Megan Maldonado, a medievalist and doctoral student, explores the richness of medieval literature and its contemporary relevance. From discussing Dante’s Divine Comedy to addressing the challenges of AI and technological shifts, this episode bridges the past with the present in a thoughtful and engaging dialogue.
This episode of Lutheran Answers features Megan Maldonado, a medieval literature scholar and Lutheran, sharing her insights on the enduring significance of the Middle Ages. Megan recounts her journey into medieval studies, sparked by a love for English literature and a pivotal class on Dante’s Divine Comedy. She highlights the interplay of theology and literature, emphasizing how medieval works allow for a nuanced exploration of faith and morality in an academic context.
The discussion also touches on misconceptions about medieval life, such as myths about holiday frequency and idealized portrayals of peasants’ lives. Megan critiques the oversimplifications of medieval history and literature often perpetuated online, advocating for a more informed and nuanced understanding. Additionally, she delves into modern topics like the rise of AI, its impact on education, and the challenges of navigating misinformation in the digital age. Throughout, Megan underscores the timeless human struggles found in medieval works, offering camaraderie across centuries.
Things To Check Out
- megan maldonado (@megievalist) / X
- Megan Maldonado – YouTube
- Divine Comedy
- Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
- I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream
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Transcript
Remy: Then we’ll have a podcast episode and if something weird happens, then we will have had a fun conversation.
Megan: Sounds good.
Remy: Okay, great. Megan, thank you for being on the Lutheran Answers Show.
Megan: I’m happy to be here. Thank you for having me.
Remy: Tell me, are you a Lutheran? Tell me more.
Megan: I am a Lutheran and I have been one since I was about a month old. That was when I was baptized into an LCMS church and I have been lifelong lcms.
There was a time where I was close to becoming a Calvinist or Reformed Baptist.
I was kind of taking, not membership classes, but I was doing a Bible study with the wife of a pastor at a Reformed Baptist church when I was, I think just out of high school, but narrowly escaped that. And here I dodged a bullet. Dodged a bullet, yeah, indeed. I. I have a lot of love and respect for those people, but the theology just wasn’t. There’s the issue of the sacraments is actually where we got into a little bit of an argument.
Remy: So still Lutheran, your husband, is he lifelong Lutheran or did you missionary date him in.
Megan: Oh, no, he was.
When was he baptized? He was baptized as a child, not as an infant.
Yes. So he was already also lcms Lutheran by the time I met him. So solid. Yeah, yeah. The missionary dating, I think is.
I, I understand why, especially for women, it can be hard to find. Well, depending on where you are, it can be hard to find men in the church, even the Lutheran Church and the church in general. But yeah, no, I didn’t have to do that, thankfully.
Remy: That’s awesome. That’s so great to hear.
So you’re moderately Twitter famous.
Megan: Am I? I’ve got like 1300 followers.
Remy: 1300. I was actually just pulling up your Twitter account to look at it.
Megan: Not that I keep track exactly of my 1300 and I don’t know what it is.
Remy: Yeah, no, I don’t keep track of my 1,372 Twitter followers.
You’re moderately Twitter famous. And also you have a YouTube channel, which I also totally knew about. I promise I did. I’m subscribed to it, so I did know about it.
Megan: It’s still pretty new. And I’m still.
It’s not that I’m thinking up more content is that I think I was putting in too much thought thought into how like detail oriented it needed to be. And then I. The more I’m on Twitter and the more I’m posting about medieval stuff, the more I’m realizing like, oh, like even what is to me very basic level knowledge could actually just be What I need to do. And I think I was hyping myself up too much of like, oh, I need to read this book first before I can even talk about King Arthur. Like, no, I don’t need to get there.
Remy: That’s the. That’s the trap I fall into myself, honestly, where I’m like, oh man, I need to read this and learn more about that before I can talk. A. And then I. The thing that helped me was Dr. Cooper, Dr. Jordan. Jordan B. Cooper.
He did not give me any advice on this at all whatsoever. But I realized that the. The compulsive need to read a book and thoroughly understand a topic before making an hour and a half video on it is. That’s what Dr. Cooper does. And he does that really well. And I don’t need to do that. You know what I mean? I can just, you know, my. My most popular video is like a. Like a 15 second video where it just has a splash screen and it’s like, is the coin shortage a sign of the end times? And it just cuts to me saying no and then it. That’s it. That’s the end of the video.
Megan: Yeah, that’s right.
Remy: That’s where I’m at.
Megan: Yeah. I think I am so concerned about positioning myself as like semi expert that if I get a thing wrong or I misspeak or I don’t give the appropriate context, then I have this ide that like my advisors from my dissertation committee will track me down and punish me. Like not literally, but it’s. That’s the kind of vibe. But yeah, I.
More. More to come on the YouTube channel and especially with the beginning of the year, I think once the Christmas season ends, because I’m not doing New Year’s resolutions personally, but I think once Christmas ends then we can kind of begin in earnest and some more reading together.
Remy: Absolutely. So you.
You do. We’ve already said it. You do medieval stuff on Twitter.
Megan: Such.
Remy: Tell me more. Why are you into that?
Megan: Good question. So, long story short, I got into medieval literature because I failed at the actual thing that I wanted to do in undergrad. I really wanted to.
I knew I wanted to study English. I really enjoyed writing and I wanted to have a focus in creative writing. So I went to community college. I transferred to UCLA and I applied for the creative writing workshop because at that point I was a junior and I didn’t get in because I didn’t. Well, I was told by a director I didn’t have any of the kind of preliminary workshops. This is becoming longer than I Intended it to be.
Remy: It’s fine. We have, like, a lot of time to fill. Just go for it.
Megan: So I had to take my backup class that I scheduled, which was a Dante in English class. Now, by this point, I had read Chaucer. I’d done, like, my general survey of the pre1750 or pre1800 English lit. That’s a very standard course for the major. And so I had some medieval experience, literary speaking, literarily speaking. But I got into the Dante in English, and I really enjoyed it. Not just because it’s an amazing read. This was almost the entirety of the Comedy. So not just the Inferno, which is typically what you get assigned.
