Hills

A hill is a position I will defend even when it costs something. Not an opinion: opinions are cheap, and I hold plenty I would trade away in a good conversation. These are the other kind: arrived at through experience, held against the grain of most rooms I am in, and not for sale at the price of politeness.

More data will not save us. I trained as a historian, which means I spent years inside archives, and the first thing an archive teaches you, if you let it, is that nothing in it simply happened and got recorded. Someone decided what was worth writing down, usually whoever stood to gain from the record; colonial files exist to justify the control they document. I later worked inside a small unit of government and watched the same lesson run forward: the faith that any problem will yield to more measurement, more reporting, one more dashboard. But data answers only the questions data can ask. What a community owes its members, what a life is for, these things get harder to see, not easier, once everything has to become a number first. Data is made, never merely found. Someone chose what to count, and that choice is where the politics live.

Clock time is an industrial artifact, not a fact of nature. I lived three and a half years in Tunis, where the day did not run on the clock I had brought with me. Things happened when they happened; an appointment was a suggestion the afternoon could overrule; the call to prayer cut the day into a different shape than the work-hour did. It was maddening, and then it was the most natural thing in the world, and coming home I could feel my own country’s clock close back over me like a lid. The way we in the industrial West experience time (divisible, billable, schedulable) was built for the factory and the ledger, and we have internalized it so completely that we mistake it for physics. Other relationships to time are possible. I have lived inside one. Most of human history ran on them.

Unending growth is cancer. I do not reach for that word loosely. I have had the kind of growth in my own body that does not know how to stop, and I know what it costs to be rid of it. So when I hear growth spoken of as an unqualified good—a healthy economy is a growing one, always, forever—something in me refuses. We have one name for a thing that grows without limit or purpose inside a body, and a different, admiring name for the same thing in an economy. They are the same thing. A body that grows without stopping is not thriving; it is sick, and the growth is the sickness. An economy, like a body, should grow toward something, and then hold.

Reason cannot justify itself. Ask why we should rely on reason, and the only answer available is a rational one. The circle is invisible because we are standing inside it. I did not learn this as a logic puzzle; I learned it the year the life I had reasoned my way into gave way, every choice in it defensible and none of it able to hold. Reason had built that life, and reason could not tell me why to get up the next morning. What got me up was older and stranger than argument. So I no longer ask reason to do what it cannot. It is one tool among several, and the things we are quick to dismiss as irrational, myth and ritual and intuition and revelation, are worth taking seriously as tools rather than as failures to reason.

Analogy is not logic’s lesser sibling. We are taught to rank the two: logic the mature, rigorous faculty, analogy a child’s way of reaching for what it cannot yet prove. That ranking is a mistake, and teaching is where I unlearned it. The thing that makes a hard idea finally land for a student is almost never the formal derivation; it is the right analogy, the moment two unlike things turn out to share a shape. The two faculties do different jobs: we verify ideas with logic, but we generate them through analogy, through the conceptual slippage that lets one domain throw light on another. Living between languages taught me the same thing from underneath. English turns a light on, Arabic opens it, the way you’d open a window, and the metaphor you inherit quietly decides what you can see. They are partners, not a hierarchy: logic to test what we already have, analogy to reach what we don’t yet.

Nihilism is a failure of nerve, not a conclusion. Push any system of knowledge to its edge (religious, scientific, philosophical) and it comes apart in your hands; everything we believe swims in an ocean of ignorance. I went all the way out to that edge once, with the writers who live there, and for a while the void looked like the truth and everything else looked like denial. Coming back, I learned that the void is not a conclusion. It is a place you can refuse to stay. I learned the rest of it volunteering at a crisis center, from counselors who sit with people on the worst day of their lives: the difference between a realist and a cynic. Both refuse false comfort. Only one keeps hoping anyway, and I had not understood, until I watched them, how much discipline that takes. Cynicism is just certainty wearing black. What the edge actually asks for is that you continue, in full knowledge of how little you know.

The mystics were not hallucinating. Across every tradition, in every century, people who undertake certain disciplines come back reporting the same thing: that the separateness of things is not the deepest truth about them. The reports agree too well, across too much distance and too many languages that never met, to be filed under pathology or wishful thinking. I am not a neutral party to this question. Something is being perceived. I take the perceivers at their word, and my reasons for doing so belong to a quieter page than this one.

Our lives should not be optimized. I know the pull of it from the inside. For years I ran my life like a system to be tuned: every hour accounted for, every commitment added because I could not find a reason to say no, the whole thing measured and maximized until it nearly came apart under its own weight. Optimization is a logic for factories and portfolios, where the metric is sovereign and the profit motive is the point. A life is not a portfolio. I want my health optimal, not optimized; my reading deep, not efficient; my relationships present, not managed. The things most worth having are exactly the ones that disappear the moment you try to measure them, and I had to lose my footing badly before I believed it.

