AI, Discernment, and the Mos Maiorum
Monday Memo 6/8 AD2026
Welcome to the Monday Memo, where I explore the world’s enduring dynamics; grounded in first principles, philosophy, character, and statecraft, rather than passing fads. Sorry this week’s post is a little late this Monday, I was catching up with an old friend who flew in from Asia. BTW: I am now at 390 subscribers! Thank you so much for joining.
Virtue, Albinus, is the ability to pay the true price in the affairs in which we are engaged, in which we live; virtue is for a man to know what each thing is worth; virtue is for a man to know what is right, what is useful, what is honorable; what things are good, what likewise are bad, what is useless, shameful, dishonorable; virtue is to know the limit and measure in the pursuit of wealth; virtue is to be able to pay wealth its proper worth; virtue is to give what is in reality owed to honor, to be an enemy and foe of bad men and bad customs, while being a defender of good men and good customs — to hold these in high esteem, to wish them well, to live as their friend — and moreover to put the interests of one's country first, then those of one's parents, and third and last our own.
—Gaius Lucilius, Saturae circa late second century BC
One of the major principles of AI usage is discernment. The user must have the mindset of analyzing the use cases and tools available to them and making the right decisions about how to achieve good results. While this is an excellent principle, the problem of actually discerning good and virtuous behavior is an old one. The Romans wrestled with it, and with maintaining the received wisdom of their society, the Mos Maiorum, the Way of the Ancestors.
The Roman poet Gaius Lucilius expressed this in his writing on what it meant to have the right mindset for a citizen of the Roman Republic. The republic, or res publica meaning the public matter, meant a government which belonged to the People of Rome, and this required discernment and wisdom from the leaders, especially the Senate. The American Founding Fathers, looking at the Roman example and their own British past, wondered if the people would have the discernment necessary for free government to endure. Could the common people master the liberal arts?
In the 19th century the expansion of public education had this concern foremost in mind, and historically, the liberal arts or artes liberales — from the Latin liber, meaning “free” — were the branches of knowledge considered essential for a free citizen to master in order to govern themselves and participate in shared civic life. These liberal arts were traditionally divided into two sequential tiers: the trivium, which governed the verbal arts of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, and the quadrivium, which dealt with the mathematical arts of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. These were in contrast to mechanical or vocational crafts, meaning the arts which were in actuality practical trades you learned for your jobs, the knowledge needed for pure economic purposes. Liberal arts were something higher but also something of a luxury, which is why they were often associated with elites. However, in a democratic age liberal arts were needed by everyone who would have a share in power.
Today the question is not whether people can master rhetoric and logic it is whether they can master the tools that presume to produce rhetoric and logic for them.
AI can become a powerful tool, and with this in mind AI is a challenge for a free society, because it requires similar discernment in its deployment as you would expect from citizens empowered to make decisions for their society. It matters what kind of culture AI is deployed into, because that will determine how users are enabled or disabled by its capabilities. Is your society able to discern how to use AI well?
If our future will be powered by AI we cannot be merely mechanical and vocational in our interactions with it.
AI cannot know what discernment is; this is something that must come from humans. It is important that we relearn the liberal arts and the lessons of the ancestors, because only we can say what is good or bad, useless, base, or dishonorable. Only we can know our societal and personal tolerances and limits — social valuation is not for the machines. To put our country and family’s interests before our own, we must be formed to discern what those interests actually are.
Because of our modern emphasis on technical-centered approaches to education, many have missed out on the old formation that came from a liberal arts education, and they may lack the capacity to determine how to use our new tools in ways that improve our condition. Recovering the knowledge tools that enable us to live in freedom, with discernment, is something we cannot outsource, because it is our human experience and meaning-making that gives us the understanding that we should seek and obtain wisdom and discernment. To outsource our judgment would be not merely to become dependent on the machines but morally governed by them.
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