Op and Hammer

Glimpsing the limits of the revolutionary intellect's tools.

Twice, for me, has probably been enough as far as Oppenheimer is concerned. To me at least the biggest sequence — the script hasn’t hit the internet so I’ll paraphrase — is Oppie opining that revolution has swept all other high pursuits and science must certainly be next, be the ultimate, the immediate rejoinder being that America had its revolution, that is, 1776.

Now at first blush the implication here is that ‘76 was unlike the world revolution Oppenheimer witnessed because ‘76 was political, not intellectual, and of course to a degree this is absolutely correct. As the Declaration explains at great length the “long train of abuses” inflicted on the distinct American people by the British regime were self-evidently severe enough to justify that people’s throwing off that yoke.

But no matter how elegant the English deployed this was a dirty laundry list — no “intellectualism” or card-carrying intellectuals required to make heads or tails of the information and form a proper judgment about it. Primal, ancient, eternal stuff: mandate of heaven lost, a people held in bondage, a Christian regime flouting the will of God…

On the other hand, however, the Declaration overlaid these basics with messages of a profoundly, inescapably intellectual character. Were these revolutionary? Judgments — both “intellectual” and common-sensical — did and do differ. Among intellectuals a media theorist is obliged to suggest or at least consider that what was really revolutionary about the Declaration was not the content (which, as Harry Jaffa and others argued, reflected Locke as much as Aristotle, who would have been of more or less one accord if made contemporaries) but the form — that the medium was, indeed, the message. Was not the real breakthrough the move from the old oral declaration of war to the new written declaration of political revolution? It was a move that demanded more than a mere announcement. As the audience is the formal cause of the work, it obliged the Declaration to submit not just notice or justification to “a candid world” as such but to the world’s intellectuals, to the republic that preceded the United States, the republic of letters.

That is, it demanded an intellectual justification — philosophical, to be specific, but not philosophical in the sense abstracted away from political matters, or indeed matters of war. Written and published intellection was now a weapon of war: one that from the outset “positioned” (posited) itself as, at least in theory, now the most important or powerful weapon of war — something much more revolutionary than the American Revolution itself, as it aimed to and did seem to establish a higher authority upon which to base and conceptualize revolution than the ancient basis of the laundry list of abuses unto self-destruction of the British regime’s authority.

I lay all this out having in mind Chris Rufo’s instantly successful and justifiably acclaimed new book America’s Cultural Revolution. Stipulating all the praise, what jumped out at me is something that hasn’t received a lot of attention so far (though it’s early), perhaps because it’s hiding in plain sight.

FROM REPUBLIC OF LETTERS TO EMPIRE OF INTELLECT

The book openly describes how our ostensible cultural revolution was really in fact an intellectual revolution, by, for, and of the intellectuals, those who perceived themselves to be of necessity revolutionary because intellect was itself necessarily revolutionary, and revolution necessarily intellectual. The stretch required to argue this turn of events can’t be traced to the revolutionary intellectual character of the Declaration outlined above is, at least to me, abusive of common sense as well as intellectual probity — which, a media theorist seems compelled to suggest, isn’t “anyone’s fault” so much as it is a consequence of the unfolding of developments in the technology of communications… barring, of course, those for whom the only true revolution is the revolution in comms tech, and the only true progress the progress thereof. To take a page from Hunter Thompson…

The quote was, of course, as Thompson knew well, not Linkletter’s but Melville’s. His personal yet public declaration of the collective consciousness of genius — a far cry, in a very underthought-out way, from the republic of letters — has reverberated ever since through the American consciousness with which it resonates so deeply. Even more than the British Empire, the American Republic is where media came to ever further extend the faculties — some of them — of Man. And amid the Wartime collapse of the British position as intellectual master of the world, the world’s intellectuals largely rushed to America to partake of, intensify, and further revolutionize those extensions.

Conditions, in short, were perfect for the world ascendency of America on the basis of the systematic development of the intellect as the ultimate weapon of war, itself made possible by the ascendancy in America of the intellect as the dominant human faculty — not only in theory or as an ideal, but as an established reality. This was the hinge of history where Oppenheimer found himself and maneuvered toward its center. The achievement of a global circuit of intellectual genius applied to the scientific mastery of the building blocks of matter was of a piece with the systematic “revolutionizing” of all areas of human endeavor by means of the intellect, which Oppenheimer makes so central to Oppenheimer’s motivation for making himself responsible for the intellectual revolution’s culmination in godlike mastery over the life and death of the whole world.

