Because I Care So Much About AI, I'm Going to Ruin It For You
Care is good. Toxic care is not good.
The other day I went to a reading and discussion for Orlando Reade's new book, about how revolutionaries and wannabes from Malcolm X to Thomas Jefferson to Jordan Peterson (!) have taken inspiration from John Milton's Paradise Lost. In the Q&A someone said she appreciated this long-enduring, wild and potent poem -- but she couldn't bear to read it because Milton was a bad man.
Milton was (at least some of the time) a nasty husband and a "severe and arbitrary" father who had a "Turkish contempt of females," in the words of Samuel Johnson (unfortunate traits in a man with three daughters).1 Should people not read his work because of that? The questioner wasn't directly suggesting Milton be cancelled, but when someone says "I can't bear to read this, knowing the author was a monster," it’s natural to wonder if anyone should read it.
The question, of course, generalizes: Should you not read Tolstoy because he too was a hard, hard burden on his loved ones? Lots of p…