culture 2 | unobtrusive lucidity

Losing Letters

Maybe I’m missing something, but there seems to be a dearth of dads writing about being dads on the Internet, at least in thoughtful, long form ways. Perhaps this is because there is a dearth of anything long form on the Internet in its current sound-bite, social-media poisoned iteration, but I digress…

This is particularly noticeable to me because I think being a dad is hard. I know that I’m not alone, because every dad I know recognizes that being a dad is hard. Like any experience, there are things that only other dads would understand. There’s also a common ground that’s formed immediately, regardless of age or culture, in being a parent. Other dads just get it. We understand and sympathize.

I very much appreciate dads writing about being dads. In a society in which we’ve actively chosen to eschew the wisdom of our elders, I think that gaining whatever insight I can from others who have already been through whatever parenting challenge that I might be experiencing is of paramount importance. That’s why this post stood out to me in a very real, very poignant way, because it is insight into parenting from the son’s perspective instead of the parent’s. The son has recently lost his father, and speaks of the importance that the father’s letters have in his life now. The encouragement is for fathers to write more letters to their children. I encourage you to take a moment to read that post…it’s well worth your time.

We’ve taught both of our daughters to write letters. In some cases, this was seen as a curious novelty by their friends, and certainly the practice is often replaced by digital channels now in the case of our oldest. Still, letters and hand-written cards frequently enter and leave our mailbox, because we feel that this is an important social activity that should not become extinct. I also notice that both of our daughters, like us, keep journals of ideas and important thoughts. Like us, these aren’t digital journals, but hand-written pages. Like us, these journals are prized possessions, not because of the items themselves, but because of the ideas and memories contained within them. I’m actually quite proud of the way both of them hold onto this much more civilized and polite manner of communicating and keeping record of their musings.

And yet…

When I think of the written communication between my oldest and myself, it’s almost exclusively digital. I’ve thought often about this blog, and about how I hope that my kids will read it at some point when they’re older. I’ve even pondered if they will be able to gain insight into my thoughts and motivations after I’m gone by reading this space (I’ve been writing here long enough for it to be an actual record in many ways). That makes many assumptions, though, not the least of which is that someone will keep this around once I’ve passed for anyone to read it. Perhaps the Pulse will have happened by then and nothing of the digital realm will exist anyway. My point is that, I take the wisdom of the writer I linked to above. I need to write more letters, or at least notes, to my kids. Physical, hard copy letters. Things that they can keep with them and treasure if they so choose, because those are permanent, or at least more permanent than a URL. They also carry more meaning, because there’s something…spiritual…about taking the time to physically write out your thoughts for someone to read. The intentionality of that act is emotionally and mentally heavier than typing on a keyboard, if for no other reason than someone took the time. That, in a frenetic society starved of free time, is a valuable currency, and thus a valuable gift.

A year or so ago, I went hiking on the coast. This is a regular trip for me during the summer months, a day when I get away, be near the ocean, and center myself. As I sat down for lunch on that hike, overlooking the ocean on a beautiful summer day, and opened by backpack, I discovered a note written by our kids. It was simple…a heart drawn with the words “we love you”, and signed with both of their names.

Simple, but profoundly powerful, because they had taken the time to write this together, to slip it into my backpack when I wasn’t looking, to send their love with me for the day in such a real, tangible way. I saved that note. It is immensely valuable to me.

I need to learn from that. We need more notes and letters. We all do.

Go write them.

Evolution of Thankfulness

Thanksgiving was quiet this year. Delayed a day by the storm that blanketed a good bit of New England with our first significant snow of the season, we celebrated with only our family and my in-laws. One afternoon of eating and good conversation, then a drive home and (I’m sad to say) some online Black Friday shopping. That was all. The weekend was really a non-event.

