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A
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B
Welcome to the Compact Podcast. Today we'll discuss Pope Leo's new encyclical, the controversy surrounding Christopher Nolan's Odyssey, and Jeff's food co op. I'm joined by Ashley Frawley and Jeff Schellenberger. And I'm Matthew Chimetz. So Pope Leo, the first American pope, has issued his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas. Jeff, you wrote about it this week for Compact. What were your thoughts on reading the document?
- [01:28]
C
I overall found it quite rich and impressive and I dug into it very quickly after it was released. It's quite long and in depth and I thought it was probably one of the most substantial responses to the artificial intelligence revolution that that has yet been issued. And what it, what it what interested me in particular was something that I've sort of been thinking about for the past couple of years, which is that I, I have the sense that there isn't really a substantial response to artificial intelligence coming from the sort of secular, liberal, progressive end of things, that much of that response seems to largely be a kind of as, as I say in the piece, a collection of irritable mental gestures as, as I quote Lionel Trilling saying that about the conservatism of the middle of the 20th century. But I think that would describe liberal and secular tech criticism of recent years. Right.
- [02:54]
B
We hear a lot about things like water usage which should be taken into account. But I think if you compare the water usage of AI centers to something like California almond production, it would be much smaller. And those arguments remind me a bit of the anti Walmart activism that you saw. I had a friend who really, that was his job was trying to keep Walmarts out of small towns. That was not a very successful movement, by the way. But there's really not a broader or deeper critique of AI of I could see.
- [03:43]
C
And so for me, this relates to and I I say briefly in the piece, and this is a point that I probably should expand on in some other context that I think in Some sense, the lack of a really in depth or substantive response from the secular side could be interpreted as, as another indicator that we are in a post liberal moment. So what do I mean by that? Well, one way of thinking about this is that liberalism involves a bracketing of questions about the good with capital G. And so to the extent that we are in a post liberal moment, questions about the good, about the ultimate ends of humanity have come back to the fore. And I do think that the only way you can really respond to the project of artificial intelligence is through these kinds of considerations. And I don't think that the secular intelligentsia is really mostly up to that. Now I have noticed it's kind of fascinating. I, I've had this thought, I thought of inserting that in, in my piece, but it seemed too extraneous. But I noticed that the notable progressive economists. Mariana Mazucado has a book coming out that I believe is just called the Common Good or Something to do with the Common Good. And interestingly, Democratic Senator Chris Murphy also has a book that has the Common good in the title. So it is kind of interesting to see, I think there is at least an attempt to reframe liberal politics around these questions. Another text that tries to do this is Alexander Lefebvre's book about liberalism as a way of life. And so I won't, I won't attempt to, you know, critique any of these, some of these, you know, are forthcoming titles that I haven't read yet. But I, I do think you, you see a gradual gravitation towards this orientation on the secular progressive left side of things. But it's, it's quite a difficult readjustment because, and, and if you read Lefebvre's book, I think he's, he's still ultimately quite uneasy about, about questions of the good or of the ultimate ends of humanity. So the reason that this, and that I think AI necessarily forces this set of questions is that it's a project informed by a specific vision of the good and of the ultimate ends of humanity. And as I quote in the, in the piece, there are a few examples from notable figures in the AI community. Eliezer Yudkowski, very early on, incredibly influential figure on the AI industry itself and its, its thought leaders. Even though he is now a doom, the most notable doomer and sort of anti AI activist. Although I think this turn in his thought obscures the fact that in some sense his metaphysics remain exactly the same. But that's, that's a whole other point. He, he states in His. One of his earliest published texts, that the pursuit of. Of superintelligence or of artificial general intelligence is. Is the temporary definition of the good. So he explicitly frames it as a project of pursuing the good. And he puts good in ca. He capitalizes G. So. And he also describes it as the interim meaning of life. Now, we could also think about Elon Musk describing, you know, saying that it's increasingly clear that humanity is the biological bootloader of digital superintelligence. So. So these are specific visions of human ends that the end of humanity is to bring about the emergence of a digital superintelligence. And that project can be identified as the good, that pursuing the good is pursuing superintelligence. So the point is that this entire project is informed by a specific vision of human ends and of the good. And at this point, the dominant secular liberal culture has simply forgotten how to talk about that or is largely uneasy about talking about