The Frank Forum

  The human soul is inimitable; Artificial Intelligence, while wildly impressive, will always fall short. We individual beings are idiosyncratic in a way that is incomputable to machines.  Many, however, fail to appreciate this indisputable fact and look at humans, not as God's inexplicable creations, but as product-maximizing homo-economici : faceless units whose value is measured by their outputs.   Schools, in particular, are overly output-driven. In an article for First Things , S. A. Dance writes that education is "a spiritual pursuit." The spirit is not quantifiable, but rather, something that is cultivated through leisure. Leisure, Dance recognizes, has become something of a pejorative. Today, leisureliness is seen as indolence.  Dance and others, however, see leisure as a meditative and reflective practice. A school's goal, he writes, ought to be to "refine our capacities to think rationally, contemplate reality, appreciate beauty, and feel gratitude....

  Breaking old habits is hard.   I say that because most of us city-dwellers are in the nasty habit of insulating ourselves from our neighbors and communities. As I wrote for National Review a few months ago, "When we walk down the street, we turn off our peripheral vision and focus only on the destination, never the journey." We have become overly-utilitarian, socially-averse and stuck in rigid routines.  I always feel the need to admit: I, too, have insulated myself. I could be far more involved in my community. I could learn more of my neighbor's names. I need to do better. We all do.  Some, recognizing that a life of atomization and loneliness is fundamentally unhealthy, have taken the plunge into community engagement.  In Front Porch Republic , Dennis Uhlman writes about a chili cook-off that he spearheaded in his new South Carolina neighborhood. From the article: By late afternoon, to my surprise, a steady stream of neighbors started to show up. ...