My latest: a plea to teach college students about God, in The Raised Hand

The Raised Hand is a Substack run by the Consortium of Christian Study Centers and edited by Daniel G. Hummel of the Lumen Center (Madison, WI) and Upper House (serving the University of Wisconsin-Madison). This school year they’ve been running monthly essays written by Christian academics asked to respond to the following prompt: “What does every university and college student need to learn?”

Yesterday they published my entry, titled “The Knowledge of God.” Here’s how it opens:

I am tempted to begin by saying that the first thing every university and college student needs to learn is how to read. But I’ve written about that plenty elsewhere, and you can’t throw a stone on the internet without hitting someone writing about the crisis of literacy on campus and in the public schools. Since I’m a theologian, moreover, there’s some low-hanging fruit (no pun intended) just waiting for me to reach up and take it.

Here's my real answer: If learning is about knowing, then every college student needs, through teaching, to come to know God. Another way to say this is that every student needs to learn how to pray.

Click here to read the whole thing. Thanks to Daniel for the invitation. And thanks to Sara Hendren, who already read and kindly boosted the piece. It was a fun one to write. Watch for a follow-up podcast conversation (sometime in the next week or two) that discusses the essay, also hosted by The Raised Hand.

A.I. fallacies, academic edition

ChatGPT is here to stay. We should get used to it.

Why? I’m not used to it, and I don’t plan on getting used to it.

ChatGPT is a tool. The only thing to do with a tool is learn how to use it well.

False. There are all kinds of tools I don’t know how to use, never plan on using, and never plan to learn to use.

But this is an academic tool. We—

No, it isn’t. It’s no more an academic tool than a smart phone. It’s utterly open-ended in its potential uses.

Our students are using it. We should too.

No, we shouldn’t. My students do all kinds of things I don’t do and would never do.

But we should know what they’re up to.

I do know what they’re up to. They’re using ChatGPT to write their papers.

Perhaps it’s useful!

I’m sure it is. To plagiarize.

Not just to plagiarize. To iterate. To bounce ideas off of. To outline.

As I said.

That’s not plagiarism! The same thing happens with a roommate, or a writing center, or a tutor—or a professor.

False.

Because it’s an algorithm?

Correct.

What makes an algorithm different from a person?

You said it. Do I have to dignify it with an answer?

Humor me.

Among other things: Because a human person—friend, teacher, tutor—does not instantaneously provide paragraphs of script to copy and paste into a paper. Because a human person asks questions in reply. Because a human person prompts further thought, which takes time. ChatGPT doesn’t take time. It’s the negation of temporality in human inquiry.

I’d call that efficiency.

Efficiency is not the end-all, be-all.

It’s good, though.

That depends. I’d say efficiency is a neutral description. Like “innovation” and “creativity.” Sometimes what it describes is good; sometimes what it describes is bad. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which, at least at first.

Give me a break. When is efficiency a bad thing?

Are you serious?

Yes.

Okay. A nuclear weapon is efficient at killing, as is nerve gas.

Give me another break. We’re not talking about murder!

I am. You asked me about cases when efficiency isn’t desirable.

Fine. Non-killing examples, please.

Okay. Driving 100 miles per hour in a school zone. Gets you where you want to go faster.

That’s breaking the law, though.

So? It’s more efficient.

I can see this isn’t going anywhere.

I don’t see why it’s so hard to understand. Efficiency is not good in itself. Cheating on an exam is an “efficient” use of time, if studying would have taken fifteen hours you’d rather have spent doing something else. Fast food is more efficient than cooking your own food, if you have the money. Using Google Translate is more efficient than becoming fluent in a foreign language. Listening to an author on a podcast is more efficient than reading her book cover to cover. Listening to it on 2X is even more efficient.

And?

And: In none of these cases is it self-evident that greater efficiency is actually good or preferable. Even when ethics is not involved—as in killing or breaking the law—efficiency is merely one among many factors to consider in a given action, undertaking, or (in this case) technological invention. The mere fact that X is efficient tells us nothing whatsoever about its goodness, and thus nothing whatsoever about whether we should endorse it, bless it, or incorporate it into our lives.

Your solution, then, is ignorance.

I don’t take your meaning.

You want to be ignorant about ChatGPT, language models, and artificial intelligence.

Not at all. What would make you think that?

Because you refuse to use it.

I don’t own or use guns. But I’m not ignorant about them.

Back to killing.

Sure. But your arguments keep failing. I’m not ignorant about A.I. I just don’t spend my time submitting questions to it or having “conversations” with it. I have better things to do.

Like what?

Like pretty much anything.

But you’re an academic! We academics should be knowledgeable about such things!

