Tocqueville and Artificial Intelligence, Part II
I have not heard back from the Cosmos Institute about the results of their 500-word essay contest, so I have decided to go ahead and share my second answer to their questions about Tocqueville and AI. It seems an appropriate time to do so given that many of us are reading Pope Leo XIV’s Encyclical on AI, Magnifica Humanitas. In addition, Carl Eric Scott has just published two posts on this very question of Tocqueville (and Tolkein) on poetry; I cannot recommend them highly enough. But to apply it to the question of AI- please enjoy my humble attempt.
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2. Tocqueville argued that democratic peoples, having lost the poetry of heroes and gods, would find poetry in technology. Does AI vindicate this account of the democratic soul, or does it reveal its limits?
Tocqueville argued that democratic souls like those of Americans in 1840 had indeed lost the poetry of heroes and the gods that we might read about in Homer. But that was not necessarily a problem. He also claimed that there remained great topics for American poets to think and write about. To quote Tocqueville:
“Human destinies, man, taken apart from his time and his country and placed before nature and God with his passions, his doubts, his unheard-of prosperity, and his incomparable miseries, will become the principal and almost unique object of poetry for these peoples; one can be already assured of this if one considers what the principle and almost unique object of poetry for these principles; and one can already be assured of this if one considers what the greatest poets have written who have appeared as the world succeeds in turning to democracy.”
(Democracy in America, Volume II, Part 1, Chapter 17)
It took another century before America produced a Faulkner or a Flannery, but Tocqueville was right: there was grist for great American novels. Some amount of loneliness is part of the human condition. Extreme forms of isolation are of course not healthy psychologically- as Aristotle said, a human who is not in some way social is a beast or a god. However, we are all lonely in this life because we’re not fully united with our Creator. This Pascalian perspective was one of Tocqueville’s foremost influences and can be found in crucial passages of Democracy in America and Souvenirs.
Tocqueville thought loneliness was accentuated in America by one of our habits of mind: individualism. Individualism stems from Americans’ love of equality, since intellectual authorities are levelled by it. But that in turn opens new avenues for greatness of spirit- the truly extraordinary and divine acts and qualities which we can discover even in the seemingly mundane, ugly, and impoverished parts of American life. And it is our loneliness that has spurred Americans to be a “nation of joiners”: the remarkable proliferation of clubs, churches, businesses, and other intermediary institutions which in turn help our democracy work.
The advent of Artificial Intelligence technology will not eliminate the possibility of poetry or greatness in America since it cannot eliminate the classic American experience of restlessness. AI has been employed to solve the “American loneliness epidemic” (as Senator Ben Sasse has called it), treating loneliness as a problem to be fixed. During the pandemic, algorithms fed us Neflix episode after Netflix episode, catering to our tastes. But eventually that got old and we went outside for a walk. Similarly with the AI dating avatars of Blade Runner and the AI companions that nursing homes are employing to fool the elderly into thinking they are not alone: these “solutions” get old.
We are more and more discovering the limits of AI in curing loneliness, rather than the limits of the democratic soul. And some of that American restlessness- we should not even want to be rid of.
