The Little Red Blog

Saturday Lecture: The Zeitgeist It Is A-Changin'

{I don’t know much about Ross Barkan, but he apparently hasn’t read (or doesn’t remember) Pascal. “For thousands of years,” Barkan informs us, as he blithely explains today’s Zeitgeist, “mature human beings knew how to be alone in their own thoughts and tolerate boredom.” Compare this smug observation with Pascal (17th century): “All humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” It also seems that Barkan, who was born in 1989, is unaware that New Age spirituality is not new: e.g., New Age - Wikipedia or, for an even longer historical view, Jason Josephson-Storm’s The Myth of Disenchantment. Those caveats aside, Barkan’s recent essay is indicative of—well, of something.}

Ross Barkan (from “The Zeitgeist Is Changing” ¹):

Church attendance, long the barometer of the US’s devotion to the unseen, has continued to plummet, but taking its place isn’t any of the pugnacious New Atheism that tugged at the discourse for a stretch of the 2000s. Instead, it’s what can be loosely termed “spirituality” – a devotion to astrology, witchcraft, magic and manifestation – that has emerged, particularly among the young. Online life, paradoxically enough, has only catalyzed this spirituality more, with teenage TikTok occultists and “manifesting” influencers racking up ever more followers.

Not all of the old romantics were opposed to Judeo-Christian religion, but they were drawn, like the youth of today, to spiritual realms that operated far beyond any biblical teachings or rationalist precepts. They were deeply wary of technology’s encroachment on the human spirit. They feared, ultimately, an inhuman future – and hence their rebellion. Today’s romantics, still nascent, sense something similar. Why else, in such an algorithmic and data-clogged age – with so much of existence quantifiable and knowable – would magic suddenly hold such sway?

What explains the dominance of digital charlatans who promise all of life’s riches are at hand if only you visualize hard enough or utter the correct incantations. ² Embracing the paranormal or believing, wholeheartedly, that star positions can determine personalities can be harmless fun – until the delusions become life-consuming and despair takes hold when they inevitably do not deliver on their promise.

Irrationality, on its own, is no virtue, and some of the romantics of the 19th and 21st centuries succumb to the same ancient dross, magic alone as the supposed channel to transcendence. That spiritualism has spread with tech is an irony fitting of the age.

Against the hype of progress, the new romantics wonder: what good has any of this done for us? Were hyper-sophisticated GPS devices, cameras, and video recorders worth it? It is too soon to predict a revival of the Luddites, but there has been at least one press report of a teen group ditching smartphones altogether because “social media and phones are not real life”. Science brought about these revolutions; science compressed once unimaginable computing power into a single handheld device. Science now promises a great leap forward with artificial intelligence, which seems intent on replacing the arts themselves – machines will now make mediocre art, music, literature, and even fact-challenged journalism.

For now, rapacious tech still has a mass buy-in. Smartphones are ubiquitous. Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Google are hegemonic. Mark Zuckerberg sculpts his pharaonic Hawaii compound. He and his ilk own the present. Whether they own the future, forevermore, is no longer clear. Generational change is hard on the incumbents. And romanticism won’t hold still; it promises, at the minimum, a wild and unsteady flame. What it burns is still anyone’s guess. ³

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The zeitgeist is changing. A strange, romantic backlash to the tech era looms | Ross Barkan | The Guardian

Ross Barkan - Wikipedia

¹ Experts say that, for best results, your zeitgeist should be changed every generation or so, perhaps at the same time you refresh the tree of liberty with the blood of patriots and tyrants. ("The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is its natural manure."  Thomas Jefferson) I would also recommend that you take your zeitgeist in for a tune-up every five years or every 80,000 miles, whichever comes first.

² Belief in incantations and ritual formulae is shocking to Christians? That seems odd.

³ As is, for that matter, whatever Ross Barkan is going on about.  

You may not be interested in the zeitgeist, but the zeitgeist is interested in you.

Saturday Lecture: In the Beginning Was the Word

Lewis Mumford (from The Myth of the Machine):

Karl Marx gave the material instruments of production the central place and directive function in human development. Thomas Carlyle described man as ‘a tool-using animal,’ as if this were the one trait that elevated him above the rest of brute creation. This overweighting of tools, weapons, physical apparatus, and machines has obscured the actual path of human development.

In fact, to consider man as primarily a tool-using animal (Homo Faber) is to overlook the main thread of human history. For man is pre-eminently a mind-making, self-mastering, and self-designing animal; and the primary locus of all his activities lies first in his own organism, and then in the social organization through which it finds further expression.

So certain were nineteenth-century archaeologists about the primacy of stone tools and weapons in prehistoric man’s ‘struggle for existence’ that when the first paleolithic cave paintings were discovered in Spain in 1879, they were denounced, out of hand, as an outrageous hoax, on the grounds that Ice Age hunters could not have had the leisure, or the mind, to produce the elegant art of Altamira.

But mind was exactly what Homo Sapiens possessed in a singular degree: mind based on the fullest use of all his bodily organs, not just his hands. At every stage, man’s inventions and transformations were less for the purpose of increasing the food supply or controlling nature than for utilizing his own immense organic resources and expressing his latent potentialities. When not curbed by hostile environmental pressures, man’s elaboration of symbolic culture answered a more imperative need than that for control over the environment—and, one must infer, largely predated it and for long outpaced it.

The evolution of language—a culmination of man’s more elementary forms of expressing and transmitting meaning—was incomparably more important to further human development than the chipping of a mountain of hand-axes. Compared to the relatively simple coordination required for tool-using, the delicate interplay of the many organs needed for the creation of articulate speech was a far more striking advance.

