Commentator
The Queen and the Prime Minister, The Death of Art by A.I.?, Ukraine's Offensive, Chile's Constitution
TIME AND CHANGE IN THE UK
I have nothing to add to the very genuine outpouring of grief from all over the world on the death of Queen Elizabeth II. She was a good queen. She went a long way towards demonstrating the value of constitutional monarchy. There’s always the whisper campaign that this whole thing is a bit silly and it’s time to wind it down, or at least to lose a few of the ermines, as The New York Times, surprisingly quick off the block, suggested. But symbolism is of incalculable worth. The queen was something close to the ideal constitutional monarch, a unification point for Brits over a fractious and generally demoralizing period of time, and, to a surprising extent, a softener of the British brand across the world. It was somehow difficult to get too upset about the realities of British imperialism when that meant, at some level, denouncing the gracious queen.
Given the length of their reigns, the comparison becomes inevitable to Victoria - and the contrast is very stark. Victoria presided over empire, proud and immutable; Elizabeth over something very different - the dissolution of empire, a peculiar period in which power took on new manifestations, and money and branding seemed often to matter just as much as violence. And there is, absolutely, the sense, even for people outside of the British imperium, of an era passing, just as there was with Victoria’s death. And Elizabeth’s era was, to a certain extent, the time-when-we-all-learned-to-get-along, 70 years under the shadow of nuclear annihilation, with population exploding, and somehow relatively prosperous and non-violent. The feeling at the moment is of a turn towards a darker era, of A.I. and of hyper-divided politics, and it’s worth taking a moment to savor just how gracefully we passed through those 70 years.
Meanwhile, Britain’s forgotten woman, Liz Truss, becomes, by the way, Prime Minister - and, of course, there’s a real poignancy in her having had her audience with the dying queen. One of the best features of modern electoral politics is the in-depth after-action report - Politico’s ‘How She Did It’ inherits the mantle from Newsweek, which took it in turn from ‘The Making of the President’ - and these deeply-reported pieces tend to be far more satisfying than the elections themselves. In Politico’s telling, the election was a real House of Cards, backbencher sort of thing, with Tory MPs having a very different view of things than just about anybody else on the planet. Basically, there was a great deal of loyalty to Boris Johnson - the phrase ‘defenestration of Johnson’ keeps coming up - and Rishi Sunak pretty much persona non grata even as the frontrunner in the race. “The members were really cross about what had happened to Boris,” one MP said, in the most charming quote in the piece. “When they found out Sunak had been planning for months, and registering domain names, it backfired.” Once that dislike of Sunak found its home in The Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday that was, really, the death-knell of Sunak’s campaign. “It’s really hard when you have the print media against you,” a Sunak ally told Politico.
So Truss becomes Prime Minister by letting everybody else knock each other out - “knocking seven sides of shit out of each other,” as one of her allies put it - and by scheming a bit less overtly than her rivals. The hallmark of her personality appears to be this sort of quiet opportunism - “the kind of cunning that people might underestimate,” as Cleo Watson, a Johnson aide, said. And, knowing the way the wind is blowing, she has tacked hard to the right, promising to cancel corporate tax hikes and modeling herself after Margaret Thatcher.
What becomes most interesting with her is the feminist narrative of the woman-who-is-constantly-underestimated. Sunak clearly thought she was a lightweight and may well have ‘lent’ votes to her in preliminary balloting in order to avoid facing Penny Mordaunt. The smart speculation at the moment is that Truss’ great liability is her loyalty to Johnson - that she is sort of obligated to keep him close and that Johnson may well reward that loyalty by taking a run at her job the moment her poll numbers dip. But, honestly, the sort of crass opportunism practiced by Truss may be the best credentialing there is for the premiership. This seems to be a very good time to be a conservative politician. The left, astonishingly enough, manages to be more absurd than the right at least on cultural issues. Support for Ukraine is enduringly popular. The U.K.’s economic problems may be dealt with - as Truss has already indicated she will do - by borrowing money and kicking the can down the road. And the task at hand for Truss seems mainly to be patrolling her own backbenches and keeping an eye out for anybody looking to unseat her.
THE A.I. TIPPING POINT
Much more important than any of that is the sense that we’re at a tipping point with A.I. I’ve been feeling it very strongly over the past couple of weeks - an intimation that this, really, is the time when the fabric of our lives changes and when we need a new relationship to our own identity.
The story at the moment is about an art competition won by an A.I. program. It’s a beautiful, arresting piece of art. The ‘artist’ making it is relatively classy about the whole thing, open about A.I.’s involvement in the work and convincing that the creation of the work was a deeply gratifying experience for him. “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” the artist, Jason Allen, told The New York Times. “I felt like it was demonically inspired — like some otherworldly force was involved.”
And there has been the expected despair. “We’re watching the death of artistry.” “This is so gross.” “This thing is actively anti-artist” are a few of the typical responses. And Allen - undermining my statement above that he’s ‘relatively classy’ about the whole thing - declares, “Art is dead, dude.”
