The Ties that Bind Us

Finding Meaning in the Tension(s)

Thanksgiving is an odd holiday.

In popular consciousness, Thanksgiving is associated with a mythologized Pilgrim experience, even as our cultural reaction to Pilgrim Puritanism has always been one of wariness. (More on that below.) In reality, Abraham Lincoln established Thanksgiving in 1863, the midpoint of a Civil War that would kill more Americans than any other war. That the country would establish a holiday of gratitude in a period of such despair and bloodshed probably deserves its own mythology, but instead, we keep the Pilgrim thing.

We consider Thanksgiving a harvest holiday, even as the harvest for most of America’s northern hemisphere climate is well past. Canada’s early October Thanksgiving makes much more sense in this regard.

We predominantly celebrate Thanksgiving as a holiday of gratitude. It’s a time for families and friends to come together and appreciate each other and the gift of delicious food. Yet many of the cultural practices of the holiday focus on consumption: consuming so much food that you feel like passing out, consuming football and a dog show, preparing for the epic consumption of the holiday shopping season. This uncomfortable relationship with shopping is ever-present but cannot become dominant: President Roosevelt’s advancing of Thanksgiving to earlier in November in order to extend the holiday shopping season further was fairly quickly reverted.

Of course now, we just start the shopping season ahead of the holiday. I think I received my first “Black Friday” sale email in the first week of November. Thanksgiving is no longer a moment of gratitude before consumptive excess, it’s more like a halftime show.

Yet it’s this dynamic tension that makes Thanksgiving the most American of American holidays. To use a food-analogy in honor of the holiday, America is an emulsion, a mixture of liquids that don’t by nature blend together. America historically was portrayed as a “melting pot”, but I distinctly remember as a teenager being taught that melting pot was a “bad” analogy because it eliminated distinct cultural identities. Instead, this teacher preferred “tossed salad”, the dominant analogy of 90s political correctness. Since then, tossed salad has lost mindshare in favor of “stew”, which brings back the blending idea of a melting pot, while retaining the distinct flavor notes of individual components.

Emulsion makes more sense to me because it reflects the core dynamic tensions at the heart of American society. An emulsion’s mixed liquid looks like a single substance, but it can “fall out” of mixture over time. Moderate agitation will re-constitute the emulsion, while severe agitation will break it further.

If one focuses only on the different components of Thanksgiving, the holiday doesn’t make sense. Each individual component stands in stark contrast to the others. Yet Thanksgiving is arguably the most appreciated American holiday. A 2024 YouGov poll found Christmas to be the most popular overall, but Thanksgiving led in its ratio of favorite to least favorite days.

Emulsions don’t magically come together. They require an emulsifying agent to bind the different liquids together. Lincoln, the real progenitor of the Thanksgiving holiday, is seen as a major proponent of “civil religion” as an emulsifying agent. Other periods of history may have idealized “the American dream” or the idea of “manifest destiny” during periods of American expansion. Today, as America appears so starkly divided across various axes, I’m not so sure of the universal emulsifying agent. We are still emerging from the post-Covid hangover and identifying what America is, and what we want it to be.

But Thanksgiving demonstrates that the emulsifying agent doesn’t have to make sense, and in fact goes beyond rationality. Americans make Thanksgiving work because they want it to work. They want to have a moment to appreciate life as it is, to take a break from constant consumption, to sit quietly in the midst of loud togetherness and focus just on digesting all that life gives us.

On to this week’s links.

Forgiveness and Thanksgiving

“Ted Lasso,” “Shrinking,” Brett Goldstein, & the Power of Forgiveness

Is it ok to admit that I haven’t seen Ted Lasso? Lasso feels like the Thanksgiving of content, a series that’s near universally appreciated, across all sorts of cultural boundaries. I know, I’ll watch it, someday.

But whether you’ve seen Lasso or not,

Mark Oppenheimer

’s piece on the power of forgiveness deeply resonates. Linking forgiveness to Thanksgiving, Oppenheimer beautifully observes:

the beauty of forgiveness lies in how the forgiver seizes the opportunity to give a gift, to lighten another’s burden—really, to free someone else from bondage. Maybe not everyone deserves that liberation, but then again, none of us deserves everything we have. Forgiveness is thus a gesture toward the universe, a way of passing on good fortune. It’s an act of thanksgiving.

Do we even like Pilgrims?

