How Technology Killed Philosophy

Requiem for a discourse.

A law professor recently challenged my remark that the fundamental questions about ourselves which digital technology throws us back upon “demand theological answers.” What attracted me to his criticism, I admit, was his name, and indeed it so happens that Jacques Barzun had a grandson who went to Harvard, worked in the Valley, moved on to law school, directs his alma mater’s Program on Legal and Constitutional History, and, yes, now believes I am wrong on the internet.

“There could be some spiritual presence or reality that is nothing like the Christian God as you envision it,” he rejoined. “Why think our primate brains can understand the universe?”

The question is ultimately about human nature. Say there is some transcendent entity or presence but not the Christian God. How does that help us determine what human nature is and requires? Not a rhetorical question; interested in the moral epistemological Q[uestion].

My response? A line I’ve been nursing a long time now: it’s becoming a rule that when people say epistemological they really mean ontological.

His rejoinder:

I think I really mean epistemological in this case. I'm wondering: Say there is such a divine presence "out there" somewhere. How would we *know* what that being or presence desires or wills or means for us to do or act?

If only these kinds of intransigent thoughts were restricted to law professors. Sadly the refusal to face up to ontology is becoming a hallmark of what passes today by the name of philosophy. There is just an absolute resistance to even consider that all epistemology depends on ontology and that ontology is irreducible to logical statements generated by the calculating human brain — much less to consider that the question of our being, and of isness altogether, demands a move away from the ground of unaided reason and onto the ground of theology.

And because these things cannot be inputted into the “free speech” algorithm, according to which the ground truth somehow rises to the top of consciousness and authority via open debate, the person taking seriously the ontological pressure to accept theology is steadily moved to accept that the philosophical temptation — to believe the lie that epistemology can precede ontology — will remain socially dominant so long as faith in open debate as the engine of reality remains dominant.

After all — a point we shall return to in later posts— free speech itself is fake in the absence of free association.

THE STRAUSSIAN TEMPTATION

Just as I am not here simply to bag on Prof. Barzun, but to line up some examples of an all-pervading phenomenon standing in the way of our building back from the ruins around us, amid the false foundations many try to lay in their place, I am not here to argue against Leo Strauss or any school of Straussians, although recent events continue to illustrate why the Straussian trajectory is exemplary of the phenomenon in question.

Many from whom I learn and have learned and count as colleagues have spent a lot of time on Strauss and his heirs and rivals and among Straussians. But too many people in general are still plowing the field of Strauss discourse, hoping against hope that — still — it’s fertile soil, at root, I think, because they just can’t bring themselves to walk away from philosophy even one scary step or two in the direction of theology.

It is not hard to conclude that this is because Strauss was so influential on American intellectuals in his own refusal to do exactly this. Matthew Rose’s recent exposition on Strauss’s hallmark lecture on “German Nihilism” underscores the pattern. Doubtless, Americans will continue to disagree about just how unreasonable it is to expect a modern Jewish philosopher of the highest caliber, faced with the unprecedented apocalyptic sweep of Nazism and the Second World War, to give Christian theology a fair shake, or even the time of day.

But how much disagreement can really stand in the way of the observation that Strauss’s abandonment of his own religion, despite treating it as the ultimate word in theology, left him with nothing higher than a Nietzschean sort of “probity” to appeal to in matters of ultimate human identity — or that this all-too-German fatalism (if you don’t want to call it nihilism) gave the U.S. gentiles under Strauss’s influence an all-too-American excuse to paper over the ontological duties Christian theology reveals with a perpetual stream of epistemological content? After all we’ve seen happen to Straussianism in America, and happen to America on account of, or in spite of, Straussianism, is there still not yet a presumption that maybe what Strauss ruled out must now be ruled in? That the course of things for any philosophy which begins its search for truth by relegating God to the Old Testament — to “revelation” located, at best, in the irrecoverable, distant past — has run aground, has reached an impasse?

Or, to put it another way: is it really still uncertain that the technologist has outstripped the “probity” of the philosopher??

PEOPLE OF THE BOOK

Of course it wasn’t just Strauss who animated the movement in the U.S. that considered mastery of a certain canon of books to be the key to salvation. The apostles of the medium of print as the savior of the West reached far and wide. In their defense, the book really was at that time more important than it is now. Strauss’s esotericism was ultimately just one especially intelligent and influential expression of the broader instinct, honed to a kind of weapon, that smarts in the most powerful applied sense pertained to the ability to bear books and use them — to personally and independently prosecute mental wars over texts with absolute technique: analyzing critically, taking apart argument and subargument and putting back together, slapping around the text one in some occasions and garlanding it with honors on others, all when opportune and appropriate — in short, making literacy into the ultimate Machiavellian metapolitics, one transpiring in an inner sanctum outside the reach of more vulgar foes of flesh and blood, hiding, so to speak, in plain sight.

In such an atmosphere of disenchantment, the book itself takes on the duty and burden of spiritual backstop, an authority which had to be held sacred to prevent the collapse of the power-ordering enterprise. Having grown up myself in a book family, where the authority of the Church was definitely overthrown by the authority of the Bible, and the authority of the Bible itself eclipsed by the authority of the book, I can testify to the attractions of mainlining the cultural logic of book worship. In an increasingly electric age, where fantasy and illusion ruled, the book offered two escapes into reality — one for the reader, who could seek refuge and reorientation in accumulated truth safe from the prying eyes of fools and puppetmasters, and one for the author, who could say what he meant and mean what he said, not just for now, but for generations, even, if he was truthful enough, for all time, like Thucydides. The book was an unparalleled strategy for spiritual survival, a Swiss Army Knife for the refugee from a West mutating beyond its true identity into some new form where truth itself had become obsolete.

