After the Future

It's the Nihilism, Stupid--2

A crucial moment in the development of modern left-wing culture arrived some time in 2013, when Ta-Nehisi Coates, reading books about the ravages and aftermath of World War II by the historians Tony Judt and Timothy Snyder, realized that he didn’t believe in God.

“I don’t believe the arc of the universe bends towards justice,” Coates wrote for The Atlantic then. “I don’t even believe in an arc. I believe in chaos … I don’t know that it all ends badly. But I think it probably does.” ...

For the stern-minded, pessimism of the intellect can coexist with optimism of the will. “I’m also not a cynic,” Coates wrote in the same 2013 essay. “Those of us who reject divinity, who understand that there is no order, there is no arc, that we are night travelers on a great tundra, that stars can’t guide us, will understand that the only work that will matter, will be the work done by us.” 

But it should not be a surprise that some of those “night travelers on a great tundra” might incline a bit more than past left-wingers to despair. Nor should it be a surprise that amid the recent trend toward increasing youth unhappiness, the left-right happiness gap is wider than before — that whatever is making young people unhappier (be it smartphones, climate change, secularism or populism), the effect is magnified the further left you go.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post entitled, "It's the Nihilism, Stupid" that focused on why so many bright young people are attracted to the Right. As I said then, the  Left that I grew up with was inspired by Gandhi, MLK, Nelson Mandela, and the Port Huron Statement. Coates rejects all that as unbelieveable. I hope for his sake it's a temporary moment in the longer trajectory of his life. I think he's an honest writer, and he acts in good faith, but I also believe that he's fundamentally wrong. 

So while I don’t question Coates’s authenticity, his nihilism is rather typical of so much of the thinking on the Left today. It is no longer original or interesting to say that it's all meaningless and that chaos is the fundamental reality. That was edgy in 1880s, and became conventional thinking among intellectuals as the Techno-Capitalist Matrix grew stronger in the post-WWII period. Lots of intelligent, decent people are drawn into this nihilism because they don't understand how their thinking is captive of the Techno-Capitalist Matrix, which is utterly nihilistic and founded in chaos. 

And I have to wonder if people like Coates, while they must be taken seriously on their own terms, can be taken seriously as political actors. It's precisely this kind of nihilistic thinking that is driving so many young people to the Right. Politics now is all about how it's become  "the Meaning, Stupid", and Coates and his fellow travelers are basically saying that it's all meaningless. That's not gonna win a lot of hearts and minds. Rather, it's more likely to abet the forces of chaos that he believes are the ultimate reality anyway. If it's all chaos, why bother? 

So neither Coates nor the broader Left, no matter how sincere their nihilism, should be taken seriously as a political actors who actually believe that the arc of Justice is real. Nihilism cannot win because it cannot inspire. It does the opposite, which is to have a negative, depressing effect on normie Americans.

Nihilism is a siloed form of thinking that mostly within the confines educated elites in the corporate, cultural, and media worlds. It's repellent to everyone else. And if you cannot engage ordinary, mainstream Americans, you cannot win. In fact, all "honest nihilists" on the Left really accomplish is to push decent, normie Americans toward the "dishonest nihilists" on the Right who tell them what they want to hear.

We are living in a time when policy and programs don't matter as much as as whether one's politics feels meaningful. The Left's politics of meaninglessness cannot compete with the Right's politics of meaning, which, whether grounded in reality or not, inspires a passionate intensity with which a politics of meaningless cannot compete. Best is to restore the kind of politics of MLK and Gandhi that is both meaningful and sincere. 

So if you believe that chaos is the ultimate reality, then your politics cannot be anything other than a politics of chaos, and as such it abets politicians of chaos like Trump, Gaetz, MTG et al. The nihilist on the Left should either keep their metaphysics to themselves or stay out of the political arena.They do more harm than good, and they give the Left a bad name with 80% of the country. 

Religion in the TCM

I saw this article this morning by Derek Thompson today in the Atlantic. I thought it was a fitting follow up to my posting of the third Cathedral lecture yesterday --

And America didn’t simply lose its religion without finding a communal replacement. Just as America’s churches were depopulated, Americans developed a new relationship with a technology that, in many ways, is the diabolical opposite of a religious ritual: the smartphone. As the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes in his new book, The Anxious Generation, to stare into a piece of glass in our hands is to be removed from our bodies, to float placelessly in a content cosmos, to skim our attention from one piece of ephemera to the next. The internet is timeless in the best and worst of ways—an everything store with no opening or closing times. “In the virtual world, there is no daily, weekly, or annual calendar that structures when people can and cannot do things,” Haidt writes. In other words, digital life is disembodied, asynchronous, shallow, and solitary.

Religious rituals are the opposite in almost every respect. They put us in our body, Haidt writes, many of them requiring “some kind of movement that marks the activity as devotional.” Christians kneel, Muslims prostrate, and Jews daven. Religious ritual also fixes us in time, forcing us to set aside an hour or day for prayer, reflection, or separation from daily habit. (It’s no surprise that people describe a scheduled break from their digital devices as a “Sabbath.”) Finally, religious ritual often requires that we make contact with the sacred in the presence of other people, whether in a church, mosque, synagogue, or over a dinner-table prayer. In other words, the religious ritual is typically embodied, synchronous, deep, andcollective.

