Welcome to Butlerian Musings

Yes, I'm starting a Substack. Subscribe if you want to keep track of my work.

I've always been a bit of a stick in the mud. Maybe that's why I have only just now decided to start posting on Substack.

I must admit, though: Substack is a way for me to keep better track of and promote my own work, and for other people to follow it more easily. I used to use Twitter much more aggressively for this purpose, and to some extent I still do, I suppose. (Follow me there, if you want: jackbutler4815.) But I've found my general productivity enhanced by using Twitter less. So to Substack I go.

A clarification upfront: This Substack will not be a venue for too many original ruminations. You'll find most of those at National Review, where I write and edit. I also write for other outlets; you can find a list of my work at them here. It will, instead, mostly be a place to keep track of my work, as I mentioned. I may sprinkle in some supplementary observations in between. So please subscribe if any of that sounds interesting to you.

I'm not really defeating the charge of being a stick in the mud by choosing, as the name of this Substack, a riff on an element of Dune lore. Long before the main drama of the epic sci-fi series, the first book of which Denis Villeneuve recently adapted as a two-part film, mankind undertook a great rebellion against what Dune author Frank Herbert describes as "thinking machines." That was the Butlerian Jihad. As a result of the Jihad, robots and other such artifice do not play much of a role in Dune*. They fall afoul of a new religious commandment: "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."

I sometimes add the parenthetical humorous aside "(no relation)" when I get a chance to reference the Jihad. I've embraced the literary coincidence. And perhaps the philosophical one. Obviously I'm not a complete Luddite; I wrote this on a computer, and benefit from modern society in all sorts of ways. But a recurrent theme of my work is a certain level of hesitation about technological advance, a fear that we may let our tools use us, or be corrupted by our tools to use each other. If being concerned about that makes me a stick in the mud, a Butlerian Jihadi, or a Luddite . . . so be it.

*Please don’t talk to me about the Dune books Frank Herbert didn’t write.