SENSORIUM DEPLOYED

Interestingly, Oppenheimer gives us a world master remarkably incurious or insensitive to actual religion — taking Trinity from John Donne’s questionable verse, and “I am become death” from the scripture of a faith to which he never ascribed — as well as to rocketry, which (story for another day) played such a stunning role in the religious inclinations of its military pioneers. Nolan’s Oppenheimer is so dismissive of Teller’s “super” hydrogen bomb because, beyond its superlative powers of destruction, delivering the payload would require “an oxcart.”

Unlike, say, Pynchon, McLuhan’s focus wasn’t on the religious significance of rockets to aerospace and the death-dealing technological mastery thereof; he was more focused on the Devil already being prince of the air. There are only three mentions of Rockets in Understanding Media, and one of them is a Canadian hockey player. The other two are these:

The movie, as much as the alphabet and the printed word, is an aggressive and imperial form that explodes outward into other cultures. Its explosive force was significantly greater in silent pictures than in talkies, for the electromagnetic sound track already forecast the substitution of electric implosion for mechanical explosion. The silent pictures were immediately acceptable across language barriers as the talkies were not. Radio teamed up with film to give us the talkie and to carry us further on our present reverse course of implosion or re-integration after the mechanical age of explosion and expansion. The extreme form of this implosion or contraction is the image of the astronaut locked into his wee bit of wraparound space. Far from enlarging our world, he is announcing its contraction to village size. The rocket and the space capsule are ending the rule of the wheel and the machine, as much as did the wire services, radio, and TV…

Automation certainly assumes the servomechanism and the computer. That is to say, it assumes electricity as store and expediter of information. These traits of store, or "memory," and accelerator are the basic features of any medium of communication whatever. In the case of electricity, it is not corporeal substance that is stored or moved, but perception and information. As for technological acceleration, it now approaches the speed of light. All nonelectric media had merely hastened things a bit. The wheel, the road, the ship, the airplane, and even the space rocket are utterly lacking in the character of instant movement. Is it strange, then, that electricity should confer on all previous human organization a completely new character? The very toil of man now becomes a kind of enlightenment.

As a good media theorist what preoccupied McLuhan was less the rocket than the satellite: not the V2 but Sputnik (not a name at all but Russian for satellite). For rockets and their payloads — human or military — left and returned to Earth, whereas satellites enclosed it — in information. The satellite, not the rocket with its warhead, really announced the conquest of the world — as opposed to the possibility of its mere annihilation — by the intellect.

VENGEANCE IS MINE, SAITH THE NERD

The importance of this distinct turn of events is absolute. For the satellite may have turned the world into an absolute object for intellectuals to master, but for us down below, it turned the world into an absolute stage to play upon. Global village became global theater, and global theater a worldwide theater of war. No longer was Zeus’s thunderbolt, Krishna’s world-destroying time, or Thor’s hammer the only, or even ultimate, spiritual expression of military hardware’s material might. Now, a supreme weapon swallowed the world and all within it, not in “the splendor of the mighty one” like “the radiance of a thousand suns” but in the total illumination of a software singularity systematizing permanent, infinite psychological operations:

Since Sputnik put the globe in a “proscenium arch,” and the global village has been transformed into a global theater, the result, quite literally, is the use of public space for “doing one’s thing.” A planet parenthesized by a man-made environment no longer offers any directions or goals to nation or individual. The world itself has become a probe. “Snooping with intent to creep” or “casing everybody else’s joint” has become a major activity. As the main business of the world becomes espionage, secrecy becomes the basis of wealth, as with magic in a tribal society….

It is just when people are all engaged in snooping on themselves and one another that they become anesthetized to the whole process. Tranquilizers and anesthetics, private and corporate, become the largest business in the world just as the world is attempting to maximize every form of alert. Sound-light shows… are in effect mergers, retrievers of the tribal condition. It is a state that has already overtaken private enterprise, as individual businesses form into massive conglomerates. As information itself becomes the largest business in the world, data banks know more about individual people than the people do themselves. The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.

McLuhan introduces the above material with an epigram from a long-forgotten book entitled The Eclipse of the Intellectual. “In the 20th century,” McLuhan observes, “the number of ‘past times’ that are simultaneously available is so vast as to create cultural anarchy. When all the cultures of the world are simultaneously present, the work of the artist in the elucidation of form takes on new scope and new urgency. Most men are pushed into the artist’s role.” Faced with a singularity of culture, reducing all cultures to garbage in a universal scrapheap/data bank, the intellectual recoils at the sight of masses of artists swarming like hungry flies and ants over the trash.

But the intellectuals have had their revenge. Nothing to me epitomizes how exhausted and oversaturated intellectualism has become than the hilarious way many conservatives insist America’s (the world’s?) children must be rