Let me begin by quoting, in full, a letter that the president of the United States of America sent yesterday to the prime minister of Norway, Jonas Gahr Støre. The text was forwarded by the White House National Security Council to ambassadors in Washington, and was clearly intended to be widely shared. Here it is:

Dear Jonas:

Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a “right of ownership” anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only a boat that landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for NATO than any person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT

One could observe many things about this document. One is the childish grammar, including the strange capitalizations (“Complete and Total Control”). Another is the loose grasp of history. Donald Trump did not end eight wars. Greenland has been Danish territory for centuries. Its residents are Danish citizens who vote in Danish elections. There are many “written documents” establishing Danish sovereignty in Greenland, including some signed by the United States. In his second term, Trump has done nothing for NATO—an organization that the U.S. created and theoretically leads, and that has only ever been used in defense of American interests. If the European members of NATO have begun spending more on their own defense (budgets to which the U.S. never contributed), that’s because of the threat they feel from Russia.

[Eliot A. Cohen: How to understand Trump’s obsession with Greenland]

Yet what matters isn’t the specific phrases, but the overall message: Donald Trump now genuinely lives in a different reality, one in which neither grammar nor history nor the normal rules of human interaction now affect him. Also, he really is maniacally, unhealthily obsessive about the Nobel Prize. The Norwegian Nobel Committee, not the Norwegian government and certainly not the Danish government, determines the winner of that prize. Yet Trump now not only blames Norway for failing to give it to him, but is using it as a justification for an invasion of Greenland.

Think about where this is leading. One possibility, anticipated this morning by financial markets, is a damaging trade war. Another is an American military occupation of Greenland. Try to imagine it: The U.S. Marines arrive in Nuuk, the island’s capital. Perhaps they kill some Danes; perhaps some American soldiers die too. And then what? If the invaders were Russians, they would arrest all of the politicians, put gangsters in charge, shoot people on the street for speaking Danish, change school curricula, and carry out a fake referendum to rubber-stamp the conquest. Is that the American plan too? If not, then what is it? This would not be the occupation of Iraq, which was difficult enough. U.S. troops would need to force Greenlanders, citizens of a treaty ally, to become American against their will.

For the past year, American allies around the world have tried very hard to find a theory that explains Trump’s behavior. Isolationism, neo-imperialism, and patrimonialism are all words that have been thrown around. But in the end, the president himself defeats all attempts to describe a “Trump doctrine.” He is locked into a world of his own, determined to “win” every encounter, whether in an imaginary competition for the Nobel Peace Prize or a protest from the mother of small children objecting to his masked, armed paramilitary in Minneapolis. These contests matter more to him than any long-term strategy. And of course, the need to appear victorious matters much more than Americans’ prosperity and well-being.

[Read: Denmark’s army chief says he’s ready to defend Greenland]

The people around Trump could find ways to stop him, as some did in his first term, but they seem too corrupt or too power-hungry to try. That leaves Republicans in Congress as the last barrier. They owe it to the American people, and to the world, to stop Trump from acting out his fantasy in Greenland and doing permanent damage to American interests. He is at risk of alienating friends in not only Europe but also India, whose leader he also snubbed for failing to nominate him for a Nobel Prize, as well as South Korea, Japan, Australia. Years of careful diplomacy, billions of dollars in trade, are now at risk because senators and representatives who know better have refused to use the powers they have to block him. Now is the time.

In a dream someone said to me, ‘Any general thesis which is put forward without a concrete example is therein badly presented’. That was all he said, and I was about to point out the irony that in merely putting forward this thesis by means of a general statement the speaker had failed his own requirement of providing an example when it suddenly occurred to me, as I exclaimed to him, ‘Ah, I see. Your putting forward this thesis without an example is itself the concrete example’. But when I awoke I realized there was a problem here. If indeed the speaker is credited with having given me a concrete example of an example-less bad presentation, then that credit must be immediately withdrawn, because what he has given me is not an example of an example-less bad presentation. But if it is not an example, then it must once again be received as an example of example-less presentation, but then it once again is not an example, and so on forever.

— Arnold Zuboff, in Analysis, July 1992

Humanities departments seem to be in perpetual crisis. Fewer students are enrolling in them. The Trump administration is cutting their funding. Smartphones and social media are hastening the collapse of reading and attention spans, even among students at elite schools. Americans are becoming more skeptical about the economic value of any four-year degree, let alone one in comparative literature.