As I mentioned above, Thanksgiving’s origin is tied to a mythologized portrayal of the so-called “first Thanksgiving” of the Pilgrims of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. But this association between a holiday that’s well loved, and a Puritan ethos that we don’t really like but can’t quite escape from, is a curious juxtaposition. Religion writer Maggie Phillips wrote a short cultural history of the Puritans in Tablet Mag a couple years ago, being careful to avoid culture war third rails while painting a complex picture of America’s long subconscious relationship with Puritanism.

Who’s the Co-Pilot?

Artificial intelligence, agency, and the emergence of humans as AI amanuenses

(What, you thought I could go a week without writing about AI?!)

A popular model of AI applications portrays AI as a “co-pilot” to a human primary user. The human drives action, the AI assists. In reality, the question of who is driving whom is fuzzy, and when one takes a look at organizational contexts (in which there’s a human chain of command and multiple access points to AI agents/bots), individual humans may not be the dominant driver.

Andrew Maynard

explores just this question, using the new-to-me term of “amanuenses” as a lens on the human/AI relationship. “An amanuensis”, Maynard explains, “is someone who was historically employed to write down someone else’s work, whether through dictation, copying, or capturing their ideas in some other permanent form.”

Despite Maynar’s unflinching honesty in evaluating how humans and AI relate, he ends on a positive note. If you’re interested in AI, definitely read the whole essay. Hat tip to

Josh Brake

for the link.

Cogs or Engines?

When we become cogs

I read this post from

Rohit Krishnan

last week, yet it comes into even starker relief when considered with Maynard’s exploration of AI/human amanuenses. “People find fulfillment by being the masters of some aspect, fully,” Krishnan writes. “To own an outcome and use their brains, their whole brains, to ideate and solve for that outcome.” But if AI leaves us simply as coordinators who enable the AI to do the thinking, will we find similar fulfillment? Will we take advantage of a windfall of time and creative energy to engage in leisurely learning? Or fall into endless depressive consumption?

Humans are Weird

Q: Are We Not (Hu)Man?

Prof

John Warner

writes and teaches about writing, in addition to being a previous editor of the well-known McSweeney’s. In this essay, Warner explores the human preference for AI-produced poetry over then human-authored variety. In short, AI-produced poetry is more accessible, easily digestible, and predictable. Humans, on the other hand, are weird unique slowflakes who can take strange turns in their thought stream. Those strange turns require greater effort from the reader to parse and understand – but they’re also what make a human human.

Warner ends with a beautiful call to action which I wholeheartedly support:

The fact that people mistake AI for human, or say they prefer AI-generated “art” to human-generated work is not a testament to the quality of AI work, but a comment on how we may have fallen out of touch with our humanity.

This is our work going forward. Not just preserving our humanity, but to do better than that, to honor our humanity.

We Forgot How We Did It

Brain Food

There’s a phrase that’s increasingly common as a meme on the internet: “we can’t, we don’t know how”. The phrase is used not to describe technology that we haven’t invented yet, but technologies that were used in the past to engineer solutions which we somehow cannot approximate today.

In his own link roundup (how meta),

Brian Klaas

recaps an article from Science exploring a new discovery of the ancient Roman art of concrete production. Klaas observes:

This offers a parable for modern scientific progress: we have a strong sense that we know best, that old technology is backward, and that new technology is, by definition, superior. But the case of the Roman concrete illustrates a potent counterpoint: sometimes that assumption can blind us to the simpler superiority of older methods, hiding in plain sight, peppered with the wisdom of our forebears.

Thank you, and please?

Thank you for taking the time to read this post. I love synthesizing ideas, and I appreciate that Substack gives me the opportunity both to learn from an incredible collection of thoughtful authors, and to contribute my synthesis back to the conversation.

While writing for one’s self is meaningful (and can contribute to thinking generally), I personally find much more value from writing for other people, and hopefully being a source of ideas that can inspire your own reflection and action.

So I am deeply grateful to everyone who subscribes to this Substack. And in a moment of dynamic tension, I’m asking for something in addition to expressing my gratitude. 😂

If you find value in reading Engineering Virtues, please share the link with one other human who you think would also find it valuable or interesting. The diversity of readers encourages me to keep writing and provides new avenues for reflection and discovery. I benefit greatly from it, and hope that you, in turn, can benefit as well.