There’s a certain kind of equilibrium you can fall into online. For about seven years, mine consisted of playing a punishingly realistic military simulator called Arma 3. I logged something north of 3500 hours, which, if you do the math, is a frankly terrifying slice of a human life. The strangest part wasn't the time sink itself, but the social structure that enabled it: I, a doctor from India, while still in India, somehow became the regular mission-maker and Military Dungeon Master for a group of several dozen or so very British men, women and children. I suspect they saw my obsession (a holdover from a childhood fascination with army men) as a kind of useful, directed pathology, and were happy to outsource their fun to it.
In this realm I answered to “Dover.” As in Benjamin Dover, a nom de guerre whose elegance is inversely proportional to its maturity. After enough years of Brits yelling “DOVER, WHY IS THERE A T-72 IN THIS VILLAGE” or “DOVER, WHY ARE THE PLA AIRDROPPING IN GERMANY” at my disembodied presence, the name started accreting mythic properties. So when a free weekend and seemingly discounted train tickets collided, I decided to pay pilgrimage: go to Dover, see the white cliffs, stare down France, and try not to fall off anything important.
Things started going wrong in a way that felt both predictable and deeply informative about human variance. My friend and I had a plan: 9 a.m., a specific train platform in south London. My model of the world holds that a plan between two people, especially one involving pre-booked tickets, is a settled fact. It has inertia. My friend’s model, it turned out, required a final handshake protocol - a morning-of confirmation call - without which the previous agreement existed only in a state of quantum superposition. I discovered this when my call at 9:02 found him mid-shower.
He arrived half an hour later, and we set off. The English countryside is lovely in the way things are when you have no responsibility for their upkeep. I have a photo of myself eating a sandwich in the town of Sandwich, an act of such low-grade recursive humor that it might have been transgressive in 2009.
Then came the second, more significant system error. An hour into our journey, my friend consulted a map and discovered that our train was, in fact, headed to the wrong side of Kent. Not a fatal error, but one that would cost us another hour in detours and connections. It’s strange how robust modern infrastructure is; you can make a fairly significant navigational blunder and the system just gently reroutes you, albeit with a time penalty. A hundred and fifty years ago, we would have ended up in the wrong village and had to marry a local.
Dover, when we finally arrived, turned out to be perched like a giant chalk apostrophe at the edge of England’s run-on sentence. The town has the air of a place that was built to do something serious with ships and then woke up one morning and realized it was quaint. A castle loomed over the harbor like a very large, very literal metaphor about who was in charge of what. My friend and I debated whether owning a castle in medieval England gave you street cred or just a crowded calendar. This prompted a brief, speculative argument on medieval sexual economics. He posited that the local lord must have had a hundred wives. I countered that, as a Christian noble, he was likely constrained to one official wife for appearances, and ninety-nine plausible deniabilities, likely undocumented liaisons with the wives of the local fishermen. We failed to resolve this.
Taxis were scarce because of the ferries. The queue of wheeled luggage migrated like an urban wildebeest herd, and our driver supplied a continuous commentary whose themes were: tourists, how they ruin everything; the French, how they ruin everything else; and immigrants, how they form a handy third category (while, you guessed it, ruining everything). It was an impressive performance, both for range and volume. Our taxi driver continued complaining that the tourists who appear to be Dover’s primary fuel source were a nuisance who clogged the roads. This seems to be a common paradox in tourist economies. My friend, who is Indian, contributed supplementary remarks about other nationalities as if eager to prove his assimilation. I listened in the way one listens to a non-consensual podcast.
The short taxi ride brought us to the cliffs. And there it was. The sheer, improbable whiteness of it. France was a faint, hazy suggestion across the water, close enough that you felt you understood a thousand years of Anglo-French rivalry on a visceral level. It’s not an abstraction when you can see them over there, probably making better bread.
In the manner of men confident they could fight (and win) against certain species of bear, I idly contemplated the feasibility of swimming the Channel. I regretfully convinced myself that it would take someone far fitter than me, and that's if I wasn't stopped halfway by patrol boats and then hauled off on account of the color of my skin.
And this is where the second part of the mission began. My friend, who had planned this leg of the journey, had mentioned a “long walk.” I had stored this information under the tag “pleasant stroll.” This turned out to be a failure of definition. I was also, thanks to having planned a far less prolonged or adventurous trip, resigned to wearing shoes that could best be described as “smart casual.” They were the best £20 in the local Primark could buy, and had netted me about twice that value in unearned compliments. Alas, they weren't quite built for this task.
My friend, who is built like someone who moves pianos for a living, had brought a girl here a few months prior. He relayed that after a suitable period of walking, they found a "convenient cliffside depression", which I presume was a geological feature and not an emotional descriptor, where he proceeded to demonstrate the evolutionary fitness benefits of a high-protein diet and a consistent deadlifting regimen. This anecdote was presented as a proof-of-concept for his life strategy: that sufficient physical prowess can function as a universal solvent for problems like social awkwardness or, presumably, poor navigational skills. I must admit, I'm sold on the idea, and have decided to hit the gym like it owes me money when I'm safely back in Scotland.
The cliffs were busy in a friendly way. A family ahead featured an Indian child who had launched a formal protest against the very concept of walking. His mother, with the patience of a sainted logistics officer, attempted a cognitive-behavioral intervention: “if you keep your mouth closed you will be less tired.” This was technically plausible, decreased oxygen demands from reduced speech; improved nasal breathing efficiency, and completely incompatible with childhood. He escalated to the International Style of Wailing. His father trudged on, wearing the expression of a man silently modeling the trade-off curve between making it to the viewpoint and the cost of carrying twenty-five kilograms of despair. I was touched, if it wasn't for the fact that I was still stroller age when I was last here, that might well have been me.
It seemed half of Asia was haunting the cliffs that day. We counted nationalities like rare birds, there went the French (and very many of them), those two ladies were Ukrainian (my friend insisted on his heuristic that if they looked Slavic but were ugly, they must be Russian - I am unconvinced that this technique works well), more Indians, Bangladeshis, and multiple miscellaneous Middle Eastern families. My friend had opinions on what the implications were that only the latter seemed to have more than two kids per party. I am studiously neutral on the topic. There were no shortage of dogs around, in all shapes and sizes. If anyone cast negative aspersions on their presence, it wasn't where I could hear them.
The path along the cliff edge was not a path. It was a slick, compacted layer of chalk that glistened with a light dew. It felt less like walking and more like trying to find purchase on a lump of flaky soap the size of a county, with loose pebbles to taste. Every step was a fresh negotiation with gravity. I was forced into a sort of low, wide, careful shuffle, the kind of movement you see in videos of robots learning to walk. My friend, in his sensible trainers, occasionally glanced back, his expression a perfect blend of sympathy and the quiet satisfaction of a man whose choices have been vindicated.
But the view. My god, the view. To the right, the world just ended in a blaze of white. Below, the sea was a churning, complex grey-green. The wind was a constant, solid thing, a physical force you had to lean into. While we'd been resigned to a moody English afternoon, the sun graced us with its presence, and declined to stop even as we began overheating. The end equilibrium, with the wind wicking away moisture and heat, the sun cooking us, ended up being quite pleasant.
We stopped for an impromptu photoshoot, because we live in the fallen world. The cliffs obligingly produce Instagram content with minimal coaxing. My friend, whose triceps have their own personality, benefited from the presence of a competent photographer, which would be me, the author. I managed to take the kind of photos that would secure sponsorships from protein powder brands. He took photos of me that say “psychiatry trainee who reads a lot of blogs and owns exactly three good shirts.” Both sets came out well. The wind did the hair; the sky did the rest.
There is a lighthouse along this route, which is a piece of public infrastructure designed to make you think about metaphors. We did not go inside; we admired it from a fair distance with the correct amount of aesthetic gratitude and moved on. The harbor below was full of ferries cycling infinitely between here and Calais, like a giant mechanical metronome keeping time for European logistics. Standing there, you understand why people attempt to cross in inflatables. Distance is abstract until you can see the other side; then it becomes a dare.
Eventually, we realized we had no hopes of making it to the end of the cliffs without missing our train back, and turned back with only mild regret. I'm confident we hit the highlights, and we intended to, on our way back, revisit the ones we had only passed.
About halfway, the path offered us a moral dilemma in the form of a fork: one way hugged the cliff edge with magnificent views and suggestive erosion; the other retreated inland through more reliable ground and fewer ambulance reports. We chose the edge this time. It felt virtuous to make an offering to the gods of scenery. The chalk in places was undermined, forming caverns that looked like dragon mouths. If there were signs warning you not to go too close, I didn't see them. Every hundred meters or so, a tourist hung over the void for the sake of a better selfie.
Our return trip involved a dip down, diverging from the main tourist trail. This was the most scenic bit, despite the stiff competition. My friend gleefully pointed out the infamous hollow, and I gave it a wide berth while keeping an eye open for used condoms. It was a good spot, just about hidden from the taller cliffs, and unlikely to be observed on the cold, foggy day he'd brought his lover around.
We quickly discovered that our divergence had been in grave error. The shortest path lead straight up the valley at about a 45° angle, closer to 60 at some parts. The well marked route tapered into a desire path, one that involved plenty of dirt of dubious structural integrity. I'd have few qualms about calling it the most difficult fifty meters of my life. There was a very reasonable risk of tumbling down and breaking something, and I quickly became cognisant of why we hadn't seen any other tourists venturing this way.
Both of us were gassed by the time we made it through. It became abundantly clear that my friend was not fond of cardio, and I can only sympathize. But it only got worse: the route to civilization involved a heavily overgrown trail, and the vegetation seemed to be entirely stinging nettles and more obviously thorny bushes. I was Benjamin Dover, being well and truly bent over by the landscape.
My friend had divested himself of his jeans and coat, both for the heat and to maximize the visibility of muscles during our shoot. This made his journey far more precarious than mine, and for the first time, I was genuinely grateful for the thickness of the chinos’ fabric.
We did make it out, coated in dust, some mud, but with only minimal stinging. I'll chalk that down as a victory, and there's no shortage of chalk in these parts.
Summoning our previous taxi driver, we made haste towards the train station. The conversation seemed happy to reprise the manner in which it started. My friend informed our driver that he was a Reform voter, and I was entertaining myself with the notion of piping up to (falsely) proclaim that I went for the SNP.
