After the Future

Mythos and Utopia

Are we using the word "mythology" illegitimately in applying it to objectivity as a state of consciousness?  I think not.  For the myth at its deepest level is that collectively created thing which crystallizes the great, central values of a culture. It is, so to speak, the intercommunications system of culture. If the culture of science locates its highest values not in mystic symbol or ritual or epic tales of faraway lands and times, but in a mode of consciousness, why should we hesitate to call this a myth?  The myth has, after all, been identified as a universal phenomenon of human society, a constitutive factor so critical in importance that it is difficult to imagine a culture having any coherence at all if it lacked the mythological bond....

What is essential here is the contention that objective consciousness [the rationalist materialism that governs scientific inquiry] is emphatically not some manner of definitive, transcultural development whose cogency derives from the fact that it is uniquely in touch with the truth. Rather, like a mythology, it is an arbitrary construct in which a given society in a given historical situation has invested its sense of meaningfulness and value.  And so like any mythology, it can be gotten round and called into question by cultural movements which find meaning and value elsewhere.

Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counterculture (1969), p. 214

So before starting, I just want to clarify that ‘myth’ or ‘mythos’ does not have the pejorative meaning for me of stories ignorant people make up that science has better explanations for. I mean it in the sense that Roszak defines above as the “collectively created thing which crystallizes the great, central values of a culture”. And as I make clear below, myths should be evaluated by how they promote or undermine full human flourishing. My argument here is that the mythos of the Techno-Capitalist Matrix is a crude Social Darwinism with an Ayn Randian transhumanist vision of the future that is a profoundly impoverished mythos of human flourishing.

Much of what I do here is more in the form of thought experiments rather than hard analysis of the hard realities of the world we actually live in. I justify it because (1) I do not accept the hard realities of the world we live in as anything more than a provisional consensus reality, i.e., a cultural construct, a “mythos” if you will, that mediates aspects or reality in more or less adequate ways, and (2) that because our constructed consensus reality is so profoundly out of balance and out of alignment with reality, sooner or later it will rebalance whether peacefully or violently. I believe that what I've been calling the Techno-Capitalist Matrix is a modern-day, hubristic Tower of Babel, and sooner or later it will bring destruction upon itself. Perhaps in MAGA we're seeing the beginning of that. I don't want to believe that, but the thought is there nonetheless.

I don't think it's controversial to point out that the chief sign of any out-of-balance society is is when the interests of its elites are out of alignment with the interests of ordinary people--the demos. Perhaps this always true to a certain extent, but there are tolerable and intolerable degrees of it. Certainly economic imbalances are profoundly destabilizing, but that can be compensated for in societies where political elites take seriously their obligations to see to the material needs of non-elites.

But another destabilizing factor is when there is what I'll call a metaphysical misalignment--when the religion, traditions, and customs of the society are no longer shared by both elites and the demos. That has been our condition in America now for decades, and it needs to be taken more seriously by cultural elites and the intelligentsia than they currently do. If there is anything good that can be said about MAGA, it's that it's forcing the issue. Because the combination of both an economic misalignment combined with a metaphysical misalignment is almost certainly fatal to any social order.

When the demos sees elites as cynical nihilists who have nothing but contempt for their traditions and customs and then that combines with their feeling of economic precarity, you have a powder keg. If Trump wins  next week, it will be because this double misalignment is far more deeply felt than I thought. But if he loses, it's a problem that doesn't go away until cultural and political elites make progress toward more alignment with the demos both economically and metaphysically. I explain what I mean by that more in the second half of this post.

Most secular elites, so convinced as they are about the superiority of their rationalism and "fact based thinking", do not understand how destabilizing their secularism is, especially for people who rely on family and local community rather than the schools for shaping their world view. But I would make another claim— it's not the backward 'metaphysical imaginary' of the demos that's the deeper problem, but the nihilistic imaginary of the cultural elites who produce the pop culture that the demos consumes.

In film, TV, and the other arts these elites have made mainstream a nihilism that was until recent decades the province of fringe intellectuals. Do you think that the depiction of the corruption and nihilism of America's corporate and political elites in TV, fiction, and film doesn't have an impact on ordinary Americans? Liberal elites think that the Dems they vote for are all some variation of Jed Bartlett, but the demos has come to see them as variations of Frank Underwood. Which are the more naive?

The American business and political elite are almost always depicted as corrupt villlains in film, TV, and the news media. There's enough truth in those accounts that it lands, but it's not the whole truth. There are lots of people in the political and business spheres that are decent people who work in good faith. But they're boring and invisible. So is it any wonder that MAGA wants to punish corporate elites, destroy the deep state, and drain the swamp that elites have told them now for decades is the Beltway reality? And who better to do it than a swamp creature from Queens who knows the landscape and wants to tear the whole rickety, corrupt system down? This is what the Left has been calling for since the sixties, but it’s the Right that has the will to do it.

But elites are simply reaping now the nihilism that they’ve sown for decades now. When the elites in France in the1780s and the Soviet Union in the 1980s no longer believed in their social order, it was just a matter of time before the whole thing collapsed. Are we in the North Atlantic democracies now in the same position? Is Trump the clownish American version of Robespierre? The Robespierres of the world do a great job of making a bloody mess, but sooner or later, a Napoleon or a Putin  emerges to restore some semblance of order, and it's generally not an order that most of us would prefer to live in.

***

The rest of this post is just me thinking out loud in a utopian vein. In my previous post, I mocked the utopian thinking of the Silicon Valley nerds who are excited about all the cost-free benefits that AGI will bring to humanity. The naiveté is obvious to anyone with a shred of common sense, but I'd add that the naiveté feels legitimate-y because it aligns with the presuppositions of the thought and practice within the Techno-Capitalist Matrix. The TCM is the primary shaper of our unbalanced consensus reality, and most of us accept it as a hard reality that is harder than we need think it is. It remains hard only so long as we believe it is, and it remains our reality so long as no one can present a better plausible alternative. 

I suggest we at least attempt to imagine other possibilities, and one way to do that is to indulge in a little utopian thinking. The kind of utopian thinking I'm talking about is different from the transhumanist, techno-optimistic, utopianism of Silicon Valley because, unlike their utopianism, mine is just a thought experiment, and as such does not pretend to predict what actually is going to happen. That's not the purpose of thinking about utopias.

Utopian literature from Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) to Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) and William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1891) were not blueprints for an imagined future so much as they were thought experiments that allowed its readers to look around at their contemporary societies and to make judgments about how they measured up or failed to. 

But measured up to what? And by what standard? Implicit in every utopian thought experiment are values presuppositions by which the writer frames his critique of the ills that exist in the current consensus "reality" by imagining a society where those ills are cured. Bellamy's book, hugely popular internationally at the turn of previous century, imagines a social-democratic utopia in a techno-optimistic, technocratic vein, and Morris's is more anti-technocracy in a Wendell Berry vein with a touch of the romantic humanism of the early Marx. I lean more toward Morris, but I’d argue there’s something important missing in both.

In a course I taught earlier this year, I asked my students to read both Bellamy and Morris with two objectives. First, to break them out of the nihilistic, dystopian mindset that pervades the popular culture produced by its mostly nihilistic, pessimistic, cynical elites, and, second, to suggest that if  we live in a consensus reality, it is malleable and so we have some agency in shaping the future if we can imagine one that's worth living in.

The challenge is not to argue about what's realistic, but about what is desired, about what is essential for human flourishing, not just for any of us as an individuals, but to ask what kind of society promotes the development of full-spectrum human beings in their unique particularity? We can talk about nuts and bolts after we've developed some consensus about what should be the North Star to orient us as we move toward it into the future. Without such a North Star we stagger erratically in the condition I call ontological dizziness--good people languish in confusion, and the worst take the field unopposed. 

I am not gifted enough imaginatively to write a utopian novel, but if I were to do so, it would be an attempt to imagine a future society that evolves out of our current one whose underlying structure--or mythos--is mapped in the diagram below.

 

 

A couple of things to to orient you: The basic structure here is one that would restore what was the structure of the mythos of Western societies before the Reformation and Scientific Revolution, and the general structure of every other society that had been transformed by the Axial Revolution. The northern limb of the North/South Axis played a major role in shaping the mythos of all the great premodern civilizations. The transcendent dimension was as important in China, India, and the Middle East, as it was in Christian Europe.

What happened uniquely in the Europe and its colonies during the modern period (roughly 1500-1900) was the gradual amputation of the northern limb of the North/South Axis that allowed for unconstrained developments on the horizontal axis. This had enormous consequences for generating material progress, but at the cost of spiritual depth and richness. The consequences were first recognized in the late 19th Century—Nietzsche's proclamation of the death of God being an important benchmark, and the utterly pointless, irrational destructiveness of Second Thirty years War from 1914-1945 being its primary concrete manifestation. It destroyed whatever lingered of the idea that history had purpose and direction. After WWII, it was no longer possible for the culture's elites to believe in the Christian mythos of a loving, personal God, or to believe that human moral progress was a possibility.

A Social Darwinian evolutionary mythos emerged to supplant the old Christian mythos: the earth and our existence on it is merely the result of random, impersonal, cruel cosmic processes. There is no moral order, and history is just the story of a succession of elites fighting to hold on to their privilege against wannabe elites who seek to replace them. Morality is just a fiction the powerful use to justify their reign at the top of the pyramid. Whoever gets the most money, the most power, the most sex wins. Isn't this the message we get in almost every prestige TV show or movie since the 70s? What has there been to counterbalance it? The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter?!

Why then are educated Liberals so surprised that Donald Trump has emerged as such a powerful cultural figure? Born in June of 1946, not even a year after dropping the bombs on Japan, he's the epitome of the postmodern, post-WWII nihilism of a society has severed its north limb. He's its egregore. Why are they surprised that the shallow Liberal morality of breaking any taboo so long as you're nice about it has been so morally corrosive and destabilizing? Those on the religious Right are the return of the repressed north limb. As with all things repressed, they erupt in their most ugly, shadowy, violent form. Liberals who a couple of years ago were complaining about microagressions will be finding out what real aggression looks like should Trump win. 

