After the Future

David Brooks and the Contradictions of Capitalism

Over the past few generations, the celebration of individual freedom has overspilled its banks and begun to erode the underlying set of civic obligations. Especially after World War II and then into the 1960s, we saw the privatization of morality — the rise of what came to be known as the ethos of moral freedom. Americans were less likely to assume that people learn values by living in coherent moral communities. They were more likely to adopt the belief that each person has to come up with his or her own personal sense of right and wrong. As far back as 1955, the columnist Walter Lippmann saw that this was going to lead to trouble: “If what is good, what is right, what is true, is only what the individual ‘chooses’ to ‘invent,’ then we are outside the traditions of civility,” he wrote.

Trust is the faith that other people will do what they ought to do. When there are no shared moral values and norms, then social trust plummets. People feel alienated and under siege, and, as Hannah Arendt observed, lonely societies turn to authoritarianism. People eagerly follow the great leader and protector, the one who will lead the us/them struggle that seems to give life meaning.

During our current moment of global populism, the liberal tradition is under threat. Many people have gone economically nationalist and culturally traditionalist. Around the world, authoritarian moralists promise to restore the old ways, the old religion, national greatness. “There are certain things which are more important than ‘me,’ than my ego — family, nation, God,” Viktor Orban declared. Such men promise to restore the anchors of cultural, moral and civic stability, but they use brutal and bigoted strongman methods to get there.  (Source)

Brooks' column today starts with a celebration of Fareed Zakaria's new book, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash From 1600 to the Present. This is the period I describe in my Cathedral Lectures as the story of how the Baconian Project emerged in the 1600s and gradually, decade by decade culminating in the Post WWII era, came to crowd out every last remnant of premodern societies, their traditions and religious values. It's the story of Techno-Capitalism, i.e., science in the service of technological advancements that capitalism has used to commodify--thing-a-fy--just about everything.

AGI, Hope, and the Human Future 2: Alienation, Boredom, and Technology

So last week we talked about if—and it’s a big IF—AGI becomes something real, we will be looking at ourselves as if in a mirror and that these AGI machine/persons will be looking back at us. What will they see? The best of us, or the worst? So following John Vervaeke, I explored the implications of AGI becoming real as a pretext to examine what basis there is for these it to see anything good in us humans at all—anything that we could hope it would emulate.

I also traced how what we call today Transhumanism originated in the 1600s in what I call the Baconian Project. I spoke about how this marked a significant and unprecedented shift in the Western Tradition that came to see nature, rather than as shot through with the divine, as just stuff with no intrinsic value except as humans manipulate it to promote their material flourishing. This clears the way for both the Scientific Revolution and later Capitalism, which both come to promote the rationalist-materialism whose metaphysical presuppositions today dominate our public discourse.

These presuppositions are very hospitable to a Transhumanism that reduces the human being to a biological machine with all the nihilism that implies. So not only are we now at a point where Techno-Capitalism is working toward the creation of machines that are becoming more human-like, but also working toward the development of humans that are becoming more machine-like. And we all accept this as normal progress because we all accept more or less the logic that derives from the architecture of Techno-Capitalism. Intrinsic to this architecture is the idea that technological innovation should have no constraints except those determined by the market, no matter how destructive of other human values. Material progress is the only progress that counts. Moral progress? Not so much.

So I’m concerned about the human prospect. It’s not the technological advancement that scares me—it’s the people who are working so hard to promote the objectives of Techno-Capitalism. I fear that they, like Dr. Frankenstein, haven’t the moral maturity or integrity to unleash these powerful new beings on the world. And I worry because there is, as yet, no constituency organized and influential enough to check them by insisting that other ‘human’ values should play a role in shaping the human future. Techno-Capitalism takes the field unopposed.

There are lots of people of good will who would be part of an oppositional constituency, but we are all divided, and in being divided we are preemptively conquered. And I want to argue that if we are to have any hope for a truly flourishing human future, it must come from people who are invested in a rich, complex understanding about what human flourishing entails. And a purely materialistic, Transhumanistic idea of human flourishing is neither rich nor complex. It is one-dimensional.

What does my idea of rich, complex, human flourishing entail?

AGI, Hope, and the Human Future 1: What Is Human Flourishing?

[This is a transcription of the talk I gave at St. James Cathedral on 2/8/24. I’ll be posting the Lectures 2 and 3 in the next two weeks.]

Before we dig into the topic tonight, I’d like to frame it by identifying two critical issues. Both have a lot to do with our current social and political turmoil: homogenization is pulling us one way, and tribalism is pulling us in a another. The intensifying of the second seems to be a reaction to the intensifying of the first. So two related questions arise:

1.     Is a rich pluralism of values possible without regressing into tribalism?

2.     Are universal values affirmable without extinguishing particularity?

Put that aside for now; I’ll come back to it later.

Now for our topic: “AGI, Hope and the Human Future: What Is Human Flourishing?”

First let’s define some terms. What is Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), and what makes it different from AI and Generative AI?

AI can do things within one domain really well—like playing chess, facial recognition, music and movie recommendations, etc. Generative AI takes text, music, images, learns the rules that structure them, and generates novel text, music, and images. You can give the entire Bach opus to a Generative AI machine, and it could write a cantata that that would seem to be a genuine Bach piece composition that had never been known of before.

But such a new piece would be ‘novel’ and not ‘original’. What’s the difference? Originality requires having a soul. Having a soul doesn’t make you original, but it’s a prerequisite for originality. The fact that so many can’t tell the difference between what is original and what is novel is a sign of the soullessness of the world that technology is creating. As machines become more human, humans are becoming more machinelike. This is an essential part of the problem I want to explore in these talks.

Chat GPT is an advanced form of Generative AI. It scares a lot of people because it’s so human in its use of language. But it’s still pretty primitive.

AGI is still only hypothetical. If realized, it will have broad cognitive abilities, and it will be able to understand, learn, apply knowledge, and problem-solve across a wide range of tasks and domains—very much like a human being.

AGI will have “emergent” properties. It will develop capabilities that humans did not program into it. It will surprise us and do things that humans don’t understand. And that really scares a lot of people because these machines will be us, but much smarter and more powerful than us.

But will it be truly conscious? Will it have a soul? Will it be able to care?

Or will it just be like a human psychopath who can mimic these human attributes without feeling them?

The late Hubert Dreyfus was a professor of philosophy at UC Berkley and one of the foremost American interpreters of Martin Heidegger. In the early part of his career, he taught at MIT. He got to know many of the pioneers in AI—and he thought those nerds had no idea what a human being was. Good Heideggerian that he was, he argued in What Computers Can’t Do: The Limits of Artificial Intelligence (1972, 1992) that in order for AGI to have human-like intelligence, it would have a body like ours, and social acculturation like ours. It would have to be a historical cultural being-in-the-world.

But what does being a historically acculturated creature in a body entail?

Will it have to gestate in a womb and experience birth trauma? Will it have months of breastfeeding? Will it go through the terrible twos and the hormonal changes of adolescence? Will it suffer? Will it grow old and die? That’s what having a body and being a human means to someone like Dreyfus. You see the point. There’s more to being truly human than just having human-like intelligence. It’s what gets left out that makes all the difference.

Embodied, acculturated human beings are particular, historical beings. They have biological and cultural constraints. Can those constraints be duplicated in AGI machines? Wouldn’t possessing those attribures be a requirement for any machine to have truly human consciousness? Isn’t therefore any AGI machine that we create without those constraints something that must be very non-human in nature. And so then mustn’t it be something that we could never really understand? Or it understand us?

The Argument I'm Making: Resisting the Techno-Capitalist Matrix

I just gave a series of three talks at St. James Cathedral in Seattle entitled AGI, Hope, and the Human Future. Here is a succinct summary of the argument that I made: 

One. Humans, especially with the prospect of developments in AI that may lead to AGI, are developing technologies that are likely to create a major discontinuity in human civilizational development. This discontinuity will be akin to the shift that followed from the development of  phonetic literacy in the first millennium BCE, known as the Axial Revolution, and the invention of moveable type in the 15th century from which followed the Scientific Revolution. 

Two. Technological developments change human nature for better and worse. It could be argued that people who lived in hunter-gatherer societies were far happier and lived in deeper communion with one another, the natural world, and the cosmos than do people who live in modern societies. People who live in modern societies live lives that are clearly more alienated, lonely, and meaningless compared to our premodern ancestors. If humans have paid a price in the intensification of their alienation, what have they received in return? Certainly material prosperity--at least for some--but also, more importantly, a sense of themselves as free, moral actors. As having an "I".  

Three. To come into full awareness of one's freedom and individuation, one must suffer a 'disembedding', a "positive alienation", a metaphorical 'wandering in the wilderness'. This is where one learns to step outside of one's acculturation and to self-legislate. As the early Christian monks fled into the Egyptian and Syrian deserts, so must we all step outside of our acculturation to find within us what the Greeks called the Transcendent Good, the Chinese called the Tao, the ancient Israelites the Torah. and Christians the Logos. But unlike our premodern ancestors who chose to flee into the wilderness, the wilderness has come to us. It has de-territorialized us in place. It has stripped us of all our traditions, customs, and external cultural props.This forces us to choose, either to surrender to what's worst in us or to find what's best. You need not be religious to know the Transcendent Good. But whether religious or not, all people of good will know it with the awakening in the heart of an inner spiritual faculty called 'conscience'.

Four. Cultural Conservatives are people who want their lost territory back. Liberals are people who are too comfortable in adapting to the nihilistic creative-destruction of what I call the Techno-Capitalist Matrix--or TCM.  But there is no getting back what was lost, and just allowing the TCM to develop unchecked leads inevitably to disaster for the human project. We humans must move forward, and we must create something new--something inspired by the Transcendent Good.

Five. Because these new technologies are unprecedented in their power to change what it means to be human, we cannot allow people who are captured by the TCM, and who therefore have little sense of the Transcendent Good, to develop these technologies unchecked. The technologies don't scare me; the people creating them do because of the way they are so deeply and unreflectively captured by the TCM. In the coming decades, all people of good will throughout the globe, i.e., all people who have consciences and who in some measure know the Transcendent Good, need to find a way to organize a resistance to the TCM. 

Six. As unlikely as it seems now because of its lack of moral and spiritual authority, the Church is perhaps the only cultural institution with global reach that provides an infrastructure to organize such a global resistance. Why the Church? The universities, the media, are captured by the TCM. The Church must undertake such a project in concert with the other great Post-Axial religions--Taoism, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism--as well as other smaller religions/sects similarly inspired. Instead of obsessing about their differences, all people of good will need to find a way to speak with one voice in resistance to the TCM. How this will happen I don't know. Expect the unexpected--out of barren wombs and empty tombs, so to say. But something like it must happen because the people who are most deeply captured by the nihilism of the TCM are leading humanity off a cliff, and the rest of us, divided and so pre-emptively conquered, are passively being dragged behind. 