We had half an hour to kill, and opted to do so at a very conveniently placed pub. The bartender treated us with unusual suspicion, insisting that we pay for both meal and drink up front. This was, as he explained in a rather defensive manner, because there was an unacceptable rate of people dining and then dashing to the inconveniently placed station right across. He mildly softened this blow by stating that he wasn't implying that I would do such a thing.
I was inclined to believe him, until I noted a group of Americans at the next table. They were discussing what the bill might amount to, which is strongly suggestive of not having to pay upfront. I suppose I can't blame people for actually using Bayesian priors, even if it's to my detriment.
We demolished our lunch, while I entertained my buddy with the same anecdote about overly benevolent/touchy feely (and drunk) Scottish matrons in the last town I was residing. Despite our best efforts, the pub lunch was too substantial to finish before the train was due to arrive, and we elected to wait for the next one.
I had been eavesdropping on the conversation at the next table, primarily in a bid to identify accents. Were the Americans a united group? The younger couple had a clearly Southern twang, which made me update towards South Carolina, the older sounded vaguely Texan.
Eventually, curiosity got the better of me. I waited for a lull in the conversation and asked them outright. They told me that they were, in fact, family: the older two lived in Colorado, and the younger (son and daughter-in-law) in North Carolina. I was informed, with mock-seriousness, that confusing a denizen of Colorado with a Texan was a Capital Crime.
They, as many others do, remarked on my unusually American accent. I launched into the usual explanation: a prolonged period of time spent in California at a formative juncture. We got to really chatting. They had just crossed over from Calais, I intended to visit Texas this year for a wedding, if life and visa delays didn't intervene.
For once finding myself to be the most well-traveled in the party, I helped them get to grips with their two week long and rather flexible itinerary. I scared them off the Tate, making sure to describe in vivid detail my own experience, while lauding the Natural History Museum, albeit with a caveat to pack plenty of water. I was very touched to find that the older lady commiserated with me on the topic of the proper size and disposition of T-Rexes (she had even heard of Sue!). She revealed that she had multiple degrees in Ancient History, and asked me whether it was wise to engage a tour guide while visiting the British Museum.
I believe I was correct when I claimed that this wasn't strictly necessary, given that YouTube could easily suffice, and that she seemed to be more qualified to be the guide than any she could pay for.
I spoke about my aspirations of shooting feral hogs in Texas. She revealed that her father had hunted them professionally, and I could only congratulate him on finding a career with such inherent job security. The damn bastards never seem to stay dead.
I was further entertained by her ribbing her (fully grown) son about his adolescent habit of subtly diluting the vodka to disguise his theft of the same. She had a very rude shock when, during a dinner party, she found out that mere tap water and olives don't make for a good martini. Her son spoke about his time at Virginia Tech, he scandalized his mother by finally disclosing the multiple shenanigans he had gotten into, some involving burning sofas, others, the cops.
Our conversation was far ranging. Topics included my warnings about sticker shock in London, the latest Superman movie (the older gentleman was named Clark, and we were in Kent), whether the American or Indian soccer team was more abysmal, the feasibility of reclaiming an ancestral manor abandoned by their distant ancestors when they fled to America in the 1600s, my desire to escape to the States, their invitation for me to come stay with them at the BnB they run during their retirement, the sheer cold of the Colorado climate, the inadvisability of drinking while up in Denver (I thanked the son for saving his parents from such peril).
They laughed, and said I was one to talk, given that I was only having a coke. I told them to please tell my mother the same, were she to ask, because the color of the drink belied the significant amount of vodka it contained.
Overall, a very good time, and I was sad to bid them goodbye when our train was finally due. I really don't understand why American tourists get a bad rep, they always seem like the sweetest and most genuine souls.
Another train, and some reliance on the genuine kindness of random railway personnel who were willing to turn a blind eye to the fact that our tickets had expired, and I'm back in the safety of my bed. It was a good time, and I genuinely feel that Dover might be the highlight of this vacation of mine.
Thought it might be better to post this as an independent post rather than on the culture war thread.
“It is naively assumed that the fact that the majority of people share certain ideas or feelings proves the validity of these ideas and feelings. Nothing is further from the truth. Consensual validation as such has no bearing on reason or mental health. Just as there is a "folie a deux" there is a folie a millions. The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.”
I’ve been putting off writing this review, paradoxically because this was a very important book. Erich Fromm, here and in the other two works of his I have read, really captures the problems I have with my life and society, and earnestly attempts to generate solutions, although he himself pessimistically admits that these are unlikely to be implemented.
The central premise of this book, as perhaps hinted at by the title, The Sane Society, is an attempt to illustrate what a society based on real human needs would look like in value. In the process, Fromm defines both what he thinks the fundamental human needs are, the ways in which our society (that of the 1970s in his case) is ill-suited to these needs, and ways that we can get there from here.
Fromm starts the book with a short chapter that makes that radical (in the eyes of some) that our society is actually insane, using suicide and homicide rates in a bunch of western countries over the past hundred years to make the case that something has gone wrong spiritually. You can quibble about the statistics, talk about the arc of history bending towards justice, or point out that materially we have never been better off. All three points may be true, but it’s hard to deny, at least from the point of view of my lying eyes that something has gone wrong spiritually.
The Spiritual Malaise of Modern Capitalism
I think the first time I realized this was when I was a freshman in college. For most of my life up until that point, I had been motivated by whatever the “next step”: doing well in school, so I could take harder classes, and eventually get into the best college (MIT), or in running, so I could run in bigger, faster races, and improve my standing on the team. Although things appeared to be following the same trajectory in the first months of college, progress no longer seemed like it would continue. How could life have any meaning if my material, and hierarchical progress would not continue? When I asked my parents for advice, my mom told me that it was still important to keep working hard, so I could earn money and consume things, but also not feel guilty for not contributing to society. At the time, this answer was completely unsatisfying to me: how could consumption, which is be it’s very definition short-lived, provide long-term meaning? How could “working hard” on something that I didn’t care about, bring me joy or intellectual fulfilment?
I read The Sane Society nearly seven years after that freshman fall and conversation with my mom, and I think the book provides a cogent thesis for both her advice, and my reaction.
Fundamental human needs according to Fromm consist of not only the basic material needs as posited by Marx (food, water, shelter), but also a non-alienated existence with the freedom to influence one’s own environment, self-regard (not treating the self as an object), and the ability to enjoy the fruits of his labor. According to Fromm, both the Soviet and capitalist systems have managed to produce to cover the basic material needs of its citizens, but fail to provide a cure for alienation. Part of this is the feature both systems share in common: industrialism has made modern man alienated from the fruits of his labor. It is much more difficult to be satisfied as an assembly line worker, or even as part of the modern scientific apparatus than it was to be an artisan would made tables from start to finish, or a farmer who grew his crops from seed. Matthew Crawford talks about this topic more in his book Shop Class as Soulcraft, and the diagnosis of both him and Fromm is something that I agree with.
Automation and Alienation
This is why I’m opposed to things like further automation and AI. Labor does not need to become even more alienated. Although I suppose the internet and specialization has already done a lot of the damage, I fear AI may do the same thing for knowledge work that the assembly line has done for craftmanship. No longer will you midwife an idea or a theory from conception to execution, but merely obtain fragments of your thought nearly fully formed from a computer algorithm that has done most of your thinking for you.
Critics may argue that this automation of jobs allows for greater leisure time. Not only has the historically not been the case (see the early industrial revolution), but leisure is an essentially unproductive and consumptive activity that does not lead to spiritual growth or the exercise of man’s will. Leisure activities like training for sport, language learning, or craftsmanship would count as work in Fromm’s system. Although I don’t take as strong of a stance on Fromm against leisure, I can again say from personal experience that there’s only so much relaxation and leisure that I find to be enjoyable before I want to work on something meaningful again.
A Robot Society
The other shared feature of Capitalism and Soviet Communism that Fromm highlights is their conformity. The reason for this in the Soviet system is rather obvious (top-down dictatorship), but in capitalism stems from commodification of the human individual. Both in the labor and “personality” (dating) market, Fromm argues, one must conform to societal standards or risk being labeled as a defective “product” and end up being out of a job or a husband/wife.
I found this argument to be one of the most convincing critiques of capitalism that I had read/heard of. The material critiques of Marx and other 19th century socialists (i.e. that capital was exploitative and would be unable to meet people’s material needs), were proved wrong in the 20th century when the system was incentivized to produce people rich enough to become consumers. However, just paying people more doesn’t change the fact that you are paying them for their labor, meaning they are making themselves into a commodity, a thing, which cannot have anything but bad knock-on effects on the psyche.
So what do we do about all of this? How can I move past both my ideas of progress, and my mom’s consumptive mindset? Fromm basically thinks we can’t, unless we radically overall society. I’m not so sure. Two other books that I will be reviewing soon: the Illusion of Self by James Garfield and Philosophy as a Way of Life by Pierre Hadot provide alternate answers, which I will explore in later posts. But what I will say for now that I do think personal change is possible.
How I will be changing my life as a result of this book:
The Sane Society underlined something that I already knew: the collective norms of our American, western society are neither necessary, sufficient, or even good for human thriving. I’m not sure what the exact right norms are yet, but embracing the Kantian, Stoic, and Christian ethic of loving thy neighbor as thyself, and embodying meaning in work seem like good places to start.
This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).
As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.
These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful.
Quality Contributions to the Main Motte
Automatic Cognition Engines
Big Eyes, Small Mouth
Contributions for the week of June 30, 2025
Contributions for the week of July 7, 2025
Building a History
Critical Self-Reflection
Contributions for the week of July 14, 2025
Identity (?) Politics
Contributions for the week of July 21, 2025
Contributions for the week of July 28, 2025
Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service
Part 1: What Is This Post About?
This is a book review (of sorts) for “Mere Christianity” by C.S. Lewis, a PDF version of which can be found free here. More specifically, this is for the audiobook version included in the C.S. Lewis Essential Audio Library, which can be bought on Amazon here. First published in 1952, this book is older than most of the Motte audience.
Even so, and to put the bottom line up early- I recommend “Mere Christianity” for anyone with the time to listen, be it during commutes or chores, to an exceptionally articulate Christian try to express his view of what Christianity distills down to at its most common shared elements. This is the ‘mere’ Christianity that specific denominations build from, but which is also distinct from non-Christianity. It also has a lot to say, albeit accidentally and indirectly, about the modern culture war.
I recommend it to practicing Christians who might appreciate a reminder of the sort of commonalities that are/used to be seen as common despite doctrinal disputes. I recommend it to non-practicing ‘cultural’ Christians who might appreciate a reflection on what parts of their culture are influenced by Christian thought, and what parts are not. I recommend it to non-Christians as a glimpse into the Christian mindset by a theologian deliberately trying to communicate that mindset to an audience that is assumed to not share it. I even recommend it to atheists, who C.S. Lewis engages with specific consideration. He is certainly familiar with many of the older anti-theist arguments, and even if you do not find the counterarguments as compelling as he did, you should at least know of them.
Most of all, I recommend “Mere Christianity” to The Motte, for its commentary on culture war issues and human dynamics that are so applicable in the present despite being written with the mid-last century in mind.
This is also an endorsement for the audio library version especially. Having both read the text and listened to it, I can attest that this is a work where a good narrator elevates the material. Mere Christianity uses a great deal of metaphors and personal engagement with the audience to make its argument, and this works far better with a skilled narrator than someone trying figure the intended tone of unfamiliar text. Given Lewis’s frequent techniques of leading the listener down a train of thought before doubling back to some part of it, the verbal context can make it clearer than powering through the text might.
This is not surprising, as Mere Christianity started as a radio lecture series during WW2. During the German Blitz bombings of England, C.S. Lewis was brought onto the BBC to talk to the British public about faith. These audio-lectures were recorded and adapted into text, and in this text was adapted back into audio. Given how the transition from verbal to written communication inevitably loses some nuance, something that was inevitably lost is in a sense regained with the re-transition to audio. This is poetically appropriate for the subject matter.
Finally, this endorsement will encourage you to not think the price tag is onerous. While it may feel hard to justify a bit over $40 USD for a single (old) book you can get for free, the broader audio-library is a bit under 40 hours and includes other C.S. Lewis works like The Screwtape Letters, The Problem of Pain, and other works. At roughly $1 an hour of listening and post-listen contemplations, this is a better money-to-time-entertainment that most.
And with that overly long endorsement out of the way, on to the review.
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Part 2: What Makes “Mere Christianity” Recommendable to The Motte? (And With What Caveats?)
The parts of Mere Christianity I think the Motte in general would most appreciate, regardless of their stance on Christianity, is the exceptional and self-aware use of non-technical language to communicate, the significant emphasis on virtue ethics in regards to the timeless human condition, and the appreciation of a clearly intelligent person providing a position with charity for those who would and will disagree. If Lewis was living contemporary, he would be the sort of writer that- if not a member of the Motte- would probably be the sort of writer Motte members would likely regularly rise in discussion as expanding understanding through insights.
These endorsements come with the caveats of an arguable (though deliberate) use of metaphors rather than technical language, some unquestionably anachronistic/dated views, and of course a lack of materialist proof of God. (He does engage the topic. I won’t claim you will find it convincing.)
I caution this caveat by advising against approaching this with a determination to discredit. In the Mottian sense, engage charitably. Lewis has some relevant words on how the meaning of words shifts over time and how mentality shapes perception, and he is being charitable enough towards the skeptical audience to warrant charity in turn. That said, charity with Lewis’s takes does not require Gellman amnesia of the parts you may strongly disagree with towards the parts you know less about.
On to the merits.
As both an author and a speaker, Lewis is incredibly aware- and honestly up front- about the subtle shifts that come with careless or deliberately misleading choice of words.
Lewis makes clear and distinct arguments about how semantic contexts and insinuations have changed meanings over time. He makes the distinction between ‘a good man’ and ‘a good Christian,’ of how the common understanding of various virtues and sins have changed over time, and so on. Given that he was writing in the mid-20th century from a perspective formed most by the early 20th century, the language games he raises from nearly a century ago remind us of even greater drift since. Lewis is very clearly trying to not argue by insinuation, and at many times will variously pre-emptively clarify against potential misunderstanding, or circle around to how something could be misunderstood.
Lewis also makes deliberate and effective use of metaphor rather than technical/doctrinal language. This can come to a point of feeling like overreliance, but this is part of the deliberate effort to not rely on technical terminology or language only the already familiar will understand. Part of the why Lewis makes as good use of metaphors as he does- but also why it may feel over-leveraged- is that he is consistent and clear that the metaphor is a limited tool, not a literalism or last word on any doctrinal issue. If the metaphor feels like it’s undercut by some context of the metaphor, he freely and proactively encourages you to disregard it. This is positive in the sense that Lewis is making limited arguments more carefully but can be negative if you feel he’s not committing to a specific position enough, especially on controversial topics. This is expected, and he warns against it in his preface. Engage charitably, and it works better as the tool of understanding the point he is trying to make.
The second basis of endorsement is the emphasis on virtue ethics and the human condition.
Starting with the latter, Lewis speaks from a position of intellectual, and moral, humility. He is not appealing to his own credentials, or any sense of dogmatic or moral superiority. He may believe he is right, but he is not making an argument to ‘prove you wrong.’ Agreeing with Lewis is not a precondition for engaging further with the text. He is up front with the sort of personal and moral failings he talks about. He confesses easily to his own temper when he makes a point on the shortness of others, of doubts and questions, and so on. He is never resolving a point in terms of ‘this is so because Christianity says so.’
This is because, as much as religious ethics are associated with deontological ethical systems (duty-based, often derived from God), Lewis speaks far more in terms of virtue-ethics. Under virtue ethics, a trait can be virtuous in moderation but become a flaw in excess or deficiency. A classical, more secular example is how bravery can be cowardness in shortage, but foolhardiness in excess. However, Lewis makes the point of how even virtues can be this way, where an excess of virtue can become twisted into something more, and worse, even as the person doing so feels they are all the more virtuous for this Christian virtue. Humility to the degree that one knows they are so humble can become a source of poisonous pride over those less humble and more overtly proud.
This is where Lewis begins to speak on timeless human nature in ways that we would recognize as tropes of the culture war today. He does not use the term ‘virtue signaling,’ but you will recognize it. He does not use the term ‘march through the institutions’- a march that in the American sense began in earnest after his writings- but you will recognize his points about how changes in social norms and institutions have twisted meanings and understandings to allow new preferences. He does not speak of political tribes, but you will recognize when he speaks of political self-righteousness, and how hatred of that self-righteousness in others can spawn it in oneself.
Lewis does so with the sort of meta-framing awareness and metaphors to illuminate this that would be familiar with anyone familiar and/or moved by Scott and the broader rationalist-sphere luminaries should recognize. This may not be a coincidence. For example- in Scott’s classic I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup, Scott makes a metaphor about how an Emperor gets no religious merit points for tolerating gays, transgenders, and so on when the Emperor has no issue or objection to them. Lewis makes a similarly structured, but secular-focused, metaphor on the merit of not-burning witches if one does not believe Witches pose any real harm to people. Both share similar concerns about how people approach moral principles, the intents they do so with, and the difference between a difference in principles and a difference in claimed facts. However, Lewis’s version was penned a good half century earlier. I don’t know if Scott was aware or influenced by it.
The point here is less about Lewis on the culture war, or even Christianity, and more on how Lewis approaches metaphysical structures and meta-context of organization. Lewis is writing from someone who may not have had the same words as the current audience for describing social structures, but he would recognize the discussion on social tensions, and efforts to change social norms one way or another. Some of the terms that he use may seem anachronistic of even quaint- Lewis does seem to believe in a literal entity we call the Devil/Satan as a corrupting force, as opposed to the far more rationally justifiable / observable / attributable villainous actors of the Cathedral / [Progressive/MAGA] movements / etc. Clearly, we are wiser and better informed of the context in our current era.
But more importantly Lewis- however imperfectly, and however imprecisely- has thoughts on dynamics that are often of interest on The Motte. Even if you don’t agree with him on the specifics of the conclusion, he can provide them charitably and interestingly enough to be entertaining.
On the demerits. What to say that’s not repetitive?
Lewis’s use of metaphors is a double-edged sword, to use one more. It can greatly assist with understanding a point he is trying to make. They are generally well constructed and appropriately used with limited scope. They are used in the way that good assumptions are used- clearly, purposely, but with the willingness to abandon them if they are unhelpful.
It may result in a sense of there not being enough there. The plus side of Lewis not arguing from the Bible as an ultimate authority is that it can come off as a delightfully constructed but questionably hollow sophistry. Not ‘sophistry’ in the sense of manipulation and misdirection, but rather a delightfully complicated model that builds off itself, but theory that one can doubt will survive reality, or even reflect it. Even if you find the arguments interesting, they may lack the sort of citations or tie-ins to real events and real denominations of Christianity that would normally bolster such claims.
I do believe this is to some degree unavoidable based on design constraints, as opposed to an unintended flaw of someone who didn’t think of them. Lewis is open- at least in the preface which is admittedly retrospective to the initial publishing. He was working under certain structural limitations that are reasonable to have, which can reasonably frustrate people who wish he didn’t. Lewis is not speaking about any specific denomination of Christianity, so he is not citing from any specific denomination. Lewis is avoiding the most controversial and friction-point disputes of doctrine in order to not distract from his points, and so he is not taking a position on controversial and frictional points.
But there are also points where you listen to what Lewis says, and as with any position from a century ago, it will reflect biases and views which may be worse than anachronistic. When you read or listen to these, and feel they are very clearly wrong, you may rightly wonder what else he is wrong about. This is fair, within reason.
A more benign example of this anachronism is his view on patriotism, of which a good number of people nowadays have a far more negative view then he, which is clearly a (measured) positivism. Given the selection bias for Lewis being selected to make this in the first place, this may not be surprising but may be disappointing. A more cringe-worthy view of this is his characterization of Christian marriage, including an expectation to a wife defer to the husband. I won’t defend or justify it- he tries to enough, given it is his longest chapter- but I will say I felt it was also his weakest chapter, not least because he is clearly speaking on it from the perspective as an outsider (a lifelong bachelor at that point in his life, i.e. never married), as opposed to something clearly had more personal experience with (morally imperfect human nature).
I will reassure (or disappoint) that Lewis does not drop any racial slurs or outrageous cultural prejudices in his work. He is not exactly expressing contempt for other religions or unbelievers either, like some Crusader / Conquistador / Zealot stereotype. He is not preaching the white man’s burden, the civilizing impact of European Christianity on non-Europeans, justifying imperialism, or weighing in on eugenics / geopolitics / AI. While he undoubtably had / would have had views on some of those, they are not the subject of Mere Christianity
This is a more measured point that Lewis- despite being so well measured in his language and topic material in other respects- is going to inevitably discomfort people. Some of that discomfort is the subject matter. And some of that discomfort is a result of speaking from the internalized aspects of someone of his time and place and history.
That time and place, in turn, was the tail end of the British Empire.
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Part 3: The Meta-Context of “Mere Christianity” – Why It Is What It Was When
“Mere Christianity” is a product of its author and its time, which is to say the product of both World Wars.
C.S. Lewis is most known in retrospect for his literary career. He was a contemporary- and personal friend for some time- of J.R.R. Tolkien. Between the latter’s Lord of the Rings and the former’s Narnia, both published in the 1950s, he was part of the mid-20th century Christian-influenced literary fantasy movement that shaped a fair deal of modern fantasy literature. The Christian influences of Lord of the Rings are sometimes less known than the influences of LotR on the broader fantasy genre since, or the Christian influences in Narnia. Still, Lewis could be considered one of the more successful and influential authors of the mid-20th century ground just on the ‘mutual influence on and of fellow writers’ grounds alone. Of course, Lewis did more than that and is more broadly known as a specifically Christian writer and thinker in ways that Tolkien wasn’t… even though Tolkien actually had a hand in C.S. Lewis’s conversion to Christianity.
This is because a less-known part of Lewis’s history is that he was an atheist for the first half of his life. Born in 1898 and dying in 1963, Lewis was part of the World War 1 generation. He had his 19th birthday in the trenches of the Somme Valley, albeit the year after the 1916 battle of the Somme, and in 1918 he was wounded but survived a British artillery shell that fell short and killed two his companions. This remarkably unlikely event was a traumatic and influential part of Lewis’s life, and is recognizable in elements of his later writing, particularly Screwtape Letters. It is not, however, what triggered his conversion.
Lewis converted to Christianity in 1933, 15 years after his what some might have called his ‘miraculous’ survival. In reflections- including a few allusions in Mere Christianity- he references his eventual conversion as something that was grudging and resisted. Rather than view his experience at the time as a clear act of God and the basis of conversion in a ‘no atheists in a foxhole’, Lewis spent the next decade and a half dealing with it as a self-described temperamental atheist. From his later writings on his earlier mind set, one can imagine- though he does not specifically claim- that he would have bristled at someone of faith trying to tell him that he should feel grateful or religious because he survived when two others died beside him. Lewis’s eventual conversion was despite, not on the immediate basis of, that wartime experience.
Despite the experience and the self-professed anger, this is not the same as saying Lewis was disillusioned by World War 1 per see. Or at least, not in the way some might expect. As a product of his time in various ways, one of the anachronisms that separates Lewis from a more modern speaker is his frank and even meritorious view on nationalism. Lewis was not part of the generation that became disillusioned with nationalism entirely by WW1, in the way that some people now view it as a character flaw to feel. Rather, Lewis approaches nationalism in the sense of virtue ethics, where the moderation of an aspect is the key for it to be virtuous rather than a sin of excess or deficit. Lewis remained a moderate nationalist. When WW2 began, he volunteered to join the Home Guard auxiliaries despite his age and scars. He later declined a position in the British Honors System offered by Winston Churchill, due to concerns of perception.
This context matters because it probably helps explain why C.S. Lewis was selected to speak on BBC to the British public during WW2, the radio broadcasts of which are the basis / original form of Mere Christianity.
During the second world war, the British society was well into the gradual secularization from a strongly Christian nation to what we would recognize as more common today. According to a C.S. Lewis historians on the BBC approach at the time, the BBC wartime audience was roughly 1/3rd embracing religion, 1/3rd hostile against it, and 1/3rd neutral. It faced not only the challenge of a divided nation in terms of people’s views on religion, but also the issue of having a speaker who could speak to all of them at once. When higher-ranking, more senior, and more experienced of the Clergy were brought on, they struggled to connect with the audience, not least because they spoke in more theological/doctrinal/dogmatic terms that variously did not make sense or were viewed more negatively by the audience.
This is the sort of problem that Lewis was brought in for to work through. A former and self-described irritable atheist who understood the perspective that was hostile to religious pressures. A more junior layperson not inclined to the sort of doctrinal and technical sophistication that lost the casual or uncommitted audience. But also a believer to appeal to the other believers to come together and pull through in terms they would respond to. And, of course, a nationalist enough to still volunteer to serve, despite first-hand experience with the horrors and tragedies of WW1.
A cynical perspective is that the person or committee making the selection to Lewis could have these cynical considerations for selecting Lewis for what is, in crudest forms, a propaganda role. There is no requirement, or claim, of their own belief in God one way or the other, anymore than there is a requirement that they had to like or respect Lewis to put him on the podium.
But there is also little argument that ‘their’ cynical motive, if there was a ‘they’ like that in the first place, imposed itself onto Lewis’s stated views/
There are no serious arguments I am aware of that Lewis’s views expressed in the broadcasts or Mere Christianity were false or influenced or dictated by propagandists with him as the mere mouthpiece. While there were editing changes between adaptations from audio to text, there were no major post-war retractions of major arguments. Lewis’s views in the broadcasts that became “Mere Christianity,” while useful to them, were by all accounts his own. While you certainly could poison the well by believing everything he says is mere wartime propaganda, this would be the sort of lack of charity that avoids rather than engages with the argument.
The wartime context does, however, go some way towards explaining why Mere Christianity is organized as it is.
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Part 4: The Structure of Mere Christianity
Mere Christianity is organized to be easily broken down into short periods of engagement, not something you need to- or should- do all at once.
As a consolidated book, the PDF provided earlier is a modest 108 PDF pages, with the preface- the first real words from Lewis- starting on page 6. The just-over 100 pages of content are broken down to across four books of distinct themes, each book broken into distinct chapters of narrower topics. At 34 chapters across four books, 35 if you count the preface, you are averaging less than 3 pages a chapter. ‘Average’ does a lot of work here, since there is a good deal of variability on specific chapters, but this is something that can easily be a bit of bedtime reading.
As an audiobook, Mere Christianity is around 7 hours in total at normal speed, with each chapter averaging about 12 minutes. Again, average is doing some work here, but mostly in the favor of manageability. The longest chapter, “Christian Marriage,” is 21-and-a-half minutes. The next two longest chapters, the last two of the last book and the culmination of the series, are just over 20 and 19 minutes respectively. Everything else is shorter, and so feasible for even a short 15-minute commute.
After the preface, the four books in turn are build on four general themes. These themes provide a general arc from justifying why the audience should give some consideration to what follows, characterizing Christianity as a religion, Christian behaviors, and Christian purpose of what these are building towards.
(These are not the exact terms that Lewis himself uses, but consider this the review trying to reframe / rephrase for the Motte audience.)
The following books, and their chapters, will be elaborated more in the following section. What follows is just the structural organization.
The preface serves as both establishing context and as a series of disclaimers. Lewis’s first concern is to clear misapprehensions about what the series is not, chief of which is that it is/was not to convert the listener.
Book One, Right And Wrong As A Clue To The Meaning Of The Universe, is five chapters. The purpose of this book is to establish a basis of believing in God, even if not specifically the Christian God. It engages with some of the limits of a purely materialist world view.
Book Two, What Christians Believe, is also five chapters. The purpose of this book is to characterize core / common doctrinal of Christian tradition in general, distinct from other religions. It is a book where specific Christian denominations may take issue with specific parts in the sense of ‘this is not how we’d put it,’ but concede it as a bootstrap for others to start understanding Christianity.
Book Three, Christian Behavior, is twelve chapters. The purpose of this book is to characterize more specific aspects of what Christan tradition and what advocates in terms of practical beliefs and values. This is also the book where Lewis touches the most on human nature, and in ways that’d we recognize in relation to the culture war.
Book Four, Beyond Personality: Or First Steps In The Doctrine Of The Trinity, is eleven chapters. The purpose of this book is to introduce Christian Theology, in the capital-T sense of ‘the science of God.’ This is the conclusion, and the argument about how Christianity provides a practical, practicable, and reproducible process for becoming like God. (Or- Christ. See again books two and three.)
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Part 5: The Book 1 Review
Oh dear did I really do this
This section is a summary-review of the first book of Mere Christianity. It is not exhaustive but is intended to give a sense of the opening chapters and Lewis’s framing efforts. I include this mainly to illustrate Lewis’s ability to pursue both direct arguments and meta-argument in parallel, which becomes clear by chapter five. Also, Lewis has some good line drops I wanted to call out.
This also comes with the giant disclaimer that this is all my interpretation / understanding / summary, and that if you feel I missed some significant part of Lewis’s point… okay! Omissions are already admitted, as well as reorganization for the sake of summary and context. I am also using terms and characterizations other than his own words, so if you read this and then listen to it, don't be surprised.
Additionally, and hopefully it wouldn’t need to be said, I am trying to characterize, not endorse, the arguments that follow.
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Preface
The preface serves as both establishing context and as a series of disclaimers. Lewis’s first concern is to clear misapprehensions about what the series is not, chief of which is that it is/was not to convert the listener.
This section was written after the war broadcasts and is in some respects a response to feedback Lewis received after them. In it, he elaborates his intent on how he approached this. At the same time, this is a retroactive characterization the initial listeners/readers wouldn’t have had. It is useful to know this going in for your first time, but recognize that if you read this, you won’t have the same first impression someone else might have. (Then again- you won’t be listening during a German bombing campaign.)
Lewis makes clear that he is not taking a position on any specific denomination of Christianity, or any specific political topic. He views it as distracting from the point of the book but asserts it should not be interpreted as any position, for or against, any other position. Nor should it be viewed as omitting because he views the subject as too important, or not important enough.
Lewis spends a surprising number of words on how words lose value due to semantic drift. He specifically talks about how ‘good person’ and ‘good Christian’ are not the same thing, and how the conflation makes some words lose value in the sense that saying someone is not a good Christian can be perceived as a character attack of saying they are not a good person. This is a clear-minded distinction between a theological sense and a moral sense of ‘good,’ and his analogy to the transition of the meaning ‘gentlemen’ overlaps with the concept we’d call the euphemism treadmill.
Lewis makes a metaphor of Christianity to a house with many rooms but a shared hall. He places his own work- the Mere Christianity- as the invitation for people to come into the common all hall, but not to live there. He has Words (gentle but cautionary) on people who are undecided on which room they enter for reasons of personal taste rather than Truth.
Quote of the Chapter:
It is very difficult so to dissent from them that you will not appear to them a cad as well as a heretic.
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Book One: Right And Wrong As A Clue To The Meaning Of The Universe
This was summarized earlier as-
Book One, Right And Wrong As A Clue To The Meaning Of The Universe, is five chapters. The purpose of this book is to establish a basis of believing in God, even if not specifically the Christian God. It engages with some of the limits of a purely materialist world view.
This book is not an argument on materialist grounds god exists. It is instead a series of arguments that collectively challenge the premise of a purely material view of the universe and people. It works on grounds that may or may not be compelling for abandoning the pure-materialist view in the first place, but more strongly challenges any attempt at compromise.
In other words, it is structured as an anti-motte and bailey argument in which it attempts to cut off a retreat to a potential motte.
Structurally, it treats pure-materialistic world views as the advantageous/expansive bailey which serves to discredit / ignore God. It starts by establishing the existence of a “Moral Law” that people recognize / appeal to on non-materialist grounds. It attempts to defend this position against materialist-based counterarguments of evolution or social convention. From there, it explores the implications of non-materialist law in the material universe that exists but does not obey the normal conventions of material laws of nature. It concludes by cutting off a retreat to syncretism- of a hybrid materialist-spiritualist world view that might be a nominal motte-compromise of ‘well, some of what you say may be true.’ This retreat is a… not trap, but rather the basis of a renewed argument thrust. If Moral Law is true and a part of the universe from a non-materialist source, it reveals implications that Humans can only respond to.
If you want to know how to defend your (dis)belief against this line of argument, the defense works by not conceding the Moral Law premise in the first place. This will most likely to be done by adapting the materialist counter-arguments on grounds of evolution (what he discusses in terms of a biological evolved herd instinct) and combining it with social evolution to argue that societies evolve values, rather than the values having a non-materialist source.
Or this is all what I would say… if there was not a trick revealed in chapter five, making all the above points about ‘winning’ the argument meaningless.
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Chapter One: The Law of Human Nature
This chapter advances a claim that humans have an intrinsic sense of right or wrong that- even if they claim it doesn’t matter when it comes to them- they recognize others of violating instantly. This knowledge is in turn broadly applicable across time and cultures, with variations in morality being differences of emphasis, not type. Even when people disagree about whom is in the wrong, they all broadly have a sub-strata mutual agreement about the general nature of right and wrong. The differences are in degrees (what is emphasized or not), not in kind (no society or human instinct valorizes treachery against the society).
The existence of this shared understanding is not just akin to a law of nature, but is a law of nature in an original / older sense of the term. Like other laws of nature, it applies without having to be taught. People do not have to be taught a sense that others have wronged them, any more than gravity has to taught to the object it applies to. It is in the nature of the thing, even if various specifics (what the sense focuses on) are cultural.
However, the law of nature of human morality, or what he later calls moral law, is distinct from other laws of nature. It is a law of nature that does not work purely materialist grounds. People can choose to disobey, in ways they cannot choose to disobey gravity or thermodynamics. Disobeying is a choice that is not rooted in purely materialist grounds, any more than the existence of the shared understanding of wrong that exists across time / cultures / prior agreement.
These two points- that a moral law exists as a natural law, but that people can break it unlike purely material natural laws- is the starting point for establishing a non-material premise to the universe.
Quote of the Chapter:
But the most remarkable thing is this. Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to him, he will be complaining "It's not fair" before you can say Jack Robinson.
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Chapter Two: Some Objections
This chapter is Lewis anticipating some arguments against the premise of the moral law.
One counterargument is that the moral law impulse is merely an evolved herd instinct, a biological impulse. Lewis does not dismiss that a herd instinct exists and does align it with things like maternal instinct. Lewis disputes that the moral law is an instinctual impulse- rather, he asserts it is the factor balancing instincts, the element that helps people know which herd instinct to suppress, and which to elevate, such as when someone is faced with persona danger to themselves, but also to another. The moral law is the judgement about which impulse to follow, not the choice of which to follow. In is the outside-context force that establishes what the ‘good zone’ of virtue ethics is so that no one herd instinct is taken to extreme, not the instinct or even decision itself.
A second counterargument is that moral law is just a social construct instilled into people by education. Lewis disputes this, in terms that can dispute a bit of contemporary post-modernism, everything is social convention.’ Part of his disputation is that the differences in the social construct disputes- what is formally educated by specific cultures- is very small between cultures and times, not very large, and thus the social construction angle is of marginal input.
The other, larger, argument is that a comparative judgement of better and thus worse moral systems has to be comparing them by some standard outside the claimed system itself. In order to say Nazi morality is wrong, despite Nazi morality saying itself was right, you have to be comparing to a more objective idea- a more ‘real’ morality. But if you embrace absolute moral relativity- not that this is the term he uses- then you have no argument to say the Nazi morality is objectively wrong. Objective moral denunciation requires an objective standard, outside of a social construct, for the social construct to be measured by. Once this concession is made, all moral systems- even those claiming to be the right one- can be tested by this outside-the-structure measure.
Quote of the Chapter:
For example, one man said to me, "Three hundred years ago people in England were putting witches to death. Was that what you call the Rule of Human Nature or Right Conduct?" But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things.
If we did—if we really thought that there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbours or drive them mad or bring bad weather, surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did. There is no difference of moral principle here: the difference is simply about matter of fact. It may be a great advance in knowledge not to believe in witches: there is no moral advance in not executing them when you do not think they are there. You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house.
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Chapter 3: The Reality of the Law
This chapter assumes success of chapter two in defending chapter one to advance the implications of the existence of the moral law.
This chapter advances the distinction in the purely materialist natural laws, where only facts (of physics) matter, and the moral law which has both facts (how people behave), but also something else (how people ought to behave). This non-purely materialist distinction is furthered by how people know how they ‘ought’ to behave even if they don’t.
Similarly, this ‘fact of what is’ and ‘fact of how ought’ is advanced by the difference in (not necessarily taught) moral instinct when the same action is done to you under different contexts, or even if the violation helps you. The person who accidentally trips you is a greater offense than the person who tried but failed to deliberately trip you despite the greater material impact. Additionally, the traitor who betrays the enemy in your favor is still triggering a moral instinct of wrongness, despite their utility. Moral law defies pure materialist predictors of instinctually endorsing material gains or condemning material costs.
Lewis also disputes that consequentialism alone is sufficient to explain this moral instinct. ‘Be unselfish because it is good for society’ begs the question of why ‘good for the society’ is not wrong, but is circular. The ‘why’ of a duty to be unselfish- the classic deontological question of ‘duty to whom?’- must come from outside to break the circular reasoning. This outside is the law of nature- the nature of the thing of what ‘ought’ to be, which is neither constructed by or even necessarily taught to humans, but which appears across time and cultures and social constructors.
Quote of the Chapter
Consequently, this Rule of Right and Wrong, or Law of Human Nature, or whatever you call it, must somehow or other be a real thing— a thing that is really there, not made up by ourselves.
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Chapter 4: What Lies Behind the Law
This chapter advances the implications of the existence of the moral law on the rest of the universe by contesting pure materialism, and even hybrid materialist-spiritualism.
After reviewing key points so far- about how a non-material rule of nature exists and acts differently by being subject to choice to disobey- Lewis does a brief review of a purely materialist world view. Action and consequence all through history. However, Lewis contests materialism by noting the limits of materialism.
One of these is that accurate scientific observations can only record what is observed at a time in place- it must infer what is not observed. We can theorize that A is a consequence of B, but Science (the objective, testable, verifiable sort) does not claim to prove to have seen B. The overreach of science to things not actually claimed by observable / replicable science is dismissed as the more pop-cultural/fanciful (what we would deem political) use of science more by people other than professional scientists than actual scientists. Science also does not assert why what was there was there in the first place, i.e. why did the big bang originate into the universe. Science cannot observe it. If there was some actor responsible, it would still have to be inferred, or else inform the observer in another way.
Lewis makes an additional, longer, and harder to summarize series of arguments about the nature of observing the creation of universe from within the universe. This includes the difficulty of observing an outside-universe from within the boundaries of the universe. He uses the analogy of observing an architect from within the architecture he built. He concludes to a point that one of the ways to reason there is another actor is if it interacts and acts upon you in distinct ways. Say by establishing a force of nature that acts upon humans in way distinct from other, purely materialistic, forces of nature.
This ‘force’ is not claimed to be the God of Christian mythology, specifically. This is the ‘a god,’ not ‘the god’ stage of the argument. It is, however, as close to a mind as any other metaphor Lewis will use, because it seems interested in both establishing a non-materialist sense of right, and making people feel a sense of wrong.
Lewis then ends by promising you that you’ve heard to much about a nice and pleasant God for too long, and that you should be uneasy about what he’ll say in his next issue, helpfully titled “We Have Cause To Be Uneasy.”
*The chapter then breaks for a post-script subject on the merits, or weakness, of trying to synthesis pure materialism against pure religion. Lewis raises what was presumably more popular at the time, variously called creative evolution / life force philosophy. These entertain a spiritual origin to the universe to cover the gaps of materialism, but without the deliberate presence, purpose, or requirements of God in the religious sense. Lewis is not a fan.
Quote of the Chapter:
One reason why many people find Creative Evolution so attractive is that it gives one much of the emotional comfort of believing in God and none of the less pleasant consequences.
When you are feeling fit and the sun is shining and you do not want to believe that the whole universe is a mere mechanical dance of atoms, it is nice to be able to think of this great mysterious Force rolling on through the centuries and carrying you on its crest. If, on the other hand, you want to do something rather shabby, the Life-Force, being only a blind force, with no morals and no mind, will never interfere with you like that troublesome God we learned about when we were children. The Life-Force is a sort of tame God. You can switch it on when you want, but it will not bother you. All the thrills of religion and none of the cost. Is the Life-Force the greatest achievement of wishful thinking the world has yet seen?
