Roger Berkowitz Tells It Like It Is

INTERVIEW WITH CLOCKED OUT

MARCH 2024

One rainy afternoon in early March, we made the hajj to the Upper West Side to meet Roger Berkowitz, Professor of Political Studies and Human Rights at Bard College and academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities. Roger was also Clocked Out EIC’s hugely inspirational academic advisor, always encouraging us to think critically, and about how Hannah Arendt actually wrote about this. We three sat at The Flame Diner to discuss the current state of academia, AI, ideological dogma, the professoriate, and Eternal Life.
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CLOCKED OUT: Thank you for agreeing to talk to us.

Roger: Ah, my pleasure. We’ll see how it goes though.

CO: Roger, you’ve been teaching at Bard for how many years now?

Roger: 18 years. 18 shocking years.

CO: Maybe you can just begin by telling us a bit about how it's changed. Has it changed at all?

Roger: Yeah, it definitely has changed in many ways. On one level, it’s gotten bigger, and it’s gotten much more conventional, to be honest. I mean, Bard still attracts the passionate and quirky student. But the quality of student has gone way up and that moderates the quirkiness a bit. Bard has a reputation that has increased massively in 18 years, all because of me I’m sure. Take that out.

It’s definitely gotten bigger, and you have a lot more students that would have gone to other schools than when I first got there. Other similar elite liberal schools. There’s a couple ways it’s changed. One is since Covid it’s changed a lot–

CO: So just in the past four years.

Roger: Well, that’s one thing. There’s no doubt that people don’t read as much, they don’t come to class as much, they don’t go to lectures as much… There’s much less of a public life on campus. A lot of these students, they get up in the middle of class and leave and go to the bathroom and stuff. I think they’re used to being at home on a computer where they can just do things.

CO: A loss of decorum.

Roger: A loss of public knowledge, or knowledge of what it means to be in a public space.

CO: Do you think there was an ideology shift during covid?

Roger: The ideology shifted before covid. After the financial crisis in 2009, a lot of top schools weren’t hiring, and so Bard’s President Leon Botstein made a bold decision to hire a lot of faculty that year. And so this enabled us to probably get some faculty—a lot of top quality young people—that we wouldn’t have gotten in other years because there wasn’t a lot of competition. We brought in some excellent people.

CO: And this younger generation of faculty, is there a difference in the way they approach–

Roger: Yeah, as a class, they’re a lot more political. I mean, given the tragedy of our politics, that should not be surprising. And it is also important. But in addition to being political, many younger faculty are also a lot more comfortable with ideology. Not all of them–I don’t want to say all of them because it’s not all of them. While these faculty bring amazing talent and energy, there is a kind of hard-nosed ideological and often morally-tinged politics. This is not just at Bard, this is across the country. It works in a couple ways.

One of them is that they come out of graduate programs, which are theoretical programs. And they have theories. And these theories–it used to be Marxism. And Marxism has advantages and disadvantages, as all theories do. Marxism seeks to subordinate the real world into scientific theories, and thus has the advantage of offering a clear vision of the world. But in simplifying and clarifying the world, Marxist ideology also cuts off nuances, differences, the messiness of reality. Saying, you know, the proletariat is good and the bourgeoisie is bad and the world is moving in the direction of the proletariat and our job is to help move it along faster—that is to take for granted a simplified version of reality. And that simplification was the fundamental Marxist view. But for most Marxists, the subject of politics was the proletariat. And at least they had an idea of making life better for the working class. I mean, I certainly don’t agree with Marxism in the sense that there’s a dialectic, materialist movement in which the proletariat will take power and the bourgeoisie will be subordinated. But I believe that Marxism has had a salutary effect on liberal capitalist politics in the sense that it’s led to a more human capitalism and a more human liberalism.

But the failure of communism and Marxism has led to a crisis in which a new ideology, that most people learn to believe or even to inhabit in grad school and come to incorporate in their professorial personae, is something like an “anti-colonialist” ideology. Anti-colonialist ideology shares the same weaknesses and strengths of Marxism in that it’s an ideology and it believes in simplifying the world and offers a path towards a utopia, but there’s a big difference, which is that the subject of politics is no longer the proletariat. It’s now “the colonized.”

CO: So you would say that the “new mandarins” of the 21st century are anti-colonialist?