So since the World Wars, the only kind of progress that could be justified had to be on Darwinian terms--there is no moral order, there is just the groping, random process for which technological advancement was the cutting edge. If this process produces machines with higher intelligence that supersede and obsoletize human intelligence, so be it. That, according to this mythos, is just evolution at work. Nothing we can do about it. Any attempt to resist is like building sand castles at low tide. Just a matter of time before they will be washed away. Look at what happened at Open AI—talk about castles in the sand. Evolution doesn't care, and neither will the machines. 

And so within this frame, Trump begins to make sense. He is an unconstrained product of this amoral evolutionary process. He's a vulgar ignoramus, but it doesn't matter because he's what evolution wants. He's the perfect exemplar of the kind of human being that a north-limbless society produces. In the mythos of the TCM, there is no transcendence, there is only southern-limb, roiling, chaotic, creative destruction that is driven by crude appetite. 

Now I, of course, completely reject this Social-Darwinian mythos. It accurately describes the world without a north limb, but that does not mean that the reality the north limb represents does not exist. For complex reasons we have moved into a Kali Yuga-esque, collective, dark night of the spirit in which most of our secular elites are incapable of sensing transcendence anymore. There are plenty of people who still feel it.  Perhaps even most people believe or are open to the idea that a transcendent dimension exists, but it doesn't matter because these individuals have no power or influence so long as Social Darwinism remains the dominant mythos justifying the Techno-Capitalist Order. 

Social Darwinism as the current mythos, the current consensus reality, requires that there be no constraints on developments on the horizontal axis. And there will be none until a robust northern limb is restored among the culture's intelligentsia and its business and political elites.

So back to utopian thinking, or at least my version of it. My future society would find a way to restore the north limb in a postmodern/postsecular key, i.e., in a key that absorbs everything we've learned on the horizontal axis during the modern era, but which has also supplanted the Social Darwinist mythos with a broadly accepted moral authority and wisdom—the restored north limb--to direct developments on the horizontal. Progress in knowledge about the material world and continued technological development are deeply valued, but equally so are virtue and self-transcendence toward a eudaemonistic ideal.

And so in such a mythos, there would be some wisdom about how to proceed on the horizontal axis rather than allowing south-limb appetite to be the only driver. Such a society would require that elites and the demos were aligned on the vertical axis, and one in which the down-to-earth wisdom of the demos, through a democratic process, would keep the high-flying hubris of elites in check.

I know. Hard to imagine, but it’s not impossible because there have been such societies before. It’s difficult, though, to imagine how we get from here to there.

There is much more to say about the diagram above, but it serves its purpose for what I want to say today without further commentary. Maybe more about it another time.

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. 

Why Nobody Cares about the Humanities

As a humanist — someone who reads, teaches and researches primarily philosophy but also, on the side, novels and poems and plays and movies — I am prepared to come out and admit that I do not know what the value of the humanities is. I do not know whether the study of the humanities promotes democracy or improves your moral character or enriches your leisure time or improves your critical thinking skills or increases your empathy.

Agnes Callard, "I Teach the Humanities, and I Still Don't Know What Their Value Is"

Agnes Callard, who wrote this for the NYT a few weeks ago, is a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago who wrote a highly touted book entitled Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming. This was a title inviting enough to motivate me to buy and read it. Well, I started to read it but gave up on it because it was a bore.¹ It struck me as an 'analytic' exercise akin to trying to prove that most trees are green. Perhaps some people, "specialists", need persuading of that. I don't. There are other, better, more interesting books to read. 

But I am more intersted in responding to what Gail Kern Paster, Director Emerita of the Folger Shakespeare Library, writes to the editor of the Times to object to Callard's essay when she says--

We humanists are the keepers and interpreters of our civilization, defined globally, and we are charged by tradition and consensus to evaluate that civilization in our teaching and scholarship. This is, of course, itself a conventional piety — but like many conventional pieties, it is a true one.

Because we have done so in the face of growing indifference and shrinking support, it is simply not helpful to have an academic colleague proclaim, even ironically, that she does not know the value of the humanities.

Ms. Paster also tells us--

Right-thinking humanists do not claim to make their students better people or even try to do so. Such a claim smacks of egotism and hubris. But we do claim to make students better critical readers, thinkers and writers — people better equipped as a result of studying complex texts to judge competing claims, to weigh evidence and to make better-informed judgments on a host of issues.

I’m sure Callard and Paster are fine people. But after reading both their statements, I can only think--No wonder the humanities are losing their funding. 

I assume it's Socrates' aporia, his "I don't know", his wise ignorance, that Professor Collard is echoing here when she claims not to know what the value of the humanities is. But is she really writing in the Socratic spirit? Maybe kind of^.2 But I didn't find it in her book--at least the Socratic spirit that I encounter when I read Plato. And as far as the hubris of wanting his students to become better people, clearly, according to Ms. Paster, Socrates fails as a “right-thinking humanist”.

Was he hubristic? By today's standards of dogmatic diffidence surely he was. It's unlikely he would find a place on the faculty at the University of Chicago, nor would he want to teach there. But he might hang out in the quad and buttonhole some of the more spirited students to engage them in some interesting conversation.

And those students would stop gladly to converse. Why? For one, he was a mensch--he exuded the humanity that we all should 'aspire' to embody. For two, they sensed in him the kind of personality with whom such conversation might change their lives. Heaven forfend that anyone would take courses in the humanities these days with such aspirations.

Taboo and Ontological Dizziness

Some years ago, I saw a very good student production of Edward Albee's The Goat or Who Is Silvia? It's the story of Martin Gray, a successful architect and gentle, loving husband and father, someone that typifies the kind of educated, cosmopolitan person who would go and see an Edward Albee play in Blue America. Martin, however, becomes enraptured with and starts shacking up with a goat named Silvia--literally a goat. And the play examines how family and friends react when they learn of his breaking the bestiality taboo, and how each falls into a state that I call ontological dizziness.

I'll come back to the play, but first a few words about ontological dizziness. It is an experience that many people are having with increasing frequency: one is walking along in a world that seems securely grounded in reality, but then he becomes aware that all the while he has been balancing on a fraying tightrope over an abyss--and that there's no certainty that the rope is anchored securely anywhere ahead. (See Note 1)

Cultural Liberals and Traditionalist Conservatives in their different ways experience themselves walking on firm ground, but they have been doing it in what I like to think of as Reality Simulation, and these simulations  give us the illusion of walking on firm ground. For both Conservatives and Liberals the simulations are getting buggy and unreliable. Another major shock or two can cause them to stop functioning altogether, and that's when you become aware you are on the tightrope hovering over the abyss. And then how does one react? 

By 'simulation' I mean that people, all of us, live in symbolic systems that provide models of reality that work with data given by Reality, but these symbolic systems interpret the data in any number of possible ways depending on the cultural download that runs the simulation. It's a simulation because it gives us a model of reality and not reality itself. It filters most of reality out because there's too much data there to work with. When the simulation breaks down reality that has been filtered out comes rushing in and then the interesting question is how one reacts? The Christian existentialist Karl Jaspers called this experience "shipwreck", and everything depends on how the shipwrecked respond. Do they drown, or do they open up to something deeper and richer. This is what I think Albee's play is all about. 

Our acculturation sets the filters, and it runs a program that takes the data given by Reality and assembles it into patterns that make a kind of sense of it. A crude analogy here might be an airplane pilot trying to land his plane in a fog using only instruments. He has access to enough accurate data to enable him to navigate the landing, but those instruments filter out everything else as noise.

The best cultural simulations work with the broadest range of accurate data, but even when a simulation works with good data, it always filters out more than it lets in. The tighter the filters, the greater the feeling of alienation; the more porous the filters, the richer the feeling of connection. Someone experiencing Zen satori clearly has a richer, deeper experience of what's there in Reality, but he still filters out more than he filters in. (See Note 2)

I think that most human mistakes are caused by the fact that all simulations that shape our imagination of Reality--even the best of them--always work with incomplete data, and so the programs that run the simulation can only provide best guesses in their interpretation of the data available to it. If the simulation seems to work, i.e., if it enables us to navigate in our day-to-day life, we assume its filtering and organization of the data are good enough. We will continue to think everything is just fine until the simulation gets buggy and starts letting in information about Reality that can crash the simulation. 

And because Reality and our relationship with it is dynamic and continuously evolving--or regressing-- sooner or later all simulations break down or need to be upgraded to make the necessary adjustments. It's better for us if the adjustments are gradual--as in the Leonard Cohen lyric--

Ring the bells that still can ring, Forget your perfect offering,

There's a crack in everything, That's how the light gets in.”

The Liberal Simulation has developed in such a way that data suggesting a transcendent spiritual dimension to Reality has been filtered out, even if it seeps in through a crack here and there. Conservatives on the other hand cling to aspects of an older simulation that affirm transcendence, but most have no more access to data about transcendence than Liberals do because they live in the same modern simulation with all the same perceptual filters that Liberals have.

They hold onto what the premodern ancestors understood about reality without the experience that the ancestors had to validate it. I'm not saying people don't have spiritual experiences. People have them all the time. But they don't know how to interpret them or work with them because they live in a simulation that for the most part doesn't take them seriously as real data and treats them as noise. 

Progress, the hope for a better future, until about a hundred years ago, had been intrinsic to the Liberal simulation, but the new data given by the reality of the World Wars, the dropping of the atom bomb, the unraveling of traditional American cultural norms in the sixties and seventies, the failure of the Political Left almost everywhere since the 80s has led the Progressive Left to surrender to the anarchy of markets and to a rejection of any grand narratives that suggests there is anything but ontological anarchy.

And so at least among the elite on the Cultural Left, their simulation no longer allows for narratives in which some kind of better future is a possibility, because the word "better" really is a word fraught with metaphysical assumptions that are no longer part of their simulation. Social Justice no longer has a relationship to the idea of the Transcendent Good. It has come to be reduced to a merely negative program to destroy traditionalist taboos. There is for them now only oppressed and liberated with no reason to justify why one group shouldn't be oppressed and another dominant except that it's not nice to oppress people. Otherwise randomness is all, so learn to live with it. 