that, although, as I said, that that may be changing, I think. I think partly forcibly. And so it is unsurprising that the most substantive response to the situation has come instead from the Catholic Church, which has its, you know, long standing and, you know, not that these questions, obviously these questions have been heavily debated within Catholic theology for. For millennia at this point, but nonetheless, it has its. Its longstanding account of human ends and of the good. And so it is really the only, or, you know, perhaps, if not the only, probably the largest institution that is able to present itself as offering an alternative vision to the one that is currently being advanced through the development of technology by the most highly valued corporations in the world. And so the further point I would make here, and the reason that I largely made this discussion about the work of Ivan Illich, the Catholic priest and philosopher, is that Illich argued that all of modernity should be understood as a continuation of the history of the Church. Now, this is quite a remarkable and provocative claim, and I don't have time to account for it in full, but essentially Illich's position is that the debates around technology and around institutions that largely make up, you know, his. His major written work is focused on education, medicine, on the philosophy of technology and tools, that these are ultimately extensions of theological debates that you can trace back 2,000 years. And that when we engage in these debates, we are in modern secular societies. We are, for the most part, unwittingly continuing in debates that were initiated in the context of the Catholic Church. And so to that extent, I think we can see this counterposing of a sort of AI centric vision of the destiny of humanity and a vision of that of human ends as defined by the Church as a ratification of Illich's basic understanding. Now, you know, there are other points I could go into. I just read sometime Compact contributor Matthew Walther's piece about the encyclical in the. In the New York Times that came out this morning. And his argument was that really what the Pope. The Pope missed an opportunity to go much harder against AI And I will say before I was planning to read and write about this before it was released, and I did in some ways find myself struck by the more conciliatory approach that it represented, because I imagine one way that I might end up responding to it and writing about it is through discussions of the notion of heresy, because I think it, and I mention the dispute between St. Augustine and Pelagius as a sort of prototype of the conflict being enacted here. But it's interesting that even when he addresses transhumanists and posthumanists, which I think we have to see the AI project as fundamentally informed by a transhumanist or posthumanist philosophical account, he is in some ways attempting to, instead of simply denouncing or excommunicating those sympathetic to transhumanist or posthumanist premises to, in a sense, build a bridge to them, and showed that there is a dramatic contrast between the Church's vision and that of the transhumanists. And as I say in the piece, one of the most interesting parts of the encyclical is where he discusses the Incarnation and essentially presents, in effect, presents transhumanism as an inversion of the Incarnation in which instead of the central event of human existence being the, the taking of human form by God, the transhumanists invert this and say the central event of human history is humanity's ascent into a kind of digital quasi godhood. And so there is some sense. And he talks about the Tower of Babel as one of his sort of framing devices for the entire account. And obviously, you could, you could simply argue that Transhumanists. Transhumanism is, is both heretical and fundamentally blasphemous quite easily. And yet it's interesting to see him attempting to, attempting to instead identify within the appeal of transhumanism the same impulses that inform people's, you know, that inform Christian believers understanding of the Incarnation. And, you know, I, so I, I think I, I can understand why Walther is somewhat more concerned about the, the, you know, again, more conciliatory approach. Being embodied here. I think he makes some quip to the, to the, to the effect that, you know, the point of the Tower, of, you know, it's as if when he discusses the Tower of Babel, well, the problem with it was there wasn't enough input and, you know, collaboration among the people building it. No, the point of it was that you weren't supposed to build it. It was. It was blasphemous and catastrophic to build it in the first place. So, you know, without trying to adjudicate that question, I do think it's interesting to me that his. I think his impulse was to attempt to appeal broadly to people who might be drawn into understanding human destiny in these transhumanist terms and to simply present them with the alternative vision offered by the incarnation, but also to show that there is a kind of continuity, at least between the impulses being appealed to here, even if where one leads is very different than the other. So, in any case, I do think it's maybe the most interesting and rich intervention in this set of debates that have unfolded over the past few years. And there's probably much more to say about it. I read it as quickly as I could and without sufficient grounding in some of the deeper kind of theological and institutional historical backgrounds. But nonetheless, I found it a very provocative and interesting read.
