The culture of Silicon Valley today sits somewhere on the autistic spectrum and exhibits the elemental qualities of water. Water will always find its way, it will find the unseen cracks, and find ways through obstacles and even tear them down, as a tiny leak can bring down a mighty dam.
Water is an amazing disruptor in nature -- materializing from thin air, it can torrent and push aside mountains, or it can patiently work at opening up tiny cracks in solid stone, freezing and expanding, thawing and flowing.
Water doesn't need ethics or morality it is a force of nature. It will always find its right level. It's an appropriate metaphor for Silicon Valley's culture of amorality. (Tom Forensky)
I am trying to formulate a way of thinking about "progress" that fits into a bigger evolutionary narrative, and so any notion of progress for me must embrace a notion of moral development. It is certainly possible to progress economically and technologically and to regress morally. it happens all the time, and Google is a case study over the last ten years. Earlier in the article Forenski points out:
Google became an important thought leader in the burgeoning social corporate responsibility movement, which was kick-started earlier by Salesforce.com founder Marc Benioff.
Corporate Social Responsibility was important because it was important to the software engineering community. It was essential in recruiting the best engineers. A company bus and a company lunch didn't cut it with that generation of coders.
Today's Silicon Valley culture is dominated by a peculiar amorality, a narcissism that claims Ayn Rand for its aspirations, even though few have read her books or even their dust jackets.
It's as if everyone has forgotten, "What the right thing to do is." And Google has worked hard to play down its "Don't be evil" rule.
There are moments in time when human beings have a glimpse of the transcendent, but usually that's all they get, and they either remain faithful to the memory of what they came to understand in this glimpse, or they allow themselves to be swept away by the primordial flood, the forces in nature and within ourselves that trend toward entropy and dissolution. And it was so easy for the elites at Google, who had such a glimpse, to allow themselves to be swept away.There are always elaborately contrived justifications for being swept away. In this case, a little Ayn Rand here, some neoliberal market ideology there. It's not something most people in Silicon Valley (or anywhere in our consumer culture0 think about; there are these occasional moments of wakefulness, and then it's back to sleep in submerged in the flood.
So the other day in my post "Sacramental Semiotics" and the comments that follow it, I was tentatively feeling my way toward explaining the "Big History" understanding of how evolution works that I have been thinking about that moves beyond purely naturalistic metaphysics. A naturalist metaphysics is a closed system; a metaphysics that is open to transcendence embraces the naturalistic "facts", but does not see them as the only shaping force in history or evolution.
A purely naturalist metaphysics presents a universe and the life world on earth as dominated by randomness, chance, sometimes stunning beauty, and often impersonal cruelty. Heat death is its telos. Why anybody chooses to embrace a purely naturalistic metaphysics (IMO) has little to do with seeing the world as it is; it has everything to do with seeing the world through a certain world-weary lens skeptical about, if not cynical about, all grand narratives.
Through such a grand-narrative skeptic's lens, the old religious orthodoxies seem antiquated and absurd. And while the great Eastern religious and philosophical traditions may for a while (in the sixties and seventies) have seemed to provide a possible legitimate alternative for allowing the possibility of a spiritual dimension, those traditions have been trivialized by Hollywood and New Age flakiness. So without a credible, robust narrative that presents a credible spiritual alternative, the intellectual class reverts to a complacent, soft nihilism. Nihilist, because when people in this class have an encounter with the transcendent, as all humans do whether they recognize it as such or not, they have no way to hold onto it or understand it, so they reduce it to the aesthetic. The soft nihilist narrative allows for an appreciation of the "spiritual" experience, but cannot give it any meaning, because, a priori there is no meaning.
This nihilism leads to moral complacency because while your typical secular intellectual wants to be moral, that means little more than being nice in a politically correct kind of way. And they are nice, but because there is no grounding for deeper moral commitments, those moral commitments are easily discarded when they become inconvenient. That's my reading about what happened at Google. It was "nice" for a while not to be evil; now it's ok. Whatever momentary glimpse some had about the importance of 'not being evil', it was too easily swept away by the flood, by the primordial, amoral forces that grope randomly for primitive survival and advantage.
And these points reinforce the argument I've been making over the years that the secular Left offers no real promise of a progressive or more just future, not because at some level many who are at home in the secular Left don't sincerely want Justice. Many do. It's just that they don't have a way to hold on to it because they don't believe in it as a transcendent ideal. If the bigger meta-story is randomness and senselessness, and if it just ends in heat death, why should anybody care deeply about the future, especially if one is relatively comfortable in the present? Why would anybody choose to suffer and sacrifice for a purpose larger than maintaining his comfort? Yes, there are the few romantic nihilists, the Che Guevara types, who are willing to make that sacrifice. But in a comfortable country like the U.S. all they can do is criticize the injustices that pile up left and right and wait for the contradictions to heighten enough so that the masses become uncomfortable enough to find the resentment that will motivate them to act.
But a politics of resentment is just another way that the primordial flood works; it leads nowhere good, and certainly not in a direction that I would call progressive. Justice, if it is to have any real staying power and any transformational effect, has to be grounded in more than a passing social mood inspired by a fleeting glimpse of the Transcendent. A commitment to transcendent ideals has to be grounded deeply in peoples' souls, in their collective imaginations and traditions, where it is understood that the Absolute Future is the only truly progressive transformational force in history.
So the counternarrative that I am trying to articulate would embrace Justice, for instance, as a transcendent ideal, if by transcendent we mean something that exists outside a system that in our experience of it is best explained in naturalistic language. But rather than imagine this transcendent realm as something that works from above, in some static Platonic world of ideas, we imagine it as working dynamically toward us from the future, the Abolute Future, working in time shaping history and evolution. I imagine history as being propelled by this raw, primitive energy that pushes from behind us, but which is given shape as it meets the Absolute Future which is flowing against it. Let me repeat here what I wrote as a comment in the preceding post:
It's all about the future, the Absolute Future, streaming toward us in a counterflow against the chaotic noise released in the big Bang. That's the story of evolution for me: the groping, random, cruel, noisy, chaotic entropic energies streaming from the past--Teilhard's Alpha point--and the ordering, coding, truth and beautifying flow coming to meet it from the future--the Omega point. And caught right in the middle is the human being, who determines whether the forces of the past win or the forces of the future do. Goodness, deep goodness, comes into the world when humans choose the Future, even in the smallest of matters.
The angel Gabriel was in this sense a herald of the Future. A simple choice is presented to Mary: yes or no, no matter what the cost, choose. Refusal or Amen. So must we all choose. The Magnificat is an eschatological song of deep truth and beauty inspired by her encounter with the Absolute Future. This is the archetypal choice for any of us who long for peace and justice. It is the template for analogous choices we too must make all the time.
So I don't know if this orientation of our spiritual imagination toward the future is helpful for anybody else, but it works for me because of the problems it solves on so many levels. And not the least of which among them is to introduce a way of thinking about history as having a purpose while at the same time recognizing that much if not most of what works in history is random, cruel, and amoral. And to recognize that randomness, cruelty and amorality are the default unless resisted. Amorality becomes 'evil' when humans fail to resist and allow themselves to be swept away by the Flood. Good comes into the world humans resist by choosing a place to stand in the Absolute Future. Good and Evil have no meaning except as they relate to the fundamental human choice to either choose the Absolute Future or to refuse it.