Brother Francis insisted that, for the Crusade of the Saint Benedict Center to be successful, everyone needed to be of a like mind, to be part of the same school of thought, and that school of thought must be entirely focused on finding the truth. If we are to have any hope of succeeding in our quest to restore the One True Church and all of its doctrines, beginning with Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus, nothing less is acceptable, nothing else will be effective. Fortunately, his philosophy lectures were recorded, along with other courses he gave, all of which are solidly Catholic and which manifest clearly the “mind of the Center.” I would like to touch upon a mortal enemy of such thought — sophistry.
Just as a review, a sophism is defined as reasoning that seems plausible on a superficial level but is actually unsound; a fallacious argument meant to deceive. Sophists are those who use such arguments. Sophistry is what they engage in. The fallacious arguments they employ are called sophistical. In Joseph Pieper’s book, Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power1, they are all part of what he calls the “abuse of language.” It is language that is used in any way that does not advance or search for the truth, language that is used not to communicate but to manipulate. Unfortunately, our modern age is drowning in sophistry.
Brother Francis always decried the Sophists of all eras, particularly those from the modern age, when men who should have known better — who had been given the truth, both human and divine — chose instead to obfuscate it and promote error. When treating of the Sophists of the early ages, those who lived before Jesus came to earth, Brother pointed out their errors, but treated them more-or-less academically. However, when dealing with modern Sophists, he gave them no quarter. This is the type of sophistry we will consider in this article.
Josef Pieper explains that the purpose of language is to conform to reality: to express the truth and to communicate that truth to someone else. He says, “The dignity of the word, to be sure, consists in this: through the word is accomplished what no other means can accomplish, namely, communication based on reality.” Whenever someone uses language to distort the truth, to flatter or mislead to gain some advantage or to get money, it becomes sophistry. Even if the language is beautiful, if it is not conveying the truth, it remains sophistry, and in fact, the use of elevated language itself can be a means of distorting the truth. When someone engages in sophistry, the desire for power is most often behind the manipulation of words.
Recently, an example of this sort of gross sophistry was exposed in the case of an organization that pretends to defend the downtrodden, those groups of individuals who are supposedly discriminated against or being treated unfairly. The Southern Poverty Law Center’s blatant use of lies, and not just lies, but the deception of funding those very groups it pretends to expose so that it can use diatribe against these groups as a way to raise money, has become public knowledge. One needs to spend a few moments contemplating this in order to let the gravity of this sophistry sink in. It’s one thing to create a “straw man” argument, but the SPLC has taken it to a new level of depravity, by actually funding the “evil” groups it pretends to “expose.”2 As Pieper says: abuse of language — abuse of power.
Pieper points out that technology has made it possible to multiply the ill effects of sophistry. No longer does a single person simply stumble on a propaganda pamphlet or book of bad philosophy and share it with a few of his friends, but, nowadays, after he stumbles upon it, he places the sophistries on the internet, which are then shared and re-shared ad infinitum, with an impact that was not thinkable in the past. As Pieper says, “It is entirely possible that the true and authentic reality is being drowned out by the countless superficial information bits noisily and breathlessly presented in propaganda fashion. Consequently, one may be entirely knowledgeable about a thousand details and nevertheless, because of ignorance regarding the core of the matter, remain without basic insight.… [t]he place of authentic reality is taken over by a factious reality…a pseudoreality, deceptively appearing as being real, so much so that it becomes almost impossible any more to discern the truth…. The sophists fabricate a fictitious reality.”3
On top of all this, the world is undergoing the so-called “Artificial Intelligence” (AI) revolution. This is where computer technology, using high speed calculations, draws upon multiple sources of information at once and translates them into language. AI brings sophistry into the modern age and is of a different strength — more powerful, more attractive, and potentially more devious. AI is replacing the real culture of living human beings that used to train the children. AI is also replacing their jobs and recent research shows it is actually changing the structure of the brain.
A problem when using AI is that people’s brains become lazy far more quickly than they realize. In fact, studies show that the brains of those who depend on AI and do not use it simply as a tool to begin their research are actually rewired and work differently. At the same time, because using AI gives them the impression that they have competence, users of AI gain a certain over-confidence. Research shows people who are dependent on AI to assist them in writing papers or doing research or performing their jobs are actually losing their ability to think and to perform. In fact, they are losing the skills that tied their minds to reality and now, because of the ease with which AI performs complicated tasks, they believe they know more than they do, and that they have skills they do not possess. They are losing their ability to evaluate, to judge, and to determine what is true or not. But instead of recognizing this as a problem, they actually believe they are more competent than they were before AI and are now possessed of the foolish confidence of a beginner in any field who only finds out how much he does not know after he gains some experience.
According to modern author, Baille Gifford, AI, if not treated with extreme but healthy skepticism, can be like sophistry on steroids; in the end, it will leave many people unable to think for themselves or to exercise certain skills, although they are completely (and falsely) convinced that this is not the case.4 In other words, the sophistry will have actually distorted their very apparatus of thought, their ability to receive the truth; their minds will no longer conform to reality.
