“The Honesty Crisis: Preserving Our Most Treasured Virtue In An Increasingly Dishonest World”

“For the past 10 years,” writes Wake Forest University ethics professor Christian B. Miller, “I have been studying both what honesty is and the state of honesty in the world today.” The exploration led him to become quite “worried about the prospects for honesty in the coming years.” 

And well he might be, given the research findings presented in “The Honesty Crisis: Preserving Our Most Treasured Virtue In An Increasingly Dishonest World” ($29.95 in hardcover from Oxford University Press; also for Amazon Kindle). Written for a general audience, Miller’s book notes that “an honesty crisis occurs when there is a significant surge in dishonest behavior due to two factors: (i) dishonesty becoming easier to get away with than it was before, and (ii) dishonesty becoming more enticing or appealing to engage in.”

Though he has never visited Chico (but may on an upcoming family vacation), Miller writes me that “I have read the work of several philosophers who teach in that area, especially Troy Jollimore who is at CSU, Chico.” 

Jollimore has written on friendship and the virtue of loyalty, and for Miller, “honesty is an excellence of someone’s character…. In particular, an honest person will avoid intentionally distorting or misrepresenting the world as she sees it—whether that is by telling a lie, stealing, cheating, breaking a promise, acting hypocritically, or BSing.”

Miller’s chapters focus on six crisis areas: the proliferation of deepfakes online; infidelity in relationships given porn’s availability along with “anonymous chatrooms and infidelity websites like Ashley Madison”; students using undetectable AI to cheat; the rise of celebrity culture which “creates greater opportunities to be dishonest”; pressures on religious leaders “to engage in sermon plagiarism, have inappropriate emotional and sexual relationships, and fall into the trappings of celebrity”; and in our fractured politics, the dissemination of phony “news” by social media.

There are no sure cures for dishonesty, but Miller argues that an honest society fosters trust, healthy relationships, respect for others, and lessens fear that others want to take advantage. It’s not someone else’s problem, it’s ours. If the book doesn’t make you uncomfortable, go back and read it again.

“Don’t Worry Little Ridge”

There they are. Dozens of kids in Paradise, making a huge circle, dressed for Halloween. The colorful, two-page spread in the children’s book has these words: “Don’t worry little ridge. With you is where our hearts belong.” 

Those are the words of Jacqualine Rhoades, a single Paradise mom raising two boys, who moved to Reno “in hopes for a fresh start in life. We were not able to heal in our hometown with the wildfires that would come next to our property every year triggering that horrible 2018 fire that we survived.”

A year after the Camp Fire, she wrote a children’s book for her young kids “in hopes it would help them to freely express their emotions…. When I sat down and read to them, they opened up about their feelings of loss and things that angered and saddened them. It was at that moment I realized I did something that helped my children.”

Enlisting graphic artist M. Kungl, Rhoades published “Don’t Worry Little Ridge” ($15.95 in paperback, independently published) for children ages 4-9. In big, bright, full-color illustrations, the story begins: “Once there was a town on a little ridge. In the town lived friendly people and lots of happy children.”

But then, “one early morning there was a terrible fire. Our little ridge was lost and sad. All the happy children had to move away. All of the happy children that moved away were sad. And it’s OK to feel sad. The children that had lived on this little ridge were not alone.” (Think pictures of parental hugs.)

So there are new places to live, new friends to make. But “our little ridge will rebuild. No matter how far away we are, we will be so brave and stand so strong. Some children may have even moved back to that town on that little ridge.” Whether near or far, that’s “where our hearts belong.” (The last two pages, complete with a smiling child and the old Paradise sign, are suitable for coloring.)

When October wanes, and power shutoffs return because of dry and windy conditions, the heart skips a beat or two. A simple word of encouragement is most welcome.

“An AI Made For Us: A Theological Manifesto”

Chicoan Greg Cootsona, the Executive Director of AI and Faith (aiandfaith.org) and a pastor at Bidwell Presbyterian Church, writes that growing up in Menlo Park immersed him in “the gospel of Silicon Valley.” It was the message that “we and our human ingenuity represent the good news. You, chosen among mortals, can solve any problem.”

But he heard a different gospel as a young college student attending UC Berkeley. “I admit it: ‘Grow up in a secular home. Go to Berkeley. Become a Christian’—it’s almost laughable. But that’s what happened.” 

Later he would spend decades “teaching on science, technology and faith in churches and university classrooms,” but in December 2022, hosting his Chico State colleagues for a holiday party, AI became front and center.

