen Daddy-come-home figurehead by asking the President to have mercy. —It’s important to note that Deacon Garrett isn’t responding directly to anything the Right Reverend Budde said, with his exhortation not to commit the sin of empathy—she spoke of unity, dignity, honesty, humility, diversity, and of course and most controversially mercy, but said nothing of empathy: the closest she gets to that is compassion. —No; his interest in warding us off empathy is purely instrumental. He’s only here to gin up his outsourced two minutes of hate against a designated target. Empathy makes it harder to hate, and so it must be done away with. Your eye shall not pity.

When pressed on his echthroic ethic—how can empathy be a sin?—Garrett directs his audience to the writings of Dr. Joel Rigney, ex-president of a seminary and devotee of Idaho pastor Doug Wilson. Rigney’s been a Main Character before, for precisely his writings on empathy, and compassion: cod-Letters from an ersatz Screwtape on how best to twist these supposed virtues from the Enemy’s loathsomely benevolent purpose. —Rigney posits empathy as a totalizing perversion of compassion, a complete immersion in the feelings of others that overwhelms one’s own judgment, one’s fundamental sense of right, and wrong, one’s very self, a feeling-with fusion that terrifies his puerilely pathetic individualism: thus, a sin.

He, of course, has it all completely and utterly backwards.

Namwali Serpell, writing about the shortfalls of empathy as a saving grace of literature, has much more interesting insights into what might be sinful about it all. She quotes a passage from Remainder, by Tom McCarthy, in which the narrator hires two black men to shoot at him with blanks, re-enacting the murder of a black man with which he’s become, shall we say, obsessed:

My two assassins took their time in killing me. The slowed-down pace at which they raised and fired their guns, the lack of concern or interest this seemed to imply, the total absence on my part of any attempt to escape although I had plenty of time to do so—all these made our actions passive. We weren’t doing them: they were being done. The guns were being fired, I was being hit, being returned to the ground. The ground’s surface was neutral—neither warm nor cold… When I let my head roll slightly back, a bollard hid all these words except for one of the two Escapes. Would my man have seen this, just before the life dribbled out of him towards the puddle? Escape?

and then uses it to question the utility, the very purpose of empathy:

The possessives, “my two assassins” and “my man”; the conscription into a willful passivity; the mechanical quality of the sequence, absent of concern or interest or survival instinct; the supposed neutrality of the usurped ground; the ironized “Escape”: Isn’t this creepy, fugue-like occupation of the dead a truer picture of contemporary empathy than the older cliché of walking a mile in another’s shoes?

The fact that it’s a rich white man taking a poor black man’s death for a spin is no coincidence. The empathy model of art can bleed too easily into the relishing of suffering by those who are safe from it. It’s a gateway drug to white saviorism, with its familiar blend of propaganda, pornography, and paternalism. It’s an emotional palliative that distracts us from real inequities, on the page and on screen, to say nothing of our actual lives. And it has imposed upon readers and viewers the idea that they can and ought to use art to inhabit others, especially the marginalized.

The sin of empathy, then, is not that one will lose oneself, and the crucially God-given sense of right and wrong one would impose on some other, by indulging the notion that one ought try to feel the feelings of that other—it’s that one’s imagined sense of those feelings, licensed by the indulgent term of empathy, risks overwriting the actual feelings and experiences of that other. —Unless tempered, by experience, by some of those other virtues mentioned above, humility, honesty, dignity, mercy, then empathy all too easily slips over the brink into something one might well call sin.

—Filed 149 days ago to Paralitticisms; Comment.

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