I plan to make this argument in more detail later this spring when I've done with my Winter Quarter teaching responsibilities. 

AI and How Washington Works

Effective Altruism (EA) gets some attention from Politico for being a "hot new philosophy" funded by deep pockets:

EAs are particularly fixated on the possibility that future AI systems could combine with gene synthesis tools and other technologies to create bioweapons that kill billions of people — a phenomenon that’s given more traditional AI and biosecurity researchers a front row seat as Silicon Valley’s hot new philosophy spreads across Washington.

Many of those researchers claim that EA’s billionaire backers — who often possess close personal and financial ties to companies like OpenAI and Anthropic — are trying to distract Washington from examining AI’s real-world impact, including its tendency to promote racial or gender bias, undermine privacy and weaken copyright protections.

...

The generally white and privileged backgrounds of EA adherents also has prompted suspicion in Washington, particularly among Black lawmakers concerned about how existing AI systems can harm marginalized communities.

So on the one hand you have lobbyists (Effective Altruism) concerned about how AI could kill billions of people and on the other hand people concerned with AI's potential to distract from DEI concerns. Hmm. Let's weigh these concerns.  Clearly the first should have the higher priority, right?

Nope. 

Here's a quote from Liberal technocrat Cory Booker--

“I don’t mean to create stereotypes of tech bros, but we know that this is not an area that often selects for diversity of America,” Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) told POLITICO in September.

“This idea that we’re going to somehow get to a point where we’re going to be living in a Terminator nightmare — yeah, I’m concerned about those existential things,” Booker said. “But the immediacy of what we’ve already been using — most Americans don’t realize that AI is already out there, from resumé selection to what ads I’m seeing on my phone.”

Of course some "AI apocalypse" (eye roll) is a possibility, but let's get real. What's important is getting marginalized folks up the meritocratic ladder so they can get their share of the technocracy and its bounty. 

While the article does its due diligence in quoting sane people who are EA allies, the main thrust of this article is to suggest Effective Altruism is a "cult" of fanatical true believers who have more influence than they should because they get a lot of funding from Dustin Moskovitz and Open Philanthropy. They are bothering everybody with all their doom and gloom.

It's like a scene in Don't Look Up.

I don't know, maybe it is cult-ish. But who cares? It's like saying that Daniel Ellsberg took himself too seriously. That's just bad form. Not done. These EA folks are naifs who don't understand the Washington game. They're too sincere. They just don't fit here. They should go back to flakey California where they do. 

The article ends with these lines--

... many AI and biosecurity experts continue to fret that deep-pocketed doomsayers are distracting Washington with fears of the AI apocalypse.

“The irony is that these are people who firmly believe that they’re doing good,” Connell said. “And it’s really heartbreaking.”

Poor dears. It's so touching that they should be concerned about the future of humanity. They just don't understand how Washington works. 

Partying our Way to the Apocalypse

Since American society's future is in the hands of people whose average level of moral maturity is that of a middle schooler, the future of humanity is likely to be determined by who wins the perennial battle between the snarky, rich cool kids and the earnest, nerdy kids who get elected to the student council.

From a NY Times article this morning about Effective Acceleration, e/acc, a group of techies that wants to take the brakes off of AI development:

Rochelle Shen, a start-up founder and biohacker, said she was welcomed by the e/acc  crowd after being turned off by the stuffiness and insularity of Effective Altruism.

“E.A. is so 2019,” she said. “You go to their parties, the guys don’t know how to dress, and the conversations are totally controlled by these one or two thought leaders.”

E/acc, she added, is “fun to be around.”

These are, of course, verdicts on e/acc’s vibes, not its ideas, some of which are still too extreme for many people to swallow. Critics have pointed to the fact that some of e/acc’s leaders, including Mr. Verdon, seem to actually agree with the Effective Altruists that a rogue A.I. could wipe out humanity, but aren’t bothered by the idea, since superhuman A.I. could represent a logical next step in evolution. And some have noticed that the movement has gotten more partisan and serious as it has grown.

“I liked it when it was an ironic countermovement instead of what seems to be transforming into an earnest libertarian movement,” said Aidan Gomez, the chief executive of the A.I. company Cohere.

Sam Altman, such a charming, smart, young man, was president of the student council for a while, but he wanted to party with the cool kids, so they kicked him off. But the cool kids got their revenge. They asked their rich parents to pressure the principal to kick out all the nerdy kids instead and replace them with cool ones. And the student body is fine with that. 

Some might argue that it's more complicated than that, but is it?

The prospect of AGI doesn't frighten me, but anarcho-capitalists terrify me. 

 

See also "Sam Altman and How Great It's Going to Be".

 

What Is After the Future About?

Note: Every once in a while I revise my About statement at the top of the left column on this site. I thought I'd post my most recent revision here today:

After the Future is a public diary that I've been writing for over twenty years. It's what I'd be writing anyway if there were no such thing as a blog. I have no imagined ideal audience. Friends, family, and a few former students know of my work here, and so of course I have them in mind as I write. But mostly I write about what I find to be compelling for whatever reason. It's where I go to think things out. 

So if what I write here has any value, I trust it will be found by those who might value it. I have no ambition for it to be more than that. If there is anything unusual in what I write, it lies in my particular sensibility or perspective, which I'd describe as that of a Postmodern Christian Neoplatonist. (See Note 1) Such a framework, while it certainly does not at this moment resonate with the zeitgeist, I suspect will emerge with broader cultural legitimacy in the future. Either it or something like it. Why?  Because it must. What we have now in hegemonic Rationalist Materialism is aberrational, and it cannot be sustained. 

I say something like a Postmodern form of Christian Neoplatonism must emerge, but, of course, it might not. But if it doesn't, that will be because the machines will have won. As Willigis Jager writes, "The men and women of the future, to paraphrase a line by Karl Rahner, will be mystics, or they won't be at all." Most of us are mystics now without thinking of ourselves as such. (See Note 2) We don't because we have the experience but miss the meaning. We haven't a metaphysical imaginary to help us identify and interpret the mystical experiences both subtle and intense that most of us have. So like seeds strewn on barren ground these experiences cannot germinate, and if they do, they have no trellis upon which to grow. 

I see Rahner's prediction about humans 'not being at all' in the future as the inevitable outcome if technocapitalism remains unchecked, and it will remain unchecked unless some consensus develops around a metaphysical imaginary that is robust enough to resist where technocapitalism is dragging us. Many (most?) decent, thoughtful people are horrified by the kind of world technocapitalism is creating, but they feel powerless to do anything about it. How can they if they have no understanding about what a human being is and so have no imagination of a positive human future to fight for? Unless that changes, the machines will win by default. I'm no Luddite. I'm not against technological advancement. I'm against unchecked technocapitalism that serves no needs except its own, certainly not the needs of ordinary human beings. 

I say something like Christian Neoplatonism because while that is my standpoint, I see the Neoplatonist part of it as the foundation for a prisca theologia that is cognate with the mystical theologies of Judaism, Islam, and the post-Axial spiritual and philosophical traditions of Asia. As suggested above, by 'mystical' I mean spiritually experiential in some degree, and entry-level experience in this sense is an intuition of the transcendent Good and Justice as an ontonormative ideal. By ontonormative I mean something that transcends our social constructions and which operates in the souls of the most alert humans as a force to subvert social constructions when they fail to live up to what transcendental Justice demands. If there is to be any sustained, robust resistance to technocapitalism, it has to be global in its scale. And so it must have a shared core imagination of what a human being is, and that imagination must comprise a spiritual dimension that draws from post-Axial commonalities and structural similarities rather than from differences in practice and distinctions in thought.

The Secular Age is over. The choice is no longer between secularism and religion, but between good religion and bad. The cult of the Invisible Hand is bad religion, very bad religion. Protestant fideism is not enough to build a new civilizational ethos upon, and in its Calvinist forms has been too complicit with the emergence of technocapitalism and a wisdomless Puritanical priggery on both the left and right that creates more problems than it solves. Therefore, we need to retrieve something like Christian Neoplatonism precisely because it restores the amputated vertical axis illustrated in the diagram below. 

What do I mean by this? The retrieval of something like Christian Neoplatonism will require the restoration of the the Wisdom Axis. Wisdom, as it has been understood in every civilization except in the secular West and its imitators, has become excluded as playing any role in shaping contemporary public discourse. Wisdom, if it is to play a role in shaping a moral consensus within any society, must be grounded in a metaphysical imaginary that has a transcendent foundation. The metaphyiscial imaginary of the West had such foundation, but it was amputated after the Reformation. It retained a cultural presence in the West as a kind of phantom limb until the mid 19th Century, but since then, i.e., for the last 150+ years, we have been living out the consequences of its loss, and with each passing decade we spin with increasing speed in unsustainable ontological dizziness. 

(Note: This diagram is explained in some detail in Note 2 at the end of Genealogy Part 12A)

We are going through momentous events in this historical moment, and while we may be having the experiences and missing their meanings, is there any doubt that we are experiencing something unprecedented in its significance? What happens in this century will be a huge civilizational axial moment, a turning point for humanity, for better or worse. What that means remains to be seen, but something big is afoot. Everybody feels it. The world is crackling with it. It's different from other historical moments if for no other reason than the ways in which machine learning and developments in biotechnology are seeking to redefine what it means to be human. Some radical discontinuity lies not too far ahead in the human future. Our anticipation of its inevitability is the deep source of our collective anxiety and our insane politics. 

I have no illusions that what I have to say is original. I traffic mostly in the originality of others whose insights and scholarship are far more profound and interesting than anything I am capable. If I contribute anything it might be in the ways I make connections. If I have a talent, it is more synthetic than analytic. I think also I have a good nose for the Living Real and with it a reliable ability to sniff out b.s. when it presents itself as something more.

So what is After the Future about? It's simply one person's attempt to read the signs of the times and to interpret them from the perspective of Christian Neoplatonist. For the moment that's rather an eccentric perspective. But then again maybe I'm onto something. 

 

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Note 1: Christian Neoplatonism shaped the metaphysical imaginary of the West from the early Church fathers from the gnostic elements in St. Paul through Origen, Clement of Alexandria, the Cappadocians, St. Augustine, Dionysius the Areopagite, through John Eriguena, the Cathedral schools, Albert the Great, and Thomas Aquinas. With the theological assertion of nominalism and voluntarism in the 14th Century, Neoplatonism lost its hegemony. This occured, ironically, almost simultaneously with Christian Neoplatonism's artistic apogee in Dante's Divine Comedy. It's spirit, if not it's theology, was carried on, however, through Meister Eckhart, Tauler, Suso, and the Rhineland Mystics, and after Luther, German pietism, which was the source of German Romanticism in the 1700s. 