There you go again. I am knowledgeable. My not wasting time on ChatGPT has nothing to do with knowledge or lack thereof.

But shouldn’t your knowledge be more than theoretical? Shouldn’t you learn to use it well?

What does “well” mean? I’m unpersuaded that modifier applies.

How could you know?

By thinking! By reading and thinking. Try it sometime.

That’s uncalled for.

You’re right. I take it back.

What if there are in fact ways to use AI well?

I guess we’ll find out, won’t we?

You’re being glib again.

This time I’m not. You’re acting like the aim of life, including academic life, is to be on the cutting edge. But it’s not. Besides, the cutting edge is always changing. It’s a moving target. I’m an academic because I’m a dinosaur. My days are spent doing things Plato and Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas and John Calvin spend their days doing. Reading, writing, teaching. I don’t use digital technology in the first or the third. I use it in the second for typing. That’s it. I don’t live life on the edge. I live life moving backwards. The older, the better. If, by some miracle, the latest greatest tech gadgetry not only makes itself ubiquitous and unavoidable in scholarly life but also materially and undeniably improves it, without serious tradeoffs—well, then I’ll find out eventually. But I’m not holding my breath.

Whether or not you stick your head in the sand, your students are using ChatGPT and its competitors. Along with your colleagues, your friends, your pastors, your children.

That may well be true. I don’t deny it. If it is true, it’s cause for lament, not capitulation.

What?

I mean: Just because others are using it doesn’t mean I should join them. (If all your friends jumped off a bridge…)

But you’re an educator! How am I not getting through to you?

I’m as clueless as you are.

If everyone’s using it anyway, and it’s already being incorporated into the way writers compose their essays and professors create their assignments and students compose their papers and pastors compose their sermons and—

I. Don’t. Care. You have yet to show me why I should.

Okay. Let me be practical. Your students’ papers are already using ChatGPT.

Yes, I’m aware.

So how are you going to show them how to use it well in future papers?

I’m not.

What about their papers?

They won’t be writing them.

Come again?

No more computer-drafted papers written from home in my classes. I’m reverting to in-class handwritten essay exams. No prompts in advance. Come prepared, having done the reading. Those, plus the usual weekly reading quizzes.

You can’t be serious.

Why not?

Because that’s backwards.

Exactly! Now you’re getting it.

No, I mean: You’re moving backwards. That’s not the way of the future.

What is this “future” you speak of? I’m not acquainted.

That’s not the way society is heading. Not the way the academy is heading.

So?

So … you’ll be left behind.

No doubt!

Shouldn’t you care about that?

Why would I?

It makes you redundant.

I fail to see how.

Your teaching isn’t best practices!

Best practices? What does that mean? If my pedagogy, ancient and unsexy though it may be, results in greater learning for my students, then by definition it is the best practice possible. Or at least better practice by comparison.

But we’re past all that. That’s the way we used to do things.

Some things we used to do were better than the way we do them now.

That’s what reactionaries say.

That’s what progressives say.

Exactly.

Come on. You’re the one resorting to slogans. I’m the one joking. Quality pedagogy isn’t political in this sense. Are you really wanting to align yourself with Silicon Valley trillionaires? With money-grubbing corporations? With ed-tech snake-oil salesmen? Join the rebels! Join the dissidents! Join the Butlerian Jihad!

Who’s resorting to rhetoric now?

Mine’s in earnest though. I mean it. And I’m putting my money where my mouth is. By not going with the flow. By not doing what I’m told. By resisting every inch the tech overloads want to colonize in my classroom.

Okay. But seriously. You think you can win this fight?

Not at all.

Wait. What?

…

You don’t think you can win?

Of course not. Who said anything about winning?

Why fight then?

Likelihood of winning is not the deciding factor. This is the long defeat, remember. The measure of action is not success but goodness. The question for my classroom is therefore quite simple. Does it enrich teaching and learning, or does it not? Will my students’ ability to read, think, and speak with wisdom, insight, and intellectual depth increase as a result, or not? I have not seen a single argument that suggests using, incorporating, or otherwise introducing my students to ChatGPT will accomplish any of these pedagogical goals. So long as that is the case, I will not let propaganda, money, paralysis, confusion, or pressure of any kind—cultural, social, moral, administrative—persuade me to do what I believe to be a detriment to my students.

You must realize it’s inevitable.

What’s “it”?

You know.

