Cicero's Hallelujah (Mmmph!)

And: Suicide Of The Humanities; AI & Idiocracy; How Gen Alpha Talks

“Hallelujah” chanted the pope

Here is a clip of the newly consecrated Pope Leo XIV chanting, beautifully, the ancient Marian hymn of the Western church,“Regina Caeli”. He chants in Latin; here are the words of the antiphon, and their English translation:

The Washington Post’s reporters on the scene heard it a bit differently:

Here’s a link to the story from which this is taken. The authors are the Washington Post’s Rome bureau chief and one of his reporters, an Italian. These are not among the Post’s religion reporters, to be clear. But good grief, if you are journalists covering Rome — especially if one of you is a native Italian — shouldn’t you know one of the most basic facts about the global religion whose headquarters is right there in your city?

(For our non-Christian, non-Jewish readers, “hallelujah,” or sometimes “alleluia,” is a Hebrew prayer of praise that occurs often in the Old Testament, or Hebrew Bible.)

To be merciful to these reporters, Leo said “hallelujah” at the end of a Latin prayer. If you have no knowledge of Christianity and the Bible, it’s easy to see how you would make that mistake. But then, what business do men whose knowledge of Christianity is so scanty have covering the Vatican? Nota bene — that’s Latin for “note well,” Post reporters in the audience — this mistake got through layers of copy editing back in Washington too! That is to say, not a single soul at that major American newspaper, whose critical eyes fell onto that copy before it went into print, realized that “hallelujah” is not a Latin word.

Not one.

It’s a small thing — not really offensive, just funny — but it reveals so very much about the mindset of the people who report and curate the news. You don’t even have to be religious to know that fact; you only have to be culturally literate. I am not Muslim, and have never lived in the Islamic world, but I would bet that I have a decent chance of knowing more about basic Islam than many of the US journalists who cover that world. A decade ago, at my TAC blog, I quoted an Ivy League law professor telling me that he, a Christian, was really worried about freedom of religion cases coming in the years to come. He said law professors at the nation’s most elite schools not only aren’t religious, but they don’t understand religion, and why it’s important to people. This cannot help but inform their decision-making.

Same with journalism. The late novelist Michael Crichton coined a term, the “Gell-Mann amnesia effect” to describe the way all of us consume journalism. In a 2002 speech, Crichton said:

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn't. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.

If the Rome bureau of the Washington Post doesn’t know that “hallelujah,” one of the most common words in Christian worship, comes from the Old Testament, and is therefore Hebrew, how much can you trust its reporting on the Catholic Church? The thing is, I bet you a case of Birra Nursia that none of their bosses care. It’s only religion, which as they all know, doesn’t really matter. It’s like a senior editor of mine at the New York Post told me 25 years ago, when I was a columnist there, and he shot down a column idea of mine having to do with Evangelical and charismatic churchgoers in the city: religion only matters when it intersects with politics. This was a really smart, savvy man — but he didn’t know what he didn’t know.

Suicide Of The Humanities, Suicide Of Our Civilization

Here is the paper presenting the PhD thesis of a doctoral candidate at Yale University. Take a deep sip of coffee, and plow through it:

"All Reproduction is Speculative Fiction: Miracle, Contagion, and Alien in three histories of Trans Reproduction”

