If it manages to avoid bankruptcy and sticks around long enough to advance, AI will attempt to come for all our jobs. Among those more immediately threatened are writers and artists, and people who teach other people about writing and art. Phil Christman is one of those. (And if this essay is anything to go by, you’d be lucky to have him teach you about writing.) He loves literature, he loves what he does, and he wants to understand it, defend it, and convince the “long-termist” ChatGPT fans of its value—although short of that, he’ll cope with shoehorning literature into other educational trends if that means it gets to stick around.
Since business school is the one kind of school nobody seems to question the value of, I do sometimes wonder why we in the humanities don’t spend more time trying to colonize it. A person would learn far more about, say, how to conduct a careful negotiation between hostile factions from reading Water Margin – that medieval Chinese classic in which a confederacy of outlaws hashes out a tenuous social order – than from any textbook. Certainly you could understand the real political economy of the world better from, say, reading Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, crosschecking as you do so every firm mentioned in that novel against the day’s issue of the Financial Times, than from the Benthamite just-so stories we furnish to the modern clerical class via Economics 101. Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God is a masterclass in “resilience,” in “adjusting to challenges,” though putting it that way makes me a little sick. If these end up being the only terms on which the study of actually good books survives in higher education, I will overcome my gag reflex sooner or later.
The other form of education that our society seems willing to respect, which is little modules and workshops dispensed to well-off professionals, also seems a likely enough vehicle for the survival of some sort of literary culture. Tell a bunch of young men that you can teach them what women really want, and then, when they show up, give them a plateful of nachos, a copy of the collected works of the Brontë sisters, a burned CD of ten or twelve Joan Armatrading songs. Maybe throw in “The Wife of Bath’s Tale.” You’d be doing them a favor. Fans of high culture should welcome vulgarization in a pinch, the same way that devout Sunday school teachers welcome the untutored, inarticulate, undirected faith of a child. People gotta start somewhere.