The main difference between Liberals and Conservatives is that Liberals have done a better job of accepting and adapting to the anarchic conditions of Late Modernity. That doesn't make them right; they're not. It just means they're better adapted. They go with the flow because they have no place to set their feet to resist it. 

***

So this idea of Ontological Dizziness, I would argue, is a key to understanding what Albee is up to in The Goat. In Albee's play, Stevie, Martin's wife, finds herself precisely in this condition of Ontological Dizziness. Her Reality Simulation has been shattered with the shock in learning that her "normal" husband is sexually involved with a goat. So, after her violent, dish-throwing, furniture-overturning rant during the middle of the play when she learns about her husband's "infidelity", she goes out to find Silvia, the goat, severs her head, and hauls the carcass onto the stage in the play's final moment. It's pretty horrifying. 

At first, I thought his play was going to be just another transgressive, HBO-style exercise in shock and norm busting, but I think Albee is trying to give the audience an experience of what's causing such widespread ontological dizziness throughout the culture. And so it struck me that the play is a rather conservative statement about the human condition. It seeks to point out that all human beings, even well-educated cosmopolitan, tolerant, live-and-let-live Liberals, need cultural norms and taboos. Even they have limits, and when they are subverted, they experience ontological dizziness just as their conservative counterparts do. Liberals are more like Conservatives than they might want to acknowledge. We all have these filtering systems because we cannot deal with too much reality. They're just different depending on your acculturation.

So, let's go with the basic Freudian/Deleuze-Guattarian assumption, as Albee seems to do, that all human beings are polymorphously perverse in their desires, but those desires are repressed by the Oedipus Complex, which is the cultural download of codes and taboos that we all receive as children. Humans, no matter what their culture, have the Oedipus Complex, which generates the codes in the symbolic sphere--the Reality Simulation--that gives humans their sense of order, an order that no sane person can live without. It creates the program--different for different cultures--that the simulation plays for us.

After the curtain came down, the actors and directors came out to discuss the play with the audience. And I asked these very artsy, urban-hip, intelligent students whether they thought Stevie had over-reacted. "Why couldn't she be more tolerant and understanding of her husband?" I asked. I was curious to see how far their non-judgmental, anything-goes-so-long-as-you-don't-hurt-anybody ethic extended. Apparently it does not extend to bestiality.  All the students thought that Stevie's violent freak-out was completely understandable, and that this was not a play celebrating bestiality, but one condemning Martin's committing it. 

Apparently some sexual taboos are still in place with this generation. But why should bestiality be so horrifying if taboos are just arbitrary social constructions? Isn't that what these students have come to believe about all the traditional taboos that govern the ethos of Rural America? Why is bestiality different? Martin makes clear that his relationship with Silvia was consensual, and that his love for her was reciprocated. Who are we to judge? Why doesn't everybody condemn Stevie for being so close minded? She should be happy for her husband and the bliss he has found. 

***

It wouldn't surprise me if Albee was familiar with Derrida's famous 1969 essay, "Plato's Pharmacy" in which Derrida plays with the Greek word pharmakos and pharmakon. Pharmakos has the ambivalent meaning of a potion that can be both cure and poison, while pharmakon is the Greek word for goat. In the play, Silvia, the goat, is a potion that both poisons and cures. It is poison as the kind of potion, like Puck's in Midsummer Night's Dream, that induces Titania to swoon for the ass-headed Bottom.

But is the potion something that creates delusion? Or is it rather something that induces 'disinhibition' insofar as it lets in heretofore filtered-out aspects of Reality? In the play this would be Martin's repressed polymorphous perversity, which is no respecter of taboos in the way it eroticizes everything. Someone like Norman O. Brown (remember him?) would say that a retrieval of polymorphous perversity and its ecstasy is the goal--and even argues that its attainment is the true meaning of the Christian idea of Resurrection of the Body. A guy like Martin is closer to it than Stevie and the others who are so appalled by his breaking of this taboo. Is the pharmakon a blue pill or a red pill? Is it the red pill insofar as it dissolves the Oedipal simulation orb? Or is it the blue pill insofar as it restores the old simulation and the sense of sanity, safety, and order it provides? Or to put it another way, which pill is the poison and which the cure?

So Martin's encounter with Silvia is like his having taken a potion that induces him to leave his particular late-modern, taboo-constrained Oedipal Reality and to enter a kind of Norman O. Brown ecstasy state. Stevie and the others are appalled by the breaking of the taboo, by the disgust that is evoked by the physical act, but for Martin it's all about the ecstasy, an ecstasy he knows the others cannot understand because they have not taken the potion.The old Liberal, taboo-constrained Simulation is dissolved, and he goes into a new, polymorphously perverse simulation of de-tabooed ecstatic Desire. If you've seen Peter Schaffer's play Equus, it explores the same territory. The psychiatrist, 'Martin' Dysart, comes to envy Alan Strang, who by all normal standards of sanity is a madman. 

Is Martin ill? Or is Stevie? Or are they both? Now, to step outside the Oedipal Simulation in Freudian terms is mental illness. The degree to which one steps out determines whether one's illness is neurosis or psychosis. So do both need a cure? Which pill to take then--the red or the blue? They both are experiencing aspects of Reality outside the Oedipal System that in their case is defined by the Liberal cosmopolitan Simulation. It has broken down in different ways for both; it's just that Martin does not feel the need to return to the old order whereas Stevie does, and so she acts in uncharacteristically violent ways for an otherwise tolerant, cosmopolitan liberal in order that she might restore the old order.

***

And so it struck me that one of the takeaways for these students--and all Liberal, cosmopolitan audiences--is that everybody has taboo systems, and everybody needs them, and when they are subverted, it's understandable that people react as Stevie did, And it's completely understandable that she wants to go back into the old simulation--she wants that blue pill. But if Stevie's violent reaction to the subversion of the bestiality taboo is understandable, isn't the violent reaction of Red America to the subversion of its taboos equally understandable?

The question here is not about what's right or wrong in any ultimate sense, but in just understanding the role that taboos play in keeping us sane. There is nothing absolute about superego, but we need one. The question is how to transform it so that it does its job of preserving our sanity while at the same time it becomes more permeable to a broader, richer experience of Reality.

And I would add that superego always assumes some kind of grand narrative. Collective sanity--a cure for our chronic ontological dizziness--cannot be restored without there being some plausible collective imagination of future possibility that is grounded in Reality. The challenge for us is not to live without such a narrative, but to develop a good one, one that works with the real data that Reality provides for us. Reality is in large part chaotic and anarchic, but what's more important is that humans learn how to work with those energies lawfully.  In order to do that, you have to believe that lawfulness has some ontological grounding. 

And we don't have a narrative for that yet, at least not one that has broad acceptance. But for me such a future narrative will draw upon the wisdom of the past. While we are in our bodies we will never be able to live outside a Reality Simulation--i.e., the symbolic systems that constitute culture--of one kind or another, but we can keep developing better simulations--better symbolic systems--that use higher levels of good data and are permeable enough to adapt as new, higher quality data becomes available. And that includes data given to us that transcends the anarchic, destructive forces that otherwise will continue to drive history. 

Update: After watching the the student production of the play, I used it in a class I taught in 2019, and I used it again the Fall of 2021. In the second reading I was impressed by an aspect of the play I missed the first time: Albee is at pains to describe how vital, grown-up, and admirable the marriage between Martin and Stevie is before Martin shacks up with Silvia.

In my first reading I focussed on how Martin's behavior burst Stevie's simulation thrusting her into deep ontological vertigo, a malady that could only be cured by sacrificing the scapegoat. I was trying to make the point that Liberals are just as burdened by taboos as Conservatives are. The problem is that both reject the taboo structure of the other, but Liberals have no real appreciation for how disoriented Conservatives feel by Liberals who so blithely dismiss the Conservative order.

Albee, in this reading of the play, is trying to give the kind of Liberal who would go to one of his plays an opportunity to empathize with the vertigo Conservatives feel and why that leads them to the kind of extreme, sometime violent behavior they undertake to restore their sense of stability. If we can sympathize or at least come to understand the underlying reasons for Stevie's act of violence, is it perhaps possible to understand why so many stormed the Capitol on January 6 thinking that to sacrifice Nancy Pelosi as a scapegoat would restore order? The point here is not to condone the insanity, but to understand its underlying causes. I think all of this is still true, but in my second reading a more interesting theme emerged for me. 

In this reading, I was far more sympathetic to Stevie not because her orderly, bourgeois life was shattered by Martin's taboo breaking, but because he ruined something that was so rare and vital for both of them--a grown-up marriage. His seeking a bliss that excluded her destroyed this rare accomplishment. What was most devastating for Stevie was his willingness to sacrifice their marriage for the fulfillment of what is really, when push comes to shove, an infantile desire, a longing to restore primal narcissism.

It might be understandable if Martin were in a loveless marriage, but clearly this was not the case. The greater moral lapse here was not on the level of taboo, but on the level of taking something sacred--his bond with his wife--and to throw it away, to choose something less valuable. Silvia, the goat, is a stand-in for all the ways we humans choose something easy and regressive for something difficult but which is essential in enabling us to grow in emotional depth and complexity, which is what a good marriage is all about. 

This is an edited version of an essay that was posted in 2021. 

----------

Note 1: A species of ontological dizziness is described In a recent interview with Sam Altman, when the NY Times's Casey Newton says--

Casey Newton: I want to ask you about this feeling that Kevin and I have had; we call it “A.I. vertigo.” There’s this moment when you contemplate an A.I. future, and you start to think about what it might mean for the job market, your own job, your daily life, for society. And there is this kind of dizziness that I find sets in. And this year I actually had a nightmare about AGI. And then I sort of asked around, and I feel like people who work on this stuff — that’s not uncommon. I wonder if you have had these moments of vertigo. Or is there at some point where you think about it long enough that you feel like you get your legs underneath you?