Yes, it’s amazing.
Yes, the language is really rich. It’s a beautiful work. But I had felt like I could talk about theology and have it be treated as a serious philosophical and moral undertaking. One that was academic, not just, you know, fundamentally academic, but, you know, it had an academic component to it where I could be taken seriously, I guess. And that was an insecurity I was going into college with. For whatever reason, I think God’s not dead had already come out. There was already this vibe of like, you’re gonna have the atheist professor, you know, bullying you into whatever didn’t actually happen. I mean, some you could have who are just a little more condescending than others. But the going assumption really is that most people are not believers, especially at a higher academic level. But I. I really enjoyed that. I could kind of dig into theology, but also, it didn’t have to be just like I was doing religious studies. It was also the marriage of literature and something that was very personal to me, which is my faith. But it was also a little bit removed because I’m Lutheran, I’m not Roman Catholic, so the stakes were low for me and kind of exploring or seeing any issues or contradictions or problems, you know, because literature is all about, I think, looking at problems.
And so from there, I got really into some other research stuff. Took more classes in my own major, English for Medieval Things. Wrote a senior thesis covering some medieval English literature. And, yeah, I debated going to grad school. Worked two years at an elementary school after graduation, and I thought, you know what? I don’t want to do elementary school anymore. It was so tiring. God bless anybody who works in that field, because I. I only remember the good things now about it. But it’s like, how many times can I tell kids not to, like, put their hand down their pants and then cook with me? Because that’s what I was doing. I was teaching in an edible schoolyard.
And it was fun, but not all of it. I was sick all the time. And I really, I thought, you know, there are no jobs in academia. But here’s a subject I really love. I’d love to dig into it more research wise. And if I’m going to have any chance of teaching it, I gotta go for the PhD and it better be at an institution where they would actually hire people out of. So now I’m at Columbia, I’m on paper. I’m towards the end of my program. I just need to finish the dissertation.
That’s more of an endeavor than I thought it would be and I thought it was going to be hard. So that’s, that’s where I’m at currently. And so I’m bringing what I know to the Internet because I’m getting a sense that medieval is having a really big moment. Like how it’s becoming a little more cool to be like Roman Catholic again, like kind of trad Catholic with that. I feel like that’s kind of bringing the Middle Ages along with it. I have a feeling those two things are pretty well connected.
But you know, people are interested in it. I have some things to say about it.
Why? Why not? I thought about it for a while. Kind of what we were talking about, this delay of not wanting to make the video or make the thing until I’m expert. I decided to just dive in and now here I am, 1370, whatever followers.
Remy: I have, I’m 72.
Megan: Okay, thank you.
Remy: Yeah, it. I think a lot of you mentioned like tradcath revival among Roman Catholics. I think a lot of Roman Catholics really fail to understand.
And this is something that from like a seminary standpoint studying church history and the fathers and just sort of like the movements of, of the church throughout the ages, you get a sense of. And I think you probably also get a good sense of it studying medieval literature and whatnot. Um, a lot of trad cats I don’t think appreciate just how much the modern Roman Catholic Church and what they think of as traditional was invented in the Middle Ages. Like there’s so much, so much of like the, like the traditional Catholic Church is like a thousand years old. You know, there’s like a good thousand to 1300 years where no one thought or did the thing you think of as like ancient and traditional.
Megan: Yeah. And even then there are some issues. I saw something on Twitter the other day x I saw some Roman Catholic trying to do some provocative posts about oh Protestants, look, they’re not doing whatever. They’re not traditional, they’re not doing xyz. You know, if they’re not communing you every week, then you need to find a new church. I saw that and I’m like, you know, there was a whole time where you couldn’t even get both the body and the blood of Christ at communion in the Middle Ages. And even then your requirement was to have it like once a year, maybe. Like there was not a big emphasis on it. And not saying that was good, but let’s not pretend like this has been the standard of the norm. And you know what? God be praised if the Reformation is still working, even if they don’t want to see it. You know, what good.
The Reformation’s ongoing. But, yeah, I agree. I think there’s a real richness to medieval theology and it’s not very cut and dry. Everybody was doing the same thing. They all believed the same thing for a long period of time. It’s just not the case.
Remy: Yeah, the standardization is definitely new. Right.
There’s a lot of the. Where I see it the most is on the Internet, arguments about the canon and Luther. You know, Luther removed all the good books from the Bible or whatever. And you constantly. The constant refrain, you see, is that, A, Luther didn’t remove any books from the Bible.
That was the British Foreign bible society in 1904 or whatever to make them cheaper to produce, just so everybody knows.
But B, Luther’s debate over whether or not the Deuterocanon should remain canonical at all is entirely a contextual debate that, you know, he was on the more conservative end of the debate that was happening around the canon at that time. You know, there were, there were people on the Roman Catholic side that were arguing against the Reformation that would have loved to have completely removed those books from the Bible. You know, it’s, it’s, it’s. The uniformity is a modern invention.
Megan: Yeah. And uniformity is like one thing on paper. But when you get it, and this is, I think, a beauty of studying literature rather than just the canonical theology, is you’re looking at what actual people are believing and practicing at the ground level. I say actual people, you know, it’s. It’s a literate class that’s not representative of a larger population, even. But, you know, still, you know, the idea, like, if I were to go into any LCMS church throughout the country or go into multiple congregations on paper, everybody should believe the same thing about the Eucharist. Everybody should believe the same thing about. I Don’t know, cohabitation before marriage or, you know, other hot topic or not issue. You know, we would hope everybody would get the same answer, but they’re probably not going to because what’s on paper is just not always reflected at the ground level. It’s why I think we see this issue over and over again with Roman Catholics of, you know, they say they don’t worship Mary, and, no, that’s not an issue. And then you go to Mexico or you go to anybody else’s, literally any other Twitter account where they’re always saying something like, oh, yeah, well, we do worship Mary or whatever. So it’s. Yeah, the uniformity is an invention now. And it doesn’t even. It’s not even real.
Remy: It’s a false uniformity.
Megan: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Remy: Well, and even so, this is something. I have friends that are very theologically inclined that love to read the Bible and digest theological content.