But everybody is talking a bit about the wrong thing. The issue isn’t art so much as the frameworks we use to display art - and, particularly, our 20th century mania for artistic ‘contests.’ These have become so integral to the way we think about and the way we evaluate art that we’ve almost completely forgotten how artificial the whole exercise really is. For this, I’d blame - to a surprising extent - the deathbed whims of Alfred Nobel. The whole phenomenon of the artistic contest wasn’t particularly tied in to the culture of the 18th or 19th century, but, with the Nobel Prize and its many derivatives (the Prix Goncourt, the Pulitzer, the Booker, etc), art moves into the domain of something that everybody can understand - into sports, basically, with Ladbrokes duly supplying betting odds on contest winners.
The absurdity of the contests is somehow always under-appreciated - what the hell does the King of Sweden have to do with whether a book is good or not? - and now that stands in stark relief with the advent of A.I. and the contests in which human-generated work is simply inferior to pieces of software.”
The good news in all this - you really have to scrape for good news in the era of the digital dystopia - is that we have been through this particular set of dynamics before. Visionary artists realized, towards the end of the 19th century, that representational art was fundamentally a dead end - not so much because there was anything wrong with it but because pictorial technique was already at a very high level and photography was rapidly supplanting hand-crafted visual art as a mimetic tool. The solution was, ultimately, modernism - to move in a completely different direction and arrive at a brand-new definition for art, which had nothing to do with technical or measurable excellence and everything to do with spirit and soul and the singular inner landscapes of the artists making the work.
It’s fitting that the great break in the history of art also had to do with the rejection of a contest - the turn away from the Paris Salon and the inauguration of the Salon des Refusés, an alternative arts scene without prizes, without juries or ceremonies, and united by a certain sensibility, a belief that art was fundamentally about interiority and exploration rather than virtuosity. Faced with the challenge of A.I., a similar values shift is needed, and the question in a sense becomes not whether computers should be excluded from art contests but whether humans should be. (And, by the way, it’s really apposite that ‘Théâtre D’opéra Spatial,’ the offending work of A.I. art, looks so much like the sort of technically masterful Belle Époque painting that populated the conventional Salon.)
The challenge of course is about money. Anybody who’s genuinely into art pretty well understands the silliness of contests and of the whole ‘meritocratic’ system for evaluating art, but these contests, and the logic accompanying them, do have their purpose in establishing some sort of market basis for art. And the response to the A.I. art is fundamentally John Henryish - the feeling that it’s hard enough to make a living as an artist even without tabletop gamers programming software to produce contest-winning work. “This thing wants our jobs,” tweeted RJ Palmer, a ‘concept artist,’ of the A.I. software.
And there’s sort of no helpful answer there. For anybody in the marketplace looking to generate an image - or, probably, an ad jingle or ad copy - it becomes far more cost-effective to simply buy the A.I. program and get what you want with a few keystrokes as opposed to hiring some trained ‘artist.’ And, in the realm of high art, virtuosity virtually disappears as a worthy aim - much in the way that the Bouguereau generation of academic painters, all of them truly extraordinarily skilled, have come to symbolize fustiness and reaction. But what doesn’t disappear is art-as-spirit and art-as-personal-expression - value placed on the singular experience of a human being and their expression of it. Unfortunately, inner worlds aren’t so easy to monetize, and real artists may have to face an extended period of time in which they are treated as amateurs - first, the market is captured largely by ‘professional’ operators and then the market may well collapse altogether given that the A.I. programs are evidently so much more skillful than the ‘professionals.’ But one thing about artists is that, contra Jason Allen, they’re willing to make art pretty much no matter what, even if it’s ‘inferior,’ even long past the point when “art is dead.”
SLAVA UKRAINI - INCLUDING CRIMEA AND DONBAS?
There’s a certain jubilation about Ukraine’s wide-ranging counteroffensive, which seems to have achieved gains around both Kherson and Kharkiv. Der Spiegel calls it “a new phase of the war.” The ever-useful Institute for the Study of War writes of “the level of shock and frank discussion of Ukrainian successes by Russian military bloggers.” The Institute for the Study of War’s assessment, by the way, is that the Kherson push was not a feint designed to draw forces away from the real attack in the Kharkiv area, that Kherson was the true axis and Kharkiv was more a case of “taking prudent advantage” of the transfer of Russian troops to the south.
When I was in Ukraine, I was warned about what would happen at this stage of the war when the inevitable counteroffensive occurred - that the Russian troops, so useless in attack, would be a different story altogether in defense; that the Russian positions would be heavily mined and fortified and Ukrainian casualties far higher than they had been in the early stages of the war; that Ukraine would end up forfeiting a certain amount of the international goodwill it had accrued given that forces attacking tend to be more brutal than forces defending.