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D
Can I just ask. So you said that the only way to make it through this is by returning to these kinds of ultimate questions. If I'm not misstating your argument, but I found this idea of, like, we have to put the care for humans at the heart of technological change. And I'm not really sure how this is different from the kind of vague liberal denunciations of AI and of technological advancement. In fact, what annoys me, particularly with post liberals, rehashing of some of these questions, which I also don't think is new. This, like, now they're sort of saying, like, oh, we need to answer these bigger questions of meaning. We're all just so focused on the economy, but we need to talk about meaning. Which is just a rehashing of the whole GDP versus happiness debate from, like 20 years ago, but given an edgy branding, which was given then too, when leftism appeared to be renegade. And what annoys me is that, you know, everybody agrees with these things. I mean, yeah, okay, you, you mentioned that, like, the tech bros are all in on this sort of madness, but for the vast majority of people are not. Like, yeah, man, like, let's let trucks just drive over people. Like, of course we want to put technology at the humanity at the center of technological advancement. The question is, why can't we do that? You know, I was just at a, at a conference and I was sitting next to one of these like, ex happiness gurus now meaning guru. And he was like, well, what we really need to do is like, refocus companies on pursuing meaning and we need to get governments to focus on what matters to people's lives. And like, oh, right, and I want to like, have cheese fries every day and like ride unicorns. Like, you're, you're just gonna wind up with somebody rolling back all this stuff that you put in. Because once British industry becomes. This is a British guy becomes unprofitable, you know, you're gonna have like somebody come into power and like, what is all this junk? Ah, you bleeding hearts that throw this all out and we're gonna slash taxes again or whatever it might be. Because there's something else driving all of this, obviously the needs of the economy. So I don't know, what is it? What is it that is different about this than that kind of liberal, compost liberal, I think, anyway, vague denunciation of the lack of humanity of our systems and so on. That just winds up being wishful thinking, I would say.
- [18:49]
C
You know, and I, I say this not as a Catholic, but I would say what's different about it is that it is coming out of the institution of the church. And the church has a historical and institutional reality that situates it differently than the kinds of interventions you're describing. That would be my simplest answer. I don't think that necessarily. I mean, so I feel like it's funny because your critique in some ways echoes that of the tech bro sort of pro AI accelerationists in response to this, which is this is just the standard NGO Hogwarts, you know, sort of anti AI hogwash. And you know, this is just sort of cringe. This is just like cringe blue hair HR stuff, you know, safetiest stuff. And I suppose the ill Itchian answer would be to say, well, in some sense that's true, because the cringe blue hair AI stuff was never not an extension of the institutional vocations of the Church. In other words, that our modern secular institutions were always attempts to inherit and take up crises. That, and, you know, this is a tricky point from Illich, which is that, you know, Illich did not have a particularly happy relationship with the institution of the church. And you know, both in, in terms of his personal and professional life, despite being a priest, you know, he, he was de facto nearly. I mean, he was. He was sort of de facto defrocked, although he never actually, you know, left the priesthood. Officially, he ceased being active as a priest. And so we could get into that. But the point is that for Illich, there were a series of fundamental crises that emerged within the Church and that modernity is. And the crises of modernity are an extension of those crises. And so the only way we can understand our current predicament is by understanding how it comes out of the problems and contradictions that afflicted the Church from its origin. So that's in very broad strokes, the Illich argument. And so, you know, I suppose the main point I would try to make here is, you know, I can sort of understand your dismissiveness of those sorts of arguments, and I'm familiar with your critiques of those positions. Nonetheless, I think what Illich would say is we can't be entirely dismissive of them because they do. They do emerge out of these extremely deep crises that are foundational to our civilization and that we can't really escape or run away from. So that would be the Elysian argument. And so by situating these in relation to the historical institution of the Church and its vocation, we can get a clearer sense of where these problems are ultimately coming from. But, you know, Illich was not a. I don't know if he was a doomer, but he was certainly not somebody who thought that these. He. He did believe that we were in an apocalyptic predicament and that there was no way of escaping that reality. So to that extent, he didn't. He didn't offer any cheerful solution to this set of problems. So I don't know if that answers your question. I mean, I think. I think it's a reasonable critique. But I don't know, part of me wants to say, well, can we be. So, I mean, I understand where. How you've been occupied with this line of criticism for a long time and have learned a lot from it. But I'm wondering if we can be so dismissive of these. These approaches. And maybe the answer is, well, yes, because, you know, actually Marx was. Was the one who figured all this out.
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D
I mean, obviously. Right.
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C
Is that the answer? Yeah,
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D
but I just see that we're, like, constantly having this debate for, like, 150 years. You know, it's like utopian socialism or some version thereof versus, like, dismissive business as usual. But, you know, there was an intervention. I mean, I guess you would say it's discredited now, so maybe it is Just a choice between these two, you know, business as usual or cringe blue haired lefties. But there was another intervention, which was the Marxist one, which was to understand that these things, that you can't solve this problem in the realm of ideas and you also can't solve it entirely, obviously through economics alone, but that these things are kind of intertwined with each other. But it's just annoying to me that it's. Everything is always, gosh, why can't we just be nice to each other? Or like, wouldn't it be nice if we, and we'll just like set up all of these would like make a rule, make a decree that this should all happen. And then we're shocked when people try to evade the decree. Why? Because they have to. You know, even if we're all, we all, you know, if we want to be kind to each other and nice to our pets or whatever. Like, nobody wants to like destroy all the drinking water on earth because they're like a cartoonish super villain. That these are the, these are the outputs of a system that nobody consciously attempted to create. But you need to understand it if you want to change it. And simply issuing these nice sounding decrees doesn't help.
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C
Aha. But we have a very wealthy class of people who do actually talk like cartoon supervillains.
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D
That's true. But they're only giving voice to a tendency and nobody else is giving voice to like, yes, you can even sound like a cartoon or super villain and have the interests of humanity on your side. Like that's the middle ground that we need.
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C
I like this. This is actually a good sort of Zizekian thing. You know, when you are, when you say you are cartoonish super villain, you are actually not cartoonish super villain. Exactly. You are in some ways far too nice.
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D
Yeah, it's like with Google. Like the moment when they became evil is when they switched from don't be evil to do good. This is when you become supervillain.
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C
Right. When you say you want to destroy humanity and replace with artificial superintelligence, you are being far too merciful to humanity anyway.
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D
Let's take. No, take that to its logical conclusion. Maybe by trying to destroy humanity, you actually accidentally free it. Because if you are going to have a full on AI techno utopia, eventually you're going to destroy the foundation for it. And if you have any faith in the human spirit, that's the basis of freedom. So maybe it's, you know, maybe the true villain here is the Catholic Church and trying to hold it back. Oh no, no,
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B
One of the most remarkable things about the rollout of the encyclical was the presence of a co founder of Anthropic, the AI company at the encyclical's debut. This was Chris Ola, the 30something Canadian tech entrepreneur and AI billionaire.
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C
Damn Canadians.
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B
Yeah, I mean this is, well, I mean surely that's the most objectionable thing of all to have this, to have a Canadian there. But I'm not surprised that the Vatican would do this to bring in such a perfidious people who failed to go along with the American Revolution. But setting aside his nationality, what did you make of that, Jeff? Because that's, that's a very remarkable gesture. Pope John Paul II put out a relatively pro market encyclical, Centos Moussan, who's kind of drawing contrast with Soviet communism, but he didn't have Jack Welch there sitting near him or something. This gesture certainly indicates that this is not a purely Luddite task that Leo's undertaking. But yeah, what did you make of that otherwise? What's the meaning of that choice?
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C
Yeah, I'd say it does sort of. It's where I would most endorse Walther's criticism of the weak tea aspect of this whole document because I do think there's something, I mean, it kind of goes back to what we were just saying. You know, I think one of the nefarious aspects of the current AI industry is precisely its rhetoric of humanitarianism, which I, you know, we should have learned our lesson about from earlier iterations of Silicon Valley. And you know, I, I don't think that it's. I. One thing that I think is interesting about it is that I actually don't think that it's cyn. This kind of goes back to my point that the AI industry is fundamentally driven by a vision of the ultimate ends of humanity and the good. And so I do think that these people do actually believe that they are carrying out this, you know, fundamentally transformational project that is not simply, you know, a pursuit of profit or whatever. And, and I mean this, by the way, I think is, is another of the weaknesses of the kind of standard left criticism of the AI industry that, you know, it's like, oh, these are just greedy capitalists, so we need to reign in their greed and expose them as greedy. I think on some level, No, I mean these people, and part of why they're sitting on top of the world at the moment is because they are able to offer this kind of powerful overarching vision of human destiny. And so I would read this probably in terms of what I just said previously, where there's a response you can imagine from the Church which is simply to denounce all of this as heresy. And I think that would be an understandable and in some ways reasonable position. It seems to me the approach here is instead to attempt to build a bridge by recognizing the impulse toward transcendence that is embodied in this, in this vision that that's driving this industry, and to attempt to identify sympathetic parties or, or parties who will engage in dialogue on the grounds that there is some sor of dialogue to be had about transcendence and about the impulse toward transcendence. Yeah.
- [31:02]
B
It's worth noting in this context, Jeff, in terms of the tone of the encyclical that Robert Prevost, the American cardinal who was elected pope, he took the name Leo and he did not take the name Pius. So Pius, Leo XIII was the great expositor of modern Catholic social teaching. And he broke from his predecessor Pius, who had issued a syllabus of errors, basically denouncing the idea that the Roman pontiff ought to reconcile himself to progress and modernity. Right. And Leo didn't come out and say, okay, progress and modernity are per se good. He sustains Pius critique of them in fundamental ways. But he adopted a very different tone. He said the most important thing is to look on the world as it really is. And he set aside long standing Catholic debates over kind of what the best regime type is. So he effectively said, whether monarchy or empire or republic or what have you is best in the abstract, our task is to work with the political forms that are presented to us today and to find ways to elevate them, bring them into conformity with our vision of the good. And so there was a certain, really retreat from these very specific contentions that were being offered against ideas associated with the French Revolution. There was more of an effort to discern a way to find something good in them or offer corrections of them that could bring them into conformity with what the Church wanted. And so I think that that attitude is more typical of Leo's attitude, whereas Francis really did have a more kind of anti modern attitude. So his encyclical Laudato Si, which was understood as a denunciation of climate change and was, that was actually a much deeper critique of modern and industrial, technological sort of civilization and logic. It was kind of anti modern in a way that we really hadn't seen seen since before the last Leo. And Leo is not as anti modern as Francis. So that's A really notable change, and it rhymes with a similar change in a previous era of Catholic history.
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D
Could I just tack on one completely different thought? The other thing was that unless Jeff, you want to come back on that point. The other thing that was interesting to me, and I just want to throw this out there as I don't have an answer, but I found it interesting was that Leo talked, and we're friends, you know, on first name basis, talked about AI slavery or like technological slavery, this possibility of new forms of digital slavery. And it occurred to me that there's this old Marxist argument where that says that slavery wasn't ended because of the goodwill of, you know, movements, although that was obviously part of it, but because it became incompatible with the foundation of capitalism or the sort of the next level of capitalism, you know, as it was moving away from this kind of mercantilist, toward this kind of like universalizing subject, this capitalism that needed a subject that both works and plays and consumes and whatever. I'm grossly oversimplifying this, but that's kind of the argument that capitalism itself did away with, with slavery. And it occurred to me that perhaps it is the case that all of this like doom and gloom around AI and all of us losing our jobs and so on and these new forms of slavery that are going to develop and so on, I mean, capitalism itself, you know, may just simply do away with that. It may, it may not be that. And also from the, like the optimistic vision of the Marx of some Marxists saying like AI will do away with capitalism because as I just gave a version of it myself, because it will make so much of our work superfluous and therefore the time necessary to reproduce our existence is much smaller and this is the basis of communism, blah, blah, blah. Maybe without any movement like none of that can happen and we will simply see that abolished in some, in some way. Perhaps it's not like we're heading toward doom or utopia, but these things are simply not possible within capitalism. We're not moving forward with capitalism. Capitalism may simply abolish the possibility itself.
- [36:07]
B
Christopher Nolan's adaptation of the Odyssey expected in July, but so much discussion of it already largely centering around the casting, with an additional significant skirmish over the costume design. And I mean, really, this, this is a high stakes battle. It's our modern American Iliad, it seems. We published a piece in compact this week by John Byron Kuner. The title is Post Literacy Raised the Stakes of the Odyssey Debate. And Kuhner is a classicist and a brilliant critic and he Makes a point that I haven't seen anyone else offer, which is that as people actually encounter these texts, less and less have less familiarity with them, any adaptation gains added cultural importance and centrality. So. And in effect, when. When there's not a large or. Or significant audience for the text itself that is familiar with the actual story as it is told in the book, it becomes harder to kind of riff on that story. It becomes more difficult to offer an interesting variation because audiences can't go to the theater and think, oh, that's rather clever that he made that choice. And it might seem awful, counterintuitive, but if you know the text, it's actually he's picking up on an element in the character. So it may seem odd to have Lupita Nyong', o, the Kenyan actress playing Helen, but this thing she brings to the performance really draws out this one element of the actual text. Well, when you have no familiarity with the text, you can't recognize variations on the theme. The variation just appears to be the theme to you. You look at the film and say, okay, well, I guess this is the Odyssey. And that really makes every decision taken by the director seem to have much greater stakes for people who are invested in these stories, who believe that familiarity with them matters. So, yeah, I was quite struck by that. I think Kuner is definitely on to something. Kudos to him. Ashley, did you have any other thoughts as you've seen this kind of debate play out online?
- [38:55]
D
Yeah. Particularly in Greece, where a lot of Greek people are kind of mad that everybody is represented but Greek people.
- [39:03]
B
Because you live in Greece.
- [39:05]
D
I do, yes.
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B
Listeners who aren't familiar. Yes.
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D
Lot of talk about that. It was interesting because one of the actors that was cast said, oh, well, the cast is representative of the world. And Greeks were like. Except Greeks. Like, literally not a single. As far as I'm aware, not a single Greek was cast. But the interesting thing is that, you know, for. For, I don't know, centuries, I suppose, the Greek myth, Greek mythology, not mythology, philosophy and so on, was universalized. Right. It was, like, treated as the basis of our universal humanity, something that could speak to everybody through the ages and so on. And so, in a way, I mean, you could read this. It's not. But you could read this as, like, the end point of a universalizing ambition of this. Of Greek, of Greek culture, that it becomes the basis of Western civilization. And then by, you know, you. By extension, then you have. Anybody can play in this role because it belongs to all of us. That would be the most Optimistic read, but it isn't that. It's not that. Because what ought to be a universalizing function of, of, you know, globalization or whatever it is, is actually flipped around and become a very clear statement about particularity, about representation. Why not these people? Why don't we represent these people? And why not this type of person? We need a trans person in there and we need this kind of person in there. We need. So it becomes this statement about all of these different groups that in and of themselves and their difference require being represented on the screen so that we can see them. And the. The myth itself is almost like torn down on purpose through doing that as opposed to being celebrated as something that is for all of us. And so it's interesting that you still have that universalizing impulse and yet it reads as entirely particular and as a kind of big fu to the history of that of, of the assumption of Greek universalism, of it being of Western cultures universalizing impulses.
- [41:24]
C
My sense is that the characters who are raising controversy are pretty minor characters. Helen of Troy is not a major figure and only appears briefly in the Odyssey. I believe the other one that's been brought up is Ellen Elliot Page as Achilles, which is.
- [41:47]
B
Okay. Is that the actual role? I'm unclear on that. I don't know.
