August 2024 – David E. Storey

How can we retain our humanity in the age of A.I.? To answer that question, we first have to figure out what makes us human in the first place.

Joe Vukov is an Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department at Loyola University Chicago. His research explores questions at the intersection of ethics, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind, and at the intersection of science and religion. In his new book, Staying Human in an Era of Artificial Intelligence, he shows what is missing in the conventional ways he think about the mind, and offers paths beyond the materialism and gnosticism that haunt our thinking about technology.

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Thanks to Ari Zazem for artwork! You can check him out here and here.

At some point in the last decade, you’ve probably thought to yourself: “I don’t have an ideology! But that jerk on Twitter obviously does!” Ideology is always someone else’s problem.

Jason Blakely, a professor of political science at Pepperdine University, begs to differ. Our political predicament, as he argues in his new book, Lost in Ideology, is twofold: we are blind to our own ideologies, and we mistakenly see ideology in merely pejorative terms. We cannot escape ideology because we cannot escape culture, and we cannot escape culture because we are storytelling creatures.

If, like most of us, you find our current political climate confusing, Jason’s “map of maps” will help you get your bearings. He covers the terrain of modern ideologies, from liberalism to conservatism to socialism and beyond, identifying their historical and philosophical roots as well as how they show up in popular culture. As the saying goes, “politics is downstream from culture,” and Jason’s book serves as a sort of decoder ring for making sense of the culture wars.

In addition to discussing his book, we explore a question on many people’s minds these days: is the MAGA movement a form of fascism?