Sam Altman: There were some. There were some very strange, extreme vertigo moments. Particularly around the launch of GPT-3. But you do get your legs under you. And I think the future will somehow be less different than we think. Like, we invent AGI, and it matters less than we think. And yet it’s what I expect to happen.

I wonder exactly what he did to get his legs under him, because engineering the possible extinction of humanity is a taboo that maybe humans should try to hold onto. Apparently he's just convinced himself that it's going to be, you know, great. No worries. 

Note 2: I'm not crazy about using the term 'simulation' here because it suggests the creation of an alternative reality, but I mean it more in the sense of the airplane pilot flying on instruments. I have in other essays used the term 'imaginary, which I prefer, as in 'social imaginary', 'cosmic imaginary', and 'metaphysical imaginary'. Imaginary is a better term. It's used by different people in different ways, but for me it points to what S. T. Coleridge was trying to get at with his idea of "primary imagination". But that's not easy to explain, and the term simulation works to better for my purposes here. It's' a better metaphor to dramatize the way the mind creates a filtering system that is in relationship with reality, gives us accurate information about reality, but filters out everything in reality that isn't salient. The monk experiencing satori is having an 'imaginal' experience; it's just that his imagination is more deeply attuned to what's actually there. 

Sam Altman on How Great It's Going to Be

From a NY Times interview with Sam Altman: 

Sam Altman: Yeah, I actually don’t think we’re all going to go extinct. I think it’s going to be great. I think we’re heading towards the best world ever. But when we deal with a dangerous technology as a society, we often say that we have to confront and successfully navigate the risks to get to enjoy the benefits. And that’s like a pretty consensus thing. I don’t think that’s a radical position. I can imagine that if this technology stays on the same curve, there are systems that are capable of significant harm in the future. And Andrew [Ng of Stanford] also said — not that long ago — that he thought it was totally irresponsible to talk about AGI because it will never happen.

Kevin Roose: I think he compared it to worrying about overpopulation on Mars.

Sam Altman: And I think now he might say something different.

...

Later in the conversatiion--

Casey Newton: This is the stuff where my brain starts to melt as I ponder the implications, because you’ve made something that is smarter than every human. But you, the human, have to be smart enough to ensure that it always acts in your interests, even though by definition it is way smarter than you.

Sam Altman: Yeah, we need some help there.

Help from whom might I ask?

I also found this interesting--

Casey Newton: I want to ask you about this feeling that Kevin and I have had; we call it “A.I. vertigo.” There’s this moment when you contemplate an A.I. future, and you start to think about what it might mean for the job market, your own job, your daily life, for society. And there is this kind of dizziness that I find sets in. And this year I actually had a nightmare about AGI. And then I sort of asked around, and I feel like people who work on this stuff — that’s not uncommon. I wonder if you have had these moments of vertigo. Or is there at some point where you think about it long enough that you feel like you get your legs underneath you?

Sam Altman: There were some. There were some very strange, extreme vertigo moments. Particularly around the launch of GPT-3. But you do get your legs under you. And I think the future will somehow be less different than we think. Like, we invent AGI, and it matters less than we think. And yet it’s what I expect to happen.

Guys like Altman and Ng sure sound like they know what they're talking about. Their prescience, profundity, and wisdom is dripping from every word they speak. I think it's just, you know, "great" that we are entrusting the future of humanity to them. Can't wait to see how "great" things will be. 

Update 12/4/23:

Is Altman perhaps a very charming bot?

(Source)

Consensus Reality and Conspiracy Theories

I understand the impulse to believe conspiracy theories. It comes from a largely correct view that most people are living in a consensus trance. It comes from that feeling that Neo had before he took the red pill: Something is deeply wrong. Why does everyone around me seem to accept these attitudes and behaviors that feel so off? And so when someone comes up with an explanation for what's going on, there's a strong temptation to go with it because now we don't have to be alone in our suspicions. There are others, too,  who "get it". We're not the crazy ones. Everyone else in the consensus trance is crazy. They're asleep. We're awake. Whether or not this alternative explanation is itself just another illusion--well, there aren't many incentives to consider that as a possibility, are there? (See Note 1)

Nevertheless, the feeling that one's life is mostly shaped by one's participation in a consensus trance is real, because we are. The feeling is innate in all of us because It's born of the same sense of falsity that compelled Socrates to challenge the Athenian consensus reality in his time and as Buddha did in the India of his time. Socrates' and Buddha's critique of what is false consensus reality was not purely a negative debunking, but rather part of an effort to open people up to the the really Real. 

Our consensus reality is largely delusional. But that's not to say it's something completely made up--it does indeed have a relationship to what's really there. That was true in Scorates' day and it is in ours. Our modern social imaginary--our current consensus reality--has a pretty clear picture about the surface reality of things, but it's the spiritual part that it filters out that is problematic. It's as if we see the notes on a musical score but are incapable of hearing the music. And it's this inability to hear the music that induces us into a materialistic trance that cuts off from the deep Real, which is where the music in its fullnness originates.  

Are we near deaf, or is it that there's just so much noise now that makes that music so much harder to hear? Either way, we live in a consensus reality that makes it extraordinarly difficult to hear the music. But it's the world we live in, and we have to navigate in it in our day-to-day lives as best we can. And a part of doing what we can is to make a serious effort to listen. The trick is to discern what's signal from what's noise, and then to find a way to filter out the noise. So conspiracy theorists are correct to be skeptical that the consensus reality is mostly noise that's filtering out the signal. But they should be even more skeptical that the alternatives their conspiracy theories point to aren't just more noise.

So we must live in the world in such a way that we accept the consensus reality for what it is--a provisional working model of reality that makes it possible for us all to live together. As we need a common language, we need a consensus reality to get along, and disrupting it for the sake of disruption because you think you're so smart as to see through it is just egotistical and often mean-spirited. Smartass intellectuals do it with their sophistical debunking, but so do redneck red-pillers who think they know better than everyone else about elites who are working behind the scenes with a plan to destroy the America they love.

They think they've had the BIG INSIGHT, and maybe there's kernel of truth in what they've learned, but they are always mistaken when they think that this kernel is bigger than it is, and when they think it is the key to explaining everything. It never is. All they're doing is creating more noise by insisting that their delusional thinking is better than the conventional delusional thinking. The challenge in the long run is to develop a consensus reality that is more deeply aligned with and so disclosive of the Deep Real, i.e., a consensus reality that is attuned to the Deep Music. 

Jumping from one collective trance into another is not a solution, and so the challenge for us individually is to do what we can to live in such a way that we grow in wisdom, which means that we progressively break with our innate tendency to be entranced by gradually getting  a better grip on Reality. We do this by becoming like Socrates. We start from a position of learned ignorance--we assume we know nothing and that we are inclined toward delusional thinking--and we gradually learn to overcome our tendency toward self-delusion and self-destructive behaviors. This is a life-long process. 

How do you know if you are becoming wiser? You see yourself slipping into and out of the trance, and knowing the difference. You find that your prudential judgments prove sound with increasing frequency. And you find that the perceptions and intuitions you have that depart from "consensus reality" stand up over time as more right than wrong. You learn better to distinguish between what's music and what's noise. Or to shift metaphors, you learn to distinguish the difference between going down a rabbit hole, which leads to delusion, from finding a trail of breadcrumbs, which leads toward a better grip on the Real. 

This is what I mean by the term 'self-transcendence' as I've been using it lately. Self-transcendence is the gradual process by which we come into a deeper, truer relationship with Reality. While we can use language to make an attempt, to essay so to say, what we have learned in this ongoing developing relationship, nobody knows the truth. Some people do, however, have a deeper relationship with it.

None of us is Wise, but some are wiser. And as a society we need to develop broadly accepted cultural practices that make it easier for people to become wiser, i.e., to hear the music, or to see the bread crumbs. We need a sapiential tradition that will help people--everyone from ordinary folks to elites--to overcome their tendency toward self-delusion and self-destructive behaviors. We lost our sapiential tradition in the West in the late medieval period, and we need to restore it now in a postmodern key. 

So if there are any conspiracy theorists out there reading this post, I commend you for your skepticism regarding the consensus reality, but your theory about what's really going on is probably wrong too. It's ok to play with alternative theories as a heuristic tool, but you must never take them too seriously or become fundamentalistic or dogmatic about them. Stay away from true believers. None of us understands what's really going on, and alternative theories to the consensus reality are just as prone to deceive us as the deceptions provided by the consensus reality. 

And yet we must always make the effort to get a stronger, deeper grip on Reality. That requires that we start from the consensus reality as a baseline, that we develop a healthy skepticism about it--which is the whole point of Socratic aporia. This creates a space for the breadcrumbs to appear, so we must keep an eye peeled looking for those breadcrumbs, and when they show up, we follow them where they lead us. And if they lead us down blind alleys, then we must have the humility and intellectual honesty to recognize it, learn from the mistake, and move on. It's ok. Making mistakes is part of the process of self-transcendence. Digging in when proven wrong is moronically self-destructive. 

But also to remember even when you have significant insights, i.e., when you make deeper connections with aspects of the Real, they never tell the whole story. They are just the next step on the breadcrumb trail. 

And a final bit of advice:  If you encounter a conspiracy theorist who is making a living from it, don't believe him even if there is a kernel of truth in what he's saying. He might even be sincere, but he has too much invested in digging in rather than admitting he's wrong when the evidence proves him so. Say No to moronically self-destructive beliefs and behaviors. 

----------

Note 1: I think that this rejection of the consensus reality in part explains why intellectuals like Martin Heidegger, Ezra Pound, Mircea Eliade, and others were seduced by the alternative fantasies that Nazism or Fascism offered. It's not that far from what pushes so many American conservative intellectuals to embrace Trump now. Anything, they have come to believe, is better than the Liberal materialist consensus reality.

