In May, the papal encyclical Magnifica Humanitas — concerned with "safeguarding the human person in the age of artificial intelligence" — took over the tech internet and inspired several IRL reading groups. Shortly after, our inbox for this issue was flooded by pitches referencing Aristotle, Alisdair MacIntyre, and our alienated modern world. We received more submissions than we have for any other issue — which was, in retrospect, a warning sign. Over the next few months, there were at least three conferences on flourishing (broadly construed), not to mention all the tweets, magazines articles, blog posts, and microsites.
The flourishing discourse is interested in big questions around meaning, community, values, purpose, the good life, and so on, and so on. We are too — but we’d like to get a lot more specific (and just a little more judgmental). Whose community? Which values? What are we trying to build? Is flourishing even the right goal?1
Another question one might ask: Why is it happening now? AI anxiety, of course, is part of the story — we’re all just a little bit more concerned about what it means to be human, and looking for answers in some very traditional places. So is anxiety about AI money (viz. having enough of it). There’s also the backlash to the obvious amoralism of 2025 VC culture. After reading enough Marc Andreessen tweets, one does start to long for the kind of healthy, rooted, traditional community that can effectively ostracize people.
One more reason we’re all talking about virtue comes from inside the house: Yes, the AI labs are doing applied moral philosophy. The language of virtue has started to make its way into technical alignment papers and Anthropic's Constitutional AI program was built around the goal of making Claude a "virtuous agent" with deeply ingrained, holistic moral qualities. Daniel Bashir traces the history of alignment to explain the dream of an Aristotelian machine and then ask: What would it take for this to work?
Tim Hwang offers his own alignment proposal that draws from a younger moral technology: Christianity. As he puts it: “Jesus Christ is one of the most potent personas in all of human culture. Perhaps Christianity is a particularly potent substrate for ensuring the safety of artificial intelligence.”
If these alignment efforts succeed, we’ll still have to make sense of a universe where humans are no longer the only reasoning beings around. Fortunately, this isn’t the first time humans have been dethroned and forced to consider this question. In the 17th century, Baruch Spinoza argued that Earth was not created for Man; the resulting existential crisis can still be felt in the cultures of the Bay Area today. Toby Shorin connects Esalen and transhumanism back to the German Romantics and Charles Darwin, and suggests that such thinkers can still offer us lessons for the meaning crisis du jour.
Thomas Peermohammed Lambert covers a more overlooked thinker. Though the 17th-century English bishop John Wilkins is considered a hapless dreamer, if he is considered at all, Lambert argues that the years he spent trying to create a universal language planted the seeds of modern science. Looking forward, novelists Ken Liu and Ada Palmer, in conversation with Beatrice Erkers, talk about why historical analogies are so seductive in moments of turmoil and discuss possible futures of many kinds.
Literal seeds and a different form of cultivation and flourishing concern Thomas Kirk, who explains how centuries of human intervention and scientific advances transformed a wild grass into the staple crop that today provides a fifth of the world’s calories: wheat.
Shifting from the ecological to the sociological, Kelsey Piper and Nicole Ruiz talk about how their very different family structures and backgrounds converged on similar ideals and practices in service of community. Owen Yingling reflects on the rise and decline of Victorian poetry.
Kelsey Osgood reports on a mysterious condition that affected migrant kids in Sweden and how its surprising resolution could shape American attitudes toward our own, more common diagnoses. Hannah Kim analyzes the evolution of “main characters” to argue that story logic is no longer the dominant framework for interpreting our lives. Its successor is not wholly foreign either — for a hint, think about trad wives and NPCs.
And finally, the neurological. Asif A. Ghazanfar tells us how to turn a philanderer into a father and vice versa via brain lesioning and chemical manipulation. And Carmen Lau breaks down cessation, the lights-out moment of no-self chased by scientists and the would-be enlightened alike.
This issue won’t tell you how to live the good life — that’s really not our business. But we do hope — as always — that the time you spent reading it did make your life a little better.