More broadly, Cootsona realized that “we ought to ask not what AI can do, but whether we are shaping it to serve us, or quietly letting it go the other way.” That’s what he addresses in “An AI Made For Us: A Theological Manifesto” ($4.99 in paperback, independently published).

Though approached from a Christian perspective, Cootsona’s application of what he calls “The Jesus Rubric” (“technology is for us, not us for technology”) may aid those of many faith traditions. AI systems “lack moral agency, and so ethical responsibility falls back on us as human beings and the institutions that design, deploy, and use AI.”

Cootsona is neither a doomsdayer nor a superficial optimist. In a fallen world the key is Christian hope. “As followers of Jesus, we believe that the full humanity for which AI must be made is the humanity revealed in him, which is to say embodied, relational, morally engaged, and capable of suffering and forgiveness.”

“AI represents a dazzling extension of our created creativity. But the point of that creativity, from a theological angle, is love of God and love of neighbor. Where it undermines them, it needs to be questioned, resisted, boundaried, or redesigned. If AI serves love, it becomes a way to care for our neighbor.”

His practical chapters for individuals, communities and churches, including “Sabbath,” “Focal Practices,” and “Creative Collaboration,” are eminently intelligent—with no artificial ingredients added.

“California Inside Out: Mapping An Ecology Of Mind”

Naturalist, painter, and poet Obi Kaufmann, based in the East Bay and author of the California Field Atlas series, contends that too much forgetting is going on. Forgetting the “Indigenous land fire that sustained ecosystems,” it shows itself in “conifer forests across the state,” where fires have been suppressed for so long that now, “cascading trajectories of megafire after megafire have established themselves, and in many cases have overridden the evolutionary conditions that these forests are adapted to.”

Prescribed burns are good, certainly, in lessening fire’s danger, but Kaufmann calls for a more fundamental change of mind. “Without fire,” he writes, “California is not California.” The key is finding what he terms the Goldilocks zone; “too much fire, and the habitat is threatened with collapse. Too little fire, and the buildup of fuel can summon a high-severity fire….”

This mind change focuses on our mutuality with what he calls our “more-than-human world.” In “California Inside Out: Mapping An Ecology Of Mind” ($20 in hardcover from Heyday; also for Amazon Kindle), replete with dozens of his paintings of the natural world, Kaufmann invites readers to understand that “California is fire,” then to “think like a watershed” and recognize “the mind of the forest.”

Kaufmann rejects both the “settler culture,” which sees nature as mere resource, but also the excesses of the environmental movement, “which began to collapse philosophically under the weight of what can be called an anti-human ethic. Have you not heard the refrain, ‘Humans are the problem’?”

Instead, he advocates “a land ethic that is born of the scientific method and informed by Indigenous tradition….”

He wants readers to imagine a watershed (“a coherent topography of ecosystems inside a common drainage basin”) that “behaves as a kind of mortal body,” interconnected in all its systems. “Although there isn’t a brain … there is a collective effort that resembles or can be thought of as thinking. The watershed can be imagined as an ecological body, one whose lifespan is measured by the succession of ecosystems across thousands of years.”

“When harmony is present in the ecological processes of the land,” he writes, “it is beautiful, and the people thrive.” 

“The Resurrection Institute”

“A government directed primarily by algorithms, focused above all else on maximizing measurable outcomes,” writes retired Butte College administrator and West Point grad Les Jauron, “might become remarkably efficient. It could also become remarkably indifferent to the individual.”

Just what that might look like takes Jauron from his Author’s Note to the chilling tale of “The Resurrection Institute” ($9.99 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle). It is the near future, and democracy in the United States has been preserved (by a hair) after President Ron Rich’s attempted a coup, though “in the aftermath of the instability, several new states were created. Two of these were in eastern Oregon and eastern Washington. These new states were called Lincoln and Jackson.”

Lincoln is unique. Run by Lincoln Company employees, “the legislature meets for two weeks each year to consider laws recommended by LincolnAI which the Lincoln Company implements by using algorithms developed by the Foundation. And the churches run the K12 education system and all social services…. Judges use LincolnAI to develop their rulings” and the police use the system to determine the likelihood of a person being guilty. Most everyone who goes to court is convicted.

The Foundation? It’s “the small group of billionaires behind the creation of the software that enabled … government by algorithm” and massive surveillance.

The Resurrection Institute is a place where state residents can bring mementos of departed relatives and receive audiobooks read in the AI voice of the deceased. Yet when New York Times investigative reporter Sam Stone is commissioned to write multiple laudatory stories about Lincoln (the owner of the Times is on the Foundation), he discovers beneath the shiny surface of public service the Institute is embarked on an audacious plan to extend the life of a select (rich) few, at the expense of hundreds of unwilling human guinea pigs.