Liberals who feel comfortable in the materialist Liberal Order that is crumbling around them need to understand that rightist Traditionalist critique of modernity better than they do because they underestimate its power. I believe that we only move out of the current crisis with a progressive mindset, but it has to have different presuppositions than those that now shape Liberal progressive thinking. A new progressive mindset must not reject Liberalism so much as go beyond it, i.e., absorb its gifts and transcend it. Such a mindset, while it must be optimistic about the human future, cannot succeed unless it finds a way to retrieve and embrace the wisdom traditions these men of the Right drew from. They were more wrong than they were right, but it's the part that they got right that we need to learn from. 

The problem is that what is valid--even profound--in what they write is tainted by what seems to have been their often bizarre political commitments. Really they did that or wrote that? YIkes. They thought there was a political solution, whereas a political solutions was simply impossible for all the reasons they wanted one, which was that there was no spiritual-cultural foundation for it. Any political solution was doomed to be barbaric precisely because those on the hard Right in the 1930s trying to effect a political solution were spiritual cretins.There is no political solution unless there is first a profound spiritual-cultural transformation.

My political commitments lie mainly on the Left because the Left is more future oriented, less fanatic, and more oriented toward practical problem solving. It has its fanatics, but they are more annoying than they are dangerous when compared to the fanatics on the Right, at least in the U.S. context. The ethos on the Left is that of good intentions, while that on the Right is shot through with resentment-driven malice. But I do not expect a political solution to resolve our crisis because the Left offers close to zero when it comes to matters of the spirit. At best support of the Left in American society buys us time for something new to emerge. But the new thing, if it is to provide a true resolution, must come from outside of politics. 

Some Thoughts on 'The Banshees of Inisherin'

Martin McDonagh's movie opens with Padraig walking at the edge of the world in the paradisal beauty of western Ireland. As he makes his way toward his friend Colm's modest, oceanside cottage, we hear a haunting women's choral piece full of longing in a language I don't recognize. Is that Gaelic?  I would expect it to be, but It sounds eastern European. That's weird. So after watching the movie, I look it up, and it turns out that it is Bulgarian folk song Polegnala e Todora, and the first thing that comes to mind is Yeats great poem of spiritual longing, "Sailing to Byzantium". 

1920s Ireland/Bulgarian folk song/Istanbul/Byzantium/Yeats. Ok, it's a stretch. I have no idea whether this was in McDonagh's thinking, but it's in mine. So while making that connection of the song to Yeats might appear somewhat tendentious, indulge me. It provides an interesting entry point into a film that otherwise seems so bewildering. I've pasted the full text of the poem in Note 1 below. Read it first, and then I'll try to explain how the movie and the poem explain one another. 

This movie has been described as a breakup story between Colm and the younger Padraig, and it is that, but clearly it's working with much more than the psychology of friendship. It's also been analogized to the breakup that defined the sides in the Irish Civil War, and clearly that's there, but more in the background. These folks live on an island that is undisturbed by history. [See Note 2] 

The site for this film is Edenic, and there are three characters that stand out because they don't fit in it: Colm, Siobhan, and Dominic. Everyone else is more or less like Padraig, happy children in paradise. [See Note 6 about the priest and the policeman.] Colm, Siobhan, and Dominic are restless in a way the other islanders are not. All three need to get out of this beautiful but spiritually claustrophobic world into something bigger. Siobhan takes the boat; Colm takes to art; Dominic commits suicide. 

The story begins in that opening scene when Padraig arrives at Colm's little white house to fetch him to go the pub as is their daily ritual. When he knocks, Colm won't answer. Looking through the window, Padraig can see Colm just sitting, staring blankly, unresponsive to his calls to come out with him. Flummoxed, Padraig tells him he's going to the pub, and he'll wait for him there. No response. Padraig arrives at the pub without Colm, orders two pints, and when Colm comes in later he avoids Padraig at the bar and takes a seat by himself. When Padraig asks him what's going on, Colm tells him he no longer wants to be friends because he finds Padraig too boring.

This is a rather blunt, if not cruel, thing to say to an old friend, especially someone as good-natured and likable as Padraig. We take Padraig's side immediately in this dispute. Colm seems to be a grumpy, old curmudgeon, but soon we learn that the older Colm is feeling his mortality, and he wants to do something with his life--he wants to touch eternity.

This sounds at first rather pretentious, and surely that's how it looks to Padraig and others. But Colm is dead serious. When Padraig refuses to take Colm's ending the friendship seriously, Colm threatens to cut off one of his fingers each time Padraig talks to him. This is shocking, and soon enough, because Padraig cannot restrain himself and so peristently tries to restore the friendship on its old terms, Colm cuts off all the fingers of his left hand, first one and then the other four all at once.

What's going on? Is Colm suffering from some borderline personality disorder? I think this is where Yeats' poem might help us to understand Colm better. He's the aged man about whom the poem speaks--

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress,

Nor is there singing school but studying

Monuments of its own magnificence;

And therefore I have sailed the seas and come

To the holy city of Byzantium.

 

We learn that Colm is composing a tune, and he wants to devote all his time to his music, and so the time he spends with Padraig is time wasted. Well, ok. But it still seems unnecessarily cruel for him to be so blunt about it, and we feel for poor Padraig who finds this change in his friend utterly incomprehensible and destabilizing.  He doesn't understand that Colm has set sail for Byzantium, and in doing so he must leave his old friend behind him if he won't come along.

 

Yeats' poem is about old age, but more than that it's a poem of deep spiritual longing, a longing to be transformed by spiritual fire--

 

O sages standing in God's holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

And be the singing-masters of my soul.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is; and gather me

Into the artifice of eternity.

We don't think of art as performing this function anymore. And so if there is nothing in you that feels the pull of that to which Yeats is pointing, it will probably be difficult to accept my reading of Banshees: But clearly the movie isn't just about two friends breaking up because one has lost interest in the relationship, but about one waking up in a bigger world and the other adamant to remain dreaming in a smaller one. It's about one who longs to soar, and the other who is happy, utterly unrestless and unalienated, and blissfully undisturbed until the events of the movie that turn his life upside down. But rather than adapt and grow in the new situation, he insists to remain only a talking animal, one whose talk is little more than good-natured birdsong, He's Papageno, [See Note 3] --one of the--

The young

In one another's arms, birds in the trees,

—Those dying generations—at their song,

The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

Caught in that sensual music all neglect

Monuments of unageing intellect.

In other words embedded in the beautiful, waxing-and-waning cycle of life and death, an eternally closed but repeating cycle the artist and the saint seek in their different ways to break open.

To sail to Byzantium does not require that one be an artistic genius. Colm is not one, but the longing for eternity that Yeats's poem so beautifully articulates is working in him. He must hearken to it, and he must resist all the forces that seek to draw him back into dreamy Eden. Chopping his fingers off is his way of saying that he no longer lives in a world where such a gesture is absurd. Absurd because why would he do that if his music is so important to him? It prevents him from playing it. But playing isn't the important thing, creating is, even if what he creates is modest by most standards. 

 

I've been re-reading Dreyfus and Kelly's All Things Shining, and this morning came across this passage about Moby Dick that explains exactly what is working in Colm and then why he must resist Padraig's friendship--

Melville too considers a character—Bulkington is his name—who is at home only in the infinite openness of the sea, for whom land “seemed scorching to his feet.” And he thinks there is something serious and terrifying and wonderful about such a character.

I looked with sympathetic awe and fearfulness upon the man, who in midwinter just landed from a four years’ dangerous voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for still another tempestuous term.

...

Bulkington reveals a deep tension, perhaps even a paradox, of human existence, in Melville’s view. As a human being Bulkington has to work hard to keep his freedom; the seduction of the shore’s safety is a constant danger. For upon the land is where all normal human comfort and vulnerability lies. And though these comforts and vulnerabilities are not true realities but only seeming ones, although they are not as stable as they seem to be and grounded in God, and although Bulkington himself recognizes this, nevertheless their comfort appeals to every human being.

The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s kind to our mortalities.

For Bulkington these human comforts and vulnerabilities must be resisted. Sure, the happiness of friendship seems a joy to normal folks, but Bulkington knows this joy is sanctioned by no God, and therefore in it lies no eternal truth; he knows that boredom, and anger, and frustration, and melancholy—yes, even the “damp, drizzly November in the soul” that we shall see is so important to Melville’s central character Ishmael—all these are a mirage, a nothing, and so can properly have no effect. He is not driven to the sea by melancholy, like Ishmael is. Rather, the “slavishness” of the land can only be counteracted by the complete lack of constraint one finds at sea. 

All Things Shining, pp. 50-51

It should be pointed out that D&K think Bulkington is a kind of nihilist because of his inability to live a normal, grateful, down-to earth life where the local gods will shine if you can attune to them. They see the longing for transcendence as a temptation to be resisted and that leads inevitably to suicide. There is something of Bulkington in Yeats and Colm, but maybe more in Yeats--

 

Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

 

And while I'm sympathetic to much Dreyfus and Kelly's argument against the kind of transcendence that seeks to lift humans off the earth and out of nature, there is a place for such ecstasy, and ecstatics need to be part of the mix in a society that has recovered its vertical dimension. [See Note 4] And the phrase "out of nature" could be parsed in ways that mean more a transformation of nature than an escape from it. [See Note 5]

 

So Colm is a Bulkington type who must resist human slavish comforts and vulnerabilities if he is to hearken to eternity's call--he needs neither his fingers nor his house to live in the free air of the spirit. But I think there's an important difference between Bulkington and Colm in that Colm's path is not some Icarian, hubristic flight toward the sun. His path is that of an artist. Artists like him don't seek to leave the immanent world to live in a transcendent one, but to bring the transcendent into the immanent world through their poeisis. And that's the reading that I'd give to Yeats' fourth verse. The artist becomes an agent of spiritual transformation in his act of making. He becomes himself transformed by the power that inspires his making. 

Two scenes illustrate that Colm is not about escaping Nature but about transforming it. The first occurs in the moments after he finishes his tune, in his joy he wants to dance, but not alone--he tries to teach his dog to dance. This is not about living among the animals as Padraig does but lifting the animal into the spiritual. The other is the scene at the pub where the fingerless Colm while spraying his blood all over the table leads his students in the playing of his new tune. It's a Eucharistic image. He can no longer play, but he's fully engaged with the other players as they are bathed in his blood in this participative ritual around an altar. This is no depressed loner. This is not a man who is seeking to be absorbed into infinity, but to bring some small part of the infinite into the world in musical ritual.  

