Artificial Intelligence and Samuel Butler's Erewhon

I'm not worried, of course, but the current controversy over AI made me think of Samuel Butler's dystopian novel, Erewhon; Or, Over the Range (1872). Butler's narrator in the novel is a New Zealand sheepherder in search of lost sheep. He gets lost in the mountains himself, and stumbles into an isolated civilization. "Erewhon" is an anagram for "Nowhere." Butler was following the example of Sir Thomas More's Utopia. More's title means Nowhere in Latin. But you probably already knew or guessed that. 

Erewhon is an upside down world which the author uses to satirize the customs and practices of Victorian England. Erewhonians are vegetarians, but some people (men) are unable to follow the vegetarian code. They go to illicit chop houses to eat forbidden meat. The parallel to Victorian brothels is obvious. Crime is treated in hospitals rather than punished. In contrast, illness is criminalized and the ill sent to prison. 

Instead of churches, it has lavishly decorated musical banks, where people (mostly women) go ostentatiously once a week in their best outfits to deposit money and listen to "hideous" music. They act as if  they place the greatest value on the musical banks, and the money they deposit into them is the "real" currency. In fact, the musical currency is worth very little. Erewhonians place most of their wealth in an alternative set of financial institutions. No points for guessing what Butler was satirizing here.

Now to the connection to AI. The people of Erewhon have destroyed most of their machinery, except for some disabled models they have put in museums as a warning. The machines had been reproducing themselves. They were evolving, becoming intelligent and threatening to become the masters of humans. Here Butler was no doubt influenced by the evolutionary writings of Charles Darwin and others, which were producing enormous controversy in the Western world. 

The destruction of the machines had taken place hundreds of years before. The controversy over the machines had divided Erewhon into two camps, the machinists and the anti-machinists. A bloody civil war ensued that lasted for many years. The anti-machinists prevailed, wiped out their opponents, and destroyed the hated machines. Not all of them, but the most advanced and dangerous

Perhaps the Erewhonians were onto something. We may be at war with the machines soon, I write on my laptop, while listening to music on my iPhone and checking my activities on my Smart Watch. 

On the Pleasure of Hating, by William Hazlitt

In 1826 the English writer William Hazlitt (1778-1830) wrote an essay called "On the Pleasure of Hating." Today considered one of the great British critics and essayists, his aim in this work was to explain the power of hate as an emotion, why so many people find satisfaction in hating others. Although much of the essay relates to Hazlitt's time and personal relationships, his analysis of hatred remains relevant to the present, given the upsurge of hate and cruelty across the planet. 

[Image: William Hazlitt, Self-portrait, from c. 1802]

At the outset, it is important to note that as a young man, Hazlitt was convinced of the benevolence of human nature. By the 1820s, he had rejected that belief. In the essay, Hazlitt argues that hatred is built into our nature. We need to have something to hate to maintain "our  thought and action." The human mind hankers after evil and "takes a perverse, but a fortunate delight in mischief, since it is a never-failing source of satisfaction." In contrast, pure good is boring. It lacks "variety and spirit." 

Perhaps for this reason, he continued, old friends often begin to hate one another as the years pass by. People who once delighted us begin to bore or annoy us. Hazlitt confesses that he no longer is on good terms with close friends of the past, who included many of the literary lights of the day, such as Wordsworth and Coleridge. His staunch admiration for the cause of liberty created friction with friends who had become more conservative due to the French Revolution. They might (and did) blame his bad temper, but he countered that they fell out with each other as well.  

The worst effects of hating, Hazlitt argued, arise in relation to religion and politics. "The pleasure of hating," is "like a poisonous mineral." It perverts religion, turning it into anger and bigotry. Virtue becomes "a narrow, jealous, inquisitorial watchfulness over the actions and motives of others." It turns "the different sects, creeds, doctrines in religion" into excuses "for men to wrangle, to quarrel, to tear one another in pieces." 

Hatred "makes patriotism an excuse for carrying fire, pestilence, and famine into other lands." Love of country does not inspire any friendly feeling or disposition to help one's countrymen. It means only hatred for the inhabitants "of any other country we happen to be at war with for the time." Here, Hazlitt was thinking of Britain's wars against the French in particular. 