In this process of self-discovery and self-transformation, tools served well as subsidiary instruments, but not as the main operative agent in man’s development. Until our own age, technics has never disassociated itself from the larger cultural whole in which man, as man, has always functioned. For the greater part of human history, no distinction was made between industrial production and ‘fine’ or symbolic art; these aspects were inseparable, one addressing objective conditions and functions, the other addressing subjective needs.

At its point of origin, technics was related to the whole nature of man, and that nature played a part in every aspect of human activity; thus, technics, at the beginning, was life-centered, not work-centered or power-centered. Though language was mankind’s most potent symbolic expression, it flowed from the same common source that eventually produced the machine: the primeval repetitive order of ritual, a mode of order man was forced to develop in self-protection to control the tremendous overcharge of psychical energy that his large brain placed at his disposal.

Once this basic internal organization was established and regulated, technics supported and enlarged the capacities for human expression. The discipline of toolmaking and tool-using, moreover, served as a correction to the inordinate powers of invention that spoken language gave to man—powers that otherwise unduly inflated the ego and tempted man to substitute magical verbal formulae for efficacious work.

The specific human achievement which set man apart from even his nearest anthropoid relatives, was the shaping of a new self, visibly different in appearance, in behavior, and in plan of life from his primitive animal forebears. Man speeded the process of his evolution, achieving through culture in a relatively short span of years changes that other species accomplished laboriously (if at all) through organic processes. The main business of man became his own self-transformation, which freed his brain, his best developed organ, for other tasks than ensuring physical survival. The dominant human trait, central to all other traits, is this capacity for conscious, purposeful self-identification, self-transformation, and ultimately for self-understanding.

The Great Refusal: The Reach of Technology

{If in fact ‘everything is connected,’ how do you refuse anything without having to refuse everything? That is one horn of the dilemma facing today’s neo-medievalists, neo-Luddites, and neo-primitivists; the other horn, of course, is that most people living in the modern ‘advanced’ world actually like their lifestyle and don’t want to give it up. David Watson eventually distanced himself from the 'anarcho-primitivist' movement, but in the excerpt below, he indicts not just the excesses of modern technology but the mindset such technology produces.}

David Watson, Against the Megamachine

The common attitude toward technology is a weird amalgam of optimism, resignation, and denial. While explicitly acknowledging the profound changes in culture and social institutions, in the rare instances when it ponders the shifting social contract mass technics have imposed, the ruling ideology concludes that we must adapt. The gigantic technological structures, the reorganized forms of life and new reorientation in thought, and the very modification of the experience of reality itself, are all considered necessary “trade-offs” for the industrial bribe. Contained in the idea that we cannot get the genie back into the bottle, that there is “no going back,” is a dim recognition that technology can indeed undermine human autonomy.

Yet strangely, technology is usually thought to be neutral, or the product of social relations, never a determinant that itself imposes conditions. This is true even among radical greens and others critical of technology, expressed for example in Brian Tokar’s remark in The Green Alternative, ‘Technologies are only as good as the society that creates them; the more powerful the technology, the more it can amplify the qualities of the society it was designed to serve.” Missing from this view is the recognition that technology — actually an interlocking system of apparatus, rational techniques, and organization — doesn’t merely follow design but changes the world in a systemic, ecological way.

Neither tools nor technology are neutral. They are inevitably powerful constituents of our symbolic world. Technology imposes not only form but content wherever it comes into use. Industrialism is the grand example, shattering the medieval world with its dynamism and synergy, its tendency to irreversibility and pervasiveness. (Here it is important to emphasize that modern industrialism and capitalism emerged in tandem as a unitary phenomenon. Industrialization and capital accumulation have always occurred synergistically, both in the period of the early rise of capitalism, and later in the various state formations of industrial capitalism during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.) But even one supposedly isolated technological addition can easily come to reshape society, creating qualitatively different conditions, a famous example being how the introduction of snowmobiles rapidly exploded Sami (Lapp) society in the 1960s. In a matter of a few years, the snowmobile undermined ancient modes of life of the reindeer-herding people, altering the behavior of the reindeer, further opening the society to the world market, and creating new dependencies and a ass society where there had previously been none. Proving again that everything is interconnected.

The process is not entirely deterministic, but clearly, technology is more than the sum of its parts. The automobile, for example, is more than a tool; it is a component in a total system of production, energy, distribution, roadways, techniques, laws, and other attendant processes that extend throughout the culture and reshape it behind our backs. Thinking in terms of our individual, enlightened use of the single component — be it a car, computer, or television — misses the whole picture. We forget that a socialization process is taking place in individuals and their society, that the totality of means, apparatus, and organization is having its effect.

“Seen as a way of ordering human activity,” writes Langdon Winner in ‘Autonomous Technology,’ “the total order of networks is anything but neutral or tool-like. In its centrality to the daily activity and consciousness of the function-serving human component, the technical order is more properly thought of as a way of life.” “Machinery is aggressive,” commented Emerson. “The weaver becomes the web.” By this he meant that gradually the means come to undermine and reshape the ends, and the world is qualitatively altered. And what is worse, the system, once fully in operation, no longer responds to human guidance. The dream of mastery gives way to desperate attempts to manage the feedback. ‘The means,” writes Winner, “accomplish results that were neither anticipated nor chosen and accomplish them just as surely as they had been deliberate goals.” He quotes Nietzsche on the utilitarians, who knew the next step or two, but no more: ‘They have no conception of the grand economy, which cannot do without evil.”

Today’s utilitarians are the crackpot realists (to borrow C. Wright Mills’ rich term) in the research labs, military command centers, board rooms and universities planning out each new stage of a new-improved world, free of war, hunger and disease — or so they promise. Meanwhile they have created an exterminist system with its daily litany of death — Bhopal, Prince William Sound, Minamata, Chernobyl, Love Canal, the burning Amazon, the Gulf War. And let us not forget the invisible, undramatic, slow- acting catastrophe — the “climate death” now discussed by climatologists, the depleted ozone, the pervasive contamination of the food chain, a ton of toxic waste a year per person in the U.S. — not the products, like the styrofoam cup or the microwave oven, which are also toxic, but simply the production waste.