Colm can only befriend Padraig if he’s willing to come with him on his voyage to Byzantium. He has this kind of friendship with his students and the other musicians. But Padraig can only befriend Colm if he returns to his dreamy, embedded, Papageno level of existence. Padraig is as stubborn in his resistance to wake up as Colm seems to be in resisting the old comforts. Padraig is intransigent, and he declares war on the one who would disrupt his paradisal life. But of course, because it is already fatally disrupted, there can be no restoring it. So like those today on the American Right who are stewing in similar resentments about the disruption and loss of their world, they grieve rather than nimbly adapt, and go to war against those who have destroyed their sleep.

Siobhan's solution is the story told in Brooklyn of those who left the comforts of the familiar to live in a bigger world. But for Siobhan it's more than that because for her it's not just freedom from the old ways, but a freedom that is defined by the life of the mind and the love of learning. For her there’s no neglect of the monuments of unageing intellect. She leaves the island to take a job as a librarian, i.e., to work as a caretaker in a repository of such monuments. [See Note 6] She is happy in her bigger world and wants Padraig to join her, but he cannot. His world is in Eden and his sense of purpose in life derives from his grievance war with Colm. 

I think that it's rather beautiful the way McDonagh celebrates the ways in which this longing for eternity plays out in the lives of ordinary people. It's as if to say great spirits are all around you if you have the eyes to see them. You don't have to be a prodigy to share in some part of this greatness. You have only to recognize it and hearken to it in whatever capacity you have--and be willing to pay a price for not fitting in.   

 

Note 1: 

Sailing to Byzantium

I

 

That is no country for old men. The young

In one another's arms, birds in the trees,

—Those dying generations—at their song,

The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

Caught in that sensual music all neglect

Monuments of unageing intellect.

 

 

II

 

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress,

Nor is there singing school but studying

Monuments of its own magnificence;

And therefore I have sailed the seas and come

To the holy city of Byzantium.

 

 

III

 

O sages standing in God's holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

And be the singing-masters of my soul.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is; and gather me

Into the artifice of eternity.

 

 

IV

 

Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;

Or set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium

Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

 

Note 2: It also occurred to me that there's something of the argument between Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn in My Dinner with Andre. Yes and No. Andre wants to soar; Wally finds meaning in a more down to earth way. The trick is to live in the tension between the urge to ascend and descend by finding a way to bring what's higher into what's lower, and to raise what's lower into what's higher. Seems to me that's what happens every time a mass is said. What's above lives into our death, so that we below might die into into the life that comes to us from above and so in our dying into life become gradually agents whose task is to renew the face of the earth. 

 

BTW, Dreyfus and Kelly's All Things Shining is a resolute rejection of Andre and endorsement of Wally. They abhor all things post Axial Revolution. They make their case in what is rather a reductive interpretation of David Foster Wallace's suicide--

PERHAPS THE SADDEST PART of Wallace’s story is that the human qualities he aspired to, the capacities of spirit that he revered and coveted, are a mirage. Indeed the entire mode of existence that he castigated himself for not being strong enough to achieve, far from being the saving possibility for our culture, is in fact a human impossibility. Wallace’s inability to achieve it was not a weakness, but the deep and abiding humanness in his spirit. (p. 42).

Well, maybe impossible for an entire culture, but not a mirage and not an impossibility for some individuals.

To be fair to D&K, they are mostly critical of DFW for imagining this reaching out for eternity as a willful, egoistic, Icarian project absent a spirit of gratitude, which I'd agree with if it were true about him. But I doubt that was true for someone for whom  St. Paul and Dostoyevski were his favorite authors. DFW is more complicated than that, and he deserves better treatment from D&K than he gets from them as a straw man who represents the longing for transcendence that they, good Heideggerians that they are, abhor.

Note 3: Whatever. Colm makes an oblique reference to Mozart most noteworthy for his being corrected by Siobhan about getting his dates wrong. Colm doesn't really care about history. But then a little more free association gives us Mozart/Magic Flute/Tamino v Papageno/Freemasons/Order of the Golden Dawn/Yeats. It's also interesting that Colm finds Padraig most interesting and likable when Padraig laces into him in drunken rage in the pub. His talk then is more than birdsong. It's also interesting that at the end, Padraig is awake in a way he was not because that's what conflict does--it wakes you up. Colm must concede that he will have a relationship with Padraig even if now it will be eternally adversarial. They can only be friends if the one or the other surrenders to live on the level of his adversary. 

Note 4: It's unlikely that if you've read this far, you need persuading that this transcendent dimension exists. But it's a territory that doesn't get much explored in mainstream, late-modern high culture or pop culture. I don't know if this is McDonagh's intent. I'm not yet familiar enough with the rest of his work. My Geneaology Series is largely about trying to make the case for the retrieval of that sense of transcendence as essential for the restoration of a vertical dimension in our broader cultural/metaphysical imaginary. I deal specifically with the idea of Platonic and Neoplatonic ascent in Part 8: Plato--Habitus as Heuristic . Part 9: Sifting through Hellenistic Hyperpluralism, and Part 10: Face to Face: The Jewish Foundation. For me Christianity works faithfully with the Greek transcendental ontology when it reverses the Platonic movement from ascent from below to above, to descent from above to below. Big difference. It’s a difference biblicists and fideists like Luther through Barth never seemed to grok in the way the Chirch fathers through the cathedral schools to Aquinas and Bonaventure and later Cusa and Ficino did.

Note 5: This kind of transformation echoes Ariel's mysterious Sea Change song in The Tempest:

 

Full fathom five thy father lies:
Of his bones are coral made:
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.

 

Note 6: What about  Dominic, Peader, and the priest? It's interesting that McDonagh chooses not to take the easy punch at the priest by making the policeman the sexual abuser instead. I don't know that there's much to be said about the priest. Nothing special about him except the role he plays that he fills in an uninspired, pro forma way. The church, of course, symbolizes the community's spiritual and moral ideals, but usually in a lowest-common-denominator kind of way. For most people the Church is a community's superego, its proclaimer and custodian of social norms.  And while the church seems to spend most of its energies in the domestication of what remains untamed in its flock, it is also the custodian of a tradition that calls its members to  the highest levels of spiritual aspiration. It's interesting to me that McDonagh seems to respect that about the church in that the island's Church has a home for both the domesticated and those that like Colm, Siobhan, and Dominic who don't comfortably fit. 

 

The policeman is the enforcer of the community's norms, but in Peader we have the perverse transgressor of them. I could go off on a tangent a la St. Paul about the psychodynamic of law and repression, but the main point here is that in his abusing his son Dominic, he has awakened him. He is no longer asleep in Eden as the others are. He is no longer an innocent and can no longer live there. He seems at first rather a feral animal than the others like Padraig who are more domesticated. He has become something raw and wild and uncomfortable. But then there's that tender moment with Siobhan when in his stumbling way he asks if it would be possible for her to love him. Siobhan understands the poignancy of the moment, and is kind in her refusal. But for Dominic it was his last hope, to be loved by someone he recognizes as capable of loving but not loving him. And that's the end for him.

 

 

Why It's Hard to Admit You're Wrong

 

“We’ve got lots of theories. We just don’t have any evidence.”

--Rudy Giuliani, as testified by Rusty Bowers in the J6 Committee Hearings

After more than 60 lawsuits brought by the former president and his allies failed to overturn the 2020 election results, Cudd’s brother Jarrod thought, “Maybe she’ll come back off the ledge here.” Even if she felt that her actions at the Capitol were righteous, overwhelmingly, others found them repugnant.

Instead, Cudd doubled down. When pressed, she says she regrets entering the Capitol, but she’s clearly still angry at how she and other Sixers were treated. The experience galvanized her, proving her worst fears about the government, Democrats, and the media.

Olga Khazan, "The Insurrectionist in the Flower Shop"

I think the Trump superfans are terrified of being wrong. I suspect they know that for many years they’ve made a terrible mistake—that Trump and his coterie took them to the cleaners and the cognitive dissonance is now rising to ear-splitting, chest-constricting levels. And so they will literally threaten to kill people like Kinzinger (among others) if that’s what it takes to silence the last feeble voice of reason inside themselves.

We know from studies (and from experience as human beings) that being wrong makes us feel uncomfortable. It’s an actual physiological sensation, and when compounded by humiliation, it becomes intolerable. The ego cries out for either silence or assent. In the modern media environment, this fear expresses itself as a demand for the comfort of massive doses of self-justifying rage delivered through the Fox or Newsmax or OAN electronic EpiPen that stills the allergic reaction to truth and reason.

--Tom Nichols, "What Are Trump Supporters So Afraid Of?"

Bottom line: Admitting you're wrong requires that you be a grown-up, that you take responsibility for your mistakes, and when appropriate to make amends. In reading the story of Jenny Cudd, the flower-shop insurrectionist, you see the profile of a woman who is in many ways admirable and spirited, but she reminds me of people I know who are dry drunks. They may not be drinking, but they're still alcoholics. Nothing changes until they admit they are alcoholics. Yes, it's humiliating. Yes, denial is so much easier. Yes, it's so much easier to blame others. But if they face up to it, they'll get over the humiliation, and they''ll realize that there addiction doesn't define them.

Overcoming the fear of humiliation is the first step toward becoming who you really are. It then becomes possible to learn that your identity and dignity subsists in something more deeply true, and does not depend on the good opinion of others. Only after the getting through the fear of humiliation can recovery begin. To live in thrall to the fear of humiliation and to the hatred of those who make you feel humiliated is to live inside a prison of your own making. The prison door is not locked. You can walk out any time you choose to. It's a frightening prospect to live in the world outside, but it really is so much better there than inside. 

But instead of walking out and going to an AA meeting, Cudd is like the drunk who organizes meetings with other drunks where they all agree that getting drunk is like a sacrament--nothing nobler or more beautiful. How can all of us be wrong, right? Their drug of choice is MAGA.

