The Privilege, page 24
“The university is supposed to teach the most important things we can learn. The question no one seems to ask anymore is who teaches the university. That question was asked, as we have talked about before, in the l7th century by Thomas Hobbes who answered without false modesty that he would teach the universities what to teach. Who had taught the universities before, who was teaching the universities what to teach when Hobbes proposed to do it instead? - Aristotle, as understood by Thomas Acquinas. Greek philosophy made to conform to the requirements of Christianity. Hobbes, along with Francis Bacon and John Locke, to say nothing of Descartes and Machiavelli, produced a radical change, a movement away from the belief in contemplation of what might be most perfect on earth or in heaven, toward a method by which to improve the condition of actual living human beings. Science, modern science, took the place of both revealed religion and Greek philosophy.
“Philosophy and religion had spoken about the ends, or purpose, of human existence; the new science was concerned only with the means by which men could acquire more power over the world in which they lived. Science, in that once famous phrase of Francis Bacon, would ‘alleviate man’s estate.’ Philosophy had taught what it meant to be a human being, what human excellence really was; science promised to end human suffering. Religion had promised eternal life; science raised the question how far the average life span could be extended. The university which had always been dedicated to the life of the mind, began, by the middle years of the twentieth century, to be more and more committed to the needs of the body, the way science could help in the production of new and better labor saving schemes and devices, how science could improve medicine, how technology could be used to help find new cures for disease, how death itself could be delayed, and even, perhaps, defeated.
“The university, still insisting that it was guided only by the search for the truth, had become prisoner to the modern illusion that science was the only way to discover it. Science, which by its own definition can deal only with facts and never with values, could not say, much less prove, that one way of life was better than any other. The university could not teach anyone anything about how they should live. The most important question anyone could ask, and everyone was left to decide it as best they could for themselves. The university taught nothing about what it means to be a human being. This bankruptcy of the American university was the real issue in the trial of Alan Boe, the trial that Joseph Antonelli conducted with such admirable skill.
“Alan Boe was not on trial; the university, what the university had become under someone like Lucas Fairweather, was on trial. Alan Boe was not just innocent of the murder of Lucas Fairweather; he was the only one who still understood what a university is supposed to be. What was the result of that trial? What did Joseph Antonelli achieve? He saved an innocent man, and that is important, but there was something perhaps even more important than that. The Friedrich trial had exposed the corruption of people who measure themselves, and others, by how much they can acquire. The Boe trial proved the corruption of those who think the main function of a university is to teach what is essentially the same thing: that there is nothing more important than learning how to make money. The two trials differ in this: Friedrich, the defendant in the first trial, was as much a slave to his own desires as his wife, the victim, had been to hers. Alan Boe, on the other hand, proved that there is still someone who knows how to think, who understands what it means to be free and independent, who is not afraid that no one else will agree with him, who would rather die than turn his back on the truth. The only person who did not feel sorry for Alan Boe after the jury found him not guilty, after no one could any longer doubt his innocence, was Alan Boe himself. Why would he feel sorry for himself? He had done nothing wrong. But the real difference is this: Alan Boe would not have felt sorry for himself had he been convicted, had there been no one at all who thought him innocent. Why would he? Whatever the verdict, whatever public opinion might be, the fact would have been the same as it had always been: he had not done anything of which he should be ashamed. That was the great advantage he has always had: he knows that he had never done anything he should not have done. That is the advantage that all of you will have. It is the reason you are here.
“One of the reasons. Remember what we do here, remember what AIE is all about. It is not to lead the world in artificial intelligence. We do that, it isn’t very difficult, but we do it so that there will be a few people left - the hundred of you - who will have the position, and the means - to lead independent lives, who will understand that artificial intelligence is no intelligence at all. Who will understand that like nearly everything modern science has made possible, it is just the latest, though perhaps the most insidious, method by which to impose slavery on ourselves. Think this through, never stop thinking this through. Slavery is bad enough when we enslave someone’s body and make them prisoner to our own will and domination. How much worse when we enslave their minds, and how much worse even than that when we arrange things so that they do it to themselves, give up their real freedom so they can have the choice what kind of addiction they want at any given moment to enjoy?
“What we are about, the reason we exist, the end we mean to achieve, is to preserve the conditions - and create them where they do not exist, if we can - for the kind of freedom that is possible only for those who have the ability and the desire to understand the world in which they live. That is, and will remain, our challenge. It is not enough to talk about being free from limitations, free from all restraint, free to do whatever we happen at any moment to like; the freedom that matters, the freedom that can change everything, is the freedom to pursue human excellence.