As I returned from meeting a friend for coffee this evening, I was thinking about Thanksgivings of years past. If I rewind a decade or so, to the early years of our marriage, I remember flying from where we lived then to where we are now. Thanksgiving was always the major holiday of the year for my wife’s side of the family, and I can recall many trips…sometimes smooth, sometimes with drama, sometimes fraught with travel delays…over the years. What I remember most, however, was that the celebration was always big when we arrived. This weekend, we sat and reminisced about those years, the family who came…some of whom we haven’t seen in far too long…the discussions that were held. The pattern over the years, seemingly ever since we moved back to New England, has been that the celebrations have been growing smaller and smaller. This year some more family moved away, and the end result was that our Thanksgiving gathering was about as small as one could imagine.

I’m sad, in a way. Having grown up in a small family, I was always amazed at how welcomed (and overwhelmed, but in a good way) I was by my wife’s much larger side of the family, many of whom I only saw during the holidays. Now, in some strange paradox, we live here, and I see them even less often. I feel as though there’s a reality distortion field at play.

This year, I’ve been going through a dark time. I hinted at this in a previous post, and it’s only gotten worse. What I hold on to, though, is the lesson learned that the relationships that we have with our family, with our friends, far transcends the issues that bring us down, that threaten to wreck havoc on our lives and upend the order that we know. When these issues happen…and they will…it’s so incredibly important to have these holiday traditions and gatherings to anchor us. They may evolve over time, but they must remain.

We need those reminders.

We need the sense of normalcy.

We need each other.

No matter how small they may appear, I will hold onto those, because they help me to stay centered. I pray, dear reader, that you have these traditions and gatherings, as well.

Why the Acolyte’s Cancellation is Good News

A model of the Millenium Falcon from Star Wars. Used under Creative Commons.

I sort of have difficulty believing that I’m writing a post about Star Wars. There’s one other that I’ve written to my knowledge, a review of the Force Awakens (spoiler: I wasn’t impressed), which I ended by affirming my stance that there had only been three Star Wars movies. When I introduced my daughter to Star Wars, I began with A New Hope, and sort of pretended that the rest hadn’t happened. The prequels were of very poor quality (you can’t have Jar Jar Binks and a good movie…they’re just mutually exclusive), and it was obvious to me with the Force Awakens that Disney was just recycling stories to squeeze more money out of the franchise.

I was perfectly content with that perspective for years.

Then, there was a pandemic, and while exceptionally bored one night, we decided to try the Mandalorian. This brought me back into the newer Star Wars programming in a positive way, because the Mandalorian is excellent. Since then, I’ve found the small screen adventures overall have been hit and miss…there are complete wastes of time like Obi-Wan Kenobi, and exceptional standouts like Andor. I’ve watched most of the Star Wars canon through the latest series at this point. I still have little room in my life for the prequels, and I’ve never seen (and don’t intend to see) the last two films. In general, though, a new series will get me in front of the television.

The first episode of the Acolyte grabbed my attention. I’m largely unfamiliar with the High Republic era, and this episode did what a good first episode should…left the viewer with so, so many questions and pondering how this fit into the larger timeline. By the halfway point, though, I was tuning in out of a determination just to finish what I had started, not because I had any interest whatsoever.

The reason for this isn’t any that I’ve encountered among blogs and podcasts of the Star Wars faithful. There are rants everywhere in that very vocal community, including the inevitable accusations of racism and intolerance being thrown at Disney leadership. Everyone has an opinion, and the Internet allows the vocalization of those opinions, but there is something deeper at play here, I think.

My issue with the direction of Star Wars in general is its departure from Lucas’ original vision in a fundamental, metaphysical way. Star Wars, at its core, is about good vs. evil, which is why it resonated with so many viewers at its debut. The Jedi and the Rebellion were good, the Empire was evil. Now, let me say that I’m not arguing that the canon should never have expanded. Lucas’ genius was dropping small references to events of the past or other people in the characters’ lives without ever digging into them, which leaves so many potential story arcs for a generation of new writers. More than perhaps any other franchise I know of, he set this up for continuation from the beginning, and that was brilliant. With these new stories will undoubtedly come new perspectives. When those perspectives depart from the original world-building at such a foundational level, though, we run into issues.

The most recent iterations of Star Wars…I would argue even going back to the prequels…have been increasingly obsessed with the fact that the Jedi can’t actually be as good as we’ve been led to believe. This isn’t unique to Star Wars, either.