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?

The Coming Discontinuity

At the heart of our difficulty predicting the future is our assumption of stability. It is like this today and so it will probably be like this tomorrow, too. What makes this way of thinking seductive is that it is, usually, true. And then, all at once, it’s not.

--Ezra Klein

What makes discontinuity discontinuous is its being unpredictable. If it were predictable, then it would be in some way continuous with trends we already understand. It is predictable that humans dread discontinuities because they are so destabilizing, and the fear of instability is continuous with historical trends in human psychology. 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. 

Mordor, the Shire, and Freedom in the Public Sphere

[This post first went up in 2012 as a further development of a post entitled "Henry A. Giroux: Neoliberalism Defined", which focused on the way in which Neoliberalism has supplanted the older political idea of republican freedom with an idea of freedom as consumer choice. It relates to themes developed in "Ukraine and the Politics of Inevitability".]

Maybe because The Hobbit is being released this weekend I have Tolkien on the mind, so let's take Mordor as the type of political system defined by hugeness, by domination and submission, and the Shire as the type defined by smallness, localism, face-to-face relationships, and self rule. In Mordor the people must submit to the will of the leader; in the Shire people live mostly by mores inherited from custom, but submit to laws and regulations they enact through debate and consensus. In Mordor, the space for the exercise of freedom is profoundly restricted, not in the interior sense, but certainly in the public sense. In the Shire, it is broad enough for people to exercise it both interiorly and publically. Nobody, I think it's safe to say, wants to live in Mordor.

In Mordor there is no public space for Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. In the Shire, the space is there, even if most people choose to fill it with vulgar distractions. In the Shire it's possible for a community to self-correct, and reorganize its public life; in Mordor that is not a possibility. Having political and economic arrangements that provide a broad scope for the exercise of freedom does not guarantee that it will be exercised, but it's possible to talk about those arrangements as either creating or restricting the public space for its exercise. 

In contemporary America, there is still a rather broad space for the practice of deep, interior, creative freedom, even if it is rarely used. Consumerist ideas about freedom are a delusion that traps large swaths of the American population in collective patterns of compulsion, and their lives individually, and our lives together, would be healthier, more free, were not that the case. But these compulsions are reinforced by the structural requirements of the economy and the interests of the mass media, and both dominate the public sphere in ways that make it extraordinarily hard to resist. Nevertheless, there is nothing that prevents anyone from choosing a life that is resistant to or oblivious of all that.

 

***

In the early American republic, which was far more Shirelike than America is now, the ethos of economic sphere assumed that citizens were economically free, that they were self-employed farmers, small businessmen, and professionals. The franchise was limited to people with property because there was a fear then that if the vote were extended to salaried workers, their employers could compel them to vote as the employer dictated. (We saw employers using this tactic in the last election.) It was a commonplace that people could not be free in the political sphere unless they were free in the economic sphere. A similar logic applied to extending the franchise to women, since they were economically dependent on their husbands.

That simpler Jeffersonian world gave way to the economic warlordism of the Robber Baron era after the Civil War that turned much of America into Mordor. The new problem that the founders couldn't grasp was the way that the population, diversity, and economy would grow and change, and in doing so make their Jeffersonian imagination of America as a network of Tokienesque Shires obsolete. Bigness and huge concentrations of power and wealth became a problem by the turn of the century that no one could have envisaged one hundred years before. And so spirited Americans who understood how the scope of the new wage slavery was destroying freedom in the public sphere began to organize to push back.

The Progressive Movement emerged to pressure elected representatives to use the power of big government to break up monopolies, to regulate private-sector economic behaviors that negatively impacted the common good, and to provide social safety-net programs to ensure a minimum of economic security and dignity for those helpless to provide it for themselves. That balance between the public interest and free-market capitalism brought us the unprecedented prosperity of the post-WWII period.

Putting aside the question whether that prosperity and the consumerism that came with it was a positive or negative for the exercise of true freedom, the important thing was the consensus that a balance had to be struck between the interests of the market and the common good. That balance is what creates the public space for the exercise of freedom in the public sphere. It's precisely that balance that has been systematically destroyed since 1980 justified by a perverse appeals to liberty understood as negative freedom from the government so that positive freedom can be exercised in the marketplace. The laudable freedom-protecting principle of economic independence and self-reliance became perverted into celebrating the un-republican vice of unrestricted greed. The ideal was no longer the economically independent farmer or small businessman, but the plutocrat, the millionaire--and America became the place where anyone can become one. And shame on you if you haven't the ambition and drive to do so.

So that old lower-case 'r' republican imagination of America was destroyed in the late 19th century, but American conservatives still cling to it as if it were still a possibility. It's not. And the irony is that conservatives in voting for Republicans think that they are voting to retain the Shire but in fact are voting for the private-sector version of Mordor, one in which the government is dominated by plutocrats. In such a world we have the illusion of freedom so long as we have consumer choice, i.e., so long as we think of the exercise of freedom primarily in economic terms.

***

Thinking about what the space for republican freedom requires demands that we first understand how that space has collapsed in the post-war period. One strand, contributing to that collapse has been the replacement of the balance between the public and private spheres struck in the New Deal compromise with Libertarian/Neoliberal, market-centered, consumerist ideas about freedom. Freedom was no longer something we exercised in any robust way in the political sphere, it was something we came to think of almost exclusively in market terms. Freedom equals your ability to choose a Prius or a Hummer, to shop at Walmart or at Nordstroms.

Since market choices are consequential in our daily experience in ways that political choices are not, it was an easy sell. As long as we had market choices in the economic sphere, we felt free, and so why should anyone care about making positive choices in the political sphere? Politics is the domain of entrenched corrupt cronyism; the market is pure and self-correcting. Government just gets in the way, so the only political choices that have validity are the negative choices that diminish the power exercised in the political sphere and expand those exercised in the economic sphere. This is the core belief that has animated American conservatism since the 19th Century--to the degree that the public sphere grows, the private sphere diminishes. It's an naive belief, but it has extraordinary power because of the way it draws upon the 19th-century American mythos.

But the problem is not public vs. private sectors, but in keeping the two in a metaxis, a creative balance. Imbalance can lead, on the one hand, to too much government, as in the Mordor that was the Soviet Union. Or, on the other, imbalance leads to the Mordor of a weak government dominated by corporate interests that wildly exacerbate income inequality and reduce most people to serfdom or wage slavery. But in the U.S., half the country fears that any attempt to redress the balance by increasing public-sector controls leads to a Soviet Mordor. These fears have been reinforced by the dominance of an unbalancing Neoliberal market ideology that has dominated the political sphere since at least 1980. 

The effect of the post-Reagan era dominance of Neoliberal market ideology has been to destroy the popular consensus that representative government was an effective tool in the hands of the electorate to promote and preserve the public good. And the result has been to give a broad, unrestricted field for the economic warlords to emerge again and to wreak the havoc they are wont to wreak. And now we are facing a situation where the worst aspects of the economic sector--the few making serfs of the many--are merging with the worst aspects of the public sector--the security-obsessed surveillance state with Draconian police powers. (Habeas Corpus taken away in the Military Commissions Act still hasn't been restored.) We haven't seen these powers being abused on a wide scale yet, but the infrastructure for such abuse is very much in place. Both Democrats and Republicans are complicit in this surrender of the government to this ideology. 

 ***

The lesson of Tolkien’s trilogy is that republican freedom is personal and interpersonal, and it is exercised in concrete commitments that mostly happen on the local level, in the various Shires in which we all live, but we cannot be oblivious of the forces in history that seek to destroy those local and personal freedoms. 

And when humans are in such a situation in which their freedoms are so severely restricted in the public sphere, the only path to recovery is a freely chosen resistance, which often requires heroic levels of sacrifice. That is, the exercise of republican freedom requires the exercise of interior freedom by enough citizens who are willing to pay the price to keep the public sphere open. Frodo is a paradigm of the exercise of that kind of deep interior freedom.

Tolkien’s trilogy is on one level a story of great powers in violent conflict, but at a deeper level it’s the story of the suffering servant, the tzadik, the righteous man, Frodo, weak by the ordinary standards defined by power, freely accepts a burden and the stealth mission that went with it. The stakes were the preservation of a political space for ordinary people to live in freely. While so much of the story focuses on the great clash of armies, the struggle on that level was futile and nothing more than a subterfuge to keep the tyrant distracted. But the tyrant was vulnerable because it never occurred to him that anyone could do the unthinkable, that is, to 'freely' surrender the enormous power of the ring willingly.

Of course, Frodo needed a little help in the end, but that’s often the way it works. We hardly ever accomplish anything without the help of others. And no matter how good we think our intentions might be, they are never pure. Sometimes our exercise of freedom is simply the effort to put one foot in front of the other with only the faintest hope that someday we will reach our destination. But as we proceed along on our way, the exercise of our freedom is best expressed when in the service of others, in the creation of something that contributes to the common good, not just our own good. And that requires that we exercise it positively in the political and economic spheres, even if it is only to create a negative space for others to freely choose to fill it or not. 

Civilization and Its Discontents

It's always been interesting to me that Freud's dour assessment of civilization was written at that moment in Europe when Enlightenment rationalism came crashing down and lay all about him in shards. That book and T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland, likewise written in the 1920s, stand as cultural benchmarks for the end of the civilizing impulse that animated the West from the time of the Renaissance. World War I was the war that marked the end of the modern era, and World War II was the war that marked the beginning of the postmodern. That's how I have come to think of it, anyway.

Freud's 1929 book was a development of ideas he introduced in his 1927 book, The Future of an Illusion, in which he attacks organized religion as a collective neurosis. Both books have become more or less the background music that plays in most secularist thinking since then. Until recently it has been impossible for any self-respecting modern intellectual to accept that religion is anything but a form of delusional wish-fulfillment born out of the fundamental inability human beings have to accept the real ugliness and horror in the world, not the least of which is the prospect of their own deaths.