Roger: Yeah, I mean I think that anti-colonialist theory and anti-colonialist movements are the pseudo-intellectual movements of our time. And the problem with this is that whereas, despite all its problems, at least Marxism helps the people it’s designed to help. The proletariat benefits at least to some degree. We can make an argument about whether welfare hurts or helps the working class. And there are people who think it hurts in the sense that it takes away their agency, and things like that. But for the most part I think the welfare state has helped people. Whereas I don’t think anti-colonial ideology helps anyone.

First of all, it’s not clear who the colonized are. There’s no one who is pure “colonized,” and there’s no one who’s a pure “colonizer.” But even so, if your view is that the evil in the world comes from whiteness or white privilege or white supremacy, how do you resolve that? I mean, the civil rights movement in the classical era sought to change the law. But the anti-colonialist movement doesn’t try to change the law. There are no laws that they actually care about. What do they want to change? They want people to feel guilty. And making people feel guilty doesn’t actually make anyone else’s lives any better. You can have people saying “Mea culpa, I’m guilty, I’m privileged…” it doesn’t actually make anyone’s lives any better.

Simon Critchley, who wrote a wonderful book called Infinitely Demanding, argues that with the rise of this new ideology where a kind of identity politics, anti-colonialist ideology replaces Marxism, politics moves from politics to ethics. And so we now have ethical movements instead of political movements. In this new ethical politics, the whole point is to say “I’m moral,” and “You’re immoral,” but to not actually change anything. And that’s what I think has taken over much of the pseudo-intellectual left, unfortunately, in the country. And it certainly has an out of proportion influence on college campuses as well. Now, I’ll say there’s also a pseudo-intellectual right that somehow largely, as far as I can tell, embraces the same anti-colonialist ideology but from the other side. Someone says, “Well, if the whole point of power in our society is to be a victim, whites are a victim,” and the right embraces identity politics and just turns it around.

CO: They’re playing the same game.

Roger: They’re playing the same game. And so you’ve had this anti-colonialist ideology take over, and it’s all about who can claim the moral high ground and who has the moral low ground. So if you’re a student, who are you actually helping if you engage in this? You’re largely taking down people in the establishment, and it’s a power play. I think a lot of people in your generation are good at using this kind of power play, going to organizations, saying that we have to take on privilege and in a sense trying to undo the people at the top of the organization and replace them with younger people.

CO: When do you think this ideological realignment began? Covid?

Roger: I think it’s been going on a lot longer than that. We actually had a paper at the conference we had this weekend where someone argued that it starts with Arendt, in a certain way. Arendt argues that colonialism in India rebounds back to England. A kind of willingness to govern brutally that British people in India developed or embraced, they brought back with them when they went back to Britain. And so colonialism in the Empire there began to undo certain fundamental institutions and norms in Britain.

But the real start of it was probably Frantz Fanon. Fanon is a brilliant writer and thinker. I just led a reading workshop on Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks in January, and I was struck by the way he understood deeply the way that racism worked in concert with colonialism and he embraced, in a complicated way, the idea that colonized subjects can only free themselves from their colonization through a kind of violence. I want to note that Fanon also understood that in acting violently, colonized subjects risked actually destroying themselves and creating an unending cycle of violence. The Algerian regime freed themselves from France, but then the colonized became its own sort of colonizer regime, and repeated the same problems. And just like the British brought the violence back from India, the Algerians brought the violence against the French back into Algeria in their government. And what he says is that it’s very hard to get out of this cycle once you’re in it. Fanon is sort of the paternal figure for most of the anti-colonial movement, and they only embrace the positive side of his theory, which is that violence is how the colonized subject frees themselves. They don’t understand the way that the violence of the colonized subject can rebound against the colonized subject and actually destroy them as well. And that’s a part of Fanon that very few people read.

And one more thing—making general statements is hard. There’s a lot of great faculty out there and there’s a lot of great younger faculty out there and I support them. I do think that there is an inclination amongst many today to see the world ideologically, to see the world as instead of rich and poor, Marxist–bourgeoisie and proletariat, to sort of label everyone as either colonized or colonizer. And either privileged or not privileged. Powerful or not powerful. I disagree with that ideological approach. Nevertheless, I value these younger faculty immensely and believe they are responding to real shortcomings in my generation.

CO: You think that’s the ideology of the professoriate today–

Roger: It’s too complicated to say, there’s a lot of great professors from lots of different perspectives out there.

CO: But it’s a general trend.

Roger: I don’t even know if I want to say that. What I want to say is this: the people who embrace this ideology may be a minority, but they have increasingly taken over certain bureaucratic parts of the university including Diversity Equity & Inclusion offices, and they’ve made it very hard for people to disagree with them because of the fear of being labeled.

CO: And so that goes against what we traditionally conceive the university to be in an ideological sense, where it’s a free exchange of ideas outside the political sphere.

Roger: First of all, that’s probably never existed.

CO: But that’s what it’s supposed to be, right? In an ideal sense, that’s what the university should be. Intellectual interrogation as opposed to indoctrination.

Roger: Most universities were originally religious, at least in the United States. Bard was originally an Episcopalian seminary, Harvard was a seminary. A seminary for young men. They were designed to create good Christian people who would be moral citizens. And for a long history of the United States, universities were designed to teach morals, ethics, citizenship, and values and they were for the elite, and they reproduced the elite. Then there are public universities in the United States which took on a different role, and were designed to help raise up working class kids and bring them into higher paying jobs and into the intellectual world, and things like that. So, there’s always been a part of the university which has been ideological, paternalistic, morally educating you.

Then there’s an opposed view which I think has its first major proponent in Max Weber, which is that the job of a teacher is not to morally educate or bring people on to a certain view or point of view, but to constantly unsettle them from their ideologies and make them free thinkers. Weber in his “Science as a Vocation” essay in 1919 makes this point. And that sort of begins the idea of a liberal arts university as a place where you come and free yourself from your ideologies and your prejudices and learn to think critically. And I think that’s one view of a university.

But I think that most universities don’t exist in one box or the other. If you were just taking away everyone’s prejudices and ideologies, is that what you want? Or do you also want to teach them what you think is valuable in a kind of moral or ethical approach to the world? And so at a place like Bard, there’s a strong public interest component. We call it a private university in a public interest. And we also call it “A Place To Think.” I think you actually look at a place like Bard and you see that it’s got a Weberian angle–a place to think–and it’s got a pastoral angle–a private university in the public interest. And I think that they’re both legitimate.

The problem is when one becomes fully dominant, and there’s no other views. There’s a diversity of approaches at a place like Bard, and I think at most great universities there’s not one ideology that reigns supreme. But there’s no doubt that in our universities but also outside of our universities in our cultural institutions and in many of our corporations, there’s a real fear–or there has been for a number of years–of saying something or of resisting a kind of religiously inspired anti-colonialist ideology in which you’re supposed to say these are the powerful people and these are the not powerful people, and it’s all simple. People call it “woke.” I don’t know if I like the word, but fine. I think it’s rooted in anti-colonialism.

CO: Earlier when you were speaking about Marxist ideology you mentioned the idea that Marxism seeks to impose scientific standards on non-scientific phenomena. And it kind of relates to a question we were meaning to ask you, which is that you teach political studies at Bard, and Bard is one of the few institutions that refers to it as political studies and not political science. Could you explain the distinction?

Roger: Yeah, the history of that is that Heinrich Bluecher, who was a professor at Bard and Hannah Arendt’s second husband–he was very wary of understanding politics as a science when it is a human study. It’s a study of human activity. Humans are free, which means we don’t follow mere laws of nature. We also follow the lawless and unknowable laws of freedom. So politics cannot be a natural science since humans don’t follow natural laws. Politics is part of what in German would be called Sozialwissenschaften, the social sciences. But in German, the word Wissenschaften is different from the English word Sciencia. Wissenschaft means “the way of knowing.” Bluecher was of the opinion that to treat a social world, the human world, through science to try and find rules that govern human behavior, which is what many social scientists try to do today, is inhuman. And it’s counter to human freedom.

And so the idea of calling it political studies as opposed to political science was in his mind to remind us that we study the human activity of politics. We don’t try to impose on it scientific rules. It may have even been an anti-Marxist approach, although I don’t think it was explicitly that. But since the main sciences of politics are behaviorism and Marxism, Bluecher resisted both, as did Arendt. But whether or not we have been true to that at Bard or anywhere is a different question. I think we’re pretty good at it, I don’t think we do a lot of science at Bard. And I think that’s an advantage of our system.