Carlo Sariego, Yale University

Sociology of reproduction and transgender studies have yet to fully utilize their critical tools together to map out the relationship between norms in reproduction and norms organized around presumed “cisness”. Primarily framed in legal, legislative, and popular arenas using the language of “need”, trans reproduction is stuck. Access to good care is essential to the survival, progress, and wellbeing of trans people. At the same time, “need” need not be the only framework for thinking trans reproduction. Now that transsexuality has long established that changing one’s sex is possible, reproductive theory must adapt to the flexible reality of our bodies. This article proposes that one of the ways to unstick trans reproduction is through the method of historical repro-speculation. Taking three examples of reproductive speculation in history and fiction, I argue that all reproduction can be understood as a form of speculative fiction and trans reproduction is well suited to re-thinking the reproductive present. This presentation proposes what I understand as a necessary seismic shift in the understanding, research, and interest in transgender reproduction. Instead of considering such a phenomenon a “problem” of identity that crops up in an arena of care rife with medical authority (although, this is surely the case), I seek to push our analysis of transgender reproduction beyond a question of “care” towards one of possibility, even desire. I proceed with three cases. First, the historical case of Dawn Hall demonstrates how miracle is an effective tool for achieving reproductive desires through a speculative present. Second, through a reading of Torrey Peters’ “Infect All Your Loved Ones”, I argue contagion is an expression of trans reproductive rage. Finally, discussing Octavia Butler’s short story “Blood Child” demonstrates how total alienation of the flesh mirrors the past, references the present, and scrambles the future of repro-possibility.

Here is a link to the full paper, which was presented last year at the annual meeting of the Social Science History Association. In it, Sariego writes,

When discussing the possible in a reproductive context we are also always discussing what it means to be human.

Yes, this is at the bottom of what Sariego and its colleagues are doing: redefining what it means to be human. You should read the whole paper — it is quite insane. In it, Sariego argues that we can and should turn to science fiction as a guide to creating realities around “trans reproduction.”

Sariego cites as part of her argument the 1960s case of a transsexual “woman” who gave birth to a child, and credited a “miracle” for it, despite the denial by medical authorities that the “woman” could gestate a baby. Sariego writes: “Thus, Dawn’s miracle baby was both the origin and the evidence that reproduction could be achieved through imaginative means.”

In other words, if you desire to be a mother, and imagine that you have become one biologically, then who’s to say that you aren’t?

Do you see the craziness here? Sariego is saying that desire and imagination create reality. “They” (which I’ll use because it is unclear if the trans Sariego is biologically male or female) cite secondarily a sci-fi work exemplifying “trans rage” to portray transness — which entails a trans perspective on using hormones to aid fertility — as something that can be spread to wider society like a contagion. The point seems to be that because society uses hormone injections to artificially manipulate reproduction in heterosexuals, this makes heterosexual women like trans women, insofar as they both rely on artificial means to achieve an ideal of femininity. In other words, by accepting that it is legitimate to use hormonal intervention to promote fertility, society implicitly endorses trans-ness. The “trans rage” comes from society’s unwillingness to accept that. The argument in the novel — and it’s an interesting one — is that society blames trans people for introducing trans “contagion,” when in fact society has already legitimated transness by using hormones to unnaturally manipulate women’s bodies to achieve an ideal.

In the third example, Sariego cites a sci-fi novel that imagines reproduction as alien — literally. It is a process through which non-human aliens create hybrid species through bizarre means, mixing both the biological with the imaginative, and choice. The result is to redefine producing children as an alien process, and coming to think of this as the new normal. Sariego:

In Octavia Butler’s series “Lilith brood” on the accumulation of human reproduction by an alien species as the trade off for saving a dying earth, a disruption in reproduction calls into question kinship structures, social identity, and ultimately what it means to be “human” after all.

Sariego writes, “This, what should be made the most unfamiliar as it is patterned under the Alien colonization, feels the most intimately strange.” And:

Overall, Butler’s use of the Alien shows how even under the strangest and least confined conditions: alien reproduction, xenogenesis, stranger birth, questions about reproductive freedom and justice are not solved by the explosion of human flesh. Instead, flesh is beside the point.

Instead, flesh is beside the point. Yes, exactly. Sariego grasps the inherent theological dimensions of this argument, pointing out with approval that the author, Butler, chooses to name her heroine “Lilith” — in Jewish-Mesopotamian mythology, the rejected first wife of Adam — is also the name of a demon. From that link (not in Sariego’s paper!):

In Jewish mythology and folklore, Lilith is a raven-haired demon who preys on helpless newborn infants and seduces unsuspecting men, using their "wasted seed" to spawn hordes of demon babies. Although her name only appears once in the Hebrew Bible, over the centuries Lilith has been cast as Adam's rebellious first wife, the soul mate of Samael the demon king, and more recently as a feminist icon.

