Richard Kelly Kemick for The Walrus:

An elderly woman walks up beside me. Her snow-white hair is freshly permed. Two gold chains hang around her neck. She is eyeing the gin distillery. I can tell she’s unfamiliar with the piece because she raises an eyebrow when the water mill actually rotates. As I pretend to appraise a picnic table’s paint job, I watch her; I want to see her reaction to the distillery’s three-figure price tag. I’ve yearned for that piece for years, my porcelain white whale. But I can’t get a distillery until I get a police station, and I can’t get a police station until I get a city hall. Instead, there’s a Batman tree ornament atop the church spire. For now, vigilante justice is the only justice my village needs. I fear a distillery will upset this delicate balance.

We all have our own particular madnesses. Even when those around us recognize them, the social contract demands we avert our gaze – or, failing that, at least to speak not of its peculiarities. It is embarrassing for others to be present when the oddity of our private selves is revealed, because they can recognize in these exposed moments their own lives, not the content of our strangeness, but the fact of strangeness itself.

To suffer without ever making explicit that suffering, with the sheer multitude of quiet desperations, is the implicit agreement that binds together society. I will not draw attention to your madness, and you will not draw attention to mine. It will surface in our public lives, as such things inevitably do regardless of any attempts at keeping them weighted down in the deep ocean that is our private lives. One insists on using their own writing instrument because “fountain pens simply write better”; one refuses an offered meal on the basis that the food is no longer raw; or one makes an offhand reference to the significance of an odd presentation of the minor arcana from their weekly reading. The silence punctuates those revelations far stronger than any mark. It is a quiet that is pregnant with uneasy tension, as if all participants are considering full abandonment of the many benefits of so-called civilization. After all, what is one to do with a rabid animal but alleviate their misery. And, of course, the exposed beast that uttered the proof of their illness is all too aware of their nakedness.

Rather than bloodletting, we have all decided to merely act as if these diseases are invisible. Never to be laid bare amidst the healthy minds of others. That is to say, the minds of those that are not ill in precisely the same way that ours happens to be.

Richard has broken this most sacred of vows, forcefully drawing our attention that which we are to pretend is not. He is supposed to have the decency to cover his nakedness, if not with clothes then at the very least with a fig leaf or a hand. Instead there he stands, facing forward, hands on hips as if to say, “I have nothing to be ashamed of”. The polite among us know that we should proffer our coats or avert our eyes – neither of which the impolite will even consider. Yet, by inaction, all are reduced to the same. Mouth agape we stand, looking at Richard as he presents his madness to us. But perhaps he is not naked after all. Perhaps he is clothed in the finest teeny little garments and all we have to do is but look closer.

William Deresiewicz in an interview with The Atlantic:

Ultimately, colleges have inherited the spiritual mission of churches. As religious beliefs have declined with the rise of science, especially among educated people, people started to turn elsewhere to ask the big questions: What does life mean? What is the world about? People turned to works of art, to literature, music, theater, philosophy, which were in turn brought into college curricula.

That’s what the idea of a humanities education in college is and should be about, but part of that idea has very much declined. It’s not about learning a specific body of information or skills the way other parts of a college education quite properly should be. Studying the humanities is about giving yourself the opportunity to engage in acts of self reflection, seeking answers to the kinds of questions you ask yourself not in a specialized capacity—but in the general capacity of being a human being, as a citizen.

Education, especially that which exists firmly outside of professional and technical training, is on unsteady ground. While it is easy enough to explain why it might be necessary to specialize in nursing or engineering, the value of philosophy and literature studies are understandably harder to quantify. Even the language that I am using reveals the way that the former is so easily caught up in the latter: that which is worthwhile is always already embedded in the world of the measurable. Yet the very tasks of description and qualification fall upon the humanities and, despite protestations otherwise, much of the social sciences.

It is not that these ivory towers have the definitive and absolute answers to the fundamental questions of being in the world (again, despite some protestations otherwise). While I do admit the possibility of categorical truths, the nature of our worldly bodies is that their proofs are ultimately personal experiences. “Is there a god?” might be solvable¹; “Does that matter?” is, as far as we understand the human being, not. It is without question that there is a force that we know as gravity. The contours can be explored, defined, and even challenged in some ways, but its worldly existence transcends mere opinion and is fact. Yet its facticity provides little more than a set of guidelines in which we are forced to operate. It rests upon us mortals to delve into the debates over meaning and morality that provide the structure for our uniquely human existence.

Humanities departments, with their drifting and ambling ways, are incubators for precisely that kind of thinking. At least they aim to be; or once did. Whether that occurs today on any sort of grand scale is a live question. It certainly is harder to justify that kind of education in academic institutions amidst the foreground of capital.² An education in name only. This is an increasingly common complaint from instructors, but it is hard to escape what is a broader societal phenomenon: the leveling out of the human being to nothing more than a unit, equal to any other unit.

This doesn’t negate the responsibility of philosophers to try. It may not be the case that we are teaching for the now. The present moment might not have the necessary conditions to permit students serious and sober self-reflection, but we cannot be certain as to what will result from our actions. We may be planting seeds that do not begin to sprout until years later. As long the mind remains, mindfulness remains a possibility – even if the satisfaction of bearing witness to such revelations is beyond educators. “The cycle of grandiosity and depression” indeed.³

Alexis C. Madrigal for The Atlantic

The vexing, remarkable conclusion is that when companies combine human intelligence and machine intelligence, some things happen that we cannot understand.

Netflix is a remarkable company. Google may deal with more sheer data, but Netflix has come to understand its data better – the impressiveness of the way that it navigates the complexities of categories and genres. The grammar of film and television is still being composed: What is the syntax of the silver screen? The morphology of cinema? The pragmatics of script?

These questions go far beyond the precision with which Netflix recommends content, just as understanding the form of the novel was about more than simply selling copies. Thomas Pynchon and James Joyce, masters of paragraph landscape and sentence construction. Netflix is not engaged in comparable projects to Gravity’s Rainbow or Ulysses – as good as Orange is the New Black and House of Cards may be, they do not radically break the form.¹ It is a first step though, one of analysis and understanding.

I am inclined to reject that the results of our thought and action are unintelligible. Ignorance, deliberate or otherwise, perhaps, but I distrust those that claim inadequacy. It may be true that we are lacking, but drive in the face of the impossible is the very marker of our being. Is it incomprehensible? Attempt at comprehension. Does it appear to be impenetrable? Try to pass through. Meekness in spirit all but ensures failure – which is not to say that boldness is a guarantee for success, it simply allows for the possibility where there was none before.

The rise of algorithmic thinking, the convergence between machine and human intelligence is upon us. Google and Netflix are obvious markers of it, although I wonder if it has not already long been the case. Algorithms are not a uniquely digital phenomenon. Regardless, this intersection is now the norm, not the exception; in addition to whatever else we may be, we are also algorithmic beings. To relegate this relationship to the realm of the unintelligible is to wallow in nihilism rather than teach our eyes to hear, our ears to see. The ballad of constant fools who rest comfortable in what seems to be.²