I have many friends like this, and they’re not all Lutheran.
They’re of various persuasions. And as I have gotten further into seminary, the thing I have noticed is that the conversation you have academically is a completely different conversation than the laity you’re having on the ground. And they often think they’re having the same or a similar conversation, but they’re not. They’re not having it. They’re not having the same conversation at all. You know, my friends who are very theologically inclined, I have several of them that will watch all kinds of theological YouTube videos and read the Bible and they think they know something. But then when you want to talk to them about, you know, well, what is the history of this and how and why did this develop? And then why is it formulated in such a way?
You find that generally they’re lost.
I’ve. I’ve had conversations with Lutheran friends where they’ve read the Augsburg Confession, they’ve read the Formula of Concord and the Apology and the Catechisms, and they, you know, they read a lot of Luther and they read a lot of the Bible, but they don’t actually read any contemporary to Luther theologians. They don’t read any of the Fathers. They don’t read any modern Lutheran theologians, and they don’t understand how these ideas are being unpacked and applied in a real sense.
And so they. They come away with misconceptions. You, I think you see it a lot on Twitter, right, where you have, like, even the trad Lutheran guys, and you see it, I’m sure, among the trad cath guys, where it’s like, oh, yeah, well, you know what the difference between hyper dulia and dulia and it’s all. That’s. Well, I don’t think you really understand the conversation we’re having, bud. You can, you use words and You’ve seen a YouTube video, but it’s a different conversation, you know.
Megan: Yeah. And it’s. I, I wondered because you’re talking about like, you know, here’s the, here’s the ground level. What’s the average lady talking about?
I used to be at a position and I’m not very old, but when I was even younger, I used to really push for like, no, it’s super important to really dig into the rich theological history of our tradition. And I think that’s, I think that’s still good. Um, but actually being with Congress and having, you know, now being older, having youth that I kind of, you know, I’m working with at my own church, it’s like, okay, well, yes, this is, this is helpful to know and it’s, it’s interesting to learn and I think that curiosity about the faith is, you know, a noble pursuit.
Yeah, I think I’m comfortable saying that. But in service of what? I think. In service of whom? And if you are going on and on about antinomianism or about, I don’t know, I literally forgot every other theological term ever. But if you’re going on and on about something, that’s always happens.
Remy: Yeah, this is why we don’t let women do theology.
Megan: Such don’t. But you know, you’re going on about something that is not just abstract because of the terminology, but your average person’s daily concern is probably just what’s right in front of them directly. How they’re hurting, how they are questioning whether or not God cares about him or her or whatever’s going on.
I think there is a way to distill and make useful and relevant all this high academic theological conversation.
But I, to your point earlier, I’m not sure that online that’s what those conversations are about. And yeah, my little thing recently that actually kind of popped off a little bit, my post about the six day creation.
I get that conversation runs the risk of being who cares or how much does this matter? I do think it matters to an extent. I recognize that soteriologically it’s not life or death, but I think it’s important to have, you know, but what is in service of? Whom is it?
Whom is it in service of?
Yeah, I, I debate that. Even still, you know, commenting on, on stuff like that, I think you were going to say something.
Remy: No, I was actually just looking up your.
Megan: You didn’t see my. My famous six day. It had easily dozens of people looking at it.
Remy: A hundred replies, though. Pretty good.
Pretty good.
Megan: Did I get ratioed? I don’t even know.
Remy: You did not get ratioed? No.
Megan: Okay. I’m not gonna lie. I think I know what ratio means, but okay. Be having more comments than likes. That’s getting ratioed.
Remy: It can be. Potentially. It’s a form to me, a ratio as I understand it. I’m 36, so God knows what I know.
A ratio to me is when somebody replies to you and their reply is more popular than your tweet.
Megan: Got it.
Yes, I’ve seen this.
Not. Not personally because obviously it’s never happened to me, nor will it ever, but.
Remy: Okay, just to just toot my own little horn here for a second. I have never been ratioed.
No, I’ve been ratioed one time.
Megan: It’s my new project.
Remy: Yeah, I was ratioed one time, but it was by three year Letterman, so that doesn’t count. Oh, you know, he’s got a bajillion followers. But no, I’ve never. I’ve never been ratioed. I’ve had several people try.
Megan: Oh, no, I think I did get ratioed once. Then this was. Oh no, this is when I had to run in with some gripers and some pro Hamas people. Yeah. But again, account with many followers. I stand by it. I think I left the post up. So I did have to go private for a little bit because I got some kind of weird threats. But you know.
Remy: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it’s so. It’s so crazy when you have something like that blow up on Twitter and then you start getting those weird threats.
You think because you’re a woman you get terrible threats and you do. But me as a man, I’m not immune to those same threats. I get those same threats personally about my wife. It’s wild. It’s what people just. They can say anything on the Internet.
Megan: They really can, especially when they don’t show their face. And like, I don’t.
It’s weird because on the one hand, do I actually think any of these people are going to do anything to me? I guarantee you I could probably take them in a fight in person. Just the vibe and I’m not strong and like I’m not a feat of my own strength.
But you also never. Because people are crazy and they’re weird and it’s kind of like being in New York. Right. You don’t even. You don’t know what somebody’s gonna do or how they’re gonna react to something all the time. And so it’s. It’s not super simple. Just take somebody in a fight.
Things we think about, you know. But, yeah, it’s. I believe it. I believe. I’ve seen the weird comments that men get. You know, it’s just. It’s pathetic and sad. But, yeah, they also bring me views and interactions. And so if I’m ever going to monetize, you know, yep, I’ll take it. I guess that’s her.
Remy: That’s where I’m at. And you can just the. The one thing too, that I have learned.
I learned this from Dave Chappelle because he said this.
He said, here’s the thing about Twitter. It’s not a real place.
It’s not a real place. I just ignore all of the people that say terrible things to me and they only reply, like once, maybe twice, and then they go away because I’m not fun. I’m not feeding into.
They’re fun, you know, but decent comments. I’m willing to engage and have. Let’s have a dialogue. Let’s have a back and forth, you know, same.