In answer to these and other challenges, many colleges are trying to make the humanities “relevant.” Some are accommodating reduced attention spans by assigning excerpts rather than books. Others are responding to financial anxieties by restructuring departments to emphasize their practicality (if they aren’t eliminating programs altogether). But such adaptations and compromises only exacerbate perhaps the most insidious threat the humanities face, and one that’s not often discussed.

[Tyler Austin Harper: The humanities have sown the seeds of their own destruction]

As a humanities professor myself, the biggest danger I see to the discipline is the growing perception, fueled by the ubiquity of large language models, that knowledge is cheap—a resource whose procurement ought to be easy and frictionless. The humanities, which value rigorous inquiry for its own sake, will always be at odds with a world that thinks this way; that’s why relevance is a futile goal. For humanities departments to continue to matter, they must challenge the modern world rather than accommodate it. Indeed, the most useful lesson the humanities have to offer today is a profoundly countercultural one: Difficulty is good, an end in its own right.

For the past several years, I’ve had the pleasantly vague title “visiting professor of humanities” at Bard College, a small liberal-arts school in New York’s Hudson Valley. Bard has given me a remit as simple as it is generous: to teach books and ideas I think are important. Every November, I submit course descriptions for two spring seminars—this year, one on Albert Camus and his influences, the other exploring the idea of the American dream through Black writers such as Frederick Douglass and James Baldwin. Within a few days of the courses being posted, prospective students start writing me to say how eager they are to immerse themselves in the texts. I’ve learned to relish their zeal, because I know it won’t last.

When they start my class, many of my bright, self-selecting students appear to be unacquainted with the difficulty of close reading. By the end of the semester, only a fraction seem to have gotten through the texts and writing assignments without outsourcing at least some of their work to AI. In my course on Camus, most students will be able to remember the philosopher’s famous injunction to imagine Sisyphus happy, but few will demonstrate mastery of the abstruse train of thought that led him to it. Not many are fully willing to try.

I began teaching in early 2023, two months after OpenAI released ChatGPT. It could generate some amusing parlor tricks—a personal favorite was interweaving Shakespearean sonnets with mid-’90s rap—but it wasn’t good at much else. During my first semester, one or two students turned in writing that featured AI’s distinct blend of fluency and superficiality, which was easy to detect.

Chatbots look very different today. As the technology has become more sophisticated, more of my students have tried to pass off AI-generated writing as their own. The craftier ones will use chatbots to come up with phrases or insights that they shape into their own prose. The work this yields is usually competent, making AI’s influence difficult to spot, but not exceptional. If I have suspicions about a student’s take-home essay—maybe it looks nothing like their in-class writing assignments—I run it through AI detectors. These are far from perfect, of course. But when they indicate the use of AI, I confront the student, and he or she almost always confesses. Still, in just three years, ChatGPT and its competitors have rendered take-home essays—what I consider the central exercise of humanistic learning—nearly useless to assign and almost impossible to assess.

More recently I’ve come to suspect that, in addition to using LLMs to ghostwrite papers, some of my students are relying on them to prepare for in-class discussion. At any rate, their contributions are getting blander and more interchangeable, less daring; eccentric or original observations are becoming rarer. If I’m right that AI is furnishing my students with talking points, then it has almost entirely eliminated the possibility that they arrive at some transformative insight on their own, which is what makes wrestling with words and ideas so joyful and fruitful in the first place.

[Kwame Anthony Appiah: The age of de-skilling]

Probing a text can be enjoyable but also tiring, even borderline painful. That’s good. Exhausting our mental faculties, such as through deep reading or effortful writing, is what makes them more potent. Physical exercise works the same way. AI, by contrast, promises knowledge without effort, just as many people see in GLP-1 drugs the possibility of weight loss without willpower. Although both have legitimate uses, their widespread adoption has diminished our capacity to appreciate, let alone endure, the sustained and challenging work required to flourish beyond the level of simple appearance. Only through difficulty do we improve our powers of thought and perception, which we carry with us in every endeavor. This is the true source of the humanities’ relevance.

Camus’s great realization was that, in a meaningless world, we create our own meaning and quality through willed struggle—a lesson that AI threatens to obscure but the humanities are uniquely poised to teach. Sisyphus is assigned to roll his rock for eternity, Camus writes. Yet he can still be happy so long as, each time he comes to the bottom of the hill, he’s the one who chooses to turn around and rise back up.