The Reason of Our Discontent

 

Friends, today I share with you two articles about A.I. -- one of them shared with me by the incomparable Jack -- which make similar points: we are becoming overly dependent on the assistance of bots and increasingly incapable of critical thought.  Well, sure.  There's an element of truth to the argument, and most people who use A.I. use it as a crutch, i.e. as a way to get things done with minimum thought and exertion on their own part.  And crutches can be bad, because, if you spend your life hobbling around on them, you may never learn to walk or sprint on your own two feet.  The problem with the argument, however, is that crutches come in many forms.  Not so long ago the main crutch students, and humans in general, were using was internet search engines.  They too can do much of our work for us, and they've become increasingly adept at it.  Before that, intellectual purists lamented the use of word processing programs, spellcheck, and the like, which made the process of writing much easier, and could fix problems of grammar, spelling, syntax, etc. that previously we had to fix ourselves.  Before that, there were libraries, which collected in one place much of the wisdom that we might need to complete an intellectual task, and not uncommonly there were librarians lurking in those libraries who, if you were even a little bit nice to them, would do much of the heavy lifting involved in research, and sometimes writing too.  Of course, students, and humans in general, have often relied on their friends and co-workers, who might have been better writers or thinkers that they were, to complete intellectual tasks for them.  People can be crutches too, lest we forget.  And then there's the biggest obstacle of all to genuine critical thinking: the tendency of almost all of us to idealize the intellectual labors done by those we regard as smarter than ourselves.  Think about the educational process itself, which more often than not involves drinking deep of the intellectual achievements of "great" thinkers, from Aristotle to Zola, who may have been brainy, sure, but none of whom had or have all the answers we seek.  In countless ways, even when we seem to be thinking hard about weighty questions, we're very often soaking up the intellectual habits and prejudices of others and then replicating them in our own work.  Truly creative thinking, in the sense of original thinking, is a very rare thing, and that's precisely why people like schools of thought, or political ideologies, or religious dogmas, to spoon feed them "truth", so that they don't have to go find it themselves.  Is A.I. a "crutch", therefore?  Sure it is, or at least it can be.  But crutches and intellectual laziness are nothing new, and so there's no reason to suppose A.I. is a game changer in that regard.  And, speaking of "reason", it's always a useful exercise to ask: what is it, and do those who claim to have a monopoly on it -- leftists are especially guilty of this conceit -- have any better understanding of it than the man on the street, or even the man in the gutter.  My view, since you asked so nicely, has always been that raw reason is a nice and beautiful thing, but, as Aristotle said, it, i.e. reason, moves nothing.  Reason helps us process information, but it doesn't suggest or validate any values.  It doesn't set priorities.  Indeed, A.I., which is something akin to pure thought or basic computational ability, doesn't have any sense of direction or purpose either.  It does, and refuses to do, whatever we humans tell it to do, or not to do.  It's a tool, and we humans, especially those of us who own Big Tech companies or know how to write sophisticated code, are still in the driver's seat, therefore.  We decide what goals and moral parameters prevail in the world of A.I., or at least that has always been the case up to now.  What I conclude from all this is that human beings have always been fundamentally lazy, in the sense that they invariably prefer to complete any task with minimal effort and maximum assistance from technology.  We've also always been a lot less rational, when you get right down to it, than Enlightenment blowhards liked to claim.  Spend an afternoon with a self-satisfied "progressive", and I defy you NOT to conclude that their supposedly rational worldview is, in fact, just a pastiche of petty hatreds and naive, unexamined assumptions, almost all of which they acquired by brainlessly vacuuming them up from left-leaning luminaries who enjoy telling others what to think.  Now, if that's the pinnacle of human reason, which supposedly A.I. is in the process of undermining, maybe we'll all be better off when our brains turn to mush!  Those are my two cents.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/dec/26/ai-dark-ages-enlightenment 

 

https://thefederalist.com/2025/12/25/artificial-intelligence-in-the-classroom-destroys-actual-intelligence-in-students/ 

 

In other news, according to Senator Jim Banks, the U.S. military has its groove back, because of the leadership of President Trump and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.  That's good to hear.  Certainly, we've got wokeism on the run, and that's something to celebrate.

 

https://americanmind.org/salvo/americas-military-is-back/ 

 

Finally, kudos to Honduras' president-elect, Nasry Asfura, the preferred candidate of one Donald J. Trump, and therefore a good friend to the USA.  Once again, we see the Americas moving in a Trumpward direction, which begs the question: why are we even bothering with those stuffy, socialistic Europeans???

 

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/12/26/marco-rubio-congratulates-honduran-president-elect-nasry-asfura