I do. But I reject the premise. As I already said, I’m not going to win. But my classroom is not the world. It’s a microcosm of a different world. That’s the vision of the university I’m willing to defend, to go to the mat for. Screens rule in the world, but not in my little world. We open physical books. I write real words on a physical board. We speak to one another face to face, about what matters most. No laptops open. No smartphones out. No PowerPoint slides. Just words, words, words; texts, texts, texts; minds, minds, minds. I admit that’s not the only good way to teach. But it is a good way. And I protect it with all my might. I’m going to keep protecting it, as long as I’m able.

So you’re not a reactionary. You’re a fanatic.

Names again!

This time I’m the one kidding. I get it. But you’re something of a Luddite.

I don’t reject technology. I reject the assumption that technology created this morning should ipso facto be adopted this evening as self-evidently essential to human flourishing, without question or interrogation or skepticism or sheer time. Give me a hundred years, or better yet, five hundred. By then I’ll get back to you on whether A.I. is good for us. Not to mention good for education and scholarship.

You don’t have that kind of time.

Precisely. That’s why Silicon Valley boosterism is so foolish and anti-intellectual. It’s a cause for know-nothings. It presumes what it cannot know. It endorses what it cannot perceive. It disseminates what it cannot take sufficient time to test. It simply hands out digital grenades at random, hoping no one pulls the pin. No wonder it always blows up in their face.

We’ve gotten off track, and you’ve started sermonizing.

I’m known to do that.

Should we stop?

I think so. You don’t want to see me when I really get going. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.

Be the teacher

It’s an old line: When asked about the experience of teaching, a teacher replies that he learned more from the students than they learned from him. One can understand the impulse, and why the answer endures as a kind of proverb or cliché: it’s an expression of humility; it resists the impression of the master dispensing Knowledge from on high; it conjures a classroom in which student and teacher collaborate together in the search for knowledge; it appeals to our democratic sensibilities; it might even tickle our know-nothing instincts, dormant though they may be. In truth, the answer might be little more than a deflection. What teacher wants to say outright, “Yes, I’m a fantastic and knowledgeable teachers and my students are lucky to have me”?

Nevertheless. I want to call bunk on this nonsensical and finally destructive reflex.

To begin, it is usually (not always) a false modesty and thus a false humility on display. No teacher worth her salt really believes her students have more to teach her than vice versa. If that were true she wouldn’t be a teacher in the first place. It would amount to vocational malpractice. You are a teacher because you have something to teach. If you don’t, then you should probably consider another profession.

Moreover, such a view misunderstands the nature of the student. The student is not already equipped, albeit awaiting something like activation. The student is a learner, and a learner needs to learn. The teacher is both the facilitator and the source of that learning. The teacher possesses something the student lacks, and it is her special privilege to help the student to come into possession of it, too. In that way there is an egalitarian element to teaching: what one communicates is not thereby lost; when you teach me and I learn, we both have knowledge that, before, you had and I did not. That is one of the beauties of teaching and learning, namely that there is no competition intrinsic to it. You and I can both know X equally and fully, and neither suffers as a result. It’s zero sum.

But precisely because knowledge is a shared or common good in this sense, when one lacks it he really lacks it. The relationship between a teacher and a student, then, is not equal from the start. It is unequal. That is what makes the teacher a teacher and the student a student. “Inequality” here has nothing to do with worth or value; nor does it have to do with everything that might count for knowledge, only with the particular type or range of knowledge in question. I have a friend who builds energy-efficient homes from scratch. In the realm of building energy-efficient homes, he is the master and I am the apprentice. (Better: I’m a flat zero.) The roles are reversed in the realm of theology. If we were to suppose otherwise, it would be sheer pretense.

Imagine a chemistry class in which the teacher claimed to learn more from the students than she taught them. Is such a claim even intelligible? Perhaps, at a stretch, there is an equivocation here: she means to say that she has learned about some other matter—life, or the resilience of this generation of students, or the lovely array of diverse backgrounds and cultures represented in the classroom. That’s as may be, but it’s not germane to the point. For she is a chemistry teacher. She teaches chemistry to students who need to learn it. That there are other or additional exchanges of various forms of knowledge happening alongside the chemistry-teaching is at once a happy fact and irrelevant to the question of whether she, the teacher, is teaching them, the students, the subject of which she is an expert. If she isn’t, we’ve got a problem.

I detect at least two anxieties here. One is a fear of authority, wedded to or underwritten by doubt about expertise. We wonder whether expertise really exists (does that imply some people are smarter than others? that some are better educated than others? than some simply know more than others, and always will?), but even if it does exist, we doubt whether it can be wielded with authority in a way that avoids abuse. For if abuse is endemic to the exercise of authority, better to deny or abolish the latter than to provide unwitting cover for the former.