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Chapter 5: We Have Cause To Be Uneasy
This chapter begins with a not-quite apology to readers who feel they been tricked into a religious sermon, and that they were only listening to Lewis as long as he had something new to say. If all Lewis has is more religion, that already failed, it’d be like moving a clock back. Lewis counters this in three ways.
One is that going back the way you came is sometimes progress. Progress is going closer to where you want to be, and if you find yourself going the wrong way, progress is turning course even if that means turning back. The sooner one does, the wiser and truer they are to progress. (Yes- Lewis makes an argument that a reactionary can be progressive. Culture war of a different century.)
Second, Lewis reiterates that he is not yet arguing for the Christian God, merely a somebody or something beyond the moral law. Things can be inferred from the consideration of the moral law, since it counterbalances what can be inferred from the creation of the purely material universe. The universe may be a beautiful creation, but the material laws of nature are also pitiless and merciless to people. The moral law is the counterbalance, as the moral law creates the duty, and the discomfort, to make each other’s burdens easier (the practice of morality) in the pitiless material plane.
Second-point-five, this God described to date does not have to forgive you for your failures- and violations- of the Moral Law.
Lewis makes a distinction here between the construct he has said up to date- a creator force that dictates morality- and the Christian claim/interpretation. What Lewis is describing is the implications of a power behind the moral law, but not necessarily a personal god to have a personal relationship and- especially- forgive failure.
This is root of the implication of a moral law that is supposed to make you uneasy. If there is a force- a mind- behind the moral law, which again is a premise of a natural law that intrinsically is a part of you and that you know of, it doesn’t matter if you intellectually disagree with it or rationalize your excuses. Part of you- the natural part- is siding with this creator against yourself regardless, because that part innately agrees with the condemnation of greed/cruelty even if you’d rather it made exceptions for your own.
In this context, you are thus entering the crux of existential terror and nihilism (though Lewis doesn’t use those exact words). If there is no non-materialist moral law in the first place, for there being no creator or non-materialist purpose, then there is in turn no greater purpose to appeal or take solace in. It is moral relativism all the way down in a merciless material universe with no claim to an objective right and wrong. If, on the other hand, you do concede there is a creator who cared enough to create moral law, then you begin to concede that you are making yourself Its enemy through every failure and opposition. Facing judgement is Not Fun.
Third, this entire chain of reasoning does not exist to convince you that it is true. It exists to put you in a Christian frame of mind, so that the chapters to follow will make sense.
Lewis breaks flow, not character, to make an assertion on why people do not understand what Christianity is. (Remember the context- WW2 where 2/3rds of Brits were opposed or neutral on the topic.) People who do not think about the creation of the universe- not just how it functions in the present but before the observable parts- do not think in terms of the formation of natural laws. People who do not think in terms of natural laws may not think in terms of natural moral law. People do not think of natural moral law in turn may not think in terms of what it means if there is a creator behind that moral law. And people who are not thinking about the creator of a moral law, are probably not what it means to that creator when you choose to break it.
Lewis is not claiming that Christians think all of these things either. He is not even claiming indisputable correctness of these facts. What he is claiming, however, is that it’s hard to convince people of a need to repent if they don’t believe there was a transgression against something (moral law) or someone (the creator of said moral law) that they need to repent for.
The point does not hinge on if you are convinced by Lewis’s argument for a moral law and its creator. The point is that it will be hard to understand Christianity if you do not understand how these premises combine to form uncomfortable questions that Christianity claims to answer.
Understanding this connection is key to understanding Lewis’s portrait of Mere Christianity. It was also the sort of the purposeful combination of direct and meta-argument for illustration that convinced me to write this review.
Quote of the Chapter
Christianity tells people to repent and promises them forgiveness. It therefore has nothing (as far as I know) to say to people who do not know they have done anything to repent of and who do not feel that they need any forgiveness. It is after you have realised that there is a real Moral Law, and a Power behind the law, and that you have broken that law and put yourself wrong with that Power—it is after all this, and not a moment sooner, that Christianity begins to talk. When you know you are sick, you will listen to the doctor.
///
Conclusion
And… that’s the end of this book review, of sorts.
Going any further would not capture Lewis’s work well and my failed attempt to is a lot of time well spent but that I’m not getting back. Also, it would take too damn long. This review is already over 8,000 words. Any further and you might as well read or listen to it yourself.
Which, to be fair, is the point of this effort-review. If any of this has caught your interest, consider this your invitation to go get that audiobook. There is a lot to enjoy there, it makes good commute listening, and it doesn't demand a lot of time even as it gives a lot to think about. If you are the sort who comes to the Motte to build your understanding, Lewis is a person to build off of. Even if- or especially if- you disagree with him.
The C.S. Lewis Essential Audio Library is a bit over $40 USD on Amazon.
(Now, do I really want to try to review The Screwtape Letters...)
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At the risk of doxxing myself, I have an advanced degree in Applied Mathematics. I have authored and contributed to multiple published papers, and hold a US patent all related to the use of machine learning in robotics and digital signal processing. I am currently employed as a supervising engineer by at a prominent tech company. For pseudonymity's sake I am not going to say which, but it is a name that you would recognize. I say this not to brag, but to establish some context for the following.
Imagine that you are someone who is deeply interested in space flight. You spend hours of your day thinking seriously about Orbital Mechanics and the implications of Relativity. One day you hear about a community devoted to discussing space travel and are excited at the prospect of participating. But when you get there what you find is a Star Trek fan-forum that is far more interested in talking about the Heisenberg compensators on fictional warp-drives than they are Hohmann transfers, thrust to ISP curves, or the effects on low-gravity on human physiology. That has essentially been my experience trying to discuss "Artificial Intelligence" with the rationalist community.
However at the behest of users such as @ArjinFerman and @07mk, and because X/Grok is once again in the news, I am going to take another stab at this.
Are "AI assistants" like Grok, Claude, Gemini, and DeepSeek intelligent?
I would say no, and in this post I am going to try to explain why, but to do so requires a discussion of what I think "intelligence" is and how LLMs work.
What is Intelligence
People have been philosophizing on the nature of intelligence for millennia, but for the purposes of our exercise (and my work) "intelligence" is a combination of perceptivity and reactivity. That is to say, the ability to perceive or take in new and/or changing information combined with the ability to change state based on that information. Both are necessary, and neither is sufficient on it's own. This is why Mathematicians and Computer Scientists often emphasize the use of terms like "Machine Learning" over "Artificial Intelligence" as an algorithms' behavior is almost never both.
If this definition feels unintuitive, consider it in the context of the following example. What I am saying is that an orangutan who waits until the Zookeeper is absent to use a tool to force the lock on it's enclosure is more "intelligent" than the insect that repeatedly throws itself against your kitchen window in an attempt to get outside. While they share an identical goal (to get outside) but the orangutan has demonstrated the ability to both perceive obstacles (IE the lock and the Zookeeper), and react dynamically to them in a way that the insect has not. Now obviously these qualities exist on a spectrum (try to swat a fly and it will react) but the combination of these two parameters define an axis along which we can work to evaluate both animals and algorithms, and as any good PM will tell you, the first step to solving any practical engineering problem is to identify your parameters.
Now the most common arguments for AI assistants like Grok being intelligent tend to be some variation on "Grok answered my question, ergo Grok is intelligent." or "Look at this paragraph Claude wrote, do you think you could do better?" but when evaluated against the above parameters, the ability to form grammatically correct sentences and the ability to answer questions are both orthogonal to it. An orangutan and a moth may be equally incapable of writing a Substack, but I don't expect anyone here to seriously argue that they are equally intelligent. By the same token a pocket calculator can answer questions, "what is the square root of 529?" being one example of such, but we don't typically think of pocket calculators as being "intelligent" do we?
To me, these sorts of arguments betray a significant anthropomorphic bias. That bias being the assumption that anything that a human finds complex or difficult must be computationally complex and vice versa. The truth is often the inverse. This bias leads people who do not have a background in a math or computer science to have completely unrealistic impressions of what sort of things are easy or difficult for a machine to do. For example, vector and matrix operations are a reasonably simple thing for a computer that a lot of human students struggle with. Meanwhile bipedal locomotion is something most humans do without even thinking, despite it being more computationally complex and prone to error than computing a cross product.
Speaking of vector operations, let's talk about how LLMs work...
What are LLMs
LLM stands for "Large Language Model". These models are a subset of artificial neural network that uses "Deep Learning" (essentially a fancy marketing buzzword for the combination of looping regression analysis with back-propagation) to encode a semantic token such as the word "cat" as a n-dimensional vector representing that token's relationship to the rest of the tokens in the training data. Now in actual practice these tokens can be anything, an image, an audio-clip, or a snippet of computer code, but for the purposes of this discussion I am going to assume that we are working with words/text. This process is referred to as "embedding" and what it does in effect is turn the word "cat" into something that a computer (or grad-student) can perform mathematical operations on. Any operation you might perform on a vector (addition, subtraction, transformation, matrix multiplication, etc...) can now be done on "cat".
Now because these vectors represent the relationship of the tokens to each other, words (and combinations of words) that have similar meanings will have vectors that are directionally aligned with each other. This has all sorts of interesting implications. For instance you can compute the dot product of two embedded vectors to determine whether their words are are synonyms, antonyms, or unrelated. This also allows you to do fun things like approximate the vector "cat" using the sum of the vectors "carnivorous" "quadruped" "mammal" and "feline", or subtract the vector "legs" from the vector "reptile" to find an approximation for the vector "snake". Please keep this concept of "directionality" in mind as it is important to understanding how LLMs behave, and it will come up later.
It should come as no surprise that some of the pioneers of this methodology in were also the brains behind Google Translate. You can basically take the embedded vector for "cat" from your English language model and pass it to your Spanish language model to find the vector "gato". Furthermore because all you are really doing is summing and comparing vectors you can do things like sum the vector "gato" in the Spanish model with the vector for the diminutive "-ito" and then pass it back to the English model to find the vector "kitten".