The main characteristic of Neoplatonism in any of its forms is its participative ontology and epistemology and its openness to the working of transcendent energies (agapic love) to effect the human transformation the Church fathers called theosis. Once that participative imagination of the human relationship with the world was gone, once the Reformation rejected theosis, the way was paved for educated elites to reject the world as shot through with the divine, and to see it instead as just stuff that could be molded by the human will. Hence Calvin's Geneva, hence the Jacobins' Paris, hence capitalism's remaking the world in its materialist-consumerist image. This worked for a while, but it is clearly no longer sustainable. 

Neoplatonism provided an imaginary for the educated to live compatibly with the animism that lingered from Celtic, Germanic, and Mediterranean paganism. That was all gradually pushed to the side after the 14th Century in a way unique in the West, and the world became Hamlet's disenchanted, sterile promontory.  But it's not the world that is sterile, but our ability to relate to the deep Living Real that suffuses it. It is we who are sterile, and that sterility must be overcome if humans are to 'exist at all' in the future. Is it possible for us as a society to become once again spiritually fertile?

I think it is possible. There have been Neoplatonic moments of spiritual fertility from time to time since the 1300s: Florentine Neoplatonism in the late 1400s, the Cambridge Platonists in the 1600s, the influence of Thomas Taylor's translations of Plato on the English Romantics in the late 1700s are the most prominent. But none of these could compete with the seductive materialistic power of the burgeoning science and the capitalist system it abetted. So my point is that Neoplatonism has always been there under the surface--is there now--waiting to re-emerge. I guess I'm arguing that it must emerge again in the near future but this time stick. For if it doesn't, it's hard to see how there can be any kind of human future that I would define as human. Am I optimistic? No. Am I hopeful? Always. 

Note 2: Studies/polling have establish that at least 40% of people have had spiritual experiences that they would call as such. My guess is that there are many more who have had spiritual experiences but they think of them as aesthetic rather than spiritual. Many people think of themselves as agnostics, but few--5-6%--are atheists, if by atheism we mean a hard rejection of any kind of spiritual reality. To be an agnostic ususally means that one does not accept the confessional assertions of organized religion, but does not preclude an openness to religious/spiritual ideas that makes sense. My hope is that in coming decades the kind Neoplatonism about which I'm talking will make sense. In order to do that it needs to provide a compelling, plausible narrative that integrates experience of the world with a recognition of interior capacity for self-transcendence. That's what the diagram above seeks to illustrate in a rudimentary way. 

The Coming Politics of AI

How exactly the parties would align—pro-AI or anti-AI or somewhere in between—is unclear. The possibilities are downright kaleidoscopic. Democrats, traditionally more concerned about long-term threats such as climate change and pandemics, might oppose AI development on the grounds of existential risk. Republicans, traditionally more concerned about the preservation of existing social structures and mores, might oppose it as a potentially destabilizing force. Or maybe they’d support it, given their distaste for government regulation. Then again, they might oppose it on the basis of their science-skepticism, whereas Democrats might support it because they’re “following the science.” Maybe both parties will oppose regulation for fear of ceding AI dominance to China.

The Democrats will eventually take a position. The Republicans will mindlessly oppose it. Gridlock will ensue. The machines will win. So it goes in a society that has no vertical axis and no idea about what it means to be human anymore.

Humans Don't Really Believe in a Human Future Anymore

So they're willing to surrender it to the bots.

Ezra Klein last week--

Since moving to the Bay Area in 2018, I have tried to spend time regularly with the people working on A.I. I don’t know that I can convey just how weird that culture is. And I don’t mean that dismissively; I mean it descriptively. It is a community that is living with an altered sense of time and consequence. They are creating a power that they do not understand at a pace they often cannot believe.

In a 2022 survey, A.I. experts were asked, “What probability do you put on human inability to control future advanced A.I. systems causing human extinction or similarly permanent and severe disempowerment of the human species?” The median reply was 10 percent.

I find that hard to fathom, even though I have spoken to many who put that probability even higher. Would you work on a technology you thought had a 10 percent chance of wiping out humanity?

We typically reach for science fiction stories when thinking about A.I. I’ve come to believe the apt metaphors lurk in fantasy novels and occult texts. As my colleague Ross Douthat wrote, this is an act of summoning. The coders casting these spells have no idea what will stumble through the portal. What is oddest, in my conversations with them, is that they speak of this freely. These are not naifs who believe their call can be heard only by angels. They believe they might summon demons. They are calling anyway.

I often ask them the same question: If you think calamity so possible, why do this at all? Different people have different things to say, but after a few pushes, I find they often answer from something that sounds like the A.I.’s perspective. Many — not all, but enough that I feel comfortable in this characterization — feel that they have a responsibility to usher this new form of intelligence into the world.

A tempting thought, at this moment, might be: These people are nuts.

That we are entrusting the human future to the jaw-dropping superficiality of these proto-sociopaths is not so much a reflection on them, as on the rest of us for letting them. We really don't have enough belief in humanity anymore to believe it's worth saving. Let the bots take over the evolution of consciousness. In the meanwhile, we'll keep fighting about the really important stuff like masks and CRT. 

I missed this article in The NY Times by Robert Burton when it came out in 2017. It expands how we have to understand the problem. 

If conventional psychology isn’t up to the task, perhaps we should step back and consider a tantalizing sci-fi alternative — that Trump doesn’t operate within conventional human cognitive constraints, but rather is a new life form, a rudimentary artificial intelligence-based learning machine. When we strip away all moral, ethical and ideological considerations from his decisions and see them strictly in the light of machine learning, his behavior makes perfect sense.

Consider how deep learning occurs in neural networks such as Google’s Deep Mind or IBM’s Deep Blue and Watson. In the beginning, each network analyzes a number of previously recorded games, and then, through trial and error, the network tests out various strategies. Connections for winning moves are enhanced; losing connections are pruned away. The network has no idea what it is doing or why one play is better than another. It isn’t saddled with any confounding principles such as what constitutes socially acceptable or unacceptable behavior or which decisions might result in negative downstream consequences.

Metaphorically, this process is reminiscent of Richard Dawkins’s notion of the selfish gene. The goal of DNA is self-reproduction; the sole intent of Deep Mind or Watson is to win. When Deep Mind beat the world’s best Go player, it did not consider the feelings of the loser or the potentially devastating effects of A.I. on future employment or personal identity. If any one quality could be ascribed to A.I. neural networks, it would be relentless “single-minded” self-interest....

As armchair psychologists, we have the gut feeling that with enough information and psychological savvy, we can figure out what makes Trump tick. Unfortunately there is no supporting evidence for this wishful thinking. Once we accept that Donald Trump represents a black-box, first-generation artificial-intelligence president driven solely by self-selected data and widely fluctuating criteria of success, we can get down to the really hard question confronting our collective future: Is there a way to affect changes in a machine devoid of the common features that bind humanity?

The issue is not that AI is becoming more human, but that humans are becoming more like AI.

Return of the Repressed

In "The Crisis of the Liberal Order, Part I", I argue on a more practical political level that the future of democracy in the U.S. depends on Liberal Democrats succeeding and Republicans in their current form failing and then being pushed to the margins. I argued that's not likely to happen if Main Street Americans continue to associate the Democratic Party with what is for them the unrelatable ethos of the secular, cultural Left, i.e., the ethos of top 15-20% of educated, economic elite Americans who live in urban areas and university towns throughout the country.

Main Street's discomfort with Dems is not primarily about whiteness and racism, it's about Dems having a mindset that Main Street finds strange because it's not what it grew up with. And for that reason, Main Streeters ally with racists and white nationalists. While most on Main Street might sincerely reject any kind of overt racism, they still feel more comfortable with the traditionalist ethos of the GOP-- even if it shelters racists--than with the secularist Liberal ethos that Democrats have become identified with. On the votes of these decent, but conventionally conservative, denizens of Main Street does the future of American democracy depend. [See Note 1]

So the Democrats, if they are to save democracy, [still] have the extraordinarily difficult challenge of maintaining their secular progressive base while winning enough Main Streeters to overcome all the structural advantages the Republicans are now exploiting. The Democrats have programs that will benefit most Main Streeters, but Main Street still doesn't like the Dems and their programs because they "feel" socialist and un-American.

The Republicans' job is so much easier. They're like Lee defending Richmond. Their task is simply to stoke the flames of anxiety and resentment in Main Streeters about Liberals seeking to destroy everything they hold sacred. And once elected, Republicans feel no need govern competently, no need to even try to solve urgent problems. Just obstruct, obstruct, obstruct to defend the interests of the 1%, which is really all they truly care about.

The problem for us now is that if Republicans aren't defeated decisively and soon, we will remain impotent and paralyzed as a society to deal with the real threat that comes from Technocapitalism. It's become clear to me that the Republican elite have come to assume that democracy is no longer viable, and so they are jockeying for their place in the autocracy to come. They don't care about where Technocapitalism is taking us or what happens to the rest of us so long as they're in control and the 1% remain unmolested. The one-party rule that dominated in the South for most of its history provides the blueprint they want to nationalize. 

In Part II, I go more metahistorical, more big picture. I try to explain why I believe that this is more than a temporary political crisis, but a civilizational one, a crisis of the spirit. The country is reeling from what I call ontological dizziness. This dizziness is symptomatic of the kind of society that the disruptive, quasi-nihilistic, materialist ontology that consumer, Technocapitalist society has created. In doing so it has crowded out the originary mythos that grounded Western societies since at least the mid-first millennium BCE until the mid-19th century. This originary mythos fused Greek transcendental philosophy with Jewish revelation, and while the Logos/Mythos polar tension in this fusion has always been fraught, those leaning more toward the Logos pole still embraced its transcendental Mythopoetic foundations. That ended in the mid-19th century, and if one hadn't realized it already, Nietzsche spelled it out for him. 

I argue that while faith is still a possibility for individuals and small groups whose ontology still draws on the great originary mythos, it is completely at odds with the materialist, Positivist ontology that has become hegemonic in defining the contemporary American imaginary. There are some people of faith, like me, who can live with that and adapt, but I also understand why people of faith who don't have the time to think things through feel that things are profoundly out of joint. Because when they try to hold two opposing ontologies together--the spiritual onotology assumed by their faith and the materialist ontology that shapes almost every aspect of the world they live in--they're just not compatible. To use a fancy word like 'ontology' does not mean that the feeling of out-of-jointness isn't experienced by ordinary Americans as deeply disorienting. 

They believe that the materialist ontology is wrong, and I agree with them. And when people tell them that they are free to believe whatever they want to believe, it doesn't change the fact that whatever they believe as individuals or small communities is contradicted and dwarfed by the mammoth materialist energies of Technocapitalism; a vulgar, materialist, violence-celebrating entertainment media; and a snarky Liberal elite who see them as antediluvian morons. They have come to feel that they are strangers in their own land.