I’m not advocating that every atheist and agnostic in America immediately choose a world religion and commit themselves to weekly church (or synagogue, or mosque) attendance. But I wonder if, in forgoing organized religion, an isolated country has discarded an old and proven source of ritual at a time when we most need it. Making friends as an adult can be hard; it’s especially hard without a scheduled weekly reunion of congregants. Finding meaning in the world is hard too; it’s especially difficult if the oldest systems of meaning-making hold less and less appeal. It took decades for Americans to lose religion. It might take decades to understand the entirety of what we lost.

I agree with Thompson when he says "the oldest systems of meaning-making hold less and less appeal", and my Cathedral Talks were an attempt to explain why, which is that they cannot flourish in the Techno-Capitalist Matrix. That does not mean that the truth claims of these religions are wrong, but that we've become so alienated from Reality, particularly in the ways that it disembodies us, that those claims can no longer make any sense to us.

The larger argument I'm making in those lectures is that the TCM is the culmination of a profoundly unbalanced project that began in the early 1600s. It has brought us many material benefits, but at the price of lost Wisdom. The future of humanity depends on whether or not we can recover that Wisdom in such a way that it plays a role in how we deal with the threats posed by climate change and a technological singularity--not to mention the immiseration of the wretched of the earth. All these threats come from an underlying that rejects any attempt to impose constraints on greed and will to power. We've got away with it so far, but the chickens are coming home.  

We need to recover that Wisdom because the human future depends on more and more of us finding a way to get a foothold outside of the TCM. Taking a religious tradition--its beliefs and practices--seriously on its own terms is one way to do that. It could be a path toward the recovery of Wisdom if it's done in a healthful way. 

I said in one of the lectures that while you don't have to be religious to have some experience of the Transcendent Good, many people who have such experiences become religious. That sense of the Transcendent Good is a place to put one's foot. So start there. Start with  that spark of an intuition that despite everything that seems to contradict the truth of it, that at the heart of things there is something deeply good and benevolent, and start acting as if it was the most important thing rather than everything else that life in the TCM would have you believe is important. Be a sign of contradiction, and be skeptical about almost everything that the TCM tells you is important—but reject solutions that are born out of fanaticism. 

All genuine religion has to be experience-based, and as the above quote by Thompson makes clear, it has to be enacted by the body. That kind of bodily enactment in itself is a sign of contradiction to life in the TCM. Such a gesture, if it is nothing else, is a path of resistance. So adopt daily practices that are a sign of contradiction to the logic of the TCM. Start small and see where it takes you. Baby steps. Let your conscience--not your Superego--guide you. 

The biggest mistake is to approach a religious tradition by trying to evaluate the believability of its doctrines. Since the Reformation, religious practice in the West has been too intellectualized and too much about a trying to reduce the 'symbolic' language of a book into language that has 'semiotic' clarity and certainty. That's just not how religious language works, and when people semioticize religion, they create idols, and idolatry is the worst form of religious alienation.

AGI, Hope, and the Human Future 3

In the first lecture I talked about how Primal Alienation is the source of all that ails us. And how humans will do almost anything to ease its disease. If the main symptoms of our alienation are our feeling of being cut off from one another, nature, our bodies, our work in the world, and what is most deeply spiritual, then the criteria for how we ought to interact with technology are pretty straightforward. If you don't like feeling alienated, don't use technology in a way that makes it worse.

And that requires being honest with yourself about how it might be making it worse. And that's made more difficult because we are living in a cultural environment that both produces alienation and celebrates it as "progress". The Techno-Capitalist Matrix (TCM), I argued, is an alienation factory because it works hard to cut us off from the things that matter, and then it offers seductive remedies for the alienation it creates that draw us into even deeper forms of being cut off. And we accept it as normal because everyone around us is experiencing the same thing. 

In the first two lectures, I spoke about how the Transhumanist movement, the culmination of the Baconian Project that emerged in the late 20th Century typifies this alienation in its most extreme form. The argument that I want to make today, following on what I had to say about Baudrillard and the Precession of the Simulacra last week, is that the postmodern condition, to use Frederic Jameson's phrase, is the cultural logic of Late Capitalism.

Postmodern thought makes no sense outside the kind of imagination of reality that Late Capitalism has created, and Late Capitalism, as the culmination of the Baconian Project, is dragging us toward two unprecedented catastrophes--ecological disaster and the prospect of AI running amok outside human control. The solutions for the problems that Baconian Project have created cannot be solved from within the logic of the Baconian project. 

The TCM provides the dominant values system that shapes ideas about progress in Late Capitalist societies. It sees the human being in exclusively immanent terms, and it sees the human being as primarily a Biological Desiring Machine. I call it the Matrix because like the Matrix in the movie, it has become an all-but-closed system. And like the Matrix, it has an OS, a set of operational principles, which are incompatible with a certain category of cultural apps. For instance any premodern, richly symbolic or sacramental religion that still tries to operate within the Matrix. 

While few people think that human beings are machines, the machine is the governing metaphor for the Transhumanists and much of postmodern thinking in defining what human beings are. And since the Transhumanists are shaping the human future for us all, we need to have an argument about what its philosophical presuppositions are and whether we want to be governed by them. Because if you, like most people, believe that the human being is something more than a wetware machine, you nevertheless find yourselves being dragged along where the inherent nihilism in Transhumanist thinking is taking you. There is no robust, countervailing, broadly galvanizing argument.

So if the TCM is an all-but-closed system, those most habituated to it cannot imagine standing outside of it because it is axiomatic that nothing exists outside of it. It is a system that seeks to be totalizing, and so it follows that all our major societal institutions are captured by it—our economic system, our healthcare system, and our political system and our mainstream cultural institutions as well--whether we’re talking about the mainstream universities, media, or art world.