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David Watson, from Against the Megamachine: Essays on Empire and Its Enemies

For more about David Watson, see: Fifth Estate (periodical) - Wikipedia

This 1969 editorial statement from Fifth Estate captures both the spirit of the times and the ideological milieu from which Watson emerged: "We believe that people who are serious in their criticism of this society and their desire to change it must involve themselves in serious revolutionary struggle. We do not believe that music is revolution. We do not believe that dope is revolution. We do not believe that poetry is revolution. We see these as part of a burgeoning revolutionary culture. They cannot replace political struggle as the main means by which the capitalist system will be destroyed. The Man will not allow his social and economic order to be taken from him by Marshall amps and clashing cymbals. Ask the Cubans, the Vietnamese or urban American blacks what lengths the system is willing to go to, to preserve itself."

Those were the days, my friend...

Saturday Lecture: "Wisdom Is on the Wane"

Eric Kahler:

It is a truism that the progress of our rational and empirical knowledge is closely connected with the development of technology, industry, and of what we understand as democracy; that all these developments are but different aspects of one and the same process. What is not so commonly recognized is the fact that these thoroughly respectable achievements—science, technology, industry, democracy—were the very ones that inevitably brought about that ill-famed collectivism and are about to promote it even further.

One should cease to identify collectivism purely and simply with socialism and communism. All social and economic forms of our modern life tend equally to be collectivistic and to develop and foster collectivism. For all of them ultimately derive from rationalistic science and technology and their manifold implications. The roots of collectivism are to be found in rationalism and technology and not in any specific social or economic doctrine. A consistent individualist would have to advocate abolition of the whole apparatus of modern life, abolition of modern science, industry, technology—which would be equivalent to reversing the general trend of human life itself.

Let us briefly survey the rise of collectivism out of rationalism. Rationalism led to rationalization, both scientific and economic-technological. Rationalization means, among other things, classification and quantification, dissection of unique individual beings and phenomena into abstracted features and functions which they have in common, and which can be quantitatively manipulated. In this way, by means of theoretical devices (terms) and technical devices (machines), our physical world and, more recently, our psychic world are explored, mainly for the mastery and practical exploitation of nature. "Scientia non est individuorum." ("Science is not concerned with individuals.") To be sure, science, positivistic science, starts from the individual since, as mentioned before, the individual constitutes the only quite real, because immediately evident, datum. But science does not leave the concrete individual entity intact; science uses it to derive from it, or from a number of them, common properties, property abstractions, statistical laws, or laws of nature, thereby cutting up, dissecting the concrete and unique individual or phenomenon.

This proceeding necessarily leads to a thoroughly quantitative conception of reality. We all know that not only natural science but also the sciences dealing with human affairs, anxious as they are to prove themselves true sciences, exhibit an ever-growing tendency toward metrics — sociometrics, psychometrics, statistics, indexing, polling, testing, and so forth; in other words, toward extracting from the qualitatively unique individuals and phenomena those elements that lend themselves to quantitative methods of comprehension. We even notice an inclination to drive terminological abstraction so far as to contract, as much as possible, verbal language into mathematical symbols and formulas. There are sociologists who boast that their science will soon have arrived at a point where it will be able to dispense with individual thinking altogether because facts in combination with business machines will do the job by themselves.

This tendency is not confined to science proper; it is about to extend its sway over our entire life. The Kinsey Reports, for instance, attempt to pin down in abstract facts and figures the most delicate, the most personal, the most inexpressibly subtle relationship between human beings. In the spring of 1952 the American Physical Society, discussing a new mathematical theory of communication, seems to have reached the conclusion that, from the thermodynamic point of view, the writing, distribution and reading of books are never worth the energy that is put into them. Now with all the deepest respect for the science of physics, I venture to doubt whether the creative effort of writing a book and the chain-reaction of responses it may unleash in the reader—sometimes through one kindling spark and sometimes with far-reaching practical consequences—can be measured in thermodynamic terms. The problem may have an odd specific interest for the scientists concerned but, nevertheless, it shows the absurdity of applying concepts of one level to an entirely different level of existence.

The frequent denial of such difference on the part of scientists is the consequential issue. We can apparently measure almost everything today. We can measure the degree of laughter of an audience in response to a comedian. We can tell metrically whether a speaker is boring. And even the qualification for a public office seems to be amenable to quantification: "Judge Francis A.," so the Chicago Bar Association's report says, "is 49.63 percent of what a Superior Court judge should be." That after twenty-three years on the bench. On the same score card Judge Rudolph D., who has been on the bench seventeen years was rated at 52.78 and Judge William L., with twenty-four years' judicial experience, at 56.7. This is only an extreme example of the manifold applications of testing, indexing, and I. Q. scoring, all of which single out certain specifically required, collectively usable aptitudes from the whole of the unique personality, disregarding the fact that a person is more than just a bunch of functional properties and can make up by other qualities for the lack of the tested ones. Systematic research in its limitless expansion sets out to ascertain everything scientifically.      

All scientification is collectivization—not only because it dissects the whole, unique personality and phenomenon into common fractional properties but because it invalidates and eventually atrophies the intuitive faculty, the personal common sense and taste of the individual who becomes afraid of using his own faculties. He does not trust himself any longer. Science is the supreme, impersonal, collective authority, and, if he feels any personal impulses rising against it, he suppresses them. What was known as human wisdom is on the wane.

Theoretical abstractions (strict terms, mathematical symbols, and formulae) correspond to practical abstractions, i.e., machines and gadgets. Conceptual abstractions are nothing else than theoretical machines used for the intellectual mastery of the world. Machines are nothing else than materialized, materially applied conceptual abstractions used for the purpose of manipulating and utilizing the physical world. This interrelation becomes most obvious at places where both procedures interlock: in the scientific apparatuses of our research institutes and observatories, in cyclotrons, synchrotrons, computing machines, electron microscopes, and so forth; and in enterprises where both purposes meet, like the Radio Corporation of America and the Rand Corporation. Technological processes, which are indefinitely reproducible, reflect scientific laws, which express infinite applicability.

Just as technology is penetrated with science, so, to the same degree, industry is penetrated with technology and with science directly. The result is economic rationalization which was also due to follow autonomously from the expansion of capitalistic enterprise: growth of organization means growth of rationalization. All these developments, the development of science, technology and industry, and their interpenetration, are but different aspects or ramifications of one evolutionary process; all of them lead eventually to collectivization and deindividualization. They split or invalidate the individual in various ways: apart from scientification, through specialization, junctionalization, standardization, anonymization. The chain reaction released by collectivizing rationalization, inherent in science, technology, and industry, starts with specialization. Specialization involves functionalization; functionalization brings about standardization—these are the three primary carriers of collective controls. And by means of these consecutive effects, rationalization paradoxically ends up depriving the individual of his rational faculty.

What does specialization do to the individual? It does not appeal to him as a whole, organic being, as a human being, as an individually unique being; it appeals to, it calls forth in him, some specific technical function, some functional qualification which he has in common with other people thus qualified. Such functions correspond exactly to the conceptual abstractions, general property abstractions, which science derives from concrete beings and phenomena. In fact, these abstractions may turn directly into functional beings: certain scientific specialists may actually be regarded as personalized functions. Specialization overemphasizes and over-develops this functional quality of the individual, singles it out while leaving other qualities and his essentially human qualities to atrophy since they are hardly required in his work any longer. Individuality, as we know, means indivisibility, something that cannot be divided. Now this is exactly what specialization does: it divides the man, it ranges that part of him which it calls forth into some abstract functional order, into the rank and file of some operational combine, into some category of occupational concern with all its paraphernalia: code of behavior, standards of opinion, lingo, and so forth. In this way, the concrete human particularity of the unique individual is displaced by the abstract particularity of the collectively specialized function. The collective, functional part of the personality grows at the expense of the individual and human part. The working day of the man is filled with his functionally limited occupation and all its implications of restrictive handling, interests, and attitudes. The problems of the dreariness of industrial work and the dehumanization and “alienation” attaching to it have been pondered by many people; for a long time, they have not concerned workers alone.

"The biggest trouble with industry," said John M. Caffrey, President of International Harvester Co., "is that it is full of human beings." The individual's need for self-determination, for selfhood, for the satisfaction of producing a whole piece of work and one that is worth producing, or for contributing to a task which he can comprehend in its entirety, with which he can identify himself, i.e., for doing meaningful work: nothing, not the best of conveniences, can fully replace this elementary satisfaction. The fundamental fact is that the workers serve a purpose which is alien to their own; they serve the purpose of a commercial collective.

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{Excerpted from The Tower and the Abyss: An Inquiry into the Transformation of the Individual, by Eric Kahler; originally published in 1957, reissued in 1989}

Sunday Sermon

Nikolai Berdyaev (circa 1933):

The crisis of our time is to a remarkable degree begotten by technology, which man lacks the strength to deal with. And this crisis is first of all a spiritual one. It is important for [us] to emphasize that Christians have proven to be completely unprepared for an appraisal of technology and the machine, for an understanding of its place within life. The Christian consciousness does not know how to relate to the tremendous worldwide event connected with the introduction into human life of the machine and technology. The natural world, in which man was accustomed to live in the past, no longer still seems to be in the eternal order of things. Man lives in a new world, altogether quite different from that in which the Christian revelation occurred, in which lived the apostles, the teachers of the Church, the saints, all with which the symbolism of Christianity is connected. Christianity was very representative of a connection with the land, with a patriarchal order of life. But technology has torn man away from the soil [and] has with finality destroyed the patriarchal order…

For a long time [Christians] regarded technology as a most neutral sphere, something religiously indifferent, something furthermost removed from spiritual questions and therefore something innocent. But this period has passed, though not all have noticed it so. Technology has ceased to be neutral. The question about technology has become for us a spiritual question, a question about the fate of man, about his relationship to God.

Technology has immeasurably deeper a significance than ordinarily is thought. It possesses a cosmogonic significance, it creates a completely new actuality. It is a mistake to think, that the actuality, engendered by technology, is the old actuality of the physical world, a reality, studied by mechanics, physics and chemistry. This is an actuality, which did not exist in the history of the world until the discoveries and inventions, made by man. Man has succeeded in creating a new world. Within the machine is present the reasoning power of man, within it operates a teleological principle. Technology creates an atmosphere, saturated with energies, which earlier were hidden within the depths of nature. And man has no assurance that he is in a condition to breathe in the new atmosphere. He was in the past accustomed to breathe a different air than this. It is still inexplicable, what this electric atmosphere, into which he is cast, will produce for the human organism. Into the hands of man technology puts a terrible and unprecedented power, a power which can be to the destroying of mankind. The first tools, found in the hands of man, were relatively playthings. And it would be possible to regard them still as neutral. But when such a terrible power is given into the hands of man, then the fate of mankind depends upon the spiritual condition of man.

One already destructive aspect of technology is war, threatening almost cosmic a catastrophe, and it posits the spiritual problem of technology quite acutely. Technology is not only the power of man over nature, but also the power of man over man, power over the life of people…therein especially it is not neutral. And especially in our materialistic times everything acquires a spiritual significance, everything is set beneath the standard of the spirit. Technology, begotten by spirit, materializes life, but it can also indeed assist in the liberating of spirit, of liberation from the bounds of materio-organic life. It can enable also an in-spiriting.