Ok--so maybe we could sort all that out in time, but there is no time. I'm arguing that this usurping materialist ontology has come to shape the presuppositions of the cosmopolitan Left and its institutions in such a way that it has enervated Liberal resistance to the greatest proximal threat humanity faces, which is posed by Technocapitalism.  

The real villain here is not the radical Right, but Technocapitalism and its materialist ontology, and the way it is impoverishing what it means to be human. Liberals have got to come to terms with how they've bought into it and how their continued acquiescence is a large part of why we're in such trouble. 

And so here we are in a society riven by a culture war in which both sides need what's best in the other--Logos from one, and Mythos from the other--but cancel one another out as techno-capitalism continues to drag us all toward disaster. What is best in each is buried under what is worst, so it's easy to understand why each side sees the other at its worst--that's mostly how they present themselves to one another.

But the curious thing is the way each is in its own way lives in a delusional bubble. The cultural right lives divorced from the reality as it is in fact shaped by the rationalist-materialist social imaginary that dominates in North Atlantic societies. That is the dominant, collectively experienced reality that all of us experience regardless of our personal beliefs. And so the dizziness that people who also have spiritual beliefs experience in such a world is understandable, and so too is their groping for and grasping onto all kinds of bizarre ideas that give them the illusion of stability or the hope of a return to it. 

On the other hand, educated Cultural Left elites are living in their own bubble. They are quite comfortable within the hegemonic rationalistic-materialistic imaginary that the cultural right finds so disorienting. And so those on the Cultural Left feel their imaginary is grounded in reality in a way that the Right does not. Their private ontology aligns with the public one. But it's not grounded in reality, either--or more precisely it's repressing the most important part of reality. It's all Logos and no Mythos. But it has no sense of what's missing, and it's precisely because the Logos-dominant worldview of the Cultural Left is so hegemonic, that those in it are blinded concerning how ontologically ungrounded and unbalanced their world is. They take for granted that it is the only "legitimate" possibility. It's not, but they feel no need for any other. At least the people on the Cultural Right know there's problem, even if their proposed solutions are horrifying. 

Techno-capitalism has created a society in which most Liberals feel mostly comfortable--it's a social construct that flows from their basic rationalist-materialist ontological presuppositions. But from my pov, this Liberal, Technocapitalist society is now or soon will be in a predicament rather like that of Wile E Coyote: Bamboozled by the trickster Roadrunner, it has run off a cliff, and there, hovering in midair for a few moments, it runs in place until gravity does its thing.

Well, Technocapitalism is the trickster spirit, and the radical Right is the law of gravity. The Right is basically saying that if you want to take society off the cliff, you're forcing us to do our thing--it's the law. We'll crash it. Since Liberals believe that laws are just stuff we make up, they have no capacity to comprehend what's happening. In their minds they should be able to go wherever they want and fulfill every desire unless a Democratic congress passes a law against it. Reality doesn't work that way. Sooner or later it pushes back. 

So I argue in Part II that if we're not off the cliff yet, we're on our way. And if we're not off yet, maybe there's a chance we can change course, or even if we're already off it, maybe--maybe--it's not too late to turn back to get a handhold on some root or branch that's extending out to us. 

If what I'm saying here is that the radical right is unwittingly performing meta-historical Hegelian negation is too far-fetched or too much of a stretch for the secular Liberal imagination to take seriously, let me suggest another analogy that comes from Freud: We're seeing a collective return of the repressed. [See Note 2] What's been repressed is the spiritually transforming vitality of the originary mythos, and as with all powerful repressed energies, the more persistent and rigid the resistance to them, the more violent and crude their return.

19th Century capitalism and its vulgar materialistic/positivistic ontological imaginary crudely replaced what at its best was profound and sublime manifestation of the Living Real that had its last cultural efflorescence during the Romantic period. So now, for lack of any vital presence of the profound and sublime in our collective life, it makes sense that something even cruder must come to displace what is already so crude. The religious-cultural Right represents the return of repressed Mythos, but in its crudest and most delusional form. If there is a more robust explanation for the emergence Donald Trump and his embrace by the Religious Right in this country, I've not heard it.

And it's not over because the hegemonic Cultural Left still hasn't learned the lesson. Nevertheless, I believe the restoration of a transcendental Mythos dimension that has broad cultural legitimacy and which restores access to the profound and sublime is still a possibility for us. The future of the human depends on it because the machines don't do profound and sublime, not at least in the way I understand what both those words mean. 

For any society to truly thrive, it must provide a trellis on which its citizens might grow to realize their best human possibilities. That trellis comprises both vertical and horizontal dimensions, i.e. both Mythos and Logos, and both must be maintained from generation to generation. In the mid-19th century the neglect with which the vertical dimension had been treated by previous generations led to its collapse. And so souls born into such a society with the collapsed vertical only know the horizontal, and they sprawl aimlessly along the ground.

In such a collapsed, flattened society, there is nothing readily available for those who would climb upward, and the whole society suffers from the deprivation of something deeply vital and inspiring. It loses the capacity to be vitalized or inspired by the ancestors who had climbed upward because what they have to report from that higher altitude no longer makes any sense.  

Nevertheless, for any healthy society to thrive, there must be both a Logos and Mythos dimension, and a constant, vigilant effort in the cultural sphere to integrate Mythos with Logos, and Logos with Mythos as knowledge on both dimensions expands. A society that has one without the other might survive for a while, but the people in it suffer, and sooner or later the repressed polarity will return guns ablazin'. And when it gets to that point, there's little chance of reconciliation.

I fear that is where we are--at a point beyond reconciliation. But maybe not. Maybe it's not too late to avert disaster. I remain hopeful, but not optimistic. 

P.S. In 2010, I wrote a long piece on the TV Series Lost a few weeks before its finale. I used it to riff about its allusions to Dante and to what a postmodern imagination--i.e., a post secular, post-Positivist imaginary--that integrates Mythos and Logos might look like. Near the end I say:

Whatever we think we know at this moment is both true and untrue. We have experiences which are true, but so what? Our interpretation of what they mean is mostly guesswork and belief. There are dimensions upon dimensions of facts, and modern rationalism has validated access only to one dimension, the northern hemisphere dimension [maya], so to say, and its superficiality and materialism is profoundly impoverishing to the imagination and to the life of the soul. Jack's story is the story for the culture as a whole. He's the modern, northern hemisphere rationalist, who has been gradually converted to become a southern hemisphere [awakened] kind of guy. He is the archetype of modern consciousness converted to the postmodern [post-secular] consciousness, and I think the smart money is on his being chosen as Jacob's replacement. If the angelic world is going to hand off responsibility for the future of the earth to someone, he has to be both a man of science and a man of faith.

What does it mean to have postmodern [post-secular] consciousness? We are in a state of mind as fallen beings, especially as fallen moderns, where we are having experiences but almost always missing their meanings, because we haven't the imaginative frame or habits of mind to recognize [what's significant in] them. Whatever we think we understand is engulfed by an infinite sea of all that we don't--and so it always was and will always be. Modern rationalists are the only fools who ever thought otherwise. That's why the sacred texts and great works of art are more true than science. They point us to dimensions of the real that transcend our current impoverished, commonplace understanding of it. Postmodern [post-secular] consciousness creates the possibility of being open to a broader spectrum of the real again. That openness is the transformation we see in Jack. 

++++++++++

Note 1: This essay originally appeared on November 22, 2021, under the the title, "The Crisis of the Liberal Order, Part III". I then feared that Dems would do worse than they actually did in the midterms earlier this month. It's pretty clear that enough Independents on Main St. were discerning enough not to do what history would incline them to do, which is vote against a sitting president with low approval ratings in the midterm after his taking the White House. But the country is still split, Trump has announced his candidacy and is still the dominant force in the GOP, and Kevin McCarthy, or someone Trumpier, is likely to be the new Speaker of the House. So everything I wrote then still stands. We're still very much not out of the woods. 

Note 2: I'm appropriating the phrase 'return of the repressed' in a way that Freud would not approve, but Jung probably would. He was trained in Freud's very rationalist-materialist horizontal milieu that set very strict taboos regarding the validity of experiences in the mythos dimension. And yet despite his resistance, repressed mythos found a way to break through in Jung. It produced his mythos-oriented depth psychology, which forced his break with Freud, and it produced the mythic symbology of The Red Book, which was derived from his experience of recurrent hypnagogic states. For someone to dismiss those experiences as psychotic is simply to betray the prejudices of someone who operates constrained within a rationalist-materialist ontology.

I should point out that Jungian mythos is set in what I would describe as a more shamanic, i.e., pre-Axial, neighborhood within the Mythos dimension than the post-Axial, transcendental neighborhood to which most of my essays point. Nevertheless, knowledge that derives from experiences in both neighborhoods (and others) are valid and need to be legitimated in the post-secular future that restores the Wisdom/Mythos dimension. The problem for us now is that we don't have a sapiential community to help individuals who have experiences like these to interpret them in such a way that they understand their significance and can learn from them in fruitful ways. To what degree Jung--and other guys like Joseph Campbell and Mircea Eliade--had the spiritual maturity and wisdom to interpret such experiences correctly is open to debate, to say the least. But at least they took such experiences on the vertical axis seriously. 

See also "A Geneaology of Our Current Insanity, Part 1".

Progressivism in a Post-Liberal World

I do not consider myself a Liberal, but I do think of myself as a Progressive in the late-19th-, early-20th-Century sense, more with the Social Gospel/W. J. Bryan strain than with the Deweyan/statist, managerial liberal strain. I'm a communitarian/subsidiarist who admires Wendell Berry, but who nevertheless recognizes that the technocratic state is a necessity. I do not align myself with the kind of Progressive today who sees him or herself as a woke social justice warrior. I'm for Justice and compassion, not some form of intellectually fashionable, performative Neopuritan priggery.

While I recognize the necessity of the technocratic state, I see our task as citizens to be vigilant in holdingit accountable and to exert whatever pressure we can so that it will use its power to solve problems in the service of a democratically determined common good. Without a broadly shared cultural commitment to an inspiring ideal of the common good, no productive, healthy Progressive Left project can get traction. Material interests alone cannot provide a sufficient basis for a vigorous Progressivism that might actually enact Justice.

I reject as a dead end the poststructuralist historicism that plays such a large role in shaping the post-Marxist politics of the contemporary Left. An effective Left politics must derive inspiration from transcendentals like Justice, Truth, Goodness, Beauty that are the source of all ontonormativity. These are not intellectual abstractions but energizing sources of felt meaning. A truly vigorous Left politics becomes a possibility only when the broader culture becomes capable of imagining a possible future in which these provide a solidarity-creating energy for its accomplishment. And I'd argue that a true Left solidarity cannot come into being so long as Rationalist Materialism provides the dominant metaphysical imaginary for American society. 

