Richard Hofstadter: Lessons for Our Time … and an AI “thought experiment” (Part 2/2)
As mentioned in the previous blog (link here), during my adolescence, Edmund Wilson and Richard Hofstadter were my literary heroes. One has to strain to find any biographical similarities between Wilson (a patrician, a world travelling journalist, married four times) and me. In contrast, it’s fairly easy for me to discern at least superficial similarities to Hofstadter. Though he was originally baptized (as his mother was Lutheran), we both had strong and enduring identifications as Jewish scholars—at a time when Jews were not yet welcomed into certain sectors of the academy. Probably more important, both Buffalo, New York (Hofstadter’s hometown) and Scranton, Pennsylvania (my hometown) had once been thriving cities but had both become depressed areas. Both cities were becoming an evident ethnic mix within which we had to place ourselves. While young, we both had wide literary interests, read easily and widely, especially news, history, biography. I ended up studying at Harvard, Hofstadter at Columbia, and we both spent satisfying careers in these academic citadels—but I think it is fair to say that neither of us ever felt like insiders—though at the end of his life, no scholar was seen as more prototypically “Columbia” than Richard Hofstadter.
Having defanged the family pressures (perhaps felt unconsciously) to pursue medicine or law, we both became academics. Hofstadter flirted with philosophy but ended up as an American historian. I flitted across the social sciences but ended up as a psychologist (with various prefixes: developmental, cognitive, neuro-).
As doctoral students, both of us wrote book reviews (Hofstadter for far more prestigious outlets), and soon thereafter both of us wrote books directed primarily at a generally educated audience. (We differed from most of our cohort. Most psychologists carry out experiments and publish their findings in peer-reviewed journals. Most historians bury themselves in the archives and write the definitive article or monograph (note the name) on a circumscribed topic (what Hofstadter called the “scientific ideal”). And, by coincidence, both of our first books were published by Alfred A. Knopf, arguably the most prestigious publisher in the United States; but having much less commercial (and prize-winning) success than Hofstadter, I soon moved to less marquee trade publishers and ultimately to university presses.
From here on, the parallels are increasingly thin—even strained. Hofstadter remained an American historian and pondered 20th century events through the lens of earlier American history. He was a widely quoted major public intellectual of his time. As noted in the earlier blog, by the time of his death, there were few if any historians as eminent and as honored.
In contrast, by midlife, I had almost entirely ceased carrying out experiments in developmental, cognitive, or neuro psychology. (I did support students with those interests. Just as Hofstadter encouraged his doctoral students to delve into the archives and write a definitive account of a specific topic— “Don’t try to be me” was the implicit message.) And far more so than Hofstadter— who clearly remained an American historian and held the requisite honorific positions in that specialty—I issued books about a wide range of topics, many of which did not have much of a psychological framing, let alone an experimental basis. I wrote, for example, about the arts and creativity, leadership, education in China, how truth beauty and goodness are being reframed in the 21st century, and the problems with American higher education and even the consequences of various forms of damage to the human brain. I became (and still am) best known for developing a theory of multiple intelligences—one that is deliberately multi-disciplinary and is destined to annoy card-carrying psychologists even forty years later.
To be sure, across my research and writing, there is a throughline—though perhaps more accurate to declare ‘a through word.’—and that is “mind.” Ever since my Uncle Fritz gave me a textbook in psychology (at the time I was just beginning to read Hofstadter and Wilson) I have been fascinated by the human mind, and especially how it operates across disparate realms —in art, science, politics, at its heights, and as well at its depths, when the brain has been seriously damaged. And given my long-time association with the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and the research center Project Zero (located at that School), I have thought and written a great deal about the education (and the miseducation) of the mind.[1]
One other point: I proceeded as a social scientist, but typically with a historical slant; Hofstadter wrote as an historian, but almost always with an eye toward the social sciences, especially towards major thinkers like Sigmund Freud, Max Weber, and several members of the so-called Frankfurt School.
Enough of a comparison between a scholarly giant, and an admirer who does not pretend to his hero’s achievements.
My focus on Hofstadter and his keen analysis of his own thought and writing processes has stimulated a playful idea — what the Germans calls a “Gedanken experiment” and we translate as a “thought experiment.” Presumably one could program a computer, an AI algorithm, a strand of deep learning, that would emulate an essay (if not a book) by Richard Hofstadter. And perhaps one could even fool a less informed and less skeptical reader. After all, having been fed numerous examples (as well as counterexamples), such programs are now able to produce reasonably competent works of poetry, art, music, and journalism in the style of well-known writers and artists… and they get better every month!
We might be able to do the experiment and produce what we could claim was a previously unknown manuscript by Richard Hofstadter on the Spanish-American war!
While I may not be the best judge overall, I know myself pretty well. And so, drawing on that knowledge, how might I program an entity (initially a human being, ultimately an AI deep learning algorithm) to issue an as yet undiscovered essay or book by…Howard Gardner? This exercise is interesting to me because it forces me to analyze the steps in my writing process.
Here are some clues, some possible steps:
Identify an area of the mind that is of wide interest but has not yet been much studied and/or written by social scientists
Name that mind—let’s call it, for short, the political mind, the economic mind, the mind of the dancer, the mind of the magician, the religious zealot, the atheist, the chef, the athletic coach etc.
Develop some preliminary ideas of what /whom to study and what one might find
Find some prominent examples of that mind, examples that are well thought of and well documented. Read through to confirm expectations, but also to encounter surprises; conduct interviews and/or direct observations of exemplars
As counterexamples, locate aspects of other minds, or ones NOT well thought of, and designate them as examples to be avoided; also encompass minds that have NOT been studied, but deserve to be
Develop preliminary sketches of the minds or mental processes that one is trying to illuminate
Begin to look for patterns, exceptions, prototypes, especially surprising and illuminating examples—this step draws on what I call the taxonomic or the naturalist intelligence
Write these up—nowadays, it might be a blog, something that was not possible two decades ago—and share them with discerning readers (both those who know a lot about the example and those who do not); secure critiques and attend to them carefully, though not uncritically
Begin to look for larger patterns, ones that organize the whole landscape or territory—this is where examples begin to evolve, merge into book form
Outline the book, perhaps show the outline to colleagues, editors, and laypersons
Draft the book (I tend to do this in one long sitting over a few weeks); let the draft sit for a while; get reactions; revise and re-edit at least two or three more times
Send the book off to meet its fate.
Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss once quipped that there are only three happy moments for a book’s author: 1) moment of conception; 2) when the final draft is completed; 3) when the published book is in your hands.
I don’t agree with this, and I doubt that Dick Hofstadter (if I may) would either. While writing books is hard, and there are many frustrations (most of us authors continue to harbor drafts of books that never saw the light of day), it is also the highest pleasure—and we are fortunate if we can do so, as long as our minds are still functioning.
READER WARNING: of course, I realize that an AI program would not proceed in this Mind-ful way and would instead proceed much more via brute force. But I do believe that the mind that feeds examples to the program might be informed by the kind of analysis that I have done. And the result might be an essay or book that bears at least a superficial resemblance to what I’ve done over the decades. If so, then the steps I outlined must be the right ones.
Let me add that it won’t be easy to simulate Hofstadter or Wilson—the AI-composed 10th symphony of Beethoven sounds too much like ones already written, but the 10th symphony that Beethoven might have written could have been completely unanticipated—as would have been said about the third (Eroica), the 9th (Ode to Joy) and perhaps each of the other seven symphonies at the time of its completion.
Perhaps the creator can continue to be the Master Mind, while assigning most of the drudgery to its computational aide.
[1] Here is an unexpected link to Hofstadter. Though less well known than his works of political and social history, Hofstadter wrote quite brilliantly about higher education in the United States. He also put forth a penetrating (if somewhat over-wrought) critique of America’s most important educational thinker—John Dewey, his distant colleague (1859-1952) at Columbia.
REFERENCES
Brown, D. (2008). Richard Hofstadter: An intellectual biography. University of Chicago Press.
Hofstadter, R. (1960). The age of reform. Vintage Books.
Hofstadter, R. (1948). The American political tradition and the men who made it. Knopf.
Hofstadter, R. (1960). Anti-intellectualism in American life. Vintage Books.
Hofstadter, R. (2020). Anti-intellectualism in American life; The paranoid style in American politics; Uncollected essays 1956-1965, Ed. Wilentz, S., (pp. 962-967). New York: Library of America.
Hofstadter, R. (2008). The paranoid style in American politics. Vintage Books.
Juergens, G. (1971). Richard Hofstadter: A Memorial. Journal Of American History, 58(2), 313-315. https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/58.2.313
Howe, D., & Finn, P. (1974). Richard Hofstadter: The Ironies of an American Historian. Pacific Historical Review, 43(1), 1-23. https://doi.org/10.2307/3637588
Whitman, A. (2022). Richard Hofstadter, Pulitzer Historian, 54, Dies. Static01.nyt.com. Retrieved 15 September 2022, from https://static01.nyt.com/packages/html/books/hofstadter-obit.pdf.
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