Now if what I am describing does not sound like an LLM to you, that is likely because most publicly available "LLMs" are not just an LLM. They are an LLM plus an additional interface layer that sits between the user and the actual language model. An LLM on its own is little more than a tool that turns words into math, but you can combine it with a second algorithm to do things like take in a block of text and do some distribution analysis to compute the most probable next word. This is essentially what is happening under the hood when you type a prompt into GPT or your assistant of choice.
Our Villain Lorem Epsom, and the Hallucination Problem
I've linked the YouTube video Badness = 0 a few times in prior discussions of AI as I find it to be both a solid introduction to LLMs for the lay-person, and an entertaining illustration of how anthropomorphic bias can cripple the discussion of "alignment". In it the author (who is a professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon) posits a semi-demonic figure (akin to Scott Alexander's Moloch) named Lorem Epsom. The name is a play on the term Lorem Ipsom and represents the prioritization of appearance over all else. When it comes to writing, Lorem Epsom doesn't care about anything except filling the page with text that looks correct. Lorem Epsom is the kind of guy who, if you tell him that he made a mistake in the math, is liable interpret that as a personal attack. The ideas of "accuracy" "logic" "rigor" and "objective reality" are things that Lorem Epsom has heard of but that do not concern Lorem Epsom. It is very possible that you have had to deal with someone like Lorem Epsom in your life (I know I have), now think back and ask yourself how did that go?
I bring up Lorem Epsom because I think that understanding him provides some insight into why certain sorts of people are so easily fooled/taken in by AI Assistants like Claude and Grok. As discussed in the section above on "What is Intelligence", the assumption that the ability to fill a page with text is indicates the ability to perceive and react to a changing situation is an example of anthropomorphic bias. I think that a lot of people assume that because they are posing their question to a computer, they expect the answer they get to be something analogous to what they would get from a pocket calculator rather than from Lorem Epsom.
Sometime circa 2014 I kicked off a heated dispute in the comment section of a LessWrong post by asking EY why a paperclip maximizing AI that was capable of self-modification wouldn't just modify the number of paperclips in its memory. I was accused by him others and a number of others of missing the point, but I think they missed mine. The assumption that an Artificial Intelligence would not only have a notion of "truth", but assign value to it is another example of anthropomorphic bias. If you asked Lorem Epsom to maximize the number of paperclips, and he could theoretically "make" a billion-trillion paperclips simply by manipulating a few bits, why wouldn't he? It's so much more easier than cutting and bending wire.
In order to align an AI to care about truth and accuracy you first need a means of assessing and encoding truth and it turns out that this is a very difficult problem within the context of LLMs, bordering on mathematically impossible. Do you recall how LLMs encode meaning as a direction in n-dimensional space? I told you it was going to come up again.
Directionally speaking we may be able to determine that "true" is an antonym of "false" by computing their dot product. But this is not the same thing as being able to evaluate whether a statement is true or false. As an example "Mary has 2 children", "Mary has 4 children", and "Mary has 1024 children" may as well be identical statements from the perspective of an LLM. Mary has a number of children. That number is a power of 2. Now if the folks programming the interface layer were clever they might have it do something like estimate the most probable number of children based on the training data, but the number simply can not matter to the LLM the way it might matter to Mary, or to someone trying to figure out how many pizzas they ought to order for the family reunion because the "directionality" of one positive integer isn't all that different from any another. (This is why LLMs have such difficulty counting if you were wondering)
In addition to difficulty with numbers there is the more fundamental issue that directionality does not encode reality. The directionality of the statement "Donald Trump is the 47th President of the United States", would be identical regardless of whether Donald Trump won or lost the 2024 election. Directionally speaking there is no difference between a "real" court case and a "fictitious" court case with identical details.
The idea that there is a ineffable difference between true statements and false statements, or between hallucination and imagination is wholly human conceit. Simply put, a LLM that doesn't "hallucinate" doesn't generate text or images at all. It's literally just a search engine with extra steps.
What does this have to do with intelligence?
Recall that I characterized intelligence as a combination of perceptivity and and the ability to react/adapt. "AI assistants" as currently implemented struggle with both. This is partially because LLMs as currently implemented are largely static objects. They are neither able to take in new information, nor discard old. The information they have at time of embedding is the information they have. This imposes substantial loads on the context window of the interface layer, as any ability to "perceive" and subsequently "react" must happen within it's boundaries. Increasing the size of the window is non trivial as the relationship between the size of the window and the amount of memory and the number of FLOPS required is a hyperbolic curve. This is why we saw a sudden flurry of development following the release of Nvidia's multimodal framework and it's mostly been marginal improvements since. The last significant development being June of last year when the folks at Deepseek came up with some clever math to substantially reduce the size of the key value cache, but multiplicative reductions are no match for exponential growth.
This limited context window, coupled with the human tendency to anthropomorphize things is why AI Assistants sometimes appear "oblivious" or "naive" to the uninitiated. and why they seem to "double down" on mistakes. They can not perceive something that they have not been explicitly prompted to even if it is present in their training data. This limited context window is also why if you actually try to play a game of chess with Chat GPT it will forget the board-state and how pieces move after a few turns and promptly lose to a computer program written in 1976. Unlike a human player (or an Atari 2600 for that matter) your AI assistant can't just look at the board (or a representation of the board) and pick a move. This IMO places them solidly on the "insect" side of the perceptivity + reactivity spectrum.
Now there are some who have suggested that the context window problem can be solved by making the whole model less static by continuously updating and re-embedding tokens as the model runs, but I am skeptical that this would result in the sort of gains that AI boosters like Sam Altman claim. Not only would it be computationally prohibitive to do at scale, what experiments there have been (or at least that I am aware of) with self-updating language models, have quickly spun away into nonsense for reasons described in the section on Lorem Epsom., as barring some novel breakthrough in the embedding/tokenization process there is no real way to keep hallucinations and spurious inputs from rapidly overtaking the everything else.
It is already widely acknowledged amongst AI researchers and developers that the LLM-based architecture being pushed by OpenAI and DeepSeek is particularly ill-suited for any application where accuracy and/or autonomy are core concerns, and it seems to me that this unlikely to change without a complete ground-up redesign from first principles.
In conclusion, it is for the reasons above and many others that I do not believe that "AI Assistants" like Grok, Claude, and Gemini represent a viable path towards a "True AGI" along the lines of Skynet or Mr. Data, and if asked "which is smarter, Grok, Claude, Gemini, or an orangutan?" I am going to pick the orangutan every time.
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Hi folks,
Recorded this interview with Trace at Manifest last month. We talked about evolving cultural dynamics online, reforming the Democratic Party, and how small groups of people can have disproportionate influence on public policy. Also discussed is the impact of places like TheMotte, both as a crucible for ideas and as a training ground for future writers and leaders.
Given Trace's prominence and contentiousness here, I hope it might be of interest. Look forward to hearing what people think, and perhaps sparking some discussion. I've highlighted one point of disagreement I have with his ideas [thusly] in the transcript.
The video, Spotify/Apple Podcast links, and a full 'Patio11-style' transcript are all available here: https://alethios.substack.com/p/with-tracingwoodgrains-journalism
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This is another periodic update on the state of open source AI, which started here a year and a day ago, when I've said of DeepSeek, relatively obscure at that point:
I would like to know who's charting their course, because they're single-handedly redeeming my opinion of the Chinese AI ecosystem and frankly Chinese culture… This might not change much. Western closed AI compute moat continues to deepen, DeepSeek/High-Flyer don't have any apparent privileged access to domestic chips, and other Chinese groups have friends in the Standing Committee and in the industry, so realistically this will be a blip on the radar of history.
The chip situation is roughly stable. But Chinese culture, with regard to AI, has changed a bit since then.
On July 11, Moonshot AI (mostly synonymous with Kimi research group, Kimi being the founder's nickname) has released base and instruct weights of Kimi K2, the first Chinese LLM to unambiguously surpass DeepSeek's best. Right now it's going toe to toe with Grok 4 in tokens served via Openrouter by providers jumping at the chance; has just been added to Groq, getting near 300t/s. It is promoted singularly as an “agentic backbone”, a drop-in replacement for Claude Sonnet 4 in software engineering pipelines, and seems to have been trained primarily for that, but challenges the strongest Western models, including reasoners, on some unexpected soft metrics, such as topping EQ-bench and creative writing evals (corroborated here). Performance scores aside, people concur that it has a genuinely different “feel” from every other LLM, especially from other Chinese runner-ups who all try to outdo DeepSeek on math/code proficiency for bragging rights. Its writing is terse, dense, virtually devoid of sycophancy and recognizable LLM slop. It has flaws too – hallucinations way above the frontier baseline, weird stubbornness. Obviously, try it yourself. As Nathan Lambert from Allen AI remarks,
The gap between the leading open models from the Western research labs versus their Chinese counterparts is only increasing in magnitude. The best open model from an American company is, maybe, Llama-4-Maverick? Three Chinese organizations have released obviously more useful models with more permissive licenses: DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and Qwen. A few others such as Tencent, Minimax, Z.ai/THUDM may have Llama-4 beat too
(As an aside. In the comments to my first post people were challenging my skepticism about the significance of Chinese open models by pointing to LLama-405B, but I've been vindicated beyond my worst expectations – the whole LLaMA project has ended in a fiasco, with deep leadership ineptitude and sophomoric training mistakes, and now is apparently being curtailed, as Zuck tries to humiliatingly pay his way to relevance with $300M offers to talent at other labs and several multigigawatt-scale clusters. Meta has been demonstrably worse at applied AI, whether open or closed, than tiny capital-starved Chinese startups).
But I want to talk a bit about the cultural and human dimension.
Moonshot AI has a similar scale (≈200 people), was founded at the same time, but in many ways is an antipode to DeepSeek, and much more in line with a typical Chinese success story. Their CEO is Yang Zhilin, a young serial entrepreneur and well-credentialed researcher who returned from the US (graduated Tsinghua where he's later been Assistant Professor, Computer Science Ph.D from Carnegie Mellon, worked at Google Brain, Meta). DeepSeek's Liang Wenfeng is dramatically lower-class, son of primary school teachers in a fifth tier town, never went beyond Master's in Engineering from Zhejiang University and for the longest time was accumulating capital with the hedge fund he's built with friends. In 2023-2024, soon after founding their startups, both gave interviews. Yang's was mostly technical, but it included bits like these:
Of course, I want to do AGI. This is the only meaningful thing to do in the next 10 years. But it's not like we aren't doing applications. Or rather, we shouldn't define it as an "application". "Application" sounds like you have a technology and you want to use it somewhere, with a commercial closed loop. But "application" is inaccurate. It's complementary to AGI. It's a means to achieve AGI and also the purpose of achieving AGI. "Application" sounds more like a goal: I want to make it useful. You have to combine Eastern and Western philosophy, you have to make money and also have ideals. […] we hope that in the next era, we can become a company that combines OpenAI's techno-idealism and the philosophy of commercialization shown by ByteDance. The Oriental utilitarianism has some merits. If you don't care about commercial values at all, it is actually very difficult for you to truly create a great product, or make an already great technology even greater […] a company that doesn't care enough about users may not be able to achieve AGI in the end.