So those on the secular Left who talk about the need for solidarity are quite right--nothing changes without it. But that kind of healthy, constructive, Left solidarity is playing no significant role on the American political landscape right now. We got a whiff of it in Bernie's campaigns, but the last time we really saw it was in the Civil Rights movement before the assassination of King. King, for all his flaws, was someone through whom Justice as a transcendental ideal shone. All Americans of good will felt it, were moved by it, and changed by it. But King was killed and reaction set in, and not long after with the ascension of Reagan, Neoliberalism and its inherent nihilism becomes the elite consensus for both the Republican and Democrat establishments. 

So after Reagan, a "Liberalism" that dominates both GOP and Dem elites becomes too entrenched an ideology to have any truck with Justice and a solidarity movement to instantiate it. Let the Invisible Hand do its thing. Goodbye labor unions, good by multi-racial solidarity, goodbye any hope on the Left for real Justice, goodbye any sense that there's such a thing as 'society', much less a common good. The hardcore Neoliberals consolidate their gains as the isolating, enervating, anti-common good, individualistic world they always wanted becomes realized by the proliferation of its solipsizing Technocapitalist produce. The Left retreats to fight cultural issues in despair of fighting structural power and for economic justice. Nothing pleases Neoliberal elites more--their opponents are divided in their squabbling over abortion and guns, and thus easily subdued. 

The historicist Secular Left has no robust answer for this because it has no real way of standing outside of it. If we've learned nothing else in the last few decades, some things other than material interests are important for the creation of solidarity. The Right has an easier job of creating it because its goals are served by drawing upon the primitive resentments and fears that have always been the primary animator of the mob. The mob is a form of counterfeit solidarity, and the best on the Left know that riding the tiger produces nothing good. Some other energies must be drawn upon to create a sense of solidarity, but they're not readily available except in small groups here and there. 

***

So how is my critique of Liberalism different from the one illiberalism makes? I do not think that Liberalism has created a world that is worthy of the hatred so many on the cultural right direct toward it. It is incomplete, not evil. But Liberalism,  whatever were the ideals that originally inspired it, has become reduced into an metaphysical imaginary and epistemology that rests almost completely on rationalistic materialistic assumptions. As such, it no longer has the resources from which we can draw to meet the challenges that face us. It has created a world that is for us now inadequate for true human flourishing. It's not about what it affirms as important so much as about what it rejects as unimportant.

For all its talk of freedom, Liberalism and its rationalist materialist imaginary imposes constraints on the spirit and closes off more possibilities than it opens up. The cure is not to destroy Liberalism but rather to subordinate what's good in it to something else more deeply humanizing. Science and critical thinking, pluralism and free speech, freedom of religion, democracy, and a conception of fundamental natural rights are good gifts Liberalism bequeaths to us. They must be retained and defended while realizing that they must inevitably be subsumed into a higher cultural synthesis in which the Wisdom dimension is restored. 

All I am asking of any defender of Liberalism reading this is to suspend disbelief, to treat what I'm saying as a thought experiment. I am asking you to try to step back from the rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary that shapes all our ways of thinking whether we have religious commitments or not. We can surely say about Liberalism that it worked for a while, that it gave us a spectacular means to create material bounty. But it exacted significant costs, and we are no longer in a position to pay them. The cost was a loss of wisdom in our public life and of our capacity even to care that we lost it.

Insofar as people care about wisdom in their private life, it has at best indirect public impacts. But the fact is that wisdom never has a seat at the table in our political economy. Utility and expediency are the only criteria, and both are useless in solving the deeper problem, which is one of metaphysical imagination. The cost therefore is not just that we lack wisdom in planning for the future, but that without it we are we are spinning meaninglessly at a time when we need our wits about us and firm ground upon which to plant our feet if we are to face what's coming without being washed away.

The inadequacy of Liberalism is apparent to everyone but the 20% or so of educated elites who have benefited most from it and who are the primary constituency that the Democratic Party now serves. They cannot understand how the regime that has benefited them so much could be hated so intensely by those whom Sam Francis called years ago Middle American Radicals, the Jacksonians that supported George Wallace back in the day, and that the GOP recruited during the Reagan era but mostly neglected until the Tea Party and Trump. The gifts of Liberalism are not valued by the Middle American Radicals or the Integralists and others on the Right because they see Liberalism as the shark that has chewed up their world and everything they hold sacred. They're not wrong. And elite Liberals do not endear themselves to these folks when they tell them to get over it and move on. 

***

So if you've stuck with me this far, I'm likely to lose you in what follows. I have no expectation that what I'm trying to do here would be well received either by those who are deeply captured by a rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary or by those who are rigidly dogmatic or fundamentalistic in their religious beliefs. I speak to those who care about the human prospect and share with me the sense of urgency about what is happening to us as a civilization. And I speak to those who are open to think through things in a way that doesn't fit neatly into any established categories, but nevertheless sees their thinking as part of a long tradition that dates back to the Axial revolution. There's lots of 'new' thinking out there about our collective life together, but the only thinking that I can take seriously has to be grounded in some understanding of the transcendent. Transcendence should not be surrendered to the Right. 

I'm arguing for something that is, to say the least, not obvious--especially to people who lean Left, who compose my primary audience. I see myself as a dog that's barking up a tree. I smell something up there and I think I know what it is, but it's hidden among the branches and leaves, so I'm not sure quite what it looks like. But there's something there, and we need to see it and understand it better.

I am among those who believe that any new political project must develop hand in hand with the emergence of a new cultural project. This new cultural project requires bringing what's up in that tree to ground. What that means for us going forward is outlined in the first five or six parts of my Geneaology Series, and if what I'm writing here makes any sense to you, I encourage you to at least read Part 1 and Part 2.

Here's an excerpt from Part 2 "Restoring the Vertical Dimension to the Metaphysical Imaginary of the West" to suggest what I'm barking about--

A metaphysical imaginary can be judged as effective to the degree that it works in providing a meaning framework for a society on both vertical and horizontal dimensions. Let's call the horizontal dimension Logos/Phronesis and the vertical dimension Mythos/Sophia. Mythos operates on the dimension of depth, with the deep meaning of things; Logos works on the horizontal dimension, on the everyday surfaces of things. Science and what might be described as everyday common sense operates on the Logos axis. Religion, poetry, music, and other art forms work on the vertical axis, and if they play a vital cultural role, they connect a society to the Living Real. Being connected to the Living Real is the only true cure for alienation.  

In Part 1, I talked about how we are facing the imminent death or disappearance of culture. By that I meant that it's what inevitably happens to any society that has lost the vertical dimension that connects it to the Living Real. No Living Real, no culture. What we have now within the rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary is not "culture" as it has been experienced by humanity throughout most of its history, but a simulacra of culture, a virtual culture, a parody of culture. 

A full, effective metaphysical imaginary integrates knowledge from both the horizontal and vertical dimensions, from both Logos and Mythos. Our contemporary civilizational crisis lies in that Mythos no longer plays a vital cultural role. There are still artists and deeply spiritual people, but they do not play a vital role in shaping the culture's metaphysical imaginary. They are subsumed into the materialist commodifying ethos of contemporary consumer capitalism. [Art and Religion become optional, a matter of preference, a consumer choice, entertainments. Neither offers robust counterbalance to the pervasive Rationalist Materialism.]

...

There is real knowledge found on both horizontal and vertical dimensions that derives from real experiences, but the criteria for the legitimacy of knowledge on either dimension is very different. The criteria for knowledge on the horizontal dimension is empirical, objective factuality; the criteria on the vertical is wisdom. Factuality is relatively easy to establish, but wisdom is rare, and some people have more of it than others. It needs to be sustained by a tradition. Because it's unverifiable except to those who have some measure of wisdom, its legitimacy became questionable to all those who had only a little measure of it. And so inevitably it led to the current crisis we are undergoing that is directly related to the loss of the vertical dimension playing a role in shaping the metaphysical imaginary of the West. This is a crisis that has been a long time coming, most acutely since the middle of the 19th Century. But we're living now with the consequences. We have become a society that lacks any capacity for making judgments that are wise. We make decisions only on the basis of expediency and utility, i.e., by criteria that exist only on the horizontal or Logos dimension.

...

Mythos, if understood as operating on the vertical dimension, is compatible with science, which operates on the horizontal. Science gets out over its skis when it tries to be Mythos. Religion gets out over its when it tries to be Logos. Nevertheless, a robust future metaphysical imaginary must find a way to satisfactorily integrate the knowledge that comes from both the vertical and the horizontal dimensions, but in such a way that the legitimacy of the knowledge gained on either dimension is respected by the other on its own terms. A healthy, integrated human being as well as a healthy, integrated society "knows" in both ways. Fideism and Scientism must be rejected as equally inadequate in their respective reductionisms. [See Note 1 for criteria to evaluate effectiveness of a society's metaphysical imaginary.]

So why is it no longer possible for us to sustain a culture-wide metaphysical imaginary that integrates both Logos and Mythos? In Part 1, I argued that because we are acculturated into a Rationalist-Materialist metaphysical imaginary, it is extraordinarily difficult even for genuinely religious people, people whose individual lives have a vital vertical dimension, to feel that the mythos that grounds their spiritual beliefs has anything to do with the everyday world in which they live. 

Religious people respond in four basic ways to this split between what their religion tells them is true and the reality of their everyday world:

1. They separate their lives into public and private spheres. In private life they go to church and practice their religion with friends and family, but in public their lives are ruled by the law of the shark, and they, too, become sharks if they have any ambition.
2. There are, of course, lots of religious or spiritual people who live decent lives in this public sphere, but because they are not driven by ambition, they only rarely rise to leadership positions. They choose careers as artisans or in service professions. But even so, unless they own their own businesses, they must work in organizations--schools, hospitals, government bureaucracies--whose ethos is shaped by rationalist-materialist assumptions and that are often run by ambitious sharks. 
3. They retreat into quietism--monasticism, Anabaptist separatism, Dreher's Benedict Option, off-the-grid cults, etc.  It's possible to live an integrated life in such bubble worlds, but living in them requires the abdication of responsibility for what happens in the rest of the world.
4. They seek power in the political sphere to order the society into a theocracy in which they will no longer feel alienated even if almost everyone else will. This was Calvin's project in Geneva, and is now the Catholic Integralist and Evangelical Dominionist project. It leads to illiberalism and oppression. 

This is pretty much reality in North Atlantic societies as most people experience it, and few are really, truly happily thriving in it. The restoration of the vertical axis to the metaphysical imaginary cannot be forced in the way the fourth group wants. As soon as it's forced, it loses any claims to wisdom or spiritual authority. Nevertheless, the restoration of a wisdom dimension is desirable, and it's more likely to happen if people are prepared for it, look for it, hope for it--and live it in their own lives as best they are able. My Genealogy Series is an attempt to trace how the wisdom dimension functioned in shaping the metaphysical imaginary of the West until it didn't, and to make the case for its retrieval in a way that makes sense in a globally pluralistic world.