Technology signifies the transfer of the whole of human existence from the organism to the organization. Man no longer lives in an organic order. Man is accustomed to live in an organic connection with the soil, with plants and animals. The great cultures of the past were still surrounded by nature, they loved their gardens, flowers and animals, they had not yet broken asunder from the rhythm of nature. The sense of the land begat a tellurgic mysticism...

Man came from the soil and he returns to the soil. With this is connected a profound religious symbolism. The vegetative cults have played a tremendous role. The organic life of man and of human societies presented itself as a life similar to that of plants. Organic was the life of the family, of the corporation, the state, the church. Society had resemblance to an organism. The romantics at the beginning of the XIX Century ascribed an especial significance to the organism and the organic. From them comes the idealization of everything organic and hostility towards the mechanical. The organism is born, and not made by man, it is begotten by nature, by cosmic life, in it the whole is not composed merely of parts, but rather precedes the parts and determines their life.

Technology tears man apart from the soil, carries him across the expanses of the world, and gives man the sensation of earth as a mere planet. Technology radically alters the attitude of man to space and to time. It is hostile to any organic embodiment. In the technological period of civilization man ceases to live amidst animals and plants, he is flung into a coldly-metallic medium, in which there is no longer any animal warmth, no warm-bloodedness. The might of technology bears with it an enfeebling of cordiality within human life, of cordial warmth, coziness, lyricism, sorrows, always connected with the emotion of soul, and not with spirit. Technology kills everything organic in life and sets it under the standard of the organization of the whole of human existence.

The inevitability of the transition from organism to organization is one of the sources of the contemporary crisis of the world. It is not so easy to be torn asunder from the organic. The machine with a cold ferocity rips the spirit from its intertwined organic flesh, from vegetative-animate life. And this expresses itself first of all in the weakening of the soul-emotive element within human life, in the dissociation of integral human feelings. We are entering upon a harsh epoch of spirit and technology. The soul, connected with organic life, has proven very fragile, it shrinks back from the fierce blows which the machine inflicts upon it, it flows with blood, and sometimes it seems, that it is dead. We perceive this as a fatal process of technization, mechanization, the materialization of life. But spirit can oppose this process, can master it, can enter into a new epoch of being victorious.

This is the fundamental problem. The organization into which the world is passing over, the organization of the enormous human masses, the organization of technical life, the organization of economics, the organization of scientific operations etc. is very burdensome for the soul-emotive life of man, for the intimate life of the person, and it begets the inner religious crisis. Elements of organization have existed since the very dawn of human civilization, just as always there have existed elements of technology, but never has the principle of technical organization been so dominating and all-extensive, always there remained much of the organic and vegetative condition. The organization, connected with technology, is a rationalization of life. But human life cannot be ultimately and without residue rationalized, always there remains an irrational element, always there remains a mystery. The universal principle of rationalization receives its just reward.

Rationalization, bereft of any higher spiritual principle, begets irrational consequences…the rationalization of life assumes forms reminiscent of collective madness. Universal rationalization, technical organization, the spurning of the mysterious foundations of life, beget a lost sense of the old meaning of life, and anguish, and the tendency towards suicide. Man is attracted by the technics created by him, but he himself cannot be transformed into a machine. Man is the organizer of life, but he himself in his depths cannot be the object of organization, within him himself there always remains an element of the organic, the irrational, the mysterious. The rationalization, the technization, the machinization of the whole of human life and of the human soul itself cannot but provoke a reaction against itself. This reaction existed during the XIX Century. The romantics always protested against the might of technology, the dissociating of the organic wholeness, and they appealed to nature, to the elemental foundation within man…

The romantic reaction against technology is understandable and even indispensable, but it is impotent, it either does not decide the problem or it resolves it too easily. To return to former times, to the organic lifestyle, to the patriarchal relationships, to the old forms of the familial economy and handicrafts, to the life with nature, with the land, with plants and animals, is impossible. And indeed this return would be undesirable, for it is connected with an exploitive use of people and animals. In this is the tragedy of the position. And it remains but for spirit creatively to define its own relationship towards technology and towards the new epoch, to master technology in the name of its own ends…Soulful emotionality cannot bear up under the harsh reality. Indifference is possible only for the hardened, the obdurate spirit. Spirit can be an organizer, it can master the technical for its own spiritual ends, but it would have to resist itself being turned into a tool of the organizing technical process. In this is the tragedy of spirit.

Leaping Before We Look

At Vox, Brian Resnick, Julia Belluz, and Eliza Barclay alert us to the fact that "there is a huge experiment underway that we didn’t exactly sign up for." The experiment in question has to do with digital technology--increasingly ubiquitous, increasingly mobile, and increasingly addictive. Is it possible that the information/communication technology of which we are so fond and on which we have grown so dependent may have unintended adverse consequences?

The answer, based on the Law of Unintended Consequences, is almost certainly Yes. The authors at Vox, however, are not entirely convinced:

If it’s true that constant digital distractions are changing our cognitive functions for the worse — leaving many of us more scatterbrained, more prone to lapses in memory, and more anxious — it means we’re living through a profound transformation of human cognition. Or could it be that we’re overreacting, like people in the past who panicked about new technologies such as the printing press or the radio?

Note the blithe assumption that concerns over older technologies turned out to be misplaced; and yet the printing press, to take one example, was a primary driver of the Protestant Reformation which overturned the world of Christendom, remade Western Europe, and unintentionally ushered in secular modernity. Was it "overreacting" to have expressed concern, or even panic, at that prospect?