CO: How do you feel like you reconcile that in your own teaching style?

Roger: I don’t use a scientific method when I write or teach. I don’t try to explain to people the development of the world according to Marxist principles, anti-colonialist principles–I don’t think that there’s a through-line that we can follow, you know? Darwinism would say “Well, there’s the competition of species and the fittest will survive, and we’re moving in that direction. Maybe we can help them.” And there’s a sort of AI vision of this which is sort of trans-humanist. The human species has been the dominant species for god knows how many thousands of years but there’s nothing to say that humanity is the highest species and AI will eventually replace humanity and that’s part of our job, to help that along.

CO: You think your job as a professor is to help AI along?

Roger: My job, no. But I think there’s a lot of faculty in the computer sciences and more technological fields now who are trans-humanist. This was the argument between ChatGPT and Microsoft. The board which fired Sam Altman was worried that it was going too fast, and Sam Altman and Microsoft were like, “we’re going to be able to make the world better, we’re going to be able to make medicines better, we’re going to be able to make all this stuff better.” And they’re probably right. But in doing that, you’re going to increasingly change what it means to be human, and humans will have to either fit into this new world order or drop out as one-eyed-jacks in the sort of Brave New World Aldous Huxley approach. Is AI going to lead to a utopia or a dystopia? It might be neither. But I think there’s certainly a lot of professors who think it’s going to lead to a utopia. And they’re not usually in the humanities, but some of them are.

CO: The idea that society can be improved through increased rationality is probably popular with people who believe that the social studies can be improved through the application of scientific standards—

Roger: I wouldn’t want to say that, I would want to say pseudo-scientific. The very idea that whiteness is–what is whiteness, you know? Who is white? Are Jews white? Are Lebanese white? Are Mizrahim white? Are rich people white? Are poor people white? Are people who are ⅔ white white? What is white anyway? What is black? The problem is that these things are socially constructed. They’re not biological racial categories. They’re not scientific.

CO: Whereas the Marxist scientific claim to truth is based on the fact that some people have more money than other people, which is factually provable.

Roger: Or that people work in factories. The pseudo-scientific part of Marxism is that all bourgeoisie are immoral and deserve to be dispossessed and killed, and all the proletariat are good and they deserve to rule. And that’s obviously not true, but there’s no doubt that there are some people who own the means of production and there are some people who work.

CO: In this new “pseudo-scientific” academic standard, we’re forced to abide by simplistic reductions of complicated social phenomena.

Roger: The pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-scientific side of it is that.

The other side is, in Marxism ideology at least was political. You’re trying to initiate political change. You wanted some people to take control of other means of production so that poor people can have more money, and that’s a political program that I can at least argue for or against. But what’s the program of anti-colonialism? There’s no program there. It’s the idea of resistance, but no political program. That’s why many anarchist thinkers such as David Graeber and Simon Critchley understand that the goal of left-wing politics today is not to build a better world but to create spaces of freedom that exist outside of all political establishments. That is the turn from politics to anarchism. When you actually ask what the demands are—and this was the problem with Occupy Wall Street and other movements—it’s not clear. And I’m not saying there can’t be. There’s certainly demands that can be made.

CO: There’s not one ideological consensus among every subgroup.

Roger: Right. The problem is that in this ethical-anarchist-pseudo-intellectual politics it’s assumed that there is a moral consensus, and if you don’t agree then you’re called the “wrong kind” of whatever kind of person. We brought someone to teach at Bard who was black, and they were considered not to take the mainstream, expected, woke black position. And no departments on campus will list their courses, because, as they said, they don’t want to “give the idea that this is the black point of view.” I said, “but it is a black point of view.” And they say “well, it’s the wrong black point of view.” And I’m like, well, who’s to say which black person has the right black point of view or the wrong black point of view. And at that point, there’s not a political claim that’s being made, it’s about whether they are ethically or morally good, and that’s the problem.

CO: Similarly with feminism—some women feel entitled to dictate “the right female point of view” on standard issues, i.e. what women are supposed to want, but many women don’t fit this expectation. But then some feminists will say that being a homemaker is antifeminist. Meanwhile some women would just prefer raising their child over working in a corporate office job.