Megan: Yeah, I think that’s where I’m at. I realized that I can just say whatever I want and be obnoxious. And what can they do? Like, you know, they can, as you said, reply, and if you don’t feed them, then that’s it.
Remy: I personally can’t believe that anyone would dare to go onto Elon Musk’s ex and be obnoxious. I cannot. How dare you?
Megan: You know, I.
I’m exceptional in that way. No one else is doing it. That’s why I got my 1372 followers.
Remy: Trendsetter. Trendsetter.
Megan: Well, I’m standing out for the crowd.
Remy: I appreciate what you’re gonna do for my podcast. I really need the publicity.
Megan: You know, I’m. I’ll launch it. I’ll ratio you. I’ll ratio everybody. I will get your name out there and my own, obviously.
Remy: God bless. That’s so great. What. What is the. What is the most.
As someone who is.
And I guess medieval literature is sort of what your forte, your study is, I suppose.
What is the most frustrating Middle Ages thing that people say that is so off base and it drives you up the wall every time. Now, it could be about a piece of literature or just about the time period. What. What’s something where when someone says it, you’re talking for 20 minutes? There’s no stopping you.
Megan: Hmm. Well, I could do that just regularly but.
Oh, good question. I mean we, we did talk a little bit earlier about this idea that, you know, in the Middle Ages this thing happened. There’s, there’s many random, I don’t know if they’re memes, but like kind of factoid posts out there about how things were in the Middle Ages. I saw one once that said that breakfast was a sin in the Middle Ages and I made a little short about that on YouTube and I’m like, what gets more than just obviously it’s wrong. Oh, I know another one that really annoyed me and I have written about a few times, the holiday posts. People keep insisting that there were like 260 holidays or something in the Middle Ages and now we have to work more than they did. That is just what gets to me more than just the factual inaccuracy is what gets a person to make these claims like what are you doing? Like what do you think you’re doing when you’re so flagrantly wrong beyond even any sense? Like it’s, it’s not even like you’re a little bit wrong, it’s just you’re inventing information.
Yeah. So the, the holiday thing, I don’t know if you’ve seen this. There’s, there was some post it was making arounds from different like super popular kind of either tradcath or like Western civ popular accounts saying that, you know, back in the Middle ages they had 200 and something holidays, 260 holidays from the Catholic Church and now you only get two weeks pto and wasn’t your life better? Wouldn’t it have been better or whatever. And it’s like it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of how easy our life I think today.
And it’s, you know, there’s other difficulties and in different ways I think being anxious about your work constantly or if you’re, you know, a finance bro and you’re up for 48 hours on Adderall, then yeah, you maybe are working harder than they were in the Middle Ages because you’re not sleeping. But it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of how much technology has given us free time, has made our work easier.
It’s just. Yeah, that’s so that’s my, that’s maybe my primary medieval thing. The whole holiday assertion that you know, you had all these days off as if your day to day life was not filled with lots of manual labor in different ways and not, you know, always the same thing. Yes, you might, you know, Have a break or a respite. And yes, there were feast days, there were holidays, there were holy days.
But no, it’s, it’s not the same as, oh, it’s my day off from work. I can literally sit here and do nothing all day and I will still be fed, I will still be clothed, I will still be warm. All that. Like, you don’t. Right, get that in your day to day life when you have to go out and chop your own wood, you have to raise your own cattle and slaughter it and butcher it and, you know, cut it up, I mean, and eat it and cook it, all that. Like, it’s, it’s not the same. It’s. Anyway, so that’s, that’s probably, that’s probably a thing. There’s a little line that people gave about Dante putting people in hell that he just didn’ like. And that’s mildly annoying. But that’s, that’s lower on my scale. I don’t know what it is with the holiday thing, maybe just because I saw it a bunch of times on Twitter and I feel like the algorithm, the algorithm kept like feeding me that same post from different people.
Remy: The, the idea that, oh, the medieval pet, the medieval peasant only worked six months out of the year and it’s like, yeah, okay, well, true or not? Like, let’s say it is true. Like, what do you think the other six months were like? He wasn’t prancing in the fields, you know, the six months he wasn’t working, probably the winter and he’s freezing cold and his kids are dying in his arms, you know, like. Yeah, right, right. Oh, yeah. But it was only six months, a year. Didn’t they have it so good?
Megan: No, I think there were, I think there are things that were good about life in the European Middle Ages or just the world in the European Middle Ages that I don’t know that will recover. The examples being quality of air, food, when you can get it.
I think the maybe sense of community, pervasive sense, not just of religiosity being in your life, but I think our real, maybe more pronounced understanding of the divine is being more immediate. A better marriage of the material world and the spiritual world. Let’s say we kind of divorce them, you know, in this Neoplatonic sense. But I think less of a division, if I can make a general statement like that, less of a division back then. So I think there are good things. I obviously I’ve studied the literature. I think there’s a lot of fascinating material there that’s still enriching, you know, to read today as a modern person.
But no, like that’s just saying you’re going to, you know, you’re, you’re, if you have good genes for your teeth, you have good genes for your eyes, your kids don’t die off, you know, shortly after birth or you know, they survive childbirth, your wife survives childbirth, you know, you have land that you own, then yeah, I think you probably would comparably maybe enjoy things, but even then your life would be difficult in ways that I don’t think you can understand today. So yeah, I think the, the kind of larping of oh, it would have been so great to be a knight and have shiny armor and be cool. I guess there’s more than that going on. It’s, there’s a lot of pain and death and suffering in ways that you’re just not going to experience today.
Remy: And how many, how many of them were honestly in the shiny armor and even, even that number for what period of time? You know what I mean?
Megan: Right. Not every man is going to be a knight. Not every man is going to even know how to read. Certainly many wouldn’t.
It’s certainly few people would be owning land and able to have the kind of agency that even like a middle class person or a working class person would have today.
You know, are there things that, yeah, if you’re like really struggling in your job and you’re just like, I just wish all I had to do was just mind my cows and my chickens and grow my potatoes and like that was it. Yeah. When you get overwhelmed it sounds very nice.
