Do Not Eat Anything You Find Already Dead

Fertility, longevity, and post-Vatican II aesthetics in Napa

The great talent of Luke Burgis is bringing smart, interesting people together for unexpected conversations. Zoë: Life Abundant in an Artificial Age in Napa on July 26-28 was magnificently productive of talk about life, death, and aesthetics more even than I anticipated. The themes advertised — Life vs. Optimization, Vitalism & Spirit, Eternity and Time, Resurrection and Revelation, Beauty and Art as Proof of Life, and Signs of Contradiction — were delivered in full. Thanks to Cluny (Jordan Castro, Farren Fei Yuan) and all organizers and funders.

First, though, my title, from Deuteronomy 14:21. The full passage goes like this:

Do not eat anything you find already dead. You may give it to an alien living in any of your towns, and he may eat it, or you may sell it to a foreigner. But you are a people holy to the LORD your God. Do not boil a kid in its mother’s milk.

If you plan to raise a child in the Jewish tradition, expect to spend more time on that kid-boiling line than almost anything else in the Bible. It’s pretty easy to explain all the peculiar rules even to an 8-year-old but the passage about the kid — especially if your translation says kid and not baby goat — will require space. My son (32) is still processing that line. After grasping the horror of it, he understood quickly that this wasn’t a rule about cleanliness. This was a rule about how to think about life and death every day, especially during mealtime.

Yes, most people eat meat.¹ Baby goats are often killed. The mother goat may be killed for food when she’s past her milking days. But boiling a baby goat in its mother’s milk is just mean — she likely gave birth recently and this is what her milk is being used for? My son knew that a biblical rule forbidding an action meant that people regularly did that action, or wanted to. People who would do what the line forbade were being cruel and thoughtless. The rule requires giving thought.

He returned to the topic for years, especially when he learned that this passage was the basis for the kashrut law of keeping meat and dairy separate. We did not keep a strict kosher home but many friends did. “What about pesto made with Romano (sheep) cheese on a hamburger?” he would say, out of the blue, on the way to soccer practice. He wasn’t trying to find a way to get around the rule but rather was continuing to think it through. What about lemon butter on chicken? The thinking habit is good even when the rule isn’t followed. Every question asked means the kid and the mother are present and, in a way, living.

I had just seen my son (and fiancée) before heading to Napa, picking out cloth for a wedding suit that happened to be 100% wool (Deuteronomy 22:11 was not in anybody’s head). But I was in a biblical frame of mind (especially after a brief visit with gwern) by the time I got to the Zoë conference in Napa. I was thinking about Luke’s book, The One and the Ninety-nine, which I appreciated as a book about the work it takes to balance duties to oneself and duties to one’s family (parents, spouse, children). It never ends.

The first panel on fertility (“Fertility is Not Enough: Birth, Meaning, and What Makes Life Worth Giving,” with Catherine Ruth Pakaluk, Ruxandra Teslo, and Clay Routledge) was interesting, thanks largely to Shadi Hamid’s great energy in asking the hard questions about what policies and cultural changes might be needed for more people to have more babies. Everyone stayed in their lane (more religion, more liberalism, more enchantment, more nostalgia) while Shadi kept asking: what can be done? My own views are that preoccupation with scale, efficiency, and effective altruism are to blame. Rearing children to adulthood is the most inefficient endeavor there is, with no benefit to scale (twins or multiples). You need extended family (aunts and uncles as well as grandparents). It’s desperate altruism.

Outside the English Department at Princeton, where I did my PhD, is the Mather Sundial, atop which sits a pelican pecking at her breast to feed her young with her own blood, an old symbol of Christ’s sacrifice. I used to pass this sculpture several times a week for five years, when my kids were little. I used to point it out to students when I taught a Bible as Literature class. I did not point it out to my children.

Bryan Johnson’s “Don’t Die” presentation about why embracing life is the most important thing a person can do was surprisingly fun. I was wearing heels and couldn’t really do the balancing game he made us do, and he really did seem healthy up there on stage (though I wondered about the many-pocketed trousers — were they for health reasons?). I note that many people online scoff at him. But what is wrong with going to bed early, telling your anxious and workaholic selves to wait for tomorrow, and get a good night’s sleep? What is wrong with screen-free hours and lowering your heart rate? What is wrong with focusing more on life than death? I was charmed.

And yet toward the end of his remarks, remembering something I’d read online about transfusions, I began to think about the various passages in Deuteronomy (12 and 15) about not eating blood because blood is life and should be poured out onto the ground like water. One’s mind goes many places in Napa, surrounded by vineyards, attuned to water scarcity, and having just been to Mass at the stunning Meritage resort chapel.

The Zoë conference returned to life and death and blood with force shortly after a deeply thoughtful “cult of One” panel (with Ben Klutsey, Luke Burgis, Toby Shorin, and Freya India), when the extraordinary Fr. Mark Roosien took to the stage to talk about Nikolai Fyodorov, Vladimir Solovyov (who looks like the ideal Lighthaven resident), Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, and the history of Russian cosmism, which advocated all sorts of new technologies (including blood transfusions) with the goal of rejuvenation, immortality, and also space travel. Fantastic presentation, particularly on the founding of the world’s first institute for blood transfusion and the role of the cosmists in embalming of Soviet leaders.