I do not see "wisdom" as being as exclusively derived from any one religious or philosophical tradition. I see religious and philosophical traditions deriving their legitimacy by their effectiveness in connecting or being a conduit for the broader culture to the Living Real. No religious or philosophical tradition is doing that for North Atlantic societies in this moment, and, I'm arguing, the lack of such a sapiential tradition with broad cultural legitimacy is at the heart of the crisis we are living through. A lot depends on whether we will be able to find a healthy way to resolve this crisis. 

The task as I see it is not to force anything on anybody but rather to ring an alarm that we are in a profound meaning crisis, and that we need to find some level of consensus on the vertical dimension. Any solution to this problem must be bottom-up rather than top-down. No sane person wants some Mandarin class to arise to impose its "knowing better" on everyone else. Or another way of saying this is that we should expect no solutions from our current Mandarins in the universities, media, and other cultural institutions, including the church's managerial class. If something 'real' arises, they will, after some initial resistance, adapt. 

How might this happen? I really don't know the specifics but suspect it will emerge in a way that is both continuous with Liberalism and discontinuous with it. How did Buddhism happen? How did Taoism happen? How did Christianity happen? How did is Islam happen? The energies of the  Living Real have a way of breaking through from time to time in a way that is recognized by the broader culture, and it does it in a way that is both continuous and discontinuous. Christianity, for instance, is both continuous with and discontinuous with Judaism. I have every expectation that something like these historical breakthroughs will happen again. How and when I have no idea, but we should hope for it, expect it.

If it happens it won't be about believing a new doctrine so much as it will be about restoring a felt connection to the Living Real. No felt connection, no breakthrough. And when such a breakthrough occurs, it's something that wise Buddhists, Christians, Jews, Muslims, other religionists, and all people of good will will recognize as cognate with their own wisdom traditions. Doctrine--right teaching--follows from the experience of connection.

The Living Real is accessible by all. Those of us who are Christians have an account regarding how such access became possible, but accepting that account is no prerequisite for access to it. What matters is that one hears the song and is inspired to sing it. It doesn't matter what language you sing it in if we all are hearing the same melody, the melody of Justice. Hearing this melody is the prerequisite for the solidarity that is necessary for any real progress.

So this is not an intellectual enterprise. It's not something you can think yourself to--and it's certainly not something a minority can force on a majority in the political sphere. It's about hearing the song. Lots of people hear it even now, but maybe only faintly because of all the noise that drowns it out, and because so few others who do hear it are singing it with confidence and gusto.

***

Question: But what to do if we don't hear it, or until we hear it?

Answer: The best we can. We respond to what's given to us and do what's called for. We work for Justice as best we can know and feel it. And sometimes that means just resisting as best we can the siren songs that lure us and our fellow citizens toward shipwreck.

In the short run, perhaps all many of us can do is say, No, that's not the song. I don't know what it is, but that's not it. That's the Socratic daemon working in us. Better to wait and trust that something true and new will break through. So while the temptation is for many compelling, the worst thing anyone can do is surrender to the siren song for want of anything better.

We are in that respect like Odysseus on the trackless sea or the ancient Israelites wandering in the wilderness. We must keep moving even if we don't know when we'll eventually arrive. And that means we must resist Circe's enchantment or the longing to return to the fleshpots of Egypt. These are mythopoetic archetypes that speak to us in this moment. I realize that this might sound like a rationale for complacency, but it isn't. It requires fortitude and hope beyond hope. It is not just about waiting passively because there will come a moment when we must act decisively, but there has to be a chance for success, even if a small one. Wisdom is knowing when the chance is presented. Only a fool expects his roses to bloom in January, but we must be alert, vigilant, and prepared for the first signs of Spring.

In a post last month I wrote that I was looking for an entertainment alternative to the nihilism that passes for prestige TV, and so I read for the first time Tolkien's Silmarillion, re-read the LOTR trilogy, and re-watched the Jackson films. I was surprised by how they engaged and moved me. And I've been wondering since why it works in a way differently from something like Game of Thrones, which after a while I found unwatchable. I think the key is that for all GOT's fantastical elements, there is no Mythos/Sophia or a vertical dimension in it. There's not a whiff of transcendence in it. It's just the modern secular world transposed into one where dragons and zombies and magic are real, but where true goodness and true wisdom are utterly absent. It's Succession in medieval garb. Some find such entertainments interesting and enjoyable. Some find Tarantino's films entertaining for the same reason. I find them suffocating.

In Tolkien's legendarium, the whole point is to imagine a world where the vertical Mythos or Wisdom dimension is integrated with the Logos dimension. It's an adventure fantasy and an entertainment on one level, but it strives and largely succeeds to create a metaphysical imaginary with a Mythos dimension that provides an analogue or metaphor for what we all long for but can't bring ourselves to believe in because of our Rationalist-Materialist cultural programming. 

So let me finish this long piece on a Tolkienian note. A few paragraphs above I referenced the mythopoesis of Homer and Exodus as a source of needed wisdom in this moment. Let me now reference Tolkien and his central character, Aragorn. "Not all those who wander are lost", he says. He knows this from his experience wandering anonymously throughout all Middle Earth for decades until finally his decisive moment arrives.

He goes by many names, but his real name, the name his mother and wife called him by, was Estel, which means hope beyond hope. Tolkien's entire legendarium is a meditation on fate and freedom, patience and fortitude, and of the centrality of hope when there seems to be no "Logos" for it. What is it in us that makes us capable of such a thing? Our capacity for living on the vertical, or mythos dimension, the dimension of depth and wisdom.

So to sum up, Liberalism Plus, i.e., the various Whatevers subordinated to "Liberalism" that Douthat talks about, can no longer work, but going forward the gifts of Liberalism must to be retained in a way that is subordinated to a living, developing, dynamic Wisdom Tradition. We don't have that now, but until we do, the bad guys and their seductive song of destruction must be resisted lest they steer us all to shipwreck . 

----------

Note 1: In Genealogy Part 5--scroll down to the second half of the essay--I lay out and develop in a preliminary way four criteria--coherency, scope, richness, and adaptability--for evaluating the effectiveness of a society's metaphysical imaginary:

(1) how coherent its integration of its knowledge on both vertical and horizontal  dimensions,

(2) how broad the scope of its knowledge on both the horizontal and vertical dimensions,

(3) how both the scope and coherence of its knowledge adds a spiritual and emotional richness, meaning, and purpose to human experience, and

(4) how adaptable the imaginary is to changes in human experience of reality [and growth of knowledge] on both the horizontal and vertical dimensions.

...A rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary has broad horizontal scope, coherence, and adaptability, but lacks vertical scope and richness. Religious subcultures like the Amish or Hasids have coherent, vertically rich metaphysical imaginaries that lack horizontal scope. What a vital, healthy civilization needs is a metaphysical imaginary that has both vertical and horizontal scope, coherence that integrates knowledge on both dimensions, and richness that comes from a sense of meaning and purpose that derives from our expanding on both dimensions, and the ability to adapt as that expansion produces knowledge not yet recognized.

Liberalism + Whatever

There are moments of transition and turmoil when liberalism appears to stand alone, and liberals sometimes confuse these moments for an aspirational norm. But nobody except Hugh Hefner, Gordon Gekko and a few devotees of the old A.C.L.U. can bear to live for very long under conditions of pure liberalism. Instead, the norm for successful societies and would-be society builders is liberalism-plus: liberalism plus nationalism (as in 19th-century Europe or Ukraine today), liberalism plus intense ethnic homogeneity (the Scandinavian model, now showing signs of strain), liberalism plus mainline Protestantism (the old American tradition), liberalism plus therapeutic spirituality (the mode of American culture since the 1970s), liberalism plus social justice progressivism (the mode of today’s cultural left), etc., etc. Something must be added, some ghost needs to inhabit the machine, or else society begins to resemble the portraits painted by liberalism’s enemies — a realm of atomized, unhappy consumers, creatures of self-interest whose time horizons for those interests are always a month rather than a decade, Lockean individuals moving in a miserable herd.

--Ross Douthat

There are many Liberalisms from the hard, classic Libertarianism of the Koch Brothers and the Cato Institute to the soft Liberal Niceness of bleeding-heart Dems, but Liberalism, whether left- or right-leaning, is the basic cultural operating system that runs American society, and as such it is essentially the ideological justification for the material conditions that Capitalism has created. And whatever the material benefits produced by Capitalism, this ideology in turn justifies its sociopathies in all its iterations from Industrial Capitalism to Consumer Capitalism to what I've been calling Technocapitalism, the thing that is warping our minds and flattening our souls as our humanity becomes more deeply disembodied and simulacral.

So it's not surprising that Liberalism is under attack from both the Left and the Right, but mostly from the Right--whether it's the Claremonsters like Michael Anton and John Eastman, the Federalists like John Daniel Davidson, or the Integralists like Sohrab Ahmari and Adrian Vermeule, all of whom in their different ways are are at the very least dabbling in illiberalism as an antidote. The post-structuralist, Identitarian cultural Left is not against Liberalism so much as it's become its reductio ad absurdum and in doing so has given Progressives a bad name. Is there any possibility for a healthy Progressivism in a post-liberal world? I think so. More on that below. 

So both Republicans and Democrats are Liberals, and both parties assume its Rationalist-Materialist metaphysical imaginary, no matter what the individual religious or spiritual beliefs of its members. Michael Novak's theo/neocon nonsense notwithstanding, the phrase Christian Capitalism is an oxymoron. American Democrats' biggest blind spot is their assumption that Capitalist political economies are the best and really the only healthy possibility. At the same time, neither party denies that Capitalist political economies are in their essence sharklike--predatory, impersonal, cruel, vicious, untameable. The difference between them lies in that the Democrats think the shark is tameable and the Republicans don't.

So Republicans have accommodated themselves to its fundamental cruelty. They justify a politics of cruelty by asserting that it's the natural order, and it's better to be predators than prey--and if you're prey, it's your own damn fault. Pack a gun, grab what you can, and defend what's yours once you get it. The cowboy patriarch John Dutton is exemplary in this respect. And so is someone like Trump, although he and his family resemble more the Roy family in Succession. They are all barbarian warlords who understand how the "real" world works, and that the law and religion are for slaves and prey, not for the master predators they fancy themselves. 

Republicans, the "Conservative" Liberals, are probably right and in this sense they are more realistic than Democrats about how capitalism and the society it has created really works. They see Liberal Democrats as feckless in their thinking that Capitalism has a benign face, and just plain silly insofar as Dems try to be Bruce, the fish-friendly shark in Finding Nemo. You know, "Fish are friends, not food." Cute idea, but unless someone like St. Francis is his trainer, a ridiculous one. The problem with this kind of "liberal" Liberal is that they are too comfortable with Capitalism and too complacent about its fundamental nihilism and so too easily find ways to to live with it because for the most part they benefit from its predations.

So implied in the Douthat epigraph above is that that Liberalism is a cultural operating system that anybody who feels the emptiness of its nihilism finds ways to hyphenate it with what he calls "liberalism plus"--Liberalism plus nationalism, Liberalism plus mainline Protestantism, etc. The "plus" is what gives Liberalism the meaning that it can't supply on its own. But in the end all these "pluses" are simply remoras clinging to the shark's underbelly. And mainstream Protestantism might have had a genuine spiritual energy for a while that imposed some constraints on the monster, but Protestantism, especially in its Calvinist forms, was always in an uneasy tension with the beast its theology cleared the way for. Eventually the monster ate mainstream Protestantism leaving only its most fanatical forms behind, and now the shark roams free gobbling up the customs and traditions of the heartland. We call the shark's unconstrained freedom since the Reagan era Neoliberalism.

Democrats feel guilty about how they benefit from Capitalism in a way the Republicans do not, and Republicans, as a way to deal with their own repressed guilt, project their contempt for Democrats as weakness, gutlessness, or a fundamental lack of manliness. Blue America is thought of by Red America as overly populated by educated hollow men like Jamie Dutton. And as for the underclass, life is hard, they assert, and we do the weak no good to make it easier for them. Better to brand them like a cow or make them shovel out the stables, and then see if they have what it takes to become a real man. And so we get these absurd, cringey manliness performances from people who have no center--empty suits  like Don Jr., Josh Hawley, and Marco Rubio. And yet they are embraced by Red America despite the utter inauthenticity of their schtick. "They're phonies, but they're our phonies," declares Red America.

But Liberal elites on the cultural Left, rather than focussing their energies by working to remedy the class and wealth disparities from which they derive their privilege, find relief from their guilt in a performative priggishness. Is there real compassion and thirst for Justice that motivates those in the woke social justice warrior project on the Secular Left? For some, of course, yes, and I don't question their sincerity. But the ethos that frames this project is more the heir of Foucault and Deleuze than Gandhi and King. Does this cultural Left mindset allow for the possibility of Justice as a transcendental ideal? Clearly not. Whether these folks have read Foucault and Deleuze or not, the mental framework that shapes the SJW project derives from a postmodern commitment to historicism that makes any talk of transcendentals incomprehensible.

So my criticism of the post-Marxist Left, i.e., the Left that has given up on class war for culture war, is that its identitarian politics leads to a form of groundless metaphysical lostness that gives meaning and purpose to its warriors only so long as one is engaged in the liberating project to abolish taboos. But once you run out of taboos, then what? This project is only good at saying No but has nothing inspiring to which it can say Yes. 

Justice as transcendental ideal also often requires saying No to custom and taboo, but the Socratic project [See Note 1] required a saying No to clear the way for something deeper and richer to emerge to which one could say Yes. Cultural Left elites today are heirs of the Sophists, not Socrates. The distinction was significant then, and it is now. There are a lot of young idealists on the Cultural Left who sincerely believe they are warriors for Justice, but in fact, they are warriors for Nothing, i.e., warriors in the service of a negative project that clears a space for nothing except appetite.

Is there an alternative? Yes, the one pointed to by Socrates--and all the prophets and philosophers of the Axial Turn. I argue in a preliminary way in my genealogy series for the restoration of a transcendental dimension to the broader cultural imaginary. While the illiberal traditionalists horrify me, I understand where they're coming from. I think their diagnosis of the fundamental emptiness or flatness of Liberalism is mostly correct. Nevertheless, while After the Future's project has been to accept parts of the conservative critique of Liberalism, it seeks a solution that aligns with a Left politics, i.e., a progressive solution that embraces ontonormativity as a foundational experience/concept. [See Note 2]

The project on the illiberal, reactionary Right derives from an assertion of ontonormativity divorced from an intuition of it as participating in the Living Real. They focus on the empty form, not the life that gave the form its shape. And so without the life, the empty form too often becomes filled by dark, chthonic impulses that serve ends that are quite the opposite of what ontonormativity would inspire. They justify the illiberalism of their project because they believe American society needs an intervention, and that because they know better, they must rescue society from its nihilism and restore Justice and Cosmic Order to a society that has lost any sense of either. But, in fact, they don't know any better.

And yet they persuade themselves that if people don't understand it now, they'll nevertheless benefit from their tough-love intervention. Eventually those who resist will come to appreciate the benefits of having been "educated" by the new regime. So they use this appropriation of transcendental idealism to justify their illiberalism, and are either ignorant of or don't care that in the past similar justifications have legitimated the most horrifying violence. It derives its energies not from the Living Real, but from an old, anal, control-freaky impulse that leads to the auto da fe and pogrom. 

I agree that the only real solution to the nihilistic crisis that is at the heart of contemporary Liberalism is a religious one, but I have argued here for years that that the fundamental choice that lies before us as a society is not between religion and secularism but between good religion and bad. Politics as religion is always bad religion because politics--and economic striving, as well--when they become the primary source of meaning in people's lives, become parodies of religion, and as such a form of idolatry. One's participation in politics and the economy should be shaped by one's religious commitments, but they should never be substitutes for them. 

++++++++++

Note 1: In Genealogy Part 3 "Axiality and the Socratic Elenchus" I write--

Socrates' transposed the daemon's negating, apophatic function as an inner experience into outward teaching practice in his dialectical method, or elenchus. His goal was not to tell people what to think, but to get them to say, for instance, that No, justice isn't this, and it isn't that, and No, Socrates, it can't be that. Then what is it? Well that's for the individual to discover for himself once the field has been cleared of all the things that Justice cannot be. Only then is it possible, or at least more likely, to see, or better, experience what it is. 

A wise teacher must first discover for himself what the truth is, but she can't tell you what you must discover for yourself. But she can help you see why x, y, and z are not it. She can help you strip away wrongheadedness to create a space for the Living Real to reveal itself to you, to allow you to learn what you can do on your own while at the same time warning you against dead ends and bad habits that will make the task more difficult or to take longer. And once you've cleared away all that is wrongheaded, in the empty space thus created, aka, the Socratic aporia, it becomes possible for the Living Real to disclose itself to you. This is as true now as it was 2400 years ago. Heidegger's 'Aletheia' owes more to Plato and Socrates than I'm aware he gave them credit for. The Socratic elenchus makes no sense if it's just a method for debunking conventional wisdom and abstractly defining certain concepts. 

Well, in part it was for Socrates a debunking exercise, and that's what got him into trouble with the citizens of Athens. But Socrates would be no better than the Sophists if he were only a debunker. The elenchus makes sense only if it is a way to prepare the soul for a revelation, a theophany, an encounter with, or better, a "remembering" of the Truth that discloses itself as sacred knowledge, the Living Real, on the vertical dimension.

See also Geneaolgy Part 8 "Plato--Habitus as Heuristic"

Note 2: "Ontonormativity" is a word I first came across in John Vervaeke's YouTube series entitled Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. I like his description of it as how we are often inspired--or awakened--by something that can only be described as transcendental, something that breaks into the everyday world that makes us experience ourselves and the world as failing to live up to its best possibilities. Such experiences inspire us to believe that we as individuals and the society we live in can do better. This can lead to naive idealism, but it needn't do so. Like most things on the vertical dimension, there are immature and mature versions of it. 

I spend a lot of time talking about Vervaeke in Parts 4A,4B, 5, and 6 of my Genealogy Series. In Part 6 I make the case why I find Vervaeke's insistence on understanding ontonormativity within a naturalistic framework inadequate. So I am appropriating the term in way that is congenial to my Transcendentalism that is different from Vevaeke's use of the term. My idea of ontonormativity bears some relationship to the Eastern idea of the Tao or the Western idea of Natural Law, but not in a way that is primarily intellectualized or systematized. By that I mean that the ontonormative is discerned by the supple or wise heart. It's grounded in a kind of inspired or awakened experience that breaks through our acculturation from a transcendent source. It's not derived from logic but from the cognitive capabilities of a supple heart. 

 

How Neoliberalism Captured the Cultural Left 2

Sean Illing interviews Stuart Jeffries, author of Everything, All the Time, Everywhere: How We Became Postmodern, and the discussion focuses on themes I've been making for years now about why the Left hasn't the resources to fight the Right. I'll say more about it below, but my argument over the years is that insofar as the Left has been captured by Postmodern theory, its politics align with Neoliberal capitalist objectives. In other words, the anti-capitalist postmodern theorist is as incoherent as the traditional values conservative who celebrates capitalism.

Sean Illing

I wanted to avoid the temptation to ask you to define postmodernism at the top, but I feel like we have to do it, right?

Stuart Jeffries

So the simple idea is that postmodernism is what comes after modernism. And modernism was a very earnest and serious commitment to progress, a commitment to overturning the frills and furbelows of Victorian culture and early 20th century decorative culture, in the arts and in architecture. It’s joyless, really.

And postmodernism is a rebellion against all that. It’s a rebellion against the idea that we should become leaner and fitter and meaner in our architecture and in our literature. It’s a rebellion against the idea that we’re on some path to improving ourselves as human beings, that we’re heading toward some kind of absolute perfection. Postmodernism disdains all that. It says that’s garbage. The postmodernists said we’re going to tear up the rule books to make buildings, to make art, and make it all about expression and fun.

Now the weird thing about postmodernism is that when you put it like that, it sounds great! But my book is about how there’s another “ism” looming as postmodernism emerges and it’s called neoliberalism, which is a new form of capitalism and very much the world we’re living in now. We’re living in a neoliberal era and postmodernism has become a cultural handmaiden for that.

...

Sean Illing

Do you feel like the emancipatory potential of postmodernism was squandered? Like, there was a genuine subversiveness to it that could’ve been revolutionary, but in the end it gets commercialized and becomes another trick of capital.

Stuart Jeffries

Absolutely. If you read Francois Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition [the book that coined the term “postmodernism” in 1979], or if you read Gilles Deleuze, both of them are quite radical thinkers. Both of them are born of the disappointment of the failure of the student rebellions in ’68 in Paris. Their ideas are filled with mourning over the lost revolution.

But they’re not Marxist revolutionaries anymore. And Deleuze, the great postmodern theorist, starts to think about desire as a liberator. So forget about socialist organizing, forget about trade unions and barricades — it’s all about desire. Desire is truly revolutionary.

And that just seems so incredibly naive to say now, because you think of how desire — sexual desire, the desire for products, the desire for material titillation — is utterly conformist. Our desires are constantly manufactured and then sold back to us. Desire is so obviously a tool for capitalism.

Marxism was the last grand narrative for the Left, and once you give up on the grand narrative all you have is individuals, and what motivates individuals? Well since the metaphysical imaginary for both capitalism and postmodernism is rationalist materialism, the only thing that makes life worth living is desire, and that's a very individual thing, so the politics becomes not about defining a collective vision for a better society, but rather only the negation of whatever impedes individual desire.