For the past decade or more, it seems that most heroes are antiheroes. The dominant opinion of our cultural moment is that no one can be good, that there is actually no such thing as good. All is subjective. Postmodernism has reached its conclusion. This cynicism makes its way into the writing of our popular culture, and deconstructs fictional character groups like the Jedi. A group that originally stood for good in the universe is now revealed to have been so hopelessly flawed from the beginning that our faith in them is found to have been misplaced. That sort of good can’t exist.

So, what to do, then? If we allow this cynicism to carry us on its current, then the Rebellion must be cut of similar cloth. So, why resist the Empire? Perhaps Thrawn should be our new role model. Give in to the evil, this thought process would tell us, because the good is an illusion.

Nihlist, much?

A lot has happened in the world over the decades since Star Wars first made its impression on my generation, much of it bad. My glasses are not rose-colored. I don’t blame anyone for reaching a point of pessimism in their lives. To give up on the concept of good, however…to refuse to believe in heroes…is to give up on what makes us human.

My issue with the Acolyte is its embracing of evil. My issue with the Acolyte is its message that all attempt at good is doomed. My issue with the Acolyte is its lack of hope, that it left me feeling empty at its conclusion.

Were this to be the pattern of Star Wars moving forward, my opinion would revert to where it was prior to experiencing the Mandalorian. That is, I would be finished with the franchise in its current state. The fact that the Acolyte has not been renewed gives me hope that future stories will return to good triumphing over evil.

That is, after all, a message that we desperately need in our own universe.

Image attribution: Michael Panse under Creative Commons.

Nostalgia in Perspective

About a year ago, I decided to re-watch the first season of Heroes. When the series first debuted, we were just married, and life was full of promise. It was, after all, the Before Times, our lives were still mostly academic, and what better to settle in to watch on a weeknight than a fascinating new take on superheroes? I was hooked.

The series, in my recollection, declined a bit in quality. Season 2 fell victim to the 2007 writer’s strike, and I was unimpressed by season 3. As I began collecting the Blu-Rays last year, though, I decided to go all the way through…to give it another chance. I’m glad, because the quality gets better again as the series progresses.

I’m not writing about Heroes, though…perhaps in another post.

As I’ve re-watched these episodes, the technology grabs my attention (product placement was really a thing in that time), primarily their mobile phones. You see, this was before we all had ubiquitous connectivity provided by slabs of glass that we carry in our pockets. These were the days of text-only data connections and physical keyboards. Better days, I would argue.

They were also the days before I made some choices based on discontent that pushed our family into a new direction, a career change that ultimately resulted in time away from my family and poor health for years, decisions that caused un-necessary stress and close financial calls through the subsequent years, to say nothing of the close friends with whom we’ve lost touch. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because, had I to do things over again, I would go back to that point and make a different decision. Watching a television series from that time period is just bringing that home for me.

It’s easy, especially when one reaches a certain age, to become steeped in nostalgia. In my case (I’m guessing I’m not alone), this is informed by the fact that life was slower, less stressful, less chaotic then. We weren’t ruled by Big Tech yet. I could look at the future and still be hopeful.

The natural inclination of this sort of nostalgic impulse is twofold: dwell in memories, and try to force life back to what it was. Neither of these are productive. The first wastes time when permitted to become consuming, the second will never work because it’s simply not possible. That’s a topic for a different day. My point is that I put effort into both of those, and they were wasted efforts. As Bonhoeffer has been quoted as saying:

“If you board the wrong train, it is no use running along the corridor in the other direction”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I have to make the best of where I am, where we are, with the lessons I’ve learned. I have to allow those experiences to make me better. I have to work to bring the best of the Before Times into the present, because we unfortunately can’t go back.

Hopefully, that’s helpful to my fellow nostalgia addicts.

A Future Realized

The first time I took a phone call on my watch, I felt like Dick Tracy.

The sad thing is, that’s not even scratching the surface of my nerd status. My Mom is a Trekkie. I grew up steeped in Star Trek and Dr. Who. My vision of the future was set. I wasn’t the kind of geek that spent much time hacking around on computers as a kid, but I definitely had a vision of what a computerized future would be like. It began with having a natural conversation with the computer, just like they could on the Enterprise. It evolved into Max Headroom, and, even at a young age, I was beginning to think through, at least at a rudimentary level, that dystopian future in which the machines were as intelligent as we are and “off” buttons were illegal.

While that concept of the future evolved with the fog, blue lights and lasers that marked a lot of 90’s prime-time science fiction, I didn’t know…and most don’t…that the idea of artificial intelligence wasn’t new. It had roots some decades before. It began at Dartmouth in 1956, with a symposium of experts. By the time I was a child imagining a brave new world of the intelligent droids in Star Wars, this thought process was well underway by many academics.

In fact, David Noble argues that the concepts can be traced as far back as Descartes, who was obsessed with the theory that the body held back the mind from achieving it’s potential.¹ For Descartes, pure thought was closest to God. He popularized a theology in which a human is only mind and body, not mind, body and soul, which would leave later thinkers no room for spirituality. The mind was the ultimate state of human-kind in this thought process.

Later, George Boole reduced thought to a mathematical formula. His binary logic became the foundation for modern computing.

Turing, eventually an atheist, invented the “Turing test,” which stated (I’m over-simplifying a bit) that if a human user could not differentiate a machine’s response from a human response, the machine was deemed to be intelligent. Turing saw a future in which we would build machines that would more intelligent that humans.

AI inevitably combined with the field of cybernetics, forming an endeavor beyond artificial intelligence that was known as artificial life. Enthusiasts of this theory believe that, as artificial intelligence becomes general and self aware, humans will have created a new species, one with which we can eventually merge and, because the mind is the ultimate in human experience, live forever in cybernetic form. Ghost in the Shell, realized.

The theological flaws are evident in this worldview. First, because it’s adherents (inasmuch as they are religious at all…most of the original thinkers had little space or patience for religion or theology) hold to a reductionist view of man, there is no awareness that we cannot create a soul in a new species. If we can manage to create an artificial mind, that is good enough. Secondly, creation in its current state is viewed as inferior. There is no tolerance for humanity, as beautiful as it can be. Only the flaws are seen, accompanied by an honest belief that it can be reformed into something completely different and better.

If you, like me, are thinking of Shelly’s Frankenstein monster here, I assure you you’re not alone. And we shouldn’t be surprised. As the world around us is reduced to unemotional data, we already are seeing an attempt to extinguish art by generative AI. The logic can only follow that this world would ignore the warnings sounded by science fiction writers through the ages that this isn’t going to end well. As Tillich said, artists are the prophets of their time. Prophets, however, can hardly exist in a world that is only data, in which humanity’s essence is only mind.

To this, I would push back with a theological response. Humanity doesn’t need to be improved upon. We are created in God’s image, and, with all of our flaws, are capable of great beauty, compassion, and creativity. Humanity needs to be brought back into its original state, which is the process of redemption, the end goal of the Divine plan already underway. Part of humanity’s state is a soul, something that can’t be quantified or reduced to an algorithm, something that can thus only be created ex nihilo…and not by us.

Realizing a Ghost in the Shell future of humans melding with machines is a future in which humanity is ruined. Preserving our humanity is a worthy goal, but this process achieves exactly the opposite. A true cyberpunk future must be avoided, and avoiding it involves waking up. To say that AI is “just” another innovation…to ignore the prophetic warnings from screen and page that have confronted us for so long…is hopelessly naive. And yet, that naiveté has spread through our culture with a contagion fueled by money and power-seeking. If history shows us anything, it is how difficult those forces are to stop.

So, a future has been realized. It’s not the one that many of us want, but rather one that is forced upon us by technological optimists with too much power. We can’t opt out, as it were. Our only hope is to try to survive, and hope that others wake up before it’s too late.

I’m not optimistic.

^1. The source of my historical summary here is David Noble’s “The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention.” I highly recommend this book as a historical treatment for the background of much our technological climate.