Roger: There are women who want to stay home with the kids, there are women who don’t want to have abortions, that are against abortions. I think the biggest issue I’ve heard in the feminist movement is that there are women who think the feminist movement has been bad for women.

CO: And like with most of these movements they end up getting co-opted by corporations and the elite class to push that agenda and the movement ends up getting neutralized.

Fiona: I think that there tends to be a convenient conflation of interests between what the mainstream correct opinion is for minority groups to have and also the one that benefits the capitalist corporate system the most. It actively benefits our economic structure to have women adopt a girlboss SHE-E-O mentality, and DEI training is useful because it allows corporations to have plausible deniability if they come under legal action for discrimination cases.

Zoe: It’s an easy out when an actual evil organization is posting a gay flag during pride month.

Fiona: And they won’t come under fire for the fact that they pay their employees minimum wage and they’re working them to the bone.

Zoe: Or how much they’ve contributed to global crises.

Fiona: And fracking.

Roger: I think this is a common critique of ideology politics, that it’s so caught up in the moralization of politics that it forgets politics. And politics includes your wage and your salary and your working conditions. And so I think you’re right, there’s no doubt that DEI has been co-opted by universities and businesses and governments to protect themselves rather than actually make significant changes in at least the economic power structure. Still, I mean, it has brought other changes. It is a good thing that we have more people of color running things. I think we do need more women and people of color in public life and having power and running things. But, again, which women of color? Which women? Which people of color?

CO: Still, if you’re a poor person and you’re struggling to buy bread it doesn’t really matter to you whether the CEO of Google is a gay black woman.

Roger: Let me give you a couple of examples. One of my first years at Bard I taught a new course and I had to get it approved by my division, and the course was listed as “Dignity in the Human Rights Tradition,” and it was about the history of human rights. And I went to the meeting, and someone else was upset that I was teaching this course for some reason, I don’t remember why, and they said “Mr. Berkowitz is teaching this course and there’s no women in it.” And I said, “Well, the main text which we’re spending 12 weeks reading is Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism,” and he said “Well, she’s not the kind of woman we meant.”

CO: He said that?

Roger: Yeah.

CO: Wow.

Roger: And I was like, well that is just ridiculous.

CO: They wanted Judith Butler.

Roger: Yeah, I mean, it was not the right kind of woman. We had this conversation on decolonizing the curriculum two or three years ago–

CO: They’re really decolonizing everything these days.

Roger: Yeah. And I said the problem is–I raised my hand and said “I don’t really understand what decolonizing the curriculum even is.” Because if you say to me that you want more people of color on the syllabus or women, and I say alright, I teach people of color, and I teach Arendt, and you say they’re the wrong kind of person. If I’m teaching Hannah Arendt and not Judith Butler, am I decolonizing the curriculum?” Or am I colonizing it because she’s a white European woman and not the right kind of woman? And if I teach Albert Murray and I teach John McWhorter, am I decolonizing the curriculum? And I teach Ralph Ellison every year–am I decolonizing the curriculum because I’m putting black people on it or am I not because they’re not the right kind of black people? And so what decolonizing the curriculum actually means is not taking away whiteness and putting in people of color, it’s teaching the people I want you to teach. That is not what I consider to be a good intellectual argument.

I think it’s certainly legitimate to say that in the 21st century to teach only white men would be a mistake. It would be a huge mistake and I would never do that. But I think to say that you have to teach these particular people because they’re the ones who have the right opinions is a mistake. They want to say that we’re just talking about putting people of color, but if I teach Gandhi is that decolonizing the curriculum? They say no, because he’s a white guy. I mean, Gandhi is a white guy. Gandhi’s been canceled. I don’t know if you know this. They’re canceling Gandhi now because in South Africa he didn’t argue for the power of blacks, he was more concerned with the conditions of Indians. I mean, I teach Gandhi and I’ve gotten some blowback for it. This is the problem with this kind of decolonization argument–it has to fit with our ideology, not just that we need plurality of viewpoints.

CO: This reminds me of something that happened in your class on Radical American Democracy. We were reading the essential writings of Emerson, and someone in the class, I forget who, had a big problem with it. She was writing Emerson off and she pulled the “why are we still reading this old white man?” argument, which I think is one of the easiest ways to get participation points in today’s classroom environment.