“There is one last thing that I want to leave you with this evening, a thought that some of you may wish to discuss with our distinguished guest. Let us suppose for a moment that in both the Friedrich trial and the Boe trial, the real killer, or killers, had been caught and that Mr. Antonelli found himself again the attorney for the defense. How would he have done it, what defense could he have used? I have a suggestion: tyrannicide. This will sound at first strange and perhaps absurd. But I wonder. Someone who commits tyrannicide, someone who kills a tyrant, was always honored as the greatest benefactor of the city over which the tyrant ruled. Neither Allison Friedrich nor Lucas Fairweather were tyrants; they did not rule anywhere. Perhaps our definition of the tyrant and tyranny are too narrow, or too limited. The tyrant who rules a city rules every individual in it; whoever tyrannizes one individual is as much a tyrant as one who tyrannizes a thousand, or tens of thousands. What is the reason someone who kills a tyrant goes free? Why is it not murder under the law? Because the tyrant is lawless, because he dominates improperly. Is that in any way fundamentally different than someone dominated by a lawless passion of greed or lust, who acting on those tyrannical drives tyrannizes over others? Perhaps Mr. Antonelli has the answer. Or perhaps, if something like this - the trials of Justin Friedrich and Alan Boe - happen again, he might on that occasion gain some greater insight into the question.”
That was the last thing he said, literally the last thing. There was nothing in the way of a summary, nothing in the way of closing remarks; not a word about when he would be there to lecture again; nothing, just a complete, inexplicable silence. He simply stopped talking. That did not mean that anyone knew it. In the darkness it was impossible to know if he was still there, thinking about what he wanted to say next. Everyone sat where they were; no one moved, no one thought about moving. A minute went by, then another, and then, finally, the lights came on, not all at once, but gradually, and only gradually growing brighter. The stage was vacant, the only thing on it an empty chair. I turned to Carruthers and realized immediately that, far from unusual, this was completely normal, this was how Redfield’s lectures always ended.
“He always speaks to you in the dark?”
The question seemed both to surprise and amuse her.
“No one has ever seen Redfield. You wouldn’t expect him to lecture any other way, would you?”
“No one has ever….”
I remembered what Albert Craven had told me, that first time Redfield had come to the office, that no one had seen the enigmatic genius behind the world’s most advanced technology company, but I had assumed that he meant no one outside the company, no one outside the circle of employees and whatever close friends and colleagues Redfield might have
“You’re telling me you wouldn’t recognize him if you passed him on the street?” I inquired, just to be sure. “How does he run the company, how does he communicate with you and the others?”
“Mainly in writing, of course; sometimes by phone.”
She said this in the way of someone describing a routine, a habit by now so ingrained that the novelty, the strangeness, of it had long since been forgotten. It was Redfield’s way, and like everything else Redfield did, there was a reason.
“He wants us - he wanted us - to learn independence, to become used to make decisions ourselves. He did not want us to worry what he might think when we saw him coming. He is not our employer, not in the usual sense; he is our teacher, someone who helps us see more clearly, and more quickly, what we might have missed on our own. You heard what he said tonight. That is our mission, the only one, really, that we have: to learn how to keep ourselves from becoming slaves to the technology taking over the world. He keeps emphasizing that; it is what he talked about the first night I was here, what he never stops talking about: the only people who understand anything that is made are the ones who make it.” She gave me a long, meaningful look, before she added, “And, what is of great importance when you are talking about artificial intelligence, only those who make the thing will never forget that the thing is made. Because if you don’t understand that, you begin to forget what has been created and who has created it. Which, in turn, as Redfield explains it, is the difference between the end and the means by which to accomplish it. Who, or what, decides the purpose for which you create whatever it is you invent. That is the question.”
Carruthers had been entirely serious, and her explanations, at least in that moment, rigorously clear, but now, when she paused and noted the puzzled astonishment on my face, she laughed self-consciously.
“I’m sorry! When Redfield talks about this it all makes perfect sense. I’m afraid when I try to explain it, I get things all jumbled up.”
“No, not at all,” I replied, giving her all the assurances of my own limited capacity. “I think I followed what you were trying to say.”
“Well, Redfield can tell you, when you see him, later this evening.”
I did not have the chance to ask her what she meant. With a quick, polite smile, she shook my hand and then, reaching inside her pocket, pulled out a small envelop and handed it to me.
“Redfield left this for you. It will tell you where you are to go next. Goodbye, Mr. Antonelli. I’m glad you were Professor Boe’s attorney,” she remarked, as she reached up to unfasten the ribbon on her head and then shook loose her long blonde hair. “I knew you would be able to convince a jury that he was a completely innocent man. He has such a remarkable face, don’t you think?” she remarked with a grave, wistful and strangely determined look in her large blue eyes.
“It was you!” I exclaimed with a sudden sense of recognition. “That night…you!”
But she was gone, banished with the others somewhere into the night. I stared all around, wondering if it had just been my imagination. A chance remark about the look of Alan Boe, the knowledge that she was one of Redfield’s employees, one of his students which meant, or might mean, willing to subjugate her own will to his, a slave, to use the word I had heard so often that evening, to Redfield’s strange, and uncommon, definition of freedom, and I was ready to accuse her of murder!