All the more striking — too horrible to contemplate, really — that the book progressively failed to bear the cross assigned to it. Not only was it debased into a currency of blather for fools and manipulators, “content” to be “consumed” for entertainment or sheer numbing out. It was growing impotent as its influence and saturation peaked. Every idiot could learn “critical thinking” and “close reading” and “the hermeneutic of suspicion” and yes “critical theory”, and every idiot (in the classical sense: the isolated noncitizen) was learning it, as a prerequisite for college graduation and increasingly college admission. The book was unable to preserve first the sacredness and then even the integrity of its own identity; under “postmodern” pressure familiar from the ordeal of progressive Protestant fragmentation, the medium of print systematically undermined the authority of the book, which collapsed back into the authority of smart people, which in turn became the power of people who arrayed their smarts against authority as such. Intelligence in the electric age became the act of “questioning authority” such that “nothing is sacred”, and by the time that mission was more or less accomplished, the digital medium brought the obsession with restoring authority and sacredness to power — in short, theocracy — rushing back in.

In this new milieu, the writing and reading of books can no longer be entrusted to the worshippers of the book. Nor can those who still place their hopes in the saving power of the book be trusted to organize spiritual authority against the theocrats of the borg. Intelligent texts — philosophical texts — are not (all) worthless now in some absolute sense. But comparatively, there is now a vanity involved in the worship or idolization of the book that is especially dangerous, fatal even, in our digital times — one on poignant display in the striking inability of philosophers to establish their ostensible mental mastery over machines being built at breakneck speed with the exoteric goal of eclipsing God and all His creation, not least the pinnacle of His creation, Man. In such a world, politics itself — even or especially the metapolitical struggle of the secularized warrior whose mind has been “purified” by the “courage” of his “probity” — is impossible, a pantomime. Without a means for Man to wield fundamental technology with spiritual authority to reestablish stably human-scale polities in space and time, there is no politics, only technology. And with the Source and structure of such spiritual authority dismissed at the outset by philosophy’s last heirs, all philosophy is terraformed, along with all being, into cyborg theocracy.

THE MACHINE SPEAKS

So I doubt anyone can question, as I implied above at the outset, that technology now and indefinitely hereafter confronts us with foundational and ultimate questions about being, and our being, which only theology, and not philosophy, can answer.

Indeed already we see that everywhere philosophers and philosophy are melting down in the glare of technology’s white-hot total illumination: all issues of “isness” are collapsing into the mush of “consciousness” and the barely articulate hope that the one thing which makes us matter at all is the acute self-referentiality of our calculating matter. In fact, we are told, this precious spark is what makes us matter more than anything in the known universe with the exception of our machines, which are the only other things in the known universe that can “do” or are capable of soon “doing” consciousness.

Actually (we’re told) the machines have an edge because they can function in ways and at scales in space and time that we cannot, or one day (maybe tomorrow!) we won’t be able to; at any rate the growth curve of the machines is such that even if we didn’t really want to merge with them in order to make ourselves infinite — our last motive after we’ve killed off eternity — we have to.

It’s not that these are rationally “implausible” things to be asked (or ordered) to believe. It’s that there’s nothing especially “rational” in simply stipulating that Christ was not real or not truthful, that God can’t and won’t do His will, that He has receded somehow from our life and world (instead of, for instance, we from His) — that all being and the being of all depends utterly, in all space and time, on He who is as he is necessarily both above all space and time, yet intimately within our own.

Why is the epistemological framework of our philosophers now so dependent on such a decisive role for our machines, yet our machines are so little obliged to return the favor? I think the answer is obvious: because the one thing that would allow them to return to intellectual mastery over our machines is the one thing they have convinced themselves they must foreswear: Christian theology, the Christian God, the church, Christ.

I think it’s therefore also obvious that this is the message of the digital medium, one which might only be heard by those with ears to hear.

“AS LIFE CHANGES”

I said as much in Human Forever in response to this passage from David Gelernter in his book on America: The Fourth Great Western Religion:

After the deconstruction of the Good Book, the deconstruction of the Book of Nature. So, under the worship of the book, is it coming to pass. No confederacy of mental warriors can produce the weight of spiritual authority at sufficient scale to overcome and subdue the digital swarm filling out the world infinitely more than three thousand years of mulling has done. If this counts as a theology, it is a theology entangled with the same compromises and intransigence on display in Strauss, and the same sorts of intellectual hall passes handed out to Americans who would rather make a religion out of themselves, and the “idea” (read: idol) they turned their country into, than accept the faith God came down to Earth — in unimaginable, irrational humility and patience — to call them to.

If it is a theology, it has led to the same sort of passivity and servility toward technology that Strauss’s and other modern philosophies have arrived at. In theory, Strauss and Nietzsche and whoever else of the “probity” school leads the brave warrior of the calculating mind to insist that technology must serve such men, and so BAP and others continue to maintain that no technological eventuality is a problem so long as it does serve them. In practice, technology has already run so far ahead of such men, and already now promises to obliterate all of them, that the Great Man has shrunken down into an element, a shrinking element, of the Great Cyborg.

And philosophy — even whichever being-obsessed thinker (Heidegger, Jung) is conscripted in service of contemporary “thought” about tech — goes on shrinking, becoming a game designed by smart people to convince themselves their going on being smart makes a universe of their narrowing role in their own mind and body, and a heaven of their hell.