She had a problem with the fact that Emerson kept referring to “Democratic Manhood.” She kept saying that it was sexist because it was referring to men and not women, or other, and there was therefore no use in reading anything of his. Imagine going about your education this way! You’re writing off an entire school of thought. You can still get things from old white men’s ideas, and apply them to yourself.

Roger: I think very few students are going through college without reading any dead white men—maybe at some colleges they are, but certainly not in my world, I mean, most of the people we teach are dead white men and I do believe it is a problem to only teach dead white men. I think dead white men have given our world a lot, but they have a limited perspective. I think there’s been some great work done involving subaltern movements, and I think slave revolts and slave movements have helped push forth conceptions of what democracy was and is. I think Native Americans contributed a great deal to this country in thinking about what equality and freedom are. David Graeber, but also a number of people including Benjamin Franklin, have highlighted that American colonists who went to live with the Indians for a couple of weeks never wanted to come back whereas Indians who came to live with the colonists wanted to always go back. There was more freedom in the Native American way of life than there ever was in the Western American way of life. I think that to some degree some of the American celebration of freedom have its roots in the encounter with the Native Americans, and I think reading some of those Native American texts and letters and descriptions, which have really only become well-known after the last 10-15 years–at least in my world–has been very helpful in helping to think through what freedom is.

So I’m a huge proponent of decolonizing the curriculum. I think my curriculum is pretty decolonized. But I don’t think that means you can only put people on there who say Native Americans were loving and peaceful people, which of course is a lie. I mean, of course the United States would commit a genocide against many Native American tribes, but let’s also be honest, many Native American tribes committed genocide against other Native American tribes, and they were never a peaceful people, and that’s part of their attraction as people who loved freedom.

And to me, the tradition of African American literature that I find most appealing, which is not to say it’s the only one, is the tradition that includes people like Frederick Douglass, and slave narratives, and Toni Morrison, and Ralph Ellison, and W.E.B Du Bois, and Albert Murray, and other writers who find in the black experience in America a love for and an evaluation of freedom and equality that pushes the American experience to be more true to its never-honored creed, and probably go beyond whatever the founders have ever dreamed of in what a free and equal society would ever look like. And I find that part of the African American literary tradition to be incredibly rich and powerful.

Does decolonizing the curriculum mean I have to teach only the people who think America is a white supremacist country? There is a history of white supremacism in America, and there are probably even continuing moments and even some institutions that are still infected by white supremacy in this country. But I don’t think America is a white supremacist country. That’s the big difference. People can argue that it is. Ta-Nehisi Coates can argue that it is, Ibram X. Kendi can argue that it is. I’ve taught Ta-Nehisi Coates, I’ve taught Ibram X. Kendi, but I don’t have to agree with them. And it seems like there’s a sense among the anti-colonialist ideology that decolonizing the curriculum means actually taking this position, and that I find completely mistaken and misguided.

CO: Are you worried about the trajectory of AI in education?

Roger: These things are never one directional, but just think how much more people can do and how much more they can know. You guys grew up with these things (holding up an iphone), but carrying a phone around with Google in your pocket has changed the way we live. I mean, if I wanna cite a quote about freedom I can just say “Google, find me a quote about freedom from Plato.” And it works. And I can also ask Chat GPT. And there’s an enormous power to that. The negative is I don’t have to read Plato to cite Plato. And that’s dangerous because people are then citing Plato without having tried to grapple with Plato and the fullness of his thought. And so you take snippets out, fit them into your argument, and you don’t actually understand Plato’s argument or Kant’s argument or Ralph Ellison’s argument, Du Bois’ argument… and I find that to be really problematic–I shouldn’t say problematic. I think it’s inhuman. And it’s unintellectual, anti-intellectual in the sense that we don’t encounter full arguments because we can find the snippets we need. Chat GPT is just the next level of that.

CO: Isn’t it a bit different from Google in that it almost assumes sentience in the way that it’s talking and trying to become more intelligent and sound more like a human?