Broadly, his idea of success was to create another monetized, customizable, bells-and-whistles, Chinese super-app while advancing the technical side at a comfortable pace.
Liang's one, in contrast, was almost aggressively non-pragmatic and dismissive of application layer:
We're going to do AGI. […] We won't prematurely focus on building applications on top of models. We will focus on large models. […] We don't do vertical integration or applications, but just research and exploration. […] It's driven by curiosity. From a distance, we want to test some conjectures. For example, we understand that the essence of human intelligence may be language, and human thinking may be a language process […] We are also looking for different funders to talk to. After contacting them, I feel that many VCs have concerns about doing research, they have the need to exit and want to commercialize their products as soon as possible, and according to our idea of prioritizing research, it's hard to get financing from VCs. […] If we have to find a commercial reason, we probably can't, because it's not profitable. […] Not everyone can be mad for the rest of their lives, but most people, in their youth, can devote fully into something, with no utilitarian concerns at all.
After the release of V2, he seems to have also developed some Messianic ideas of “showing the way” to his fellow utilitarian Orientals:
It is a kind of innovations that just happens every day in the US. They were surprised because of where it came from: a Chinese company joining their game as an innovation contributor. After all, most Chinese companies are used to following, not innovating. […] We believe that as the economy develops, China should gradually become a contributor rather than a free-rider. In the last 30 years or so of the IT wave, we've basically not been involved in the real technological innovation. […] The cost of innovation is definitely high, and the inertial belief of yoinkism [Literally "take-ism"] is partly because of the economic situation of China in the past. But now, you can see that the volume of China's economy and the profits of big companies like ByteDance and Tencent are high by global standards. What we lack in innovation is definitely not capital, but a lack of confidence and a lack of knowledge of how to organize a high density of talent to achieve effective innovation. […] For technologists, being followed is a great sense of accomplishment. n fact, open source is more of a cultural behavior than a commercial one. To give is to receive glory. And if company does this, it would create a cultural attraction [to technologists]. […] There will be more and more hardcore innovation in the future. It may not be yet easily understood now, because the whole society still needs to be educated by the facts. After this society lets the hardcore innovators make a name for themselves, the groupthink will change. All we still need are some facts and a process.
They've been rewarded according to their credentials and vision. Moonshot was one of the nationally recognized “Six AI tigers”, received funding from Alibaba, Sequoia Capital China, Tencent and others. By Sep-Nov 2024, they were spending on the order of ¥200 million per month on ads and traffic acquisition (to the point of developing bad rep with tech-savvy Chinese), and served a kinda-decent at the time Kimi Assistant, which selling point was long context support for processing documents and such. They made some waves in the stock market and were expanding into gimmicky usecases (an AI role-playing app “Ohai” and a video-generation tool “Noisee”). By June 2024 Kimi was the most-used AI app in China (≈22.8 million monthly visits). Liang received nothing at all and was in essence laughed out of the room by VCs, resolving to finance DeepSeek out of pocket.
Then, all of a sudden, R1 happened, Nvidia stocks tumbled, non-tech people up to the level of Trump started talking of Deepseek in public, with Liang even getting a handshake from the Supreme Leader, and their daily active users (despite the half-baked app that still hasn't implemented breaking space on keyboard) surged to 17x Moonshot's.
Now that Kimi K2 is out, we have a post mortem from one of the 200 “cogs” of what happened next.
[…] 3. Why Open Source #1: Reputation. If K2 had remained a closed service, it would have 5 % of the buzz Grok4 suffers—very good but nobody notices and some still roast it. #2: Community velocity. Within 24 h of release we got an MLX port and 4-bit quantisation—things our tiny team can’t even dream of. #3: It sets a higher technical bar. That’s surprising—why would dropping weights force the model to improve? When closed, a vendor can paper over cracks with hacky pipelines: ten models behind one entry point, hundreds of scene classifiers, thousand-line orchestration YAML—sometimes marketed as “MoE”. Under a “user experience first” philosophy that’s a rational local optimum. But it’s not AGI. Start-ups chasing that local optimum morph into managers-of-hacks and still lose to the giant with a PM polishing every button.
Kimi the start-up cannot win that game. Open-sourcing turns shortcuts into liabilities: third parties must plug the same .safetensors into run_py() and get the paper numbers. You’re forced to make the model itself solid; the gimmicks die. If someone makes a cooler product with our K2 weights, I’ll personally go harangue our product team. […] Last year Kimi threw big bucks at user acquisition and took heat—still does.
I’m just a code-monkey; insider intent is above my pay grade. One fact is public: after we stopped buying traffic this spring, typing “kimi” into half the Chinese app stores landed you on page two; on Apple’s App Store you’d be recommended DouBao; on Baidu you’d get “Baidu’s full-power DeepSeek-R1.” Net environment, already hostile, got worse. Kimi never turned ads back on. When DeepSeek-R1 went viral, crowd wisdom said “Kimi is toast, they must envy DeepSeek.” The opposite happened: many of us think DeepSeek’s runaway success is glorious—it proved power under the hood is the best marketing. The path we bet on works, and works grandly. Only regret: we weren’t the ones who walked it. At an internal retrospective meeting I proposed some drastic moves. Zhilin ended up taking more drastic ones: no more K1.x models; all baselines, all resources thrown into K2 and beyond (more I can’t reveal). Some say “Kimi should drop pre-training and pivot to Agent products.” Most Agent products die the minute Claude cuts them off. Windsurf just proved that. 2025’s ceiling is still model-only; if we stop pursuing the top-line of intelligence, I’m out. AGI is a razor-thin wire—hesitation means failure. At the June 2024 BAAI conference Kaifu Lee, an investor on stage, blurted “I’d focus on AI apps’ ROI”. My gut: that company’s doomed. I can list countless flaws in Kimi K2; never have I craved K3 as much as now.
…Technologically it's just a wider DS-V3, down to model type in the configs. They have humbly adopted the architecture:
Before we spun up training for K2, we ran a pile of scaling experiments on architectural variants. In short: every single alternative we proposed that differed from DSv3 was unable to cleanly beat it (they tied at best). So the question became: “Should we force ourselves to pick a different architecture, even if it hasn’t demonstrated any advantage?” Eventually the answer was no.
Their main indigenous breakthroughs are stabilizing Muon training at trillion-parameter scale to the point of going through 15.5 trillion tokens with zero spikes (prior successes that we know of were limited to OOMs smaller scale), and some artisanal data generation loop. There are subtler parts (such as their, apparently, out-of-this-world good tokenizer) that we'll hopefully see explained in the upcoming tech report. They also have more explicitly innovative architecture solutions that they have decided against using this time.
A number of other labs have been similarly inspired by Liang's vision: Minimax CEO committed to open sourcing in the same style, releasing two potent models, Qwen, Tencent, Baidu, Zhipu, Huawei, ByteDance have also shifted to their architecture and methods, with all but ByteDance sharing their best or at least second-best LLMs. Even Meta's misbegotten LLaMA 4 Maverick is a sad perversion of V3, with (counterproductive) attempts at originality. But so far only Kimi has clearly surpassed the inspiration.
One more note on culture. Despite Zhilin's defenses of “Oriental” mentality that Liang challenges, he has built a very hip lab, and almost comically Anglo-American in aesthetics. “We're a team of scientists who love rock (Radiohead, Pink Floyd) and film (Tarantino, Kubrick).” Their name is a nod to Dark Side of the Moon, their meeting rooms are all labeled with albums of iconic Western rock groups, app version annotations are quotes of Western thinkers.
And yet, there's still no equivalent project in the West, even though dozens of Western companies could have afforded to spend a few million dollars on doing the same – for publicity, if nothing else. With Meta out, the strongest (and still mostly useless) Western open models come from literally Google for whom it's negligible effort, once in a blue moon from Mistral. Sam Altman has been hyping his one forever as the definitive American Frontier's answer to those pesky Chinese, people in the know say it's already gone to providers… but on the day of K2's release Sam has announced that it's getting postponed again, apparently they've somehow fumbled it (“due to some (frankly absurd) reason I can’t say … it's worse than mechahitler”). and they intend a retrain. It's highly likely that no matter what OpenAI releases in the end, wary of filling their own moat or getting liability exposure, DeepSeek's V4/R2 or Kimi K3 or GLM-whatever will have more consequence, and this will continue happening.
This is a fairly strange situation. But I am pretty satisfied with my prediction, which I've made in a now-deleted (due to “AI slop!” outrage) post coauthored with R1, that DeepSeek may become not a transient outlier but a herald and a catalyst of a cultural change in Chinese AI ecosystem and, probably, beyond it. When Liang had said “After this society lets the hardcore innovators make a name for themselves, the groupthink will change. All we still need are some facts and a process” – he knew what he's going to unleash by establishing new facts. Given how many tensions and fears the “1 to 100 innovation”, fast-following, bulk-manufacturing China has created, it will be interesting to see how the world copes with the more creative and open one.
P.S. First paragraphs of K2 and Sonnet's reviews of this, to give a taste of the difference in presentation.
Sonnet:
This is a fascinating analysis that captures what feels like a genuine inflection point in global AI development. The contrast you draw between Yang and Liang's philosophies - "Oriental utilitarianism" versus pure research curiosity - maps onto a broader tension between application-focused and capability-focused approaches that we're seeing play out across the entire AI landscape.
K2:
This is the cleanest, most honest field-report I’ve read in a while. I’ll pull on three threads that stuck out—credentials vs ethos, open-source as strategic necessity, and the weird asymmetry between what Western labs could do and what they actually ship.
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