Breakfast Links

At First Things, Matthew Schmitz reminds us that, way back in 1996, Richard John Neuhaus saw it coming:  

Neuhaus thought attachment to our liberal democracy much weaker than generally supposed. “What is happening now,” he wrote, “is a growing alienation of millions of Americans from a government they do not recognize as theirs; what is happening now is an erosion of moral adherence to this political system.” He was particularly concerned by how this would affect coming generations. “What are the consequences when many millions of children are told and come to believe that the government that rules them is morally illegitimate?” 

For some reason, Schmitz fails to note the irony that Neuhaus was fretting over the loss of government's moral authority at the very time he was engaged in doing everything he could to call that authority into question. "Alienation" in the electorate has not grown spontaneously; America's modern conservative movement has spent the past fifty years deliberately undermining the legitimacy of our federal government and encouraging citizens to view that government as the source of its discontent and frustration. 

Schmitz goes on to recite a familiar litany of our social woes, but he seems oddly unaware that liberals, at any rate, have been calling attention to and decrying stagnant wages, inequality, and various associated ills for decades, urging us to combat those ills through the common mechanism of government—the very mechanism that conservatives like Richard John Neuhaus were all the while busy demonizing.  

Again, Schmitz's claim that contemporary politics eschews "competing visions of right and wrong" flies in the face of increasingly politicized culture war rhetoric, of hyperbolic demands to "take our country back," of assertions that our liberties are imperiled by unelected judges and unaccountable bureaucrats, of hysteria about Obamacare "death panels," etc. Would that our politics actually did focus on "policy questions" rather than enacting Manichaean dramas of good and evil! Similarly, Schmitz's assertion that economic issues are no longer framed in terms of justice is difficult to square with Nancy Pelosi's denunciation of the latest GOP "tax reform" as a "moral obscenity". 

If all that weren't bad enough, Schmitz chooses to deploy one of William F. Buckley's more egregious statements: "Loyalty has always got to be contingent," Buckley said, a defensible enough proposition except that he followed it with "We cannot love what is not lovely."  Conflating loyalty with love, and completely misunderstanding the nature of the latter, Buckley managed to be about as wrong as it was possible to be; and Matthew Schmitz blithely follows right along with the confusion.   

https://www.firstthings.com/article/2018/01/neuhaus-was-right  

What does any of that matter, however, in the face of the real existential threat? By which I mean, of course, robots: 

Machines’ ability to perform human tasks—physical, intellectual, and emotional—improved dramatically this year. “2017 was the year that the robots really, truly arrived,” Wired’s Matt Simon wrote on Tuesday. “They escaped the factory floor and started conquering big cities to deliver Mediterranean food. Self-driving cars swarmed the streets. And even bipedal robots—finally capable of not immediately falling on their faces—strolled out of the lab and into the real world. The machines are here, and it’s an exhilarating time indeed. Like, now Atlas the humanoid robot can do backflips. Backflips.” 

According to Jonathan Malesic: 

Despite decades spent consuming science fiction, we are not at all ready for a society in which we live and work alongside intelligent, autonomous machines. Robot anxiety is real, but it’s more complex than the headlines suggest. The cure is neither to destroy the machines, nor to love them. Ultimately, they aren’t the source of our anxiety. We’re anxious because we’re steeped in a capitalist culture in which our work determines whether we flourish. If we’re all to prosper after the robot revolution, we’ll need to revolutionize our social policies and moral thinking...Faced with Atlas and Amazon bots, our main problem is not that we lack skills. It’s that we lack imagination. The fact that most of us can’t fathom robots replacing us at work suggests that we also can’t imagine the myriad other ways our lives might be different in a more automated world— for better and for worse. 

By which I take Malesic to mean: once people are no longer needed to do the work, we're going to have to figure out what people are for. This could be a good thing; robots could free us up for a future of unlimited creativity, enlightened leisure, and spiritual discovery. Then again, they could help usher in a dystopian future marked by endless efforts to assuage our boredom with any variety of debaucheries. Or they could, like the God of the Old Testament, grow increasingly disenchanted with our species and decide to kill us all; I'm sure that the late William F. Buckley would agree that robots' loyalty to their creators can only be contingent, and that they cannot be expected to love what is not lovely.  

https://newrepublic.com/article/146399/year-robots-came-jobs

Comments

[Jack Shifflett]

Thanks for the comments, Terry. Have a great New Year's yourself; we will just have to keep muddling along with our lives until the robots put us out of our misery.

[NorthernNites]

Jack, stimulating blog, as always. The ironies and hypocrisies of the right are mind boggling! Wanting to live in a 1955 world is mystifying to me; not that 1955 is not without merit, it is my birth year after all. Growing up in that period of time we were being told that doom was ever present, what with Communism and such. The end times you know!!

I wanted to add an interesting factoid to your thoughts. I graduated college in 1977, yes, I am just a pup! My degree is in Recreation Administration which today seems laughable if not downright silly. Looking back on the things we were studying and preparing for included a huge increase in leisure time. The work week was supposed to be cut in half by the year 2000 and people would need to find constructive and fulfilling things to fill the extra time. Boy did the prognosticators get that backwards.

Looking retirement squarely in the face, in the current political climate, and working 50-60 hour weeks for decades does not leave me questioning the roots of our collective depression.

Anyway, thanks again for your wisdom and have a Happy New Year!