And I’m not saying that they’re, you know, that’s not a good thing to want. But yeah, I think just we talk a lot about diversity in syllabi and the media of different countries or different people groups or languages or whatnot. But there’s a real diversity to time that I think we really underestimate. In terms of what do we think of as diverse or being different from what we are acquainted with?
Remy: Are you saying diversity of time? Are you saying how today we have clear cut blocks of work time and free time which may not be the case previous generations.
Megan: Oh, I even mean just when we think about what’s diverse in terms of what we read or the kind of media we have, we think of that as being different geographies or cultures. But I think time periods, especially when we go further and further back, that is a different kind of diversity because that’s, even if, let’s say you have ancestors that would be from the Middle Ages, you know, maybe I have English ancestors from then. I’m maybe I don’t know for sure. I can’t understand them. I can’t understand that period of time unless I study it, unless I take the time with it and all that. Yes. So I think that designated time blocks would also be probably a little foreign to the medieval people, at least in terms that we have them today, like the 9 to 5. But yeah, I think that it’s.
Even if you are somebody who’s really inclined to celebrate Western civilization or Western Europe, you know, for your own ethnic reasons or whatnot, you still like. I don’t think people appreciate how different life would have been back then and how much it takes to understand some of this stuff. Yeah, that’s what I’m trying to say.
Remy: Yeah.
I think people also don’t appreciate. Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, you’re the expert here.
But how, how different, how new, how different life is. It’s a very, it’s a very new thing. The way we think of life today. It’s a very 1908, you know, industrial revolution, Henry Ford life we’re living right now, and that’s not that old. We’re only a century, century and a half into this sort of way of life. And the idea that this was solidified, this kind of idea for me. I heard someone say that you could take a housewife, you know, or whatever, the closest equivalent is a woman from the pre Civil War America and you could drop her into Greece at the height of its power before Rome.
And her day to day life would really not be that much different overall. Like the, what kinds of things she would spend her time doing on a day to day, you know, and I think that’s, I think that kind of holds true sort of in general. You could take an American farmer from 1780 and drop him into Germany in 1560 and with the farming really be all that different, you know, what he farms and the language he speaks. Right. But there’s a general feel of a deep and sincere religious piety. There is, you know, there’s no electricity. Everything’s done by hand, it’s done by cattle, assisted labor, you know what I mean? Like, is it really, is it really that much different?
Megan: I hadn’t thought about that before. I mean, I’m sure somebody who is much more well versed in the technological differences would have something very important to about, I don’t know, the development of potato farming or something. But.
Yeah, and it’s Funny. You go to 1908. I would even say, post World War II, women working more outside of the home for a wage and post sexual revolution.
I.
It’s funny. I had a class. Gosh, what were we. Oh, we were discussing.
Was it Midsummer Night’s Dream? I think it was. You’re reading that? With my seminar. I was, you know, teaching this, and students were curious about why tragedies end with death, typically in, like, a Shakespearean play or, you know, Renaissance play. Why do tragedies end in death, but comedies end in marriage? Like, what if these are opposites? Why are they opposites? And so, you know, I asked them, you know, what.
Why might they be opposites? What happens with the marriage? Nobody could answer that. You would have kids.
It didn’t occur to them that that would be the natural consequence of marriage. And I said, okay, pre birth control, pre sexual revolution, what happened when a man and a woman got married? What would happen afterwards? You would have new life. You would have children.
And. Yeah, I.
Yeah, I don’t think that’s fascinating. We can. Yeah. And this, you know, small sample size. But life is so different. And, yes, there are, I think, lasting evergreen themes and existential struggles. Obviously, you know, we have the same religion, you know, variously getting articulated over the course of the centuries, but there are lasting things. There are things we can take away and relate to. So I’m not going to pretend like this is some alien culture, the Middle Ages, and we don’t understand it, but it’s. It’s almost hard to forget, too, how much something that’s normal to us today or life that seems normal to us today, how recent it is, as you’re saying.
Yeah, the. The whole. That marriage thing. I still think about that at times. It’s still, like, it sticks with me. I don’t know why that.
Remy: Yeah, that’s crazy.
Yeah. So it reminds me of Y2K.
I think you’re old enough. Do you know what Y2K is?
Megan: Yes.
Remy: Okay. All right.
Megan: I won’t say my age, but, yes, I won’t ask.
Remy: So I’m 36. I was 12 or 13 or so right around the turn of the century at 2000.
And people were going crazy. I was scared. I had to talk to my parents about it. There were people selling everything they had. A couple of people, like, killed themselves because it’s the end of the world. Like, it was the end of the world. And it ended up being so much nothing at all that if you ask someone born after 2000, they don’t know what it is. We didn’t even tell them about it, you know.
Megan: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s true. I, I’ll say that I was not old enough to have been cognizant of the news, probably. Though I do remember the morning of 9 11. So like, I, that’s, that’s the hints I’ll get. You know, lady doesn’t tell her age. But I, yeah, I don’t remember my parents. That probably would have been the tip of. I don’t remember my parents really reacting much to, you know, the, the change.
But yeah, that and I think the real kind of sense of security or lack thereof that came with 9 11. It’s something that’s, you know, foreign to young people. And I feel like old saying this and reminiscing on it, even though I don’t feel that old. And I’m probably not relatively speaking, but yeah, it’s, it is interesting to feel time as you do get older. It’s, yeah, something that I’m getting more acquainted with, you know, as the years go by, as everybody does. And that’s another thing too. It’s like, this is such a familiar thing to so many people. And this is where it is good to go back and read older works because people have lived through these kind of weird phenomena of experiencing existential crises and fear of death or fear of whatever and, you know, one sense of one’s own mortality. And like, yeah, it’s, it’s comforting to see other people going through it, articulating it.
There’s a kind of camaraderie there, even though it’s with dead people. So I think that’s a useful way to approach literature. But yeah, it is. It’s weird when you start to experience it yourself getting older. That’s what I’m finding, at least.
Remy: Yeah, I, I saw a thing tangentially related to what we’re talking about that Gen Z and Gen Alpha are becoming less technologically literate.
Millennials and Gen X, I find that hard to believe.
Megan: You have to tell me more because I, I’m skeptical.
