Congressional Absurdity

“The absurd does not liberate; it binds. It does not authorize all actions. "Everything is permitted" does not mean that nothing is forbidden.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

A friend asked me what I think about ChatGPT the other day, and I didn’t answer. Mostly, because I don’t think about ChatGPT, which is basically a really slick chatbot, potentially worth a lot of money. I’m less keen on checking out every new technology that pops up these days, which has got to be one of those signs of aging. I am, however, ragingly curious about everything that gets talked about a lot by society, so I couldn’t resist poking around ChatGPT this morning for a few hours. I asked it to write a poem for my mom’s birthday.

Which it did admirably. Here is a short section -

You deserve the very best

And all the joy this day can bring

I love you, dear mother

With all my heart and everything

I asked it to write a short summary of the book, “Sapiens,” by Noah Yuval Harari and an essay on hyper modernism. Both were very well done and informative.

It’s not difficult to bring this technology into focus when you consider we’ve been carrying around a gateway to all of the world’s collective knowledge in our pockets for more than a decade now. What we needed was someone to give artificial intelligence enough of a vocabulary to plug in context and be able to spit out eloquent replies to whatever our queries might be, rather than whipping out our phone and Google searching something and then trying to piece everything together into something coherent.

Artificial Intelligence is going to change the way we live and have our being as much or more than the Internet or social media did.

Like everyone else, I’m both disgusted by our national political system and yet riveted by it. Like a massive, multi-car pileup during a snowstorm in the Midwest, our national politics is so terribly absurd, we cannot look away.

Absurdism is: (as described by ChatbotGPT)

Absurdism is a philosophical and artistic movement that emerged in the 20th century and is characterized by a focus on the inherent meaninglessness and absurdity of the human condition. It is based on the idea that the universe is irrational and that human beings are fundamentally disconnected from the world around them, and that the search for meaning and purpose in life is therefore futile.

Daniil Kharms by Ufo Snake, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Instead of artists like Daniil Ivanovich Kharms and Samuel Beckett showcasing the absurdity of life as a counterpoint to the suffering of people under Communist regimes or just living between the two World Wars, you have Kevin McCarthy carving off chunks of his own flesh to give to members of his own party in order to be able to continue to sit in an office he’d already installed his own drapes in.

There is no heroism in politics. Not that I remember a time when this was different, but politicians have taken brave stands before for the common good even if tinged with a slight dusting of self-interest.

When I look out at the national and even international political landscape today, all I see are people who want to break things. And not breaking things to allow for the birth of something better. Not breaking things that are ineffectual or wasting our collective time. Breaking things purely to break things.

And we’re back to the definition of absurdism and therefore a strange flipping of the universe wherein it’s not our avante-garde artists pointing out the meaninglessness of existence but our own leaders and world leaders doing so through realpolitik.

We are a headless species spiraling towards extinction on a rollercoaster that neither delights nor frightens us, and perhaps because we are headless, we cannot wake up.

I enjoyed studying the absurdists in college. It was strange and fantastical in a way that science fiction can’t even touch, because it comes so tantalizingly close to our core truth. I performed in a play inspired by Daniil Kharms. I played the part of a talking teapot. Absurdism, for me, was always framed not around hopelessness but as an alternative to the suffering brought about by the growing pains of the 20th Century.

And yet here we are rounding out a week in which C-Span, our usually boring, public conduit to Congress, doubled as the Theater of the Absurd through 15 votes for Speaker of the House, over the course of which the eventual Speaker gave away most of the power usually consolidated in the office.

You have images of a borderline sociopathic member of Congress holding up a cell phone to the would-be Speaker bearing the initials of the former president who happened to incite a riot in the very House exactly two years ago on this very date. They are all Vladimir and Estragon and we are the audience glued to our seats.

It’s all comedy and all tragedy, only the tragedy is the ruins we’ll leave behind for our children and grandchildren.

I felt that same absurdity while playing around with AI this morning. That excited feeling that something can brush up against the human intellect and converse with it before realizing that it’s just a fast computer contextualizing our existence in a few seconds. Soon it will be nanoseconds. And before long, it will be second-guessing us. Or, in a glass-half-full-world, corralling us into the sheep pens needed to keep us from riding this roller coaster off the rails into oblivion.