The Vox authors go on to consult a number of "experts"--but who can be "expert" on the long-term consequences of our brand-new technologies and our brand-new reliance on them? There are no experts on the future. Moreover, the rarely acknowledged fact is that the last two centuries have amounted to a vast unauthorized and uncontrolled experiment on larger and larger numbers of people: an experiment involving not just transportation and communication technologies but also plastics, chemicals, medicines, munitions, food additives, artificial lighting, standardized time, proliferating images (both still photography and motion pictures), all of which have contributed to unprecedented affluence, convenience, and comfort--albeit not without some side effects.

Modern life was never tested in any laboratory before being unleashed on the populace. Based on its trial runs in Western nations, however, we can see some troubling indications--high rates of depression, anxiety, addiction, and suicide--that modernity may not be all it's been cracked up to be. The stories of Faust and of the Sorcerer's Apprentice might have been instructive, had we taken them at all seriously; but we did not, and here we are, merrily unleashing upon ourselves more and more potentially dangerous but irresistibly attractive gadgetry.

The authors at Vox ask, Are we now transforming human cognition itself? Again, the answer is obvious: we're transforming everything, consequences be damned. "Leap before you look" has been our operating maxim for some time, and we have no intention of rethinking it now.

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/11/28/18102745/cellphone-distraction-brain-health-screens-kids 

Our "Chromo-Civilization"

Neal Gabler (in LIFE: THE MOVIE) discusses the "Graphic Revolution" of the 19th and 20th centuries, which resulted in "the ascendance of the eye" and a society that "opted for the visual". Photography, obviously, contributed to this revolution, as did "new print technologies" (such as "halftone technology" which enabled the new "photographic obsession" to be exploited by newspapers and magazines. All this would lead, of course, to motion pictures, TV, and to what E. L. Godkin referred to as our "chromo-civilization" in which visual images displaced the written word as our primary means of communication.

Gabler cites the late Neil Postman:

Postman, one of the most brilliant and articulate critics of popular culture, saw the Graphic Revolution inaugurating a whole new way of appropriating information that would ultimately change the nature of information itself. In Postman's view, each medium is a "unique mode of discourse" that enforces its own form of mental processing and its own ideas of intelligence. Print demanded ratiocination. "To engage the written word means to follow a line of thought which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning," Postman wrote in Amusing Ourselves to Death. It followed that a predominantly print-based society, as America's was until the late nineteenth century, while not necessarily one coruscating with intellectual brilliance, nevertheless was one in which logic, order and context prevailed. An image-based society, on the other hand, dispensed with all these because images did not demand them. How much logical discipline did one need to recognize a picture?

Images are also a more immediate mode of discourse than is print, which would suggest that an increasingly image-based culture will be an increasingly impatient culture, a culture not much given to thoughtful reflection or to the processing of complex ideas. It will be, as Gabler says, a "two-dimensional society," taking images at face value (the camera doesn't lie!) rather than probing beneath their surface or analyzing their context. The saying "a picture is worth a thousand words," the origins of which have been traced to the early twentieth century, is not so much a venerable proverb as it is a modern marketer's con; it belongs right alongside Madison Avenue's admission that what it really sells "is not the steak, it's the sizzle".

Where Gabler disagrees with Postman is over the latter's placing "the blame for chromo-civilization at the foot of the technology that made mass-produced images possible." Gabler, by contrast, believed that the technology itself was a response to "a change in the American consciousness...the Graphic Revolution, including television, could just as easily be seen as part of a much larger, more significant movement in American life. That movement," said Gabler, "was the Entertainment Revolution."

Entertainment has always existed, of course, in every culture and in every era; and people have always sought it out when they could do so. Gabler's argument, though, is that only in America and only in the modern era has a culture been based on entertainment:

The desire for entertainment--as an instinct, as a rebellion, as a form of empowerment, as a way of filling increased leisure time or simply as a means of enjoying pure pleasure--was already so insatiable in the nineteenth century that Americans rapidly began devising new methods to satisfy it...Television may very well have become, as Postman has said, "the command center of the new epistemology" that had begun with illustration, telegraphy and photography. But if television was the latest epistemology, entertainment itself was the cosmology that had governed American life with increasing vigor since at least the turn of the century...the new consciousness was a function not of television or even of images but of entertainment.

It was, argued Gabler, our desire to be entertained that drove the triumph of visual culture, and not the other way around:

In fact, the various forms of entertainment, including television, were only shadows on the wall of the cave. What made entertainment a cosmology was the constellation of expectations that these shadows created, expectations that would weigh heavily on the American consciousness and change our mental architecture [leading] in turn to an expectation that everything should provide pleasure if only because anything that did not would very likely be shoved aside by something that did. That power of expectation had led in turn to a power of conversion in which more and more of American life would come to resemble entertainment in order to survive.

And so we have progressed from Cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am) to Je suis amusé, donc je suis (I am entertained, therefore I am); but I am not at all certain it's anything to brag about. 

Staying Alive?

"He not busy being born is busy dying." (Bob Dylan)

"Whether you're a brother or whether you're a mother / You're stayin' alive, stayin' alive / Feel the city breakin' and everybody shakin' / And we're stayin' alive, stayin' alive..." (The Bee Gees)

Stephen Cave's IMMORTALITY takes seriously the premise of "Terror Management Theory," cataloguing human efforts throughout history to frustrate the Grim Reaper. Cave examines what he calls our "Immortality Narratives" and he claims they can be reduced to four kinds: (1) finding a way to stay physically alive forever; (2) dying but coming back again via some form of resurrection; (3) dying to bodily existence but surviving as an eternal spirit or soul; (4) surviving by means of the legacy one leaves behind, be it human progeny, works of art, a business empire, eternal fame, etc.

Modern medical science and medical technology, Cave notes, are fueling optimism that we may actually realize the "Staying Alive" narrative. Since we have already extended, through a variety of interventions, the average human life span, why settle for anything less than immortality? As Cave points out, reframing the daunting task of defying death as a simple matter of incrementally extending life makes it seem manageable. It also allows us to repress our fear of mortality and to disguise our actual goal; which is, to borrow from the Gnostics, to make death die:

The belief that death is an insurmountable problem is paralyzing: if death is certain and could come at any time, then what is the point in struggle or innovation? The belief that death is a set of solvable problems, on the other hand, is a great motivator: it encourages exactly the kind of research and development that brings progress and drives our civilization forward. Now every week come new breakthroughs in our understanding of cancer, heart disease and countless other ailments. This progress is real and is lengthening lives, and every time we read about it, the promise that we can one day altogether eliminate aging and disease is renewed and made more credible.

Death has always seemed beyond our control, but our modern obsession with "wellness" (diet, nutrition, and exercise) puts us back in charge, or at least gives us the illusion of being in charge:

The modern version of the Staying Alive Narrative is working because it focuses on the details, taking problems apart and analyzing them. But this approach has another benefit in addition to actually solving some of these problems: it also distracts us wonderfully from the first part of the Mortality Paradox—the awareness that we will die. By breaking mortality down into innumerable bite-sized problems, we all end up with a lengthy to-do list of tasks to keep ourselves busy, and so we go jogging, do yoga, watch our weight, read food labels for the right kind of fat, drink coffee or avoid coffee, drink wine or avoid wine, and so forth. Newspapers are daily full of such prescriptions. They give the illusion that mortality is something we can do something about—that it is in our hands.

Despite which, the mortality rate for the human species remains right where it has always been, at a flat 100%. As Bruce Springsteen sang, "Everything dies, baby, that's a fact":

The Austrian philosopher Ivan Illich called this the “medicalization of daily life.” The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has subsequently described it as the primary strategy of modern times for suppressing the fear of death. Following the Engineering Approach, we break death down into its individual manifestations—from salmonella to car accidents—and persuade ourselves that they are individually avoidable if we take the right precautions. “Keeping fit, taking exercise, ‘balancing the diet,’ eating fibres and not eating fat, avoiding smokers or fighting the pollution of drinking water are all feasible tasks,” wrote Bauman, “tasks that can be performed and that redefine the unmanageable problem … of death … as a series of utterly manageable problems.” And through pursuing those precautions, by avoiding smokers or keeping fit, we can avoid facing up to what Bauman calls “the great metaphysical futility of it all.”

Not everyone agrees; according to some, the impressive progress we have made thus far in postponing our deaths is just the beginning. "Transhumanists" in particular (Ray Kurzweil is an example) insist on raging, raging against the dying of the light, believing that we can and eventually will win the war on death:

We do not have to win the war against aging all at once. The twentieth century already saw an additional forty years added to life expectancy in developed countries; perhaps, [transhumanists] argue, the next wave of breakthroughs will give us another forty. And in this time, we could be developing the technology that could buy us yet more decades; and in those decades, we could then achieve the breakthroughs that would give us another century—and so on, until the discovery is made that can grant us medical immortality. This is what the optimistic transhumanists describe as achieving “longevity escape velocity,” or living long enough to live forever.

We have the technology, the transhumanists say; we only need the will to use it:

Genetic engineering should enable us to rewrite our bodies’ instruction books, ensuring many diseases that are now fatal never arise. Stem cells, which have the ability to develop into any kind of tissue, from skin to neurons, hold out the promise of growing healthy tissue to replace that which is diseased or worn out—even whole organs. And nanotechnology (engineering on the scale of atoms or molecules) gives hope of the ability to repair our bodies from the inside out using billions of tiny, targeted machines.

These technologies—especially genetics—are already starting to produce real results. As they steadily advance, they demonstrate the huge creative power of the Engineering Approach to the Staying Alive Narrative. Like a self-fulfilling prophecy, the belief that the problems of mortality can be solved is helping to make it so, as thousands of researchers dedicate themselves to finding new cures. As a consequence, life expectancy continues to rise, further confirming faith in the underlying narrative of progress.

Immortality thus achieved will not mean living forever as the feeble creatures we are right now. In the transhumanist future, we will be stronger, better, faster, and definitely smarter:

Researchers believe we will soon be able to control our attention, emotions and appetites. Some transhumanists argue that nanobots be used not only to heal disease and halt aging but to literally expand our minds: within a couple of decades we might be able to supplement the hundred trillion or so existing neuronal connections in our brains with vast armies of nanobots, exponentially increasing our powers to remember, reason and create. Such implants could also be wirelessly connected to each other and to the outside world: we would control computers simply by thinking about it—which, given that all complex objects will soon be computer driven, will mean everything from flicking TV channels to driving the car. We would be effectively telepathic—communicating with each other over vast distances by thought alone and surfing the Internet in our heads.

As utopian (or dystopian) as that may sound, Stephen Cave notes that such progress as we have made thus far at extending life has come at a high price, measured not just in dollars but in human suffering:

In recent times, life expectancy in the developed world has continued to increase at the rate of about two years every decade—i.e., those born in 1990 could expect to live two years longer than those born in 1980. But only one-quarter of this additional time is spent healthy. In other words, of those additional two years, eighteen months are spent in ill health or disability. We are living longer, but we can all expect to spend many of those extra years unable to wash or dress ourselves, unable to recognize loved ones, our senses fading and our strength gone. The brutal fact is that increasing survival rates from the deadly infections of the past means keeping people alive long enough to develop the much more lingering diseases of modernity. In the developed world, one-third of people will develop cancer in their lifetimes, while a third can also expect to suffer from some form of serious dementia such as Alzheimer’s before they die. This is not what the gung-ho transhumanists dream of when they claim science can defeat death—but it is the nightmare reality. It is not so much living longer as just dying slower.