- [41:52]
C
I saw something to that effect. But. All right, regardless, if that were the case, again, these are characters who are seen pretty briefly in the text of the Odyssey. So I sort of think the supposed sort of woke casting imperatives here were actually not a particularly dominant feature of this film, as far as I can tell. But obviously they're the ones that have gotten attention. So you know, I tend to think. I tend to be like somewhat dismissive of, of this whole brouhaha. It seems quite silly to me. I just, you know, I. First of all, I find doing like race science on characters from ancient myth inherently ludicrous. And you know, this is a place where the anti woke and the woke entirely mirror each other. Because the woke are obsessed with the idea of some sort of. Well, in selectively obsessed with the idea of some kind of ethnic essence that can be traced back into the. The primordial past. And of course then they anti woke up are also obsessed with this. And so they think that it's meaningful to claim that a character in a 3,000 year old myth should be legible in terms of contemporary racial stereotypes just seems fundamentally silly and ahistorical. So I mean, it is sort of, I suppose, like there are sort of interesting questions and problems raised by some Adjacent cases. Like, I think in this case, like, I honestly, I find it. I, I mean on one hand, clearly the, the people doing the casting sort of cared enough to, you know, do a bit of diversity based casting. Although as I said, as far as I can tell, the, the major cast members are not, you know, particularly provocative and the, the most discussed ones are, are relatively minor characters in the story. But you know, I, I just tend to think fixating on this stuff is quite silly. I will say. You know, there are some kind of interesting cases that I, I've noticed in terms of casting of things like Shakespeare, which is that for example, I mean at this point it's become almost a cliche of Shakespeare theatrical performances that I've gone to in recent years. Casting a female, casting an actress to play a male lead, whether it's Richard III or Macbeth, has become just kind of a cliche in Shakespeare production, as far as I can tell. So you know, to that extent there is just kind of this agenda which I, I would say has, you know, may have, may have once been sort of interesting in certain cases, but has just become this tiresome gesture. And of course, you know, it, it's like there, there are limits to this as well that, you know, there are obviously female characters who you're probably not. Well, you never know actually, maybe you will, maybe they will cast a biological male as Ophelia and stuff like that. Now I'm not sure, but it does strike me that like this, this imperative towards, you know, essentially giving, you know, ostensibly exclude, you know, sort of marginalized groups access to playing these sort of major and central role, obviously that there is this imperative and it, it does raise some interesting questions like, you know, you can have a black, you know, Macbeth or whatever, but you're not likely to have a white Othello. And I mean that's partly because like in, in some of these cases you, I mean you did have Orson Welles do Othello and I guess Lawrence Olivier do Aello and blackface way back when. But you know, there, there are these questions of where. The sort of casting gesture comes into conflict with some other imperative on the level of the story. And then cases where it doesn't, where you know, the, the character can just be conceived of as some sort of universal being who, who. Any. Who any sort of identity can be plugged into. So I don't know, I mean, I think there are sort of interesting debates to be had about those sorts of things sometimes. But in this case, I have to admit I'm, I'm Profoundly uncompelled by the entire debate. It just seems like a total waste of time and fundamentally uninteresting.
- [47:31]
B
My drama professor in college, who was very flamboyant and had a lot of great memorable lines. One, the least funny, and I think the wisest, was when you're making a choice about how to read a play or stage something, if it's, if it's not obvious what you should do, you can do it this way or that way. The correct choice is the most interesting choice. So just do what is most interesting. And I think, as you say, Jeff, these kind of surprising casting decisions have become less interesting over time. And so the imperative for doing them has really lessened in terms of historical epics and their casting. The greatest historical epic ever committed to film, certainly Ben Hur, as directed by the great William Wyler. And in that film, Charlton Heston plays the hero, Judah Ben Hur, the great champion of the Hebrew people. And I'll just mention one of the funniest elements from the production of that film was that they had to do 16 takes of Charlton Heston reading the line, I'm a Jew. So they, they struggled. They struggled with that one. So sometimes, you know, the kind of woke casting, like let's slot Charlton Heston in as the great Judah Ben Hur. Not, not the most kind of ethnically correct casting decision of all time does lead to problems in the production. I'm a Jewish. I'm a Jew. I'm a Jew. You still haven't nailed it, Charlton. Let's. Let's try again, buddy.
- [49:27]
C
Of course, Charleston. Charlton Heston also appears as Moses, of course, in the Great Ten Commandments.
- [49:38]
B
I mean, he may be the greatest. I mean, he's probably the most famous Jew of all time in some sense. I mean, he's played Moses and Judith Ben Hur. It's pretty, pretty incredible. Speaking of Israel, Jeff, you are a member of the Park Slope Food Co Op, which I understand is prepared to boycott, divest from, and perhaps sanction Israel or How far does this go? But I know that this week you and your fellow co op members are going to have something of a debate on this.