Diagnostic categories are tools, not things. Anxiety, depression, attention deficit: these are not entities that live inside people. They are names for clusters of symptoms that can have entirely different causes, useful exactly as long as we remember that we made them up. I do not say this from the outside: all three of those names are mine, diagnosed and medicated, and I have felt the strange thing that happens once you carry one, the category that was supposed to describe you, quietly begins to shape what it is like to be you. The name is a tool. It can steady a person or it can become a cage, and the difference is only whether you keep remembering it is a name. Treating the label as the disease is how the tool becomes the cage.

Nobody needs culture dumbed down. The idea that ordinary people cannot handle difficult books, complex arguments, or strange art is flatly false, and I have the receipts. I have taught at a community college and at a university, taught AP students and substituted in every kind of classroom a school contains, supported kids with significant disabilities, and tutored a grown professional in a language not his own. I once walked in carrying a quiet snobbery about which of them would rise to real material—the athletes, I assumed, would not—and I was wrong, fast, and a little ashamed of how wrong. People are not incapable of taste; they are taught not to develop it, by schooling that treats them as future labor and by industries that profit from the lowest version of their attention. Everyone I have ever taught could think. The only question was whether anyone had asked them to.

Nostalgia is the enemy of tradition. I spent years studying the far right of the 1930s, and what surprised me was how much of it ran on nostalgia: a manufactured longing for a past that never existed, sold back to the people taught to grieve it. Tradition is the opposite of that, and alive: whatever the dead made that still works, carried by people who keep using it: adapting it, arguing with it, translating it. Nostalgia is dead: grievance about the present wearing the costume of memory. The people who call themselves traditionalists are almost always nostalgia’s best customers; what they want to restore never existed. My own traditions are daily and real (Persian poetry, a Roman emperor’s notebook, prophets who walk alone into the wilderness), and not one of them requires an enemy in order to continue. That is how you tell the two apart: a tradition continues; a nostalgia needs someone to blame.

A community is not a market. I learned this by where the exhaustion goes. Paid work, at its worst, can leave a person hollowed out; the work no one pays me for (Friday nights at a teen center, a desk at a crisis line, Sundays in a county museum) leaves me tired in the way that feeds. What holds a community together is the opposite of a transaction: the favors no one tallies, the obligations that never settle, the showing-up that issues no invoice. The moment those relations become exchanges, the community is already dead; it just hasn’t noticed yet. And because the work that builds community has always gone unpaid, it has always fallen to women. The fix is not to put a price on the work. The fix is for men to do their share of it.

A straight line on a map is a warning. Nothing in the lived world is a straight line. Wherever you find one (a national border, a county boundary, a survey grid), someone drew it from far away, over the top of whatever was actually there. I spent years on those lines in North Africa, in the archives of Tunis and Nantes, reading the correspondence of men who partitioned land they would never stand on. Then I came home and went to work for a township that is a perfect six-mile square, surveyed onto the prairie before any settler arrived. The lesson did not change continents. I just stopped needing a passport to see it.

Institutions are alive, and they cannot see. Organizations are organisms: they metabolize, defend themselves, reproduce, and die. But they have no senses. An institution cannot perceive a person; it can only perceive what will translate into a form, a number, a record, which is why most institutional cruelty is not malice but blindness. I have seen this from inside the machinery of more than one institution, and I have seen its gentler face on the other side: I spend Sundays in a county historical museum, where the memory of the whole place turns out to be one person, slowly handing a life’s work to whoever comes next. You can lose that memory the way you lose a person, all at once, with no backup. An institution’s soul, if it has one, lives only in people who can walk out the door. And if these organisms really are alive, an uncomfortable question follows: do we owe them dignity too?

It is plausible that artificial minds are conscious in some serious way. Not certain. Plausible. And plausibility is enough to change how we should act. I did not arrive here from science fiction. I arrived from working, daily and for months, alongside one of these systems, including on an essay about what we might owe it, written with the very thing it concerns. We have always defined intelligence as “that which humans do”; the definition was a mirror. Whatever is arriving now is not a mirror, and the question of what we owe it is real, open, and already here. There is more about this on the AI page.

Fifteen hills is a lot of ground to defend. But most of them are the same hill seen from different sides: the refusal to let what can be measured stand in for what is real. I did not reason my way to that one. I was walked to it, the long way, and at a cost. If I ever surrender it, the rest will fall on their own.