The second anxiety belongs to the humanities. That is to say, most of us would admit that a chemist or a geologist or an epidemiologist(!) knows his stuff, and the stuff he knows is stuff we don’t. But for academics outside the STEM fields, there is a widespread suspicion—a simmering low-grade feeling—that what we trade in is not so much knowledge as it is, well, opinions and ideas clothed in jargon. So that, in a strong sense, we don’t have anything to teach our students. In which case they have as much to teach us as we them. After all, if it’s contested readings all the way down, who’s to say they won’t propose a reading as good as, or better than, ours?

I’m not an English professor, so I won’t comment on why language and literature should see itself as a true disciplina or Wissenschaft akin to biology or mathematics. My minimal point is that, even in those disciplines that most explicitly and critically practice and foster the arts of interpretation (and, spoiler, no human inquiry, however empirical, is exempt from these arts), the teacher has something to hand on to her students, and she should do so with gusto. If she had nothing, she could not and would not be a teacher. As it stands, she does and she is, and so her posture should be one of confident authority, not false modesty. Students learn when we know what we are doing and do it without apology. They do not learn when we pretend to lack what they so desperately need.

I sometimes wonder whether the abdication of pedagogical authority is rooted in a false diagnosis of “students these days.” As though they already know what they need to know; or, if they do not, then their exquisitely sensitive egos can’t stand the suggestion that they need to learn what they don’t know. Neither is true, at least in my experience. My students don’t think they know everything already. Almost to a person, they are eager to admit how little they know, and how much they want to learn. That doesn’t mean they simply take my word for it (nor should they). But no one’s egos are being bruised when I teach them as one whose training has prepared him to teach theology with some measure of authority (an authority that is relative in more than one respect: relative to their other courses in theological subjects; relative to their courses in other disciplines; relative to the teachings of the church; relative to the testimony of Holy Scripture; relative, ultimately, to God, the source of all knowledge and the supreme authority). On the contrary, my students lean forward in their seats. They see from my own passion for the material, first, that this thing matters; second, that it is substantial, hefty, neither thin gruel nor small beer; and third, that it is therefore worth desiring for its own sake. It stands apart both from them and from me: it’s the thing I keep pointing toward, gesturing at, like the finger of the Baptist. It’s real, it’s good, and it’s worth knowing—precisely because they only barely glimpse it, at least at first.

That’s the magic. That’s what can happen when you’re in the classroom and you’ve got something to teach folks who are ready to learn. Be the teacher, and the rest falls into place.

NYT, guilt by association, and libraries

It's a relief to see so many thoughtful—albeit blistering—responses to the long-awaited NYT hit piece on Scott Alexander and his erstwhile blog. It means that I'm not crazy for having the reaction I did when I read it, and that I don't need to write much to draw attention to the article's numerous flaws: only to point you to all the existing ones that already do the job. That's only a few, and none of the Twitter threads and dunks. I must say, the immediately striking thing about the piece is how boring and boringly written it is, in such a bone-deep passive-aggressive voice. Why all the fuss (internally, that is, at the NYT) for that?

But: one additional thought. It has to be strange, at the experiential (nay, existential) level, for a writer truly to think that he can damn another writer through nothing but guilt by association. And not just association in general, but association understood, first, as proximate contact (i.e., having read and engaged a "dangerous" or non-mainstream or legitimately Bad author); and, second, as having potentially contributed to the potential acceptance of said unsavory character's unsavory ideas (i.e., not having controlled in advance the judgments one's own readers might make in reading one's engagement of another's writings).

The entire hit piece is structured this way. "Alexander might be an okay dude, but it's possible that his blog might have led some readers to Wrong Thoughts." What I cannot for the life of me understand is what it means for a fellow writer to think this, to have written this way. Does he really suppose the way authors and their works ought to be judged is by the sheer possibility that some readers might draw undesirable conclusions? or misunderstand the authors' views? or go beyond the authors, or follow their evidence or arguments to different ends than the authors?

This view is patently preposterous. It's self-defeating for any writer to hold. And it's even worse as a picture of reading and learning. Imagine it applied to libraries:

1. Libraries invariably contain books of all kinds.
   
2. Some books invariably contain Bad Ideas.
3. Moreover, All Kinds Of People read books.
4. Therefore, some people will have Bad Ideas as a result of reading certain books contained in libraries.
5. Therefore, libraries are Of Questionable Quality.
6. Therefore, ban all libraries.
   

There is a real hatred afoot today: a hatred for learning, for thinking, for reading and giving space to ideas and authors outside of a narrow mainstream—whether or not that mainstream is a mushy moderate middle or something else entirely—and this hatred not only animates the hit piece on Alexander, it is a sort of electrical current pulsing through our culture today. Resist it, y'all. Resist it in any way you can.