Roger: I think so. I think it’s more deceptive and we think of it as more like someone we’re talking to and engaging with and so in a sense it hides better than Google its artificiality. And therefore seems less dangerous when it maybe is more dangerous. But again, it’s a continuum. I think Google was doing a lot of this and I think Chat GPT is bringing it to another level. I use Chat GPT when I have to write a paper. I’ll often ask Chat GPT a series of questions. I forgot when it was, but I was writing a paper and I asked Chat GPT “Who has written on this and what did they write?” And after about 15 minutes of asking more questions I found some new books that I didn’t even know of that I should read, right? And I thought that was very useful to me because it changed how I wrote the paper, so I think it can be useful. I post–Hannah Arendt Center posts on Linkedin, and when you post something now it says “would you like AI to suggest a rewrite?” And I’ve tried it a couple times, and they’ve had some interesting ideas, and I usually edit what they write. It’s a helpful tool and I think as long as you treat it as a tool, it’s helpful. The problem is if you stop treating it as a tool and treat it as the answer. And I think that the more people grow up with Chat GPT the more they’ll distrust it. A very interesting case is that I was writing a paper on friendship and I asked Chat GPT for a few quotes from Homer on friendship and it gave me some great quotes, and I put the quotes in my paper and I put the citations in and then I said “you know what, let me check this.” So I pulled down my Homer from my shelf and I went to that section, and the quote wasn’t there.

CO: Woah.

Roger: The quote was real, but it had made up where it was in the text.

CO: Chat GPT lies. Maybe it is human.

Roger: Well, it’s called “ghosting.” They say Chat GPT has lots of ghosts, because it doesn’t think–it simply does pattern recognition. If these quotes are in the same place a couple of times in this citation, it gets confused and it creates the idea that the citations go together. It’s a ghost. I know someone who asked Chat GPT for a list of the plays they’d written. And Chat GPT listed ten of their plays, but also four plays that were not theirs. And it’s because, for whatever reason, Chat GPT found those plays next to theirs a couple times, and thought “oh, these must be their plays.” It’s just pattern recognition. As it gets better those ghosts will become less and less frequent, but I don’t think it’ll ever get rid of it because Chat GPT doesn’t think.

So you have to somewhat understand how it works, and you have to be able to use it as a tool and not be used by it. But I don’t have the kind of existential angst about Chat GPT that I know some people do. I mean, technology is always there, it’s always gonna exist, it’s always gonna cause problems, and it’s always gonna create opportunities. The question is how we use it. The real threat of Chat GPT is if we just stop seeing it as a tool and start seeing it as the answer. If you say to Chat GPT, “how should we reform healthcare?” And it comes up with a new law, and you pass the law, you’re giving up. You’re giving up your political human will. And it might be the most efficient way.

CO: Chat GPT for President.

Roger: Chat GPT for President. It may be the most efficient, but it may require that certain people be killed to do this. By the way, humans kill people too. So it’s not, like, the end. But it’s like, you know, management consultants. The worst field ever invented. 99% of what management consultants do is get hired to tell people what they already know, and give them cover to do what they were already gonna do, which is usually to fire a lot of people. And so, you know, a management consultant comes in, a company wants to fire a bunch of people or create a new division and cut another division, they do this research and they charge them a couple million dollars and they say you should create this new division and cut this other division, and they say “oh, we’re gonna fire these people because the management consultant told us we have to.” It’s cover-thy-ass-syndrome.

So I think Chat GPT is gonna be used by many people in the same way. You want to kill some people, you want to cut funding for this, you ask Chat GPT and it says “yeah, let’s kill some people and cut some funding for this” and you say, “look, Chat GPT agrees.”

CO: It’s like in the olden times, the wizened advisor.

Roger: The real danger of AI—and I wrote this 15 years ago on our conference on “Human Being in the Human Age” and I have an essay on it called “Singularity in the Human Condition”—is that it makes us believe that our desire to be perfect is possible, and thus our desire to transcend our humanity. This is what trans-humanism is. That we humans are fallible, we do stupid things, we have bodily problems, we have moral lapses, we get tired, and we have this idea that if we could just be more rational we would be better. And, well, if you’re worried about war crimes, let bots who are programmed never to kill civilians fight the war. And if you’re worried about a surgeon getting tired, let AI do the surgery. And increasingly, we do that. And we will do that. And as you take humans out of the loop, war will become more ethical. It will become more humane, but less human.

Is that a problem? I mean, I think there are a lot of people who would say “who cares if it's human, we want it to be humane.” And I understand that argument. It’s a powerful argument. If you could make war more humane by having machines kill machines rather than humans kill and get revenge, get attacked, have your children murdered, then go on a three month bombing spree out of revenge, wouldn’t it be better just to let machines take over and do it rationally according to the rules of war? Makes some sense, but it also makes war less human and there’s a seduction to that. I think especially many idealists, people who want the world to be better and more perfect, would say “I could care less if it’s human, I want it to be humane.” And I think you have to be a humanist of some sort and you have to believe that tragedy is part of what makes humanity interesting and worthwhile, and that catastrophe is part of what it means to live in human life.

Not everyone’s gonna accept that. I went to see Ray Kurzweil speak with a friend of mine who has an incurable disease. And Ray Kurzweil talking about immortality and how AI is gonna cure all diseases, and my friend and I got into this big debate afterwards and I was like “look, do we wanna cure everything? Do we want all illness to go away?” And he said “I have to tell ya, I do. Cause I’m dying.” I get it, right? Do you want to die? It’s human to die.

Think about what it means to live a human life if death is not something you have to worry about. It changes the entire nature of five thousand years of what it means to live as a human being–whatever, four thousand, three thousand or however the hell old we are. It’s very easy in the abstract to say “we should let people die.” But when it’s you, or your mother, or your father, or your baby it’s much harder. And that’s how AI is gonna fundamentally change humanity, by letting people live so long. I mean, also, this is a big problem I think for humanity: what are people who are two hundred years old gonna do? At some point don’t you get bored? Aren’t people gonna get bored? What are they gonna do?

CO: Okay, how are people gonna live to be two hundred.

Roger: With new organs, or you might be able to download your brain into a computer. One answer is your body fails and you redownload, and another is you regenerate new organs.

CO: Maybe you’ll just live two hundred years in the virtual realm.

Roger: I mean, nanobots are gonna course through your body and repair your cells. This is stuff people are working on. This is not total science fiction, this is real.

CO: They’re already doing AI brain implants.

Roger: They’re doing brain implants, and they’re doing cell repair on a micro level. And it’s not crazy to think that people are gonna live regularly to two hundred years old, maybe even in your generation.

CO: God, the Supreme Court is gonna be so annoying. And Biden will be President forever.

Roger: I mean, life-tenure takes on a whole new meaning. But yeah, the average age of death has been going up quite a bit.

CO: I guess the old people, the two hundred year olds are just gonna be the richities of the richities. They’re gonna own all the property. Poor people are still gonna die at a normal age.

Roger: They’re gonna live on social security for hundreds of years.

CO: Social security for a hundred years?

Roger: I don’t know. I don’t know what’s gonna happen.

CO: I feel like the powerful double-centenarians are gonna take away social security. They’re gonna own their houses and properties for so long that people are gonna be born and they’re not gonna have anywhere to go. They’re gonna own America. They’re gonna colonize.

Roger: They’re gonna create a new planet.

CO: But it’s gonna be the best planet ever because the people who can afford to go will make it luxurious.

Roger: Well, most of the people who go there are gonna be the young, adventurous colonizers.

CO: I guess that’s what happens. But for now, when it comes to the current state of academia and thought, it seems like the jury is still out on which side is going to win our current culture wars. For example, in the battle between free speech and more enforced standards of speech, which side do you think will prevail?

Roger: I don’t think one side will win. I think like with most things in the world it’s a pendulum, and it swings back and forth. There’s always been times of censoriousness and times of free thought. I think that we’ve been on a censorious swing for a long time, and I think we’re still in that swing, but I think a fight against it has been picking up and I think that right now for the most part things are much better now than they were five years ago.

CO: Three books you recommend?

I hate these exercises. There are so many books that have formed parts of me. And what I take from a book may be so fully different from what you take. Moreover, certain books meant a lot to me when I was 10, others formed me in college, still others speak to me today. So much depends on where and when one reads a book. But that said, here are three books I love, that I think about a lot, that I wish more people would read and be touched by. Obviously, I recommend you read Hannah Arendt. But I’ll choose three others that at times in my life have formed who I am.

Six Nonlectures by E.E. Cummings

Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison

The Motion of Light on Water, Samuel Delany

Parts of this interview have been edited for clarity purposes.