Those who find out the truth tend to disappear mysteriously, and Sam and a small group of friends must figure out how to spirit themselves out of the state, away from certain death. Jauron takes delight in detailing the machinations of the Foundation—and the Mission Impossible-like counter-machinations of our heroes. 

What could go wrong?

“The AI Con: How To Fight Big Tech’s Hype And Create The Future We Want”

The Book in Common for the current academic year at Chico State and Butte College lands in the middle of contentious claims from employees (and ex-employees) of OpenAI and Anthropic, Google Gemini and xAI, that autonomous AI agents will either cure cancer or destroy humanity.

But the authors of “The AI Con: How To Fight Big Tech’s Hype And Create The Future We Want” ($32 in hardcover from HarperCollins; also for Amazon Kindle), linguist Emily Bender and sociologist Alex Hanna, call foul on both claims. With careful analysis and a conversational (and sometimes sardonic) tone, the authors inveigh against both the Boosters and Doomers. 

They are “two sides of the same coin … the belief that the development of AI is inevitable and that that resulting technology will be both autonomous and powerful…. One shows a utopian world of abundance, the other a dystopian hellscape.” And, pointedly, “Neither depicts the real harms of actually existing automation, at best dismissing them as less important than the imaginary existential threats.”

Though the authors are writing at the end of 2024, their critique of AI (“a marketing term”) remains surprisingly relevant despite the debut of increasingly powerful frontier systems. (The authors refuse to anthropomorphize chatbots, calling them instead “text synthesis machines.”)

Though there is certainly good automation, the authors say, the examples of companies misusing AI (like insurance companies determining whose claims get rejected) are legion (they cite hundreds of examples). The focus on “AI safety” deals with “fake scenarios” whereas those “working on issues of concrete harms of AI systems” (dealing with “racial and economic equity, freedom of movement across borders, personal safety from state violence” and more) are interested in the here and now.

AI is high on its own supply. So fight the AI hype which “helps others get rich by giving them cover to collect (e.g., steal) and then launder massive amounts of data.” Ask questions about what is being automated, resist using the “tools” at work, demand accountability, create and enforce current legislation protecting civil rights, engage in collective action.

No AI was used in the writing of this column. 

“Tales From Tehama, Vol. 1”

On February 3, 2024, the Red Bluff Daily News featured the first of a weekly 600-word column celebrating Tehama County’s history. Its author, Josie Reifschneider-Smith, longtime board member of the Tehama County Genealogical & Historical Society, has now collected the first fifty-two columns in “Tales From Tehama, Vol. 1” ($20 in paperback from Tehama County Genealogical And Historical Society, an imprint of Heidelberg Graphics).

The columns are historically accurate, but far from stodgy. Reifschneider-Smith asks readers to “get ready for a rollicking trip into Tehama County’s past,” and so it is. “Is that an ostrich swimming across the Sacramento River, twice? … While paying respect to a man’s lonely grave in the Paskenta Cemetery, are those war whoops and gunfire you hear riding in the wind?” All the answers are found within.

“Gerber’s Saxophone Field Day” in 1927 had me laughing out loud. A newspaper in Illinois noted that “They are threatening to make it a national event; isn’t there some law to compel them to quarantine it and keep it?” 

More than 500 saxophone players showed up and, Reifschneider-Smith writes, “there was even a saxophone throwing contest where ‘grown men will pitch a saxophone with the bell filled with lead. If the horn hits a “gobbler” (saxophone player) and kills him, the thrower will be given a free ticket to the inquest’ (Red Bluff Daily News, August 18, 1927).”

“On May 20, 1914, the same day Ranger Abbey from Mineral watched in disbelief as Lassen Peak awoke with a blast of ash and steam, 20-some miles to the northwest, an 18-year-old sawmill worker stared in wonder from the porch of the crew’s bunkhouse as Lassen erupted. The young man’s name was Floyd Tipple. Two weeks later, he would find himself scrambling for his life during an eruption while visiting the crater.” Historical photographs complement the text. 

Personalities obscured by time are brought to life, like J. Granville Doll who in 1853 pretty much owned Red Bluff. 1950 brought “the naked lady of Vina.” And in 1954, Annie Wilkins passed through Red Bluff, the “last of the saddle tramps.”

“Tales From Tehama” is a wonderful guide, a history book with sax appeal.