Remy: It’s because when I got a new computer, the first computer I remember my family getting it had Windows 95 on it and we wanted Windows 98. And my dad bought it with the Windows 98 install disks and it was eight, three and a half inch hard floppies.
The little. The save icons for my younger listeners came with eight save icons. And I had to at however old I was in 1998, 9, 10 years old, I had to figure out how to install Windows 98 on this Windows 95 computer. And I did. And that has been my experience with technology my entire life. I have had to learn how it works and then replicate it. But Gen Z and Gen Alpha are growing up in an era of smartphones and tablets where if you want to do something, there’s an app for it in the App Store, and you just push a button and it works, and everything just works magically. Tap to pay. I just type my credit card number in and hit the button and save it and tap to pay works. But they don’t actually know how any of this technology works. And so when it breaks, they can’t fix it, and so on and so forth. And so we’re actually sliding the other way in technological literacy now, where, you know, they can open the. If you give them a computer, they can open a word processor and maybe type. But doing actual functions on a computer and using it to the max is very niche.
Megan: Hmm. Okay, I see. So what was counterintuitive to me at first, and you’re remarking on this is like, I’m seeing babies navigate iPads like crazy. Like, of course, they seem so literate, but the technology, correct me if I’m wrong, it’s so intuitive, maybe too intuitive and too automatic that you don’t have.
Remy: You don’t have to know anything about it.
Megan: Yeah, yeah. And I’m, you know, I’m one to talk. I’m fairly illiterate. I like to think. I’m not, like, totally, you know, I can control, alt, delete something, you know, if it. If it freezes up, that’s the extent of my prowess.
But, yeah, okay, that makes sense. It’s a shame. And I.
I’m worried about AI for similar reasons and that it’s. It’s outsourcing, thinking and problem solving.
Remy: Yes.
Megan: For more complicated tasks than just calculating, you know, quick, you know, math. It’s. People have made the comparison. Like, oh, it’s just like when teacher said that calculator is bad. Like, no, this is. It’s different. When you ask an AI, you know, what the answers are to your existential crises, or when you’re asking AI for real advice or to think through your essay or to write your code for your course that you’re taking it. It’s concerning. And I, Yeah, I see more young people using it. Like, there’s going to be a real lack of just skills all around. It’s not even just computer or technological skills. It’s like soft skills like thinking through complex ideas and communicating without having to prep yourself by answering a question with AI first. I guess it’s a real issue. I don’t know what your opinions are on AI.
Remy: Yeah, I think AI.
I think what you’re describing is absolutely correct. And I also think it’s 100% inevitable.
There are, I saw you mentioned like coding and like I’m, I’m big into programming and coding and whatnot. And I saw a, I’ve never used like any AI, like for co. No, one time I did use AI one time to see what it would do to generate some code. But generally, no, I like, I’m not using, I know how to write the code. I don’t need a robot to write it for me. But I did see a very interesting guy in the programming space said that computer programmers in the future are not people that know how to write code. They’re people that know how to troubleshoot AI written code.
That the AI will write the code and the programmer will just troubleshoot because the AI is not going to get it 100% perfect. And I see that happening in a lot of different sectors where the human element is there to just troubleshoot when the machine element gets it wrong.
Megan: Now I’m curious because I don’t know anything about coding. To play devil’s advocate, I could ask, okay, so why, why is it bad if the code’s still getting written? Ultimately, and let’s say that there is a human getting a job who can troubleshoot the AI. So in this hypothetical scenario, there’s no loss of a job.
What’s, what’s lost here other than the codes being written differently, in your opinion?
Remy: Well, you can have, first off, I mean there’s, well, there’s a drastic cut in the workforce where you would need several programmers, let’s say professional programmers, to develop one high level app. And I’m talking like a banking app or something. You’re, you know, your bank has a team of dozens of programmers, you know, building the, you know, Wells Fargo app or whatever that would, that entire team, dozens of people would be replaced by one guy.
But not just that team, multiple teams. Because the AI can do multiple, multiple apps. And if all he’s doing is troubleshooting, he’s not spending much time on any given thing, any given day.
In my experience, AI tends to write inelegant code.
There is a certain amount of creative human problem solving that happens that where humans find really short, really elegant, really beautiful ways to write code. And the AI is not concerned with that. And so the AI will generally just brute force in the Quickest, shortest possible solution to the problem.
Megan: Do I, as the user, experience that difference?
Remy: Sometimes. Sometimes you do, sometimes you don’t. Most of the time you don’t know. Most of the time it doesn’t matter to you. From a code maintenance standpoint, it’s hell, you know, when you, when you got to come in behind another programmer and see what they do or don’t do and you have to try and figure out where they were at when they wrote this and, and what they were smoking. But most of the time, no. Sometimes code can be written so poorly that it does impact performance and the app is slow because it’s got to sort through all this. So, like a good example, this is Windows. If you pull up in the kernel to Windows, there’s still code from the original. You know, I think 3.1 is the earliest version that’s still in the Windows kernel. It doesn’t even, the code is completely incompatible and it doesn’t even run anymore, but it’s commented out and still sitting there in the background. And the Windows kernel is gigabytes, gigabytes big, you know, with just bloat and dead code. So yeah, I see it. I see the, this sort of AI takeover as inevitable.
One of the more interesting things I saw an educator talking about how to use AI to your advantage. And so it’s, instead of write an essay about this book because all of your students are going to go home and chatgpt an essay about that book. So instead of doing that, what you do is you assign to the student, have Chat GPT write you a three page essay about, I don’t know, the Red Badge of Courage. Okay, great. And then we’re all going to come into class this week together and we’re going to go over our three page papers together and we’re going to see where did the AI get it right and where did it get it wrong? Because they do hallucinate, they do make things up. They just insert what sounds good. And so we’re going to correct our three page papers and then we’re going to expand them to five or six pages together.
So it’s, you’re, you’re not getting away from this tool, but you’re still, you found a way to sort of harness it and use it to teach your children to think critically.
Megan: I saw, well heard actually in a workshop with some medieval academic instructors of how to use AI or if it could be used at all.
And somebody had made a similar.
Not comment, but described a similar lesson plan, which was get fairly not Expert, but familiar with a particular topic of your choosing. You’ll have two or three weeks to really research it and then ask AI questions about it and see what its answers are. Um, you can print it out, highlight green for yes good, accurate, yellow for technically true, but there’s some important context missing or it’s oversimplified, or just read, you know, false, hallucinated, whatever, and there was a lot of yellow, I think the professor was saying. And I think what’s troubling is that unless you are fairly well versed in your field, especially with more technical questions that you give to AI, you don’t pick up on the inaccuracies. And I, I’m still stunned by how easily it can get things wrong. Like I’ve, you know, I toy around with it. I fed it a bit of text and said, okay, you know, like, help me edit this, you know, if it’s like a bit of a chapter, like reverse outline this for me, tell me what the sections are and it will still make up sense. Like it’s a, you know, a 10 page PDF, let’s say it will still make up information even if I gave it the exact thing. So I’m not confident in using it to do very complex tasks. Tasks. It’s fun if I want to like, you know, just fool around with it or you know, give it a clerical task, like asking me to, I’ll ask you to like write me out a schedule for the weekend or something like, you know, if I’m very busy. Even then it’s still like we’ll get things out of order if I asked it for certain things. But it’s just, it’s not reliable enough for me to really endorse it as a useful pedagogical tool for instructors. I do see the value in at least showing students, like, here’s the ways that it can get it wrong and you can’t really appreciate it until you know more about the thing.
But yeah, I, if it’s going to be so inevitable, I just wish it were better. Like I still wouldn’t be comfortable with it morally. I still see it getting things, simple things wrong.
Remy: Nothing, nothing is going to replace deep learning about a topic, right? And this. So this is the thing I was talking about earlier about how when you’re academically, when you get into a specific topic, how you realize that the conversation that the laity are having is not the conversation that’s on the table and it’s not the conversation anyone who seriously understands and reads about this topic is having. None of us are talking about the thing the people on Twitter are talking about. And it’s because it’s the. So AI is just a shortcut to the thing that’s already happening, which is your Theo bro, who watches YouTube videos and listens to podcasts. And then at the end of the day, because he’s listened to two different podcasts and watch a couple of 10 minute videos, he think he fully understands everything that happened at, you know, the, the Council of hippopotamus in 462 or whatever. And it’s like. Well, you don’t, you don’t understand, by the way. Yeah, of course, of course.
It’s the one where Santa Claus punched a guy, I think, but it’s what I heard. Yeah, yeah, no, but it’s. You don’t. Unless you, unless you understand in nuance. Right. All of the things that led up to that council being called in, the specific issues and then the results in nuance and then how those results have radiated throughout Christian history. You don’t actually really understand that thing. What you have is a very brief overview that would be entirely highlighted in yellow because it’s oversimplified or it’s missing critical context. And that’s the way, it’s the way people already have, understand, digest, and are informed when it comes to information. The only thing AI is doing is speeding it up a little bit, I think.
Megan: I think it speeds it up. And is there something about AI that has the veneer of infallibility and expertise? Because it’s a machine and I think.
Remy: There’S this aesthetic of sort of the influence of materialism.
Megan: Yeah. And it’s like it’s this hyper rational because that’s. I think what all the sci fi has taught us is that the machine is going to be very deeply expert and so rational that it doesn’t care for human emotion or any human values except for, oh my gosh, Harlan Ellison. I have no mouth, but I must scream. Have you read this? The short story?
It’s a little, it’s a little uncomfortable in places, but it is, it is a machine that has a deep pathological hatred for humanity. And it’s interesting, so recommend it. But not for children.
Anyway. It’s. Yeah, I think there’s this idea that because I’m getting a computer to tell me something, that it’s, it’s more unbiased. It’s. It’s rational, it’s not going to be influenced by errors. And of course it has, you know, the entirety of the Internet that it can access. So of course it’s going to pull the correct information, which in my experience.
Remy: Which of course you can’t lie on the Internet. So.
Megan: No, no, but I, I have been impressed by its inventions and hallucinations. It did invent a quote. I asked it to analyze a passage for me of some text, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and it quoted.
Who was it? Derek Brewer, who was a scholar in this field. But I searched the quote and I was like, this doesn’t sound like anything anybody would say. Just invented the quote. It even had like a book and it had a page number for the thing. None of it existed by anybody, not just him.
So I am impressed. But it’s. Anyway, it’s all very sad to me.
Remy: And the thing, the thing people forget about like chat, GPT and other large language models is what they’re doing is they are not.
They are taking your input and then based on everything they have researched and learned, they’re stringing together what is most likely a coherent sentence. That’s it. That’s all that the LLM is trying to do, is string together a coherent sentence. It’s not trying to string together facts or, or data or anything. The information that it was trained on is only so that it can string together a coherent sentence that sounds like it’s about the topic you’re asking it about. That’s it. That’s all it’s trying to do. And it’s, that’s super important. I think it’s also important to know with things like this, we take it for granted in literature that people can be wrong in literature that, that are. That history books can be wrong, you know, that historians get it wrong, that sometimes historians fabricate things right. The history is written by the victor and this sort of thing.
But we fail to realize that AI is just as sinful as man is that it’s just as fallen as man is that if man is not perfect, how can any creation of man’s become perfect? Right.
We forget that.
Megan: I think so, yeah. And it’s a shame because I think, as I’ve observed certain students, not always my own, I had an incident, but I probably shouldn’t talk about it.
But to see students, you know, they’re going to school. Even a school at Columbia where it’s like a trillion dollars a year or something like that, I think it’s almost 100,000 if you’re living on campus. I think it’s like 90k a year for an undergrad and it’s like you’re going there you’re going there to study engineering, let’s say, like why are you having somebody else write your code? Like this machine write your code. What are you here for? Why are you, you not doing it yourself? I get that it’s difficult. Like it, you might not get an A, but that’s not the point of college anymore. It’s not the point of learning. I think you, every school is now a trade school but for like the crappiest jobs possible, which is just like pressing buttons from 9 to 5 for $40,000 a year probably in like the most city in the world.