Chapter Seventeen
Redfield left directions to where we were finally to meet. It was not very far, two miles, more or less, father up the hills, at the very top of the ridge line. The directions had the aspect of a child’s treasure map, long winding lines and then a sharp right turn onto an unmarked, and unpaved, road, even more narrow than the one I had followed to the headquarters of AIE, but not nearly as long, a hundred yards at most before I reached the clearing and Redfield’s contemporary mid-century home that could have been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.
Clusters of bamboo stood on both sides of the double front doors the other side of a twelve foot long wooden bridge that straddled a shallow pond lit from below. Large coy moved slowly and methodically back and forth, glistening like golden baubles in a rich man’s shaded palace. One of the doors was open part way and I stepped inside onto gleaming hardwood floors and tan matted carpets. Sliding parchment thick walls, almost Japanese in style, divided place from place and everywhere the glow of indirect lighting banished brightness and shadow both. Bookcases, ebony black, lined the walls of the living room. A flagstone fireplace, opening on one side into the living and on the other into the dining room, stood at the corner between the two rooms. The shelves, instead of filled with books held only a few dozen; formal photographs of famous men and famous places took up all the remaining space. There was, so far as I noticed on that first, cursory glance, no picture of Redfield, no sign of anything by which he could be identified. The house might have belonged to anyone, at least anyone who lived a fairly anonymous life.
Outside, through a double set of double sliding doors, at the edge of a lap pool forty, fifty feet in length and eight or ten feet wide, Redfield was standing, his back to me, gazing out into the cloudless star-filled night. He had not heard me come in, and, forced this long to wait to see him, I looked around, taking another, slower view of the house, the place Redfield called home. It seemed, as I glanced across the living room, a perfect place for a single, private life. I could imagine living there myself, if I had been more a recluse and less interested in my own form of anonymity, the kind I had lived in the middle of the city. Redfield had every convenience necessary, and none of those that are not. There was no large television set fastened to the wall; there was no television set at all. There was no sound system, at least none that I noticed; no electronic devices of any kind, nothing of the ‘smart’ house technology, nothing that could by even the loosest definition be called artificial intelligence. The light switches were the kind you see every day, in place right on the wall. It was exactly what it must have been like when it was first built, fifty or sixty years ago. That is what really caught my eye. After all this time, it still looked new, a house that had been lived in, but only for a year or so. It must have cost a fortune to make it look like that.
Wearing a light brown sports jacket, pale gray shirt, tan slacks and loafers, Redfield shoved his hands deep into his pants pockets and stared down at the ground. A moment later, he looked back at the house and, when he saw me standing at the sliding glass door, started to smile, and then gestured for me to come outside. You would have thought we were old friends from the way he greeted me. He seemed genuinely glad I was there. We sat at a round glass topped table, and without asking if I wanted something to drink, he poured us each a glass from a bottle of French wine.
“Did you think my performance this evening a little too dramatic?” he asked, as his eyes flickered with acknowledgement at what he seemed certain must have been my impression. “You probably - no, you have to think that I am some sort of mad man, some demented egomaniac, trying to get even with the world.” He seemed almost to take this under advisement, to wonder whether it might really be true. “Or perhaps I have not given you enough credit; perhaps you have now begun to realize what it is I’m trying to do.”
“Why don’t you tell me - what you’re trying to do. I think I understand why you speak only in the dark, and even why no one who works for you has ever seen you. It forces you to listen more carefully when you sit there in the dark like that. And as to why you don’t let anyone see you, I imagine that is for something like the same reason: it makes them take more seriously what you do communicate to them in writing or, I’m told, sometimes on the telephone. It’s a little like being God - no one ever gets to see you, which is part of the reason everyone believes you capable of anything.”
Redfield slid down in the chair, stretched out his legs and crossed his ankles. A brief, candid smile darted across his lips as he seemed to remember something.
“Years ago when I was still a student - it was in one of Alan Boe’s advanced seminars - there was a young woman, a black woman, who was completely blind. That is when I learned it, what I saw watching her. We were all sitting around a long, oblong table. She - I’m afraid I’ve forgotten her name; forgotten her name but have never forgotten her - would speak and of course never look around, never look - and this is really the point - to see how others were reacting to what she was saying. She had this wonderful face, eager, alert, and as kind as any you have ever seen. Everyone was looking at her; you could not look away, she held you that close, but she of course did not notice. That was when I started to realize how much we are all confined by the looks we see, the way others look at us when we talk to them, and how, quite without our knowing it, we make adjustments in our own look, adjustments in the way we phrase things, in the way we try to change what we are saying or at least how we are saying it, to the response we see that we are getting. It works the other way as well. We sit there, in a seminar, in a gathering of any size, and our own expression, our own thoughts, change with the change we see in the expression of whoever is speaking to us. But not when a blind woman is speaking, not when the speaker speaks in darkness. Then the speaker is in a way speaking to no one, he speaks all alone, he speaks his silent thoughts out loud. He becomes like one of Shakespeare’s characters speaking to himself, knowing all the time that he has an audience for the private musings of his mind.”