Civilization, according to Freud, is essentially the product of the fundamental tradeoff humans make to live in an ordered, secure world. The rule of law is the foundation of any civilization, for without it the law of the jungle prevails instead, and according to that law, the strong dominate the weak. Without the restraint of civilizing laws, the stronger prey on the weaker, the former searching out the latter to satisfy their instinctual drives, which boil down to sex, money, power.

I am inclined to think of Power as primary, and the other two as secondary. Power is aggression. Aggression is about one person or a group of persons seeking to dominate another. As Hegel pointed out way before Nietzsche, Freud, and Adler, this aggression is not economically motivated; it's about prestige. It's about the ego rush one feels in victory. Wealth and sexual satisfaction are a byproduct. They are the trappings of power. You must be powerful if you were able to acquire all that wealth and to obtain all those slaves and wives.

Premoderns understand this seeking after prestige as essential for their "honor." Their value as human beings depended on how much of it they got, and the worst possible thing that could happen to them would be to lose it. The Chinese call it "losing face" which is basically the same thing. You lose your honor, you lose your face, you lose your identity. You're nobody. Your identity is in this sense completely a social construction. There's nobody at home behind the mask.

In its most primitive form obtaining "face" requires prestige battle to the death. The truly noble person is the one who would rather die than submit. This sentiment is echoed in the New Hampshire state slogan and imprinted on all New Hampshire license plates: "Live free or die." The slave is the one who makes the calculation that it would be better to live serving the one who vanquished him than to be slain by him. He chooses submission. Any feudal hierarchy is based on this fundamental transaction. And it's why Roman emperors and medieval kings were always having to put down rebellions by ambitious generals, dukes, and barons who lusted to have more face.

The whole point for those in the old aristocracy was "honor", and honor was something that depended on station, and station was something you took by force of arms. The question they would ask themselves was basically: Do I have have the balls or don't I? This is barbarism, of course, but at least these men were men, not alienated, faceless wimps sitting in cubbies in big, anonymous, high-rise cages. It was a barbarism mitigated to a certain extent in the high middle ages by the Christian-inspired chivalric code and the tradition of courtly love.

But it affected not at all the earlier Christian rulers, the Roman emperors and their Germanic successors in the west. The whole underlying prestige-centered honor code was barbaric through and through. Christianity replaces the ideas 'face' and 'honor' with 'dignity' and integrity. The whole movement of Christianity is one away from external identity props and toward the discovery of an interior identity, the 'face' that is created in the image and likeness of God, where we live as citizens of the Kingdom born within, as the gospels describe it. The idea of face and honor are irrelevancies for citizens who abide there.

Christianity transvalues honor into integrity. You can lose face if others take it from you, but having or losing your integrity does not depend on others. Honor is about the value that others give to you; integrity is a self-valuation that follows from an interior achievement. But integrity is not something you can organize a society around, unless you have a critical mass of people who have achieved it. Clearly there was no such critical mass in post-Constantinian Christendom, nor is there one now, or perhaps ever.

Until such a day when a critical mass develops, a true Christianity is more of a leaven in any civilization in which there are true Christians. It's influence is subtle, and it works more on the periphery than at the center. 

Back to Freud: His point was that civilization in suppressing aggression creates alienation. Alienation is what happens to human beings when they are cut off from their instinctual life. It happens when they make a choice for safety and conformity of the group that comes with renouncing one's impulse life. It is the condition of the slave. This, according to Freud, is the source of the discontent that must necessarily come with civilization. Becoming civilized in modern societies (since Hobbes anyway) requires submitting to the law, and submitting is always an act of slavishness.

Most of the "advanced" thought since Freud has been about finding ways to become more instinctual and less civilized, while remaining "nice." In other words, wild and crazy, but loveable--like John Belushi or Jack Black. These are our contemporary models for what it means to be un-alienated. The way this works in practice is while continuing to suppress aggression, give more free rein to the pursuit of sex and money, and to put an American-Dream happy face on both. Consumer capitalism provides the political cultural framework that celebrates this solution to the problem of alienation. And it works insofar as it satisfies what is most vulgar in human desire, but fails in all the truly important ways. And then we fight endless wars to give an outlet for the aggression for those who need to earn a 'face' through mortal combat.

Freud's idea of civilization is the opposite of what I mean by it, but his is understandable because his experience of it was mainly of its collapse. The people he treated were living in cultural forms that had no inner vitality. That was Nietzsche's big idea--there was no there there anymore; there are only the empty forms, like a copse of dead trees. They point to something that once lived but no longer does.

Nevertheless people hang onto those dead forms and because their sense of self is deeply entiwined with them, and this clinging to lifeless forms is the essence of alienation, because in order to be un-alienated you have to be in touch with Life, something green and living. For Freud that meant the suppressed instinctuall life of formalistic Victorians, a suppression of life impulses that arise from below, so to speak. But the late 19th century in its mechanistic materialism created a sytem that also suppressed life that descends from above, so to speak. 

The goal of civilization is not to suppress life but to create forms for its expression in such a way that we are raised up above the barbaric and purlely instinct-driven. But that does not require a suppression of instinct, but rather humanizing it. And the humanization, I'd argue, is only possible by the introduction of something outside the barbaric eat-or-be-eaten system, and that would be the leavening effects of 'grace'. 

Freud and Darwin would have described the human predicament accurately if the world were indeed a closed system. But something enters from outside the system that has this leavening effect. You don't have to be a believer to know what it is. We've all experienced it at one time or another. True advances in the human story occur when grace and human instinct combine to create something new. The instincts are the raw material. Grace is the active principle inspiring our imaginations, and the human will works with both to bring something of value into the world. It can be a small thing; it can be a great thing. But if it is worth anything, all three were essential in its making.

In the early years, many of the Christians who "got it", the ones who understood that the kingdom was within and that one's identity was not solely determined by social constructions, headed out into the wasteland. In the period in which we live, celebrated by T.S. Eliot's famous poem, people who get it no longer have to flee into the wasteland because the wasteland has come to us. They get that's our life now, and so we must learn to wander in it, in a way analogous to the Israelites of old, but as with ordering from Amazon, no need to go out, it has been delivered to us right at home. Nevertheless we long for the fleshpots of Egypt and find it hard to hope that there might be any landscape physical or psychic, exterior or interior, in our future that is flowing with milk and honey.

[Ed. note: This is a repost from November 2012. It seems relevant for explaining what's going on in Putin's head, and also why it has nothing to do with his perverse understanding of Christianity.]

Reactionary Chic

Whereas the old Christian conservatism was about defending an old order, the new social conservatism is about overthrowing a new one. The transformation of the right is a direct response to a shift on the left. In the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the G.O.P. was the party of the traditional moral order, many individualists, rebels and eccentrics found themselves aligned with progressives. Today the reverse is true. The left is now widely seen as the schoolmarm of American public life, and the right is associated with the gleeful violation of convention. Contemporary social pieties are distinctly left wing, and progressives enforce them with at least as much moral ardor as the most zealous members of the religious right.

--Nate Hochman

According to Pogue, the [reactionary chic] movement “has become quietly edgy and cool in new tech outposts like Miami and Austin, and in downtown Manhattan, where New Right-ish politics are in, and signifiers like a demure cross necklace have become markers of a transgressive chic.” This might be an overstatement, but it’s pretty clear that there’s cultural energy in the opposition to the progressive norms and taboos that are derisively called “wokeness.”

The BuzzFeed News writer Joseph Bernstein captured this energy in a March article about an anti-woke New York film festival funded by Thiel and headed by a Black queer provocateur named Trevor Bazile. “Call it, if you must, a vibe shift: a new generation of internet-native tastemakers — like many of the people crowded into Bazile’s party — who find the moralistic gatekeeping of millennials all a bit passé,” wrote Bernstein.

Michelle Goldberg, "The Awful Advent of Reactionary Chic"

There's tremendous energy in any group that sees itself as unfairly marginalized, and there's also a lot of energy in transgressing the pieties of the establishment. Isn't that what's driving what Goldberg calls 'reactionary chic' in her column yesterday? She gives an example of what is being reacted against:

In novels set in progressive social worlds, internet leftism tends to be treated with disdain — not a tyranny, but an annoyance. In Torrey Peters’s “Detransition, Baby,” a young trans woman reacts with priggish outrage to a dark joke shared between the book’s heroine, Reese, and her friend, both older trans women. “Reese recognizes her as one of those Twitter girls eager to offer theory-laden takes on gender,” writes Peters. “The girl has listened in on the joke and shakes her head — insensitive! — staring at them over her black-framed glasses with watery, wounded eyes.”

For those who get most of their politics online, this can be what the left looks like — a humorless person shaking her head at others’ insensitivity. As a result, an alliance with the country’s most repressive forces can appear, to some, as liberating.

I remember thinking decades ago that what made gay culture interesting and energetic was its transgressiveness, it's being anti-establishment, it's being a place for those who couldn't stand the sanctimonies of the straight, conventional world to gather in a joyful communities of liberation and mutual support apart from all of that was too buttoned down, prim and proper. There was something my gay friends in New York and Seattle had that straight people did not, which was a vital sense of community that gave them a sense cohesiveness and energy and purpose. They had an elan, a verve, a joie de vivre, a disinhibited, creative craziness that most straight people I knew lacked, and I saw it as as being directly associated with their being counter-cultural, their being against and so liberated from establishment pieties.

And I wondered back then if the assimilation of gay culture into the mainstream would take the joy out of it, make it as boring as the culture it saw itself then in opposition to. It would appear so, at least insofar as the partisans of gay assimilation into the establishment have now become santimonious scolds. They've become the new establishment with a new set pieties. They've become the new gatekeeper regime of the boring and ordinary. It's annoying because all moralistic priggery is annoying, but as such it was inevitable that it would spawn a new counter-cultural reaction. 

So it's ironic that the sexual identity politics of the 80s has spawned a new transgressive community on the Right that now occupies the space they once did. These days if you want to belong to a community that provides cohesiveness, energy, and purpose born of transgressiveness, you have few other choices than on the radically chic Right.