… Long before Judaism claimed her, Lilith-like demons were haunting the nightmares of ancient Sumerians, Assyrians and Babylonians. Male and female demons called lilu and lilitu respectively appeared in the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, and the Mesopotamian goddess Lamashtu was a winged demon that tormented women during childbirth, caused miscarriages and stole breastfeeding infants.

Yes, a Sumerian demon repurposed as a feminist icon.

Sariego’s conclusion:

Cis, straight, queer, and trans reproduction share the same raw materials and the same unreliability. Thus, repro speculation, as understood above in the miraculous, contagious, and alien forms is the only way forward.

Do you understand this argument? Sariego claims that queerness is our common lot, that there is no normal, that the limits of human bodies are a fiction, and that science fiction is a good guide in helping us progress to a more just world.

Carlo Sariego’s web page at Yale says that “they” are “a doctoral candidate in the joint-degree PhD program in Sociology and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. They are an interdisciplinary sociologist with research and teaching interests in gender/sexuality, medical sociology, and science and technology studies.” Carlo is also a graduate of Cambridge University.

Now, I do agree with David Rieff here:

This is true. The paper really is insane. But look more deeply, and you’ll see that the universities — including our top ones — are incubators for these profoundly anti-human ideologies. This stuff might be crazy, but the elites who produce these ideas, concealed though they may be inside the impenetrable language of the academy, are trying to make it real.

What kind of society, what kind of civilization, produces such apocalyptic madness inside its greatest universities? Ours, that’s what kind. This transhumanism is not merely the pet project of theory-addled, sexually confused weirdos like Carlo Sariego. It actually matters in the brave new world rapidly coming into being.

Let me put it like this. In the last item, I quoted the Ivy League law prof saying that the law school elites who produce future elite judges know nothing about religion, and that that fact will inevitably make a difference in how those judges rule on religious liberty cases. You and I, and a nation of Walmart shoppers, would read Sariego’s paper (if it were translated into plain English) and think, “Jeez, what a nut.” But Sariego’s thought is normative among academic elites, the knowledge-producing class. It is by no means alien to the kinds of people who study at our best universities … and who will move from that into positions of leadership throughout our institutions. They live in a different reality than most of us. And they have far more power than normies to make their imagined realities come true.

The bottom line: yeah, this is funny, but more deeply, it’s deadly serious. When J.D. Vance, then a senatorial candidate, gave a speech a few years back declaring that “universities are the enemy,” it understandably caused alarm among academics. That said, what are we to make of the fact that our best universities produce and reward “scholarship” that is extremely anti-human, and that, if taken seriously, proposes to destroy the human? That’s exactly what this is. If Sariego were proposing in the paper using science to genetically eliminate homosexuals, or Jews, we would know exactly what we are looking at. But because it’s construed as a matter of trans liberation and progress towards greater autonomy over our bodies, hey, no problem.

The other night in Budapest, a reporter for a left-wing media outlet asked me what I thought about the Orban government’s having driven the Soros-founded Central European University out of this city, and to Vienna. I know better by now than to get into it with liberal Hungarian media, and I also know that there’s a lot I don’t know about intricacies of things that happen in this country, where I don’t speak the language. And, as a general matter, the idea of a government driving out a university is pretty appalling.

But I can say this: Prime Minister Orban well understood what George Soros stands for ideologically, and he also understood that Soros’s ideology runs directly counter to his (Orban’s) idea of the national good. Plus, he understood that in a small country like Hungary, if its future elites get their education at Soros U., they are much more likely to implement the ideology they learn there when they take positions of institutional responsibility. It is not at all far-fetched to consider that Orban’s democratically-elected government compelled Soros U. to move to Vienna as a way of defending Hungary against the spread of Soros’s globalist, mass-migration, sexually progressive ideology.