Gifford says: “The crucial near-term risk is not that AI makes people less intelligent in any simple sense. It is that it creates what researchers call ‘illusions of understanding.’ That is the belief that you understand more than you do, that you have considered all possibilities when you haven’t, and that your judgement is objective when it is being shaped by the system you are relying on. These illusions are invisible to those experiencing them…. You cannot fix a problem that the people affected by it are confident does not exist.”5
Joseph Pieper died in 1997, long before the current AI technology existed (though it was the goal all along in the computer world). It is noteworthy that much of what Pieper writes about the abuse of language can be applied to these AI “large language models” (LLMs), which reduce reality to probability-derived math problems processed by computer machine language and regurgitated to the user as a pile of pleasant-sounding mind slop. Pieper writes, “…the general public is being reduced to a state where people not only are unable to find out about the truth but also become unable even to search for the truth because they are satisfied with deception and trickery that have determined their convictions, satisfied with a fictitious reality created by design through the abuse of language. This, says Plato, is the worst thing that the sophists are capable of wreaking upon mankind by their corruption of the word.”6
So with this hyper-charged mechanism for sophistry, what is a reasonable person to do? How does he protect himself from being sucked into the convenient vortex of AI sophistry? Josef Pieper gives us a general direction: “In this respect we are well able to pronounce the general principle and at the same time to be very specific: opposition is required, for instance, against every partisan simplification, every ideological agitation, every blind emotionality; against seduction through well turned yet empty slogans, against autocratic terminology with no room for dialogue, against personal insult as an element of style (all the more despicable the more sophisticated it is), against the language of evasive appeasement and false assurance… and not least against the jargon of the revolution, against categorical conformism, and categorical nonconformism….”7
Practically, everyone who wants to retain his faculties and not be enervated by the siren call of modern technology, including Artificial Intelligence, needs to force himself to do things that are uncomfortable and apparently not as easy and efficient as inserting a phrase into an AI application. For example, in small things, one can take charge: such as performing arithmetic calculations in one’s check book rather than using an electronic calculator, such as forcing oneself to write his own material and do his own research, even if AI is used as a starting point, instead of relying on AI to provide an easy answer.
Gifford says, “The people who will thrive are not those who use AI the most, but those who can still think without it. The institutions that will matter are not those that adopt AI fastest, but those that preserve the human capabilities AI cannot replace.” While Gifford is speaking of the effects of AI on the brain, the same applies to the level of sophistry being spun by such systems. Only those who step back and continue to do their own thinking will have any chance at all to avoid being swept away in the flood of sophistry.
In an ironic demonstration showing the concerns about an even greater danger of sophistry, AI wrote its own examples for a book about AI. Recently, Steve Rosenbaum, the author of a book about AI, entitled The Future of Truth, discovered that quotes he used were actually AI fabrications. An article about the problem noted: “The author of a nonfiction book about the effects of artificial intelligence on truth acknowledged on Monday that he had included numerous made-up or misattributed quotes concocted by A.I.”8 This demonstrates the power of AI to create sophistry on a level never before experienced by man. AI is not real language, but (to quote Brother Francis) it parades around as if it were: the ultimate sophistry.
All of this is important because the abuse of language becomes the abuse of power. In his 1994 book, The Disappearance of Childhood, author Neal Postman states prophetically: “To this day, and not withstanding the individuality of authors, there is a tendency to believe what appears in print. Indeed, wherever the mark of a unique individual is absent from the printed page, as in text books and encyclopedias, the tendency to regard the printed page as a sacrosanct voice of authority is almost overwhelming. What is being said here is that typography is by no means a neutral conveyor of information.”9 If this is true of print, we can only imagine the power of videos and podcasts. When we consider that nowadays, much of this language is being generated by a machine that is pumping out sophistry at a level previously unheard of, it is easier to see the problem. In a C-Span interview, Postman added, “Technology redefines our language. It gives us different meanings of older words and very often we are not aware as we should be of how that process is working. … All technological change is a Faustian bargain. Technology giveth something but technology also taketh something away, and not always in equal measure…. It is never one sided.” Postman’s comments support Joseph Pieper’s contention: abuse of language…abuse of power.
It seems to me that, despite the attractiveness of ease which is offered by technological sophistry such as AI, the same universal conditions apply that resulted from the fall of Adam and Eve: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread till thou return to the earth, out of which thou wast taken: for dust thou art, and into dust thou shalt return” (Gen. 3:19). To avoid the increasing seductiveness of the sophistries offered by today’s technology and hold to the truth, one must return to the path set for us by God in the beginning: that of toil, of work, of slogging our way through problems and difficulties. Unless we take the more difficult path, while constantly asking Jesus, Mary, and Joseph for their help and guidance, we are helpless in the face of the tsunami of sophistry which is headed our way.
— Footnotes —
1. Pieper, Josef, Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power 1992, Ignatius Press
2. It needs to be made clear that the Southern Poverty Law Center has funded groups like the “Aryan Nation” and the “Ku Klux Klan” but has never provided money to other groups it has attacked, including all those that are Traditional Catholics.
3. Piper, Josef, Ibid. p. 33-34
4. “AI isn’t coming for your job. It’s coming for your mind,” at bailliegifford.com
5. Gifford, Ibid.
6. Pieper, Josef, Ibid.. p. 35
7. Pieper, Josef, Ibid., p. 39
8. “Book on Truth in the Age of A.I. Contains Quotes Made Up by A.I.,” at nytimes.com. Editor’s note: We here at Saint Benedict Center have used the best of AI LLMs for research purposes, and have discovered such fabrications, called “hallucinations” in the (generous) professional AI jargon. These include completely fabricated passages from St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae that appear remarkably convincing. When “confronted” with the counterfeit nature of the material, the LLM will, strangely, become obsequiously apologetic. This has happened so often that we developed a policy of “don’t trust; verify” when dealing with alleged quotes from sources.
9. The Disappearance of Childhood, Neil Postman, Vintage Books, 1994