The desire to live forever, to conquer death through science, is an old human desire that has taken various forms over the centuries. As a Red Sox fan I am aware that Ted Williams’s head (and body) are frozen in Arizona. As a Shakespeare fan, I’m pretty sure the Bard has achieved immortality in part by writing about immortality through verse. There’s also living through one’s children, being excited about things they will witness when I’m gone.

After lunch were breakout sessions. I can only speak to the panel I participated in, “Models of Desire: Machines, Mimesis, and the Future of Wanting,” with Luke Burgis, Rebecca Lowe, the excellent Toby Kurth, and myself, which was very fun and featured an AI voice of René Girard talking about machines and mimesis. Then came a staged Hamilton Society debate I fled after a few minutes, anticipating what apparently occurred: women had to fight doubly hard to be called on to speak, which is rather in keeping with history, but still not fun. Instead I had a lovely conversation out on the terrace with John Cunningham and Zachary Davis.

It was fun to see Patrick Collison and say hello before he took the stage with Luke Burgis for a panel on The New Aesthetics, Patrick’s project with Tyler Cowen to jump start art and beauty in the 21st century. I am in general agreement that there’s way too much Ikea sameness in the world, though I was lucky to spend the past year in an office above the Alain Locke Gallery and the Hip Hop Archive surrounded by cool sounds and images. One colleague, Rodney Carmichael, is working on the relationship of housing projects and hip hop, in a way quite similar to Patrick’s gesture to Bauhaus as a physical site and school for creativity. When a group of people (some super talented, some only a little talented) find themselves in a space conducive to making art, art will be made.

Then Luke Burgis asked Patrick a question about aesthetic stagnation: did it have something to do with Vatican II (1962-1965), which changed so much about aesthetics? Yes, I thought immediately. I grew up in a small New Hampshire town filled with conservative French Canadian Catholic families and I remember third-grade kids talking about it. Apparently parents were complaining about it.² It was a mystery to me then; over time I’ve understood that in fact it was the evacuating of mystery that many people complained about.

I’m not Catholic so forgive errors here, but as I understand it, post-conciliar aesthetic principles were noble simplicity, intelligibility, and immediacy. Dignity was aligned with constraint and concision; more circles and semi-circles; people should understand rites with ease; meaning should be comprehended with minimal interpretive delay. It was once explained to me that Mass in the vernacular reduced the linguistic distance between sacred speech and daily speech. Put into the language of AI, post-conciliar aesthetics preserved clarity of action with minimal latency of meaning.

I took Luke’s question to be about whether a New Aesthetics might involve bringing mystery back into the mix. I thought about this during “The Mystery of the Human Person,” led by Fr. Harrison Ayre, all through dinner, and during the final session the next day on agency (led by the excellent Jeff Frank). I’m all for art that is hard to understand, for complicated music, for architecture that offers new surprises every time you visit, like murals and design motifs. (Not architecture in which you get lost, that’s something else.) I was fortunate during my years teaching at the Peabody Conservatory to listen to new and complicated music all the time but such wealth is hard to find outside a music school.

I return to that last line of Deuteronomy 14:21, which has what I might call lexical clarity and structural opacity. Its noble simplicity (“do not boil a kid in its mother’s milk”) does not mean transparency or immediacy. Its simplicity requires interpretive labor that has been taken up by all the greats (Philo, Clement, Maimonides, many others). “I heard what you said clearly but I need to process it. It’s really big” is the only logical response to hearing it for the first time. It’s a good passage to give to an LLM, which will offer squishy paraphrase, will turn it into something like “do not turn nourishment into an instrument of death,” “respect the bond between mother and offspring,” or “practice compassion toward animals.” Claude just gave me: “at its core, the command asks us to respect the boundary between what nourishes life and what takes it.” No more interpretive labor is required.

I came away pondering this: both making art and bearing/raising children are labor-filled endeavors for which you shouldn’t focus on efficiency.³ You’ll throw out many drafts in one creative process and many plans in the other. There is something lovely about a firm whose business is payments efficiency supporting inefficiency. (Of course Stripe is already funding beautiful books on progress with Stripe Press.) Mystery is the opposite of efficiency. An aesthetics of mystery would be a challenge for efficiency advocates everywhere. And it may be the most fertile idea imaginable.

Luke just today posted on X: “We should be spending just as much money on aesthetics and education and human formation as on data centers and chips and training.” Co-sign. Artificial intelligence is, for now, a largely immaterial phenomenon involving inference, model weights, digital agents. The vibe in Napa was relentlessly material: food, wine, poetry read aloud (by the excellent Dana Gioia), the request to get up, stand on one leg, and actively talk to one another. This is flourishing.

Luke Burgis, Patrick Collison

1. My daughter and her family are vegan, which is really the best workaround if you don’t want to explain boiling kids in milk to children. I hew largely to a plant-based diet but shared an amazing steak with Rebecca Lowe at Cole’s Chop House in Napa that, as it was dry-aged, could arguably be in violation of Deut 14:21.

2. A brief anecdote: In third grade you learn to spell the days of the week. I could spell them perfectly. But the quiz had the question “we eat fish on _____” and not being Catholic, wondering how I should answer, I picked the hardest day to spell, Wednesday. When I saw the big red X (-10 points) I went up to the teacher and said look, I spelled Wednesday right. She said yes but that’s not the answer. I said what’s the answer, and she said Friday. I said look, I spelled Friday right on this one here and she said yes but you didn’t spell it right for this question. Sometimes a B+ is a fair grade and sometimes it is not.

3. Yes, there’s economy of line and Cheaper by the Dozen but these are exceptions.