The question with the counteroffensive of course is whether it really can succeed or whether it will inevitably bog down into stalemate. The greater challenge for Ukraine, eventually, is to face the difficult conversation about whether some kind of a negotiated settlement is enough or whether it’s necessary to push all Russian forces out of all Ukrainian territory, including Donbas and Crimea. From the Ukrainian perspective, anything less is heresy - which will sooner or later put Zelensky in a very tough position of having to explain to his own people why total victory is less-than-possible.
George Packer, in a recent and beautifully written piece for The Atlantic, describes the mood of the Ukrainians in very similar terms to what I experienced in March/April. “We don’t even think about anything else,” a young Ukrainian in Lviv told him. “We need victory. Not-victory is not even in the mind. We have no choice.” The phrase “We will win” was accompanied always by the phrase “No compromise.” And Packer, hardened, veteran reporter, can’t help but be dazzled by the Ukrainian spirit. “People walked fast,” he writes. “Self-organization shaped an expression that I associated with Ukrainian faces: open, direct, uningratiating, a little tough but on the verge of being amused—alive.”
The feeling is that this pure spirit cannot last forever - although it has endured, remarkably intact, for many months. Ultimately, the Ukrainians simply need to win in a tough and bloody counteroffensive. And the Russian supply chain needs to snap. If not - if the counteroffensive stalls, if the Russians can keep their troops supplied - then the war moves into a more political phase in which Zelensky finds himself negotiating both with the Russians and, more painfully, with the patriotic mood in his own country.
CHILE’S CONSTITUTIONAL FLOP
There seems to be a mania for constitution-writing at the moment. In the United States, good liberals are proposing starting from scratch with a fresh Constitution - as in this staggeringly irresponsible New York Times op-ed. Michael Moore and Jamelle Bouie have proposed Constitutional amendments of their own. And there have been murmurings from the right - it’s sort of implicit in the whole premise of the ‘Tea Party’ - to put together a fresh constitutional convention (and The New York Times, with jaunty hypocrisy, is quick to denounce those efforts in conspiratorially-tinged language, writing, “Elements on the right have for years been waging a quiet but concerted campaign to convene a gathering to consider changes to the Constitution").
In the midst of these partisan fantasies about a rewritten Constitution, Chile’s arduous process of constitution redrafting is a case study of everything that can go wrong - and an indication of why nations really don’t want to depart from tradition and continuity unless they absolutely have to. For Chile, there was no real question that they had to. The old Constitution was a fossil of the Pinochet era and, as Francisco Toro writes in a lucid piece for Persuasion, “a libertarian fever dream.” But the Constitution produced by a Constituent Assembly and voted down overwhelmingly this week turned out to be an artifact of a different kind - a Woke extravaganza, with a cornucopia of progressive desires enshrined as rights and with precious little reality check. Toro continues, “The Assembly elected to draft the text was dominated by progressive activists, and a fierce sort of group-think seems to have run away with them - the replacement text yielded an unwieldy mess so overstuffed with aspirational language, it’s simply useless as a functioning document.”
And the 170-page, 388-article document is good for laughs - the enshrining of internet access as well as ‘digital disconnection’ as constitutional rights together with the constitutional adoption of gender quotas in government. The problems with it are so obvious that it’s astonishing the document made it all the way to a vote without somebody insisting on some editing. As Toro writes, the Constitution drafters became “animated by a vague sense that if rights are good then more rights must be better” and lost the ability to think in terms of priorities or trade-offs.
I guess there are a few lessons from Chile. One is just a note to future constitution-writers that less is more - the bulky constitutional style that has come into vogue in recent decades results, inevitably, in overly-specific bureaucratically-minded documents lacking in authority. Another is the understanding that a document like the U.S. Constitution really is precious and that the new sort of Constitutional Convention proposed by both left and right is wildly unlikely to produce anything reflecting the same degree of governing consensus. And another is the validity of and need for a political center. As Chile’s ‘centrist’ senator Ximena Rincón said, “We have a new opportunity, and we cannot miss it.” In Chile, right failed with the Fascistic Pinochet Constitution, left failed with the muddled group-think of the Constituent Assembly. There has to be a place for some kind of balance. And, with Chile at a genuinely exciting moment in its political history - “a process that arose unexpectedly, like a light in the midst of uncertainty and anguish,” as one of the Assembly’s leaders put it - it’s a critical moment to think seriously about what actually matters in politics, in the fraught place where justice and ‘rights’ meet reality.
Worth reading:
-New York Magazine exposé on Scientology - a stomach-churning piece about the Church’s exploitation of the R-1 visa loophole to import, essentially, slave laborers into the U.S.
-A primer on Muqtada al-Sadr and the current wave of violence in Iraq.
-Heartfelt account of living with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome - and (a favorite subject of mine) coming into contact with a sense of ‘fate.’
The sweetest queen. Love those pictures of her.
Poor queen. I think you're underplaying Britain's economic problems though. If I'm Ladbrokes I give her less than two years.