As soon as you understand that, you understand everything that has gone wrong on the cultural Left and why it was so easily captured by Neoliberalism, why it isn't subversive or revolutionary in any truly meaningful way and is really just a branch of the same disease that brings us unimpeded capitalism, which thrives on unimpeded desire.

The inevitable result is that a Progressive politics without a narrative loses to a politics that has one. The folks on the Right haven't heard the news yet about the unbelievability of grand narratives. Maybe they should take a course on it. In the meanwhile, the people on the Right, whose desire is primarily grounded in wanting to destroy the cultural Left and its capture of American cultural institutions makes it very easy for them to get organized in movements designed to do just that.

What does the Left have to offer as a counter--anarchic, evanescent, happenings like Occupy or quixotic, unpopular riots like the anti-WTO demonstrations in Seattle? But except for a few of the most hardcore on the Left, as soon as Left politics stops being fun or entertaining, there is no 'desire' for it. And besides, the politics of the Left can't compete with the politics on the Right for being fun. Those folks on January 6 were having a ball. Owning the Libs is great sport. Watching Libs get apoplectic about Trump is a hoot. 

Liberals just don't understand how boring and uninspiring is their sanctimony, how ridiculous their woke fetishes, how easy they are  to mock and to dislike. Their political naïveté and rhetorical ineptness bred in university seminar rooms is truly breathtaking, and yet all the youngsters these days in the media who went to prestigious universities and liberal arts colleges are its acolytes. The Right scares them, as it should, but this generation simply hasn't the ability to push back because it has no place to set its feet. The cultural Left has become the new "establishment", but theirs is an establishment without a foundation except for old habits that grew out of beliefs they no longer hold. 

The only possible argument against Neoliberalism needs a foundation that lies deeper than desire. That is an intellectual impossibility given the presuppositions held by the cultural Left, and so inevitably it will be defeated, if not by the Right, by a more sophisticated and deeply grounded movement on the Left. 

Listening to the entire interview is well worth it. See "How Neoliberalism Captured the Cultural Left III" where I talk more about Jeffries book. 

See also How Neoliberalism Captured the Cultural Left I and "Young Socialist Intellectuals".

Sociopathic Artificial Intelligence 2

After posting yesterday, It came across this Thomas Edsall column from May in which he quotes Stiglitz and Korinek:

In their December 2017 paper, “Artificial intelligence, worker-replacing technological progress and income distribution,” the economists Anton Korinek, of the University of Virginia, and Joseph E. Stiglitz, of Columbia — describe the potential of artificial intelligence to create a high-tech dystopian future.

Korinek and Stiglitz argue that without radical reform of tax and redistribution politics, a “Malthusian destiny” of widespread technological unemployment and poverty may ensue.

Humans, they write, “are able to apply their intelligence across a wide range of domains. This capacity is termed general intelligence. If A.I. reaches and surpasses human levels of general intelligence, a set of radically different considerations apply.” That moment, according to “the median estimate in the A.I. expert community is around 2040 to 2050.”

Once parity with the general intelligence of human beings is reached, they continue, “there is broad agreement that A.I. would soon after become super‐intelligent, i.e., more intelligent than humans, since technological progress would likely accelerate.”

Without extraordinary interventions, Korinek and Stiglitz foresee two scenarios, both of which could have disastrous consequences:

In the first, “man and machine will merge, i.e., that humans will ‘enhance’ themselves with ever more advanced technology so that their physical and mental capabilities are increasingly determined by the state of the art in technology and A.I. rather than by traditional human biology.”

Unchecked, this “will lead to massive increases in human inequality,” they write, because intelligence is not distributed equally among humans and “if intelligence becomes a matter of ability‐to‐pay, it is conceivable that the wealthiest (enhanced) humans will become orders of magnitude more productive — ‘more intelligent’ — than the unenhanced, leaving the majority of the population further and further behind.”

Key phrase here is "without extraordinary interventions". Who will the agents of such extraordinary interventions be? Will it come from the class of elites who are best positioned to benefit from these enhancements?  You can be sure the technocapitalist elite are making sure they are at the front of the line to get these enhancements. Who will stop these sociopaths? 

 

The article goes on:

In the second scenario, “artificially intelligent entities will develop separately from humans, with their own objectives and behavior, aided by the intelligent machines.”

In that case, they write, “there are two types of entities, unenhanced humans and A.I. entities, which are in a Malthusian race and differ — potentially starkly — in how they are affected by technological progress.”

In this hypothetical race, “A.I. entities are becoming more and more efficient in the production of output compared to humans,” the authors write, because “human technology to convert consumption goods such as food and housing into future humans has experienced relatively little technological change.” By contrast, “the reproduction technology of A.I. entities — to convert A.I. consumption goods such as energy, silicon, aluminum into future A.I. — is subject to exponential progress.”

Evolution without grace, i.e., evolution driven by the logic of the will to power and greed, has no particular interest in human beings, not even as much as the Mongol horde was interested in the thousands of humans they massacred or enslaved in their manic project to expand their power and control. Evolution without grace is the default and can be resisted only by moral actors who are grounded in something that transcends it. Evolution without grace only cares about expansion, and if that means that humans are no longer needed at the leading edge its expansion project and machines will serve evolution better, then what reason have we to think that hyper-intelligent machines won't take over? 

I don't think either of these two scenarios are inevitable, but because they have become the fodder for so many Hollywood dystopian entertainments, we tend to dismiss such concerns as unlikely. But what argument is there against all the evidence that supports that this is where unchecked technocapitalism is headed? And what argument is either of these two scenarios is more of a likelihood than not if there is no intervention to insure that machines serve human purposes rather than the reverse. Do we just shrug and say, "Well, it will all work out one way or the other."

How can such an intervention be marshaled if there is no consensus about what human purposes are? Certainly no intervention can be marshaled from within the hegemonic rationalist materialist metaphysical imaginary, because it's precisely that imaginary that supports the values presuppositions of Social Darwinism, i.e., evolution without grace. The point I'm trying to make here is this: These scenarios are, if not inevitable, extremely likely unless there's an intervention. But from where shall it come? Who on the scene today has the moral authority to say No to technocapitalism and the power to enforce such a No?

Our situation vis a vis AI is very much like the one depicted in Don't Look Up. In that movie, the impending disaster was a comet heading toward the earth that is a MacGuffin for what could be any potential human extinction event from eco-catastrophe to the rise of the machines. The most important insight around which the premise of the film is based is that even when confronted with extinction, humans are so fragmented, so distracted and so morally feckless that they are incapable of uniting around an obvious human value--survival. The logic of technocapitalism is the default, and that logic, left unchecked, leads to the extinction of the human project. Only a few sociopaths escape to despoil a planet elsewhere. 

So as long as the nihilistic sociopathic logic of technocapitalism and its rationalist materialist metaphysical imaginary plays such an outsized role in shaping our moral and material priorities, what reason have we to think that any kind of resistance to its logic can be mounted? What reason have we to think that any good can come of just letting that logic play out?  And where within the rationalist materialist imaginary can we get a foothold to push back against this logic?

On Sunday in a post entitled "The Coming Discontinuity" I wrote:

But whatever is going to happen probably has nothing to do with what we expect or with what we want or don't want. So perhaps, for precisely that reason, we should entertain the possibility that it might be smarter to think about the future with imageless hope. That's the attitude of a true wanderer who wonders in the wilderness. 

What I've written here yesterday and today is not meant to contradict that but rather to put us on alert that an attitude of hope requires active vigilance. It does not justify a lazy complacency that whatever happens happens. Imageless hope for me is rather like Keats's 'negative capability', i.e., a way of being attentive to the world with a kind of radical openness that expects to be surprised. But it's quite possible that we will miss what's there that might actually be a solution if we're not paying attention. And maybe more than we can understand now depends on our not missing it. 

Sociopathic Artificial Intelligence 1

“I don’t anthropomorphize,” Chowdhery said bluntly. “We are simply predicting language.” Artificial consciousness is a remote dream that remains firmly entrenched in science fiction, because we have no idea what human consciousness is; there is no functioning falsifiable thesis of consciousness, just a bunch of vague notions. And if there is no way to test for consciousness, there is no way to program it. You can ask an algorithm to do only what you tell it to do. All that we can come up with to compare machines with humans are little games, such as Turing’s imitation game, that ultimately prove nothing. 

From "Artificial Consciousness is Boring" by Stephen Marche

Boring? Depends on the question you ask.

I do not think that artificial intelligence will ever be able replicate human consciousness. That's not really even an interesting question from where I stand.  The not-boring question is whether AI and machine learning evolve a kind of inhuman consciousness that will supplant or push aside human consciousness,

I think there is reason to fear that machines can become more sociopathically intelligent than human beings and operate at a level that is incomprehensible to human intelligence. And I think there is reason to fear that with a malevolent programmer or even with an unintentional programming mistake, machines can become a destructive, malevolent, and uncontrollable by humans. ... Artificial Intelligence need not be seen as possibly attaining human consciousness to warrant our alarmed interest.

Machines can be programmed to create Bach cantatas that even Bach experts would think were composed by Bach, and they can be programmed, as this article describes, to talk and converse with humans in ways that humans will be convinced pass the Turing test. They already play chess better than humans and they could probably be programed to write jokes and do a stand-up routine that might be genuinely funny. There are algorithms for all of that, and once those algorithms are part of a machine's intelligence and once a machine has access to all the music or jokes ever written they will be able to use the algorithms to develop novel variations on those algorithmic themes. They might even be able to combine algorithms in ways not done before by humans to make something truly novel that no human ever thought of before or maybe could ever have thought of. 

But novel isn't original. To be truly original you have to be connected to the originary power of the Living Real, and while machines might even develop a concept like monotheism as the fictional Cylons in Battlestar Galactica do, that doesn't mean they will ever have the capacity to experience awe. They can mimic awe, but they cannot experience it. The Living Real is something that humans can experience, and machines simply will never be able to. You can create machines that mimic human thinking and human feeling, but not machines that have souls with depths capable of experiencing the mystery of Being. The Heideggerian Hubert Dreyfus makes similar arguments.  

The problem for human beings in the future lies in that the kind of mentality that drives technocapitalism is sociopathic, at least insofar as its principals proceed without any consideration for or connection with the Living Real. Technocapitalism's energies are Social Darwinist, and so its Social Darwinist biases will be consciously or unconsciously programmed into the machines it makes. And therein lies the danger. Humans can make machines that mimic and exaggerate by their sheer power of intelligence the worst traits of sociopathic Technocapitalist thinking and behavior. And that's what will happen unless they are held in check by human beings who embody the best traits of being human. Is there anybody among the principals in technnocapitalism either here or in Europe or Asia who embodies what is best in being human?

No? What could go wrong?