That is to say, Orban recognized what we in the US are very slow to do: that universities are political actors. They do not exist, and do not think of themselves as existing, independent from the societies of which they are a part. But they do exist under the tacit classically liberal understanding that they provide the knowledge society needs to thrive and to advance.

I’m not defending Orban’s move, but what if he is right about universities and their role today, and we are wrong? What if universities have come to the point where they produce the kind of knowledge that will damage, even kill, society? After all, the Great Awokening started in universities, with radical faculties teaching illiberal ideas about race, and profoundly disruptive ideas about sex and gender, as well as the moral obligation to refuse to tolerate dissent from the left-wing paradigm. Back in the 1990s, we all rolled our eyes at the “political correctness” within universities, and reassured ourselves that when the kids got out into the Real World™, reality would correct their cuckoo ideas.

Instead, they set about correcting reality. And they succeeded to a great extent, in the sense that their ideas changed policies and laws to make them conform to what was once a radical set of beliefs cultured within academia.

It is a fair and necessary question, especially in a democracy: what responsibilities do universities, and the knowledge-producing class, have to the rest of us? In what ways should they be accountable?

AI And Idiocracy

Consider this:

Here’s a link to the original story, which is written by Clay Shirky, an administrator at NYU. He points out:

We are also hearing a growing sense of sadness from our students about AI use. One of my colleagues reports students being “deeply conflicted” about AI use, originally adopting it as an aid to studying but persisting with a mix of justification and unease. Some observations she’s collected:

• “I’ve become lazier. AI makes reading easier, but it slowly causes my brain to lose the ability to think critically or understand every word.”

• “I feel like I rely too much on AI, and it has taken creativity away from me.”

• On using AI summaries: “Sometimes I don’t even understand what the text is trying to tell me. Sometimes it’s too much text in a short period of time, and sometimes I’m just not interested in the text.”

• “Yeah, it’s helpful, but I’m scared that someday we’ll prefer to read only AI summaries rather than our own, and we’ll become very dependent on AI.”

Much of what’s driving student adoption is anxiety. In addition to the ordinary worries about academic performance, students feel time pressure from jobs, internships, or extracurriculars, and anxiety about GPA and transcripts for employers. It is difficult to say, “Here is a tool that can basically complete assignments for you, thus reducing anxiety and saving you 10 hours of work without eviscerating your GPA. By the way, don’t use it that way.” But for assignments to be meaningful, that sort of student self-restraint is critical.

You see what Shirky is getting at, right? The pressure on students to perform, perform, perform, so they can get the diploma, so they can get to the best grad schools, so they can get the best jobs — it’s so overwhelming that many of them cannot resist the siren song of AI to help them.

Tyler Austin Harper, a college professor, makes a good point here:

Yes. This is what we have done as a society: instrumentalized education as primarily a means to a job. If learning is about little more than acquiring the credentials to advance professionally and materially, then why shouldn’t young people do exactly what they have been incentivized to do?

But you see where this is taking us. An academic friend who reads this newsletter texted me last night, after a full day of teaching:

We are raising kids who can't read, can't calculate, can't figure, can't think, can't write ... and it is all being done RIGHT UNDER OUR NOSES! With the educational establishment's blessing!

It’s re-primitivization. And if people cannot do all those things, they are incapable of self-government. They will be governed, but they won’t have any say in the matter, and wouldn’t know how to articulate it if they did.

How Gen Alpha Talks

Arieh Smith is a polyglot who YouTubes under the name Xiaoma. You’ve probably seen his amazing adventures on YouTube before, in which he travels around the world and dazzles locals, even in exotic places, by speaking to them in their language. In the clip below, he delivers a short (and quite good) speech to a bunch of high schoolers, using their generational slang. It’s subtitled for oldsters like me and thee. Give it a watch — it’s funny, but also a bit profound, about how language works, and why it’s important to become language-proficient:

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