- [50:17]
C
Yeah. So this is newsworthy insofar as it has been covered in the paper of record, the New York Times, the Park Slope Food Co Op, I believe, was founded in 1971, 1972. And it is by many accounts the central institution of the most obnoxious woke Brooklyn liberalism you can imagine. Now, I will say I am a very happy member of the Park Slope Food Co. Op One thing that goes against its reputation is that despite the current imbroglio, which I'll go into in a second, it is generally extremely well run and kind of an impressive entity institutionally, despite what you would think would be the crippling effects of these kind of inane ideological disputes that, you know, presumably would cripple. I mean, I'm, I'm channeling what I imagine the sort of standard set of right wing assumptions about this would be, but you know, that presumably the whole place would just be ground to a halt constantly by disputes over pronouns and things like that. In reality, it's actually quite impressively well run and has great food and has very good prices and you get access to it by doing a shift every six weeks. I personally am involved in packaging bulk foods, so I go down in the basement and you know, put like nuts and tea and bags and then, you know, stock them in the aisles of the store. And so I do that for two hours and 45 minutes every six weeks. And in exchange I get access to extremely favorably priced groceries that are, you know, a very nice selection. And so overall it's, I'd say it's a place where a lot of people, despite it having a certain reputation, a lot of people, you know, appreciate and enjoy it for the, the same reason that I do and are somewhat aloof from the occasional sort of ideological paralysis into which it collapses. And so in any case, the, the, the thing that has been covered and you know, was, was the subject of a long New York Times report a couple days ago is there is a kind of final showdown over the attempts to boycott Israeli goods which, the conflict over which has been ongoing for I believe, decades at this point and the past couple of years. Obviously it's really heated up during the Gaza war. And the thing that's slightly comical about this whole question is that I believe there are maybe three or four Israeli products stocked in the entire store and then maybe occasionally some others sort of seasonal produce items. But really it's a very small, in terms of the actual goods in the aisles of the store, it's extremely minor. So it really is a question about the institution, you know, whether the institution wants to make this statement. It seems hard for anyone to argue that, you know, this in itself is going to have any impact whatsoever given the, you know, minuscule scale on which Israeli goods are being sold. But nonetheless, I think it has become this kind of central institutional showdown that, you know, people who are on the pro boycott side will point back to the, the co op's history of boycotting South African goods during apartheid, I believe, Chilean goods during the Pinochet dictatorship. So this goes back a long way. But you know, for various reasons, including the fact that there are, you know, despite the reputation of the place, there is a pretty ideologically and religiously diverse membership, including a, you know, considerable number of, of Orthodox Jews who are members and so who don't kind of fit the, the otherwise standard profile of the, the sort of, you know, Brooklyn secular liberal that you might expect. And so anyway, there is this final vote which is going to be extremely fraught and I'm not, not really looking forward to, which is basically if the pro boycott side is unsuccessful at. So currently the, the rules for having a boycott of the store is that 75% of the store's membership has to vote in favor of a boycott for a boycott to be enacted. And so this is why a boycott has not so far been enacted. Because while it's possible they would win on a, the pro boycott side would win on a simple majority, they will not win. They will not be able to win 75% of the vote. And so there is currently a procedural effort to lower the threshold for a boycott vote to 50% or to, you know, simple majority 51%. And it's thought that were this procedural change to, to go through, then the boycott would also go through. And conversely, if, if the attempts to impose the, the new lower threshold for boycott votes fails, then the pro boycott side will be banned from bringing up the whole question for the subsequent two years. So essentially if they lose, they will also lose the right to continue forcing everybody to debate this at every meeting.
- [56:50]
B
So not to go all Robert's Rules of Order on you, but how many, what percentage of the votes do you need for the procedural change? Is it 75% or some lower threshold?
- [57:01]
C
Yes. So you need, you need 50% in order to change the receipt the vote for boycott to 75%. So in other words, if they get 50%, then they will be able to lower the, the threshold.
- [57:21]
B
Oh, they only need a majority for the procedural change.
- [57:24]
C
Yes.
- [57:25]
B
Oh, wow. Okay.
- [57:26]
C
So it'll definitely be down to the wire. It's going to be a nightmare. And it is kind of, as I said, it's interesting only insofar as it in practical terms is a very minor question and yet it has become a debate over kind of the soul of the co op. And I'm not actually sure what's going to happen.
- [57:53]
B
Well, report back to us next week, will do. So with that, thanks to Ashley thanks to Jeff. Thank you producer Steven Adubato. For more go to compactmag.com subscribe.
- [58:28]
D
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- [58:34]
E
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- [59:10]
C
Fantastic.
- [59:12]
E
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