It’s which I’m not not talking smack about anybody’s salaries because I’m a grad student, so I’m not a lot of money here.
Remy: I was like, did you just describe your own life?
Megan: No, not exactly. But it’s a shame because I mean you do have students in my experience and I haven’t been teaching at the college level for very long. But you’ll have students who are really interested in what they’re learning, really excited and curious and that’s great. And then you have people who are incentivized really by the, the economy, by the way they were raised by the school itself even to do as well as possible in your classes. Just get the A grade so that you can go on your junior year internship with Goldman Sachs and then get your job at the end of it because that’s what the college degree is now. It’s just a ticket into the job that you want.
You know, it’s, it’s, it’s a shame, but with all these incentive structures in place to make learning just a point A to point B, very practical. Give me my diploma experience.
I don’t know how to persuade swaths of young people not to use AI. Like it’s, there’s not a good argument to be made because I’m coming from an angle of don’t you want to learn these things and wrestle with these thoughts? And the answer is, well, that’s not the point of college anymore. So it’s, it’s tough.
Remy: Related to this, the. Is there, is there anything that you’ve read in older literature that either from a technological standpoint or from a, an aspect of day to day life or anything where you’ve read it and it surprised you because you understood it so thoroughly. Has there ever been a moment where you’re reading something old and it resonates with you and you’re like, oh my gosh, that hasn’t. It’s been a Thousand years. And that’s the exact same way I’m feeling.
Megan: There.
Yeah. The example that comes to mind, I don’t have a one to one direct experience with it, but I don’t know if you’ve heard of Sir Gallon and the Green Knight. And so, yeah, they made a great.
Remy: Movie about it a few years ago.
Megan: That’s my other medieval thing that I don’t. There we go.
I hated the ending. They didn’t understand the romance at all. They. Not only is it just different, but it was bad. And it just undermines for me the whole virtue of the piece anyway. Okay.
In. In the cotton Nero manuscript, which almost got burned up in a fire, there’s only one copy of this romance in that same manuscript. And we believe that the same person authored all four of the texts. Because that’s not a given in any manuscripts. Manuscripts could be as, I’m sure, you know, compilations of different things written by different people.
But the first piece. Yeah, I think it’s just those four. First piece is a poem called Pearl. And it is. It’s difficult to read in the original language. It’s East Midlands dialect. It’s a. It’s a little bit harder than Chaucer. You can, I’m sure, find a translation. But it’s a beautiful poem about a father, or a man, I should say, who has a pearl of great price, that’s what he keeps calling it. And he loses it in the grass and he can’t find it anymore. And then he falls asleep, has this dream, vision and he sees this pearl transform. And we come to see or come to learn that this is his daughter. We don’t. I don’t know if we ever learn her exact age, but she has died and she’s gone into heaven. He’s having this experience and then the poem concludes and he. He has this understanding now because he’s. He wants to kind of, I guess, interact with her. There’s this kind of yearning to not necessarily have her back, but there’s a mourning there. And he accepts that basically that she is in paradise now, she’s in heaven. And you know, I haven’t had any children, so I haven’t lost any children. But that real. I think, to the point of, oh, we think the Middle Ages are X way, or we think the theology was X way. I think maybe we think of medieval people as being super pious. But in this poem there’s a really touching and moving struggle with understanding the theological nature of, you know, salvation and what happens when a believer dies. But the grief that’s also there. And he wants to be back with his, his child.
So it’s, it’s a beautiful, I recommend it.
Yes, that’s, that’s, that’s one where it’s like, okay, yes, this is very old.
And yet this real, this really deep yearning to be with somebody you love who’s died, even though, you know, like, you should be okay with it or, you know, how am I okay with it? What does that look like? But I still want them back. Like, that’s, that’s, that tension I think is really well explored in, in the Pearl poem, you know, not, not a light hearted read, but it is a beautiful work. So I recommend it.
Remy: Not to make that amazing sentiment super shallow, but it’s like, it’s like if you go, you can find Romans, Romans often made tombs for their family pets.
And you can go and read like the inscriptions, we have them, you know, that they wrote to their dogs.
And it’s like, it’s like, my God, this guy 2100 years ago is describing my dog, you know, and like how I felt when I lost my dog, you know, I don’t know, it’s, it’s really weird to see that there are a lot of things that change throughout human history, but there are a lot of things I think that don’t. Right. And that’s, you know, you said that earlier, there’s a lot of things that just never will change.
Megan: Yeah. And I think in learning how to read these older works, and there is sometimes a little bit of footwork going into just learning how to read something old, whether it’s a language difference or the context you need to know, you do get at the very least a kind of sense of, I think I said earlier, camaraderie with people of the past.
You know, there are so many, it seems like so many people, so many young people and a lot of young men, I think too, struggling with loneliness and feeling isolation. And at the very least, you know, seeing that, you know, you are not the only one struggling with this, whatever comfort that brings you, I don’t think that’s where that should end. But I think certainly seeing that you are part of a, a larger community of people who have also wrestled with this and maybe have some answers that you have not tried yet or something, I think that’s a value to reading literature, not just the, you know, oh, what kind of moral value does this have? Or is it entertaining? But you are, you’re interacting also with the people who have, have written this. That’s not to say that every work of literature always communicates exactly what the author believes or does. That’s a whole separate conversation. But, yeah, I think there’s. There’s lots for people to read. But I can see why this kind of Western civilization yearning online amongst men. I can see why it’s becoming more popular lately. I do feel like there’s this sense of maybe if I look to the past, I can kind of get a grip on my. My present circumstances and struggles.
Remy: Megan, thank you for coming on. We. I feel like we didn’t really stay on medieval literature too much, but I still had a good time.
Megan: Listen, we brought it back.
I wish I had something medieval to say about A.I. you know, I don’t yet, but I’m sure. I’m sure somebody’s done something.
Remy: And if not, somebody will. Or you will, right? It’s only a matter of time.
Megan: Yeah. Well, as long as nobody steals my idea, watches this, and takes it, and runs with it.
Remy: Very good. Thank you so much for being on, and I hope you have a great rest of your night.
Megan: Same to.
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