People claim to be "patriots and friends of freedom," but the world is divided into two types: tyrants and slaves who support the efforts of kings to forge "chains of despotism and superstition." The words and actions of fools and knaves are hailed as "public spiritedness."  

If humanity truly desired right to prevail, "they might have had it long ago." But "they are prone to mischief." In private life, "hypocrisy, servility, selfishness, folly, and impudence succeed." Meanwhile, "modesty shrinks from the encounter, and merit is trodden under foot." 

Hazlitt then turns to and on himself. He confesses to having witnessed and analyzed human "meanness, spite, cowardice;" to have seen people's lack of feeling and concern for others; to have observed our self-ignorance and our tendency to prefer "custom" over "excellence." 

All these failings lead to social "infamy," to disgraceful and appalling behavior. In his own case, they have led to disillusion. "I have been mistaken in my public and private hopes, calculating others from myself, and calculating wrong; always disappointed where I placed most reliance; the dupe of friendship, and the fool of love." He asks, has all this not given him reason "to hate and despise myself? Indeed I do; and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough."

Perhaps these were the words of a bitter old man, who spent his last years in poverty. His two marriages had failed. He found it difficult to make a living due to his radical ideas and critiques of influential people. Or perhaps he had discovered an inconvenient truth about human nature, one that helps explain the failure of "the acme of Creation" to establish a world of peace and justice. 

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William Blake: Naked Spirituality

In his seminal biography of William Blake, published in 1863, Alexander Gilchrist relates that one day a visitor to Blake's house arrived to find William and his wife Catherine sitting in their garden summer house, stark naked. "Come on in," Blake famously called out to his friend, the aptly named Mr. Butts. "Its only Adam and Eve, you know!"

The artist and poet William Blake (1757-1827) was both brilliant and eccentric. Some of his contemporaries considered him mad, but that seems a step too far. Blake's artistic brilliance has recently been on display in a magnificent, comprehensive exhibition at the Tate Britain (ended Feb. 2, 2020). His eccentricity appears as well, in his style, subject matter, and comments by contemporaries. Gilchrist, who rescued Blake from obscurity, called him "a new kind of man, wholly original." It's hard to disagree with that.

Blake was unconventional in his life as in his work. His work, including paintings, engravings, etchings, and drawings, is chock full of spirits, angels, demons, humans experiencing pleasure and pain. Some of Blake's images were inspired by his reading and cultural milieu. Others sprang from his fertile imagination. Blake claimed to have seen supernatural beings, even conversed with angels in a tree. (Below: "The Good and Evil Angels")

Many of Blake's characters have one thing in common: a lack of clothing. Blake obviously delighted in the human form, whether in physical or spiritual versions. In Blake's vision, mystical religion cavorts with eroticism. He portrays Adam and Eve in the buff, of course, but in a wholly sensual pose. Satan, angels, and God keep an eye on them. Only God is decently attired. 

Lots of other nudes, some in erotic positions, are juxtaposed with religious imagery and symbolism. (Below: "Satan before the Throne of God")

"Lot and His Daughters" shows the scantily clad daughters checking out their drunken Dad's equipment before, well, you know.

What we can see today was probably the tip of the iceberg. His executor, appointed by Catherine Blake, burned many volumes of  her husband's drawings and manuscripts. 

William Blake certainly had highly unusual ideas for his time regarding sex, ideas influenced by religious mystics such as the Moravians, and the radical feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. At times, he endorsed a version of free love and condemned marriage as a legal prison. But his ideas were complex and changed over time, becoming more conservative as he grew older.

He once told a barrister friend that it was part of God's plan that he should have access to a "community of women." He cited the Bible: Did not God's Chosen, the Patriarch Abraham, have concubines? Blake's friend was taken aback: "Shall I call him Artist or Genius--or Mystic--or Madman? Probably all." 

When Blake told his wife Catherine of his Abrahamic vision, she cried, and he abandoned his quest for concubines. It seems he was motivated towards the Abrahamic idea in part by Catherine's apparent inability to bear children.  

William and Catherine Blake are buried in Bunhill Fields Cemetery, Finsbury, London.