Dr. Ezekiel Emmanuel stirred up a storm of controversy a few years back when he wrote an article titled "Why I Hope to Die at 75"; but I suspect he spoke for more than just a few who do not look forward to the debilities, indignities, and dependencies of increasingly older age. Unlike Dr. Emmanuel, I do not intend to set a preferred expiration date in advance--I prefer to keep my options open; but I surely do not want to live forever. For now, today is enough for me, and tomorrow as well; but immortality is far more than I can even contemplate.

{All quoted excerpts are from Stephen Cave, Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How It Drives Civilization  (Crown/Archetype; Kindle Edition)}

Spirit in the Machine

In his study (1923-1940) of Nicolas Berdyaev (NICOLAS BERDYAEV AND THE NEW MIDDLE AGES), Evgueny Lampert noted Berdyaev's "strange optimism" about man's relationship to technology. On the one hand, Berdyaev considered "the crisis of our time to be largely determined by technology, which has given us a colossal power, but which in the last resort we are unable to control." And yet somehow "in the last resort Berdyaev welcomes this process. He believes that the spirit can transform and revivify it and enter a new and integral life." 

One can consider Berdyaev's writing on this issue (MAN AND THE MACHINE) to be part of an ongoing conversation that goes back at least to Henry James' essay "The Dynamo and the Virgin," to the writings of Lewis Mumford, and to Leo Marx's THE MACHINE IN THE GARDEN, among many other contributions. What is noteworthy about Berdyaev is that he does not deny the problems and perils of technology, but that he simultaneously (perhaps stubbornly) affirms the power of the spirit: by which he does not mean that God will deliver us from the machine age but that humankind has within itself the (God-given) resources to redeem it. 

According to Lampert, "For a long time the sphere of technology was regarded as quite neutral and indifferent from the religious point of view, remote from any spiritual issue and, so to say, innocent." Berdyaev, by contrast, "has come to realize that technology is fundamentally a spiritual problem...and that it has created an entirely new spiritual environment."  

Lampert went on to summarize Berdyaev's concerns: 

Technology has put into man's hands a terrible and unheard-of power, with which he aspires to unleash the hidden forces of nature and exploit them for his own ends. But at the same time it has proved stronger than man himself; it has subdued him, it brings him bitterness and disappointment, it threatens him with destruction, and by its power the final cataclysm of the world may come about. Berdyaev views technology in the first place as the chance in human existence from 'organic life' to 'organization'. ¹ 

Lampert explained Berdyaev's belief that, prior to the age of technology, "The life of social units, of the family, of the state, of the religious community was conceived as essentially organic and resembled a living organism." Technology, Berdyaev said, had "cut man off from nature [and] transferred him to the plane of universal space and imbued with him the feeling not of the cosmic but of the material, spatial, and 'planetary' character of the earth. It showed itself as a power hostile to all organic incarnations and plunged man into a new cold, metallic atmosphere, charged with electric power, but devoid of cosmic warmth and the throb of living blood." ²

Yet, for all that, Berdyaev retained his belief in the creative capacity of mankind to transcend itself and to escape its self-imposed snares: 

Berdyaev does not want, nor does he like, mere romantic reaction whether it be the reaction of the nineteenth or of the twentieth century. [He] does not aspire to a mere return to former patterns of organic life, to a patriarchal structure of society and old forms of agricultural and artisan civilization; he is equally opposed to the conversion of life and nature into a mere instrument of technical exploitation. He wants man...to define his attitude to the new environment in a creative and positive way. And in the very experience of technical civilization he perceives hidden possibilities for a greater intensification of the spirit, and for a power which steels and tempers heart and mind. Man can and should be capable of "organizing"; he can and should become maker and master of technical forces, which does not in itself and of necessity imply the mechanization and rationalization of life. In fact true creativeness renders life mysterious in its unforeseen possibilities and points to the "irreducible, irrational element of being..." 

What strikes me is Berdyaev's insistence that the spirit in which he believed (the spirit he held to be both "man-God" and "God-man") could transform any condition of existence. All the brutalities and sufferings of history, all the wrong turns, all the dehumanizing forces at work—remember that Berdyaev lived through the 1917 Russian revolution, only to be exiled a few years later³—could not shake his faith in "the meaning of history". He never called for a Benedict option; instead, he poured out, in a series of books and against the increasing pessimism of his era, his conviction that mankind was God's agent in the world and that God's will would be done. 

Atheist that I am, that's a faith I can, and do, respect. 

__________________________________________________________________   

¹ This is not inconsistent with Jacques Ellul's emphasis (in TECHNIQUE) on the modern reliance on rational organization, uniform procedures, and quantification. "Technique," for Ellul, was not just about machines and technology; it was about a way of apprehending and relating to reality. 

² We have learned to be cautious about praise of "the organic order" and about invocation of what Berdyaev referred to as "telluric mysticism" (not to mention "the throb of living blood"). I think, however, that what Berdyaev had in mind was not so much the Nazi volk as Kirkpatrick Sale's "human scale"; at least, that's what I prefer to think. 

³ Years after the revolution, Berdyaev wrote "We can [now] see all things naked and undeceiving...the Russian people, in full accordance with their particular mentality, offered themselves as a burnt-offering on the altar of an experiment unknown to previous history; they have demonstrated the extremest consequences of certain ideas. They are an apocalyptic people and they could not stop short at a compromise, at some 'humanitarian state': they had to make real either brotherhood in Christ or comradeship in Antichrist. If one does not reign, then the other will. The people of Russia have put this choice before the whole world with awe-inspiring force." Say what you will about Berdyaev's optimism, but it was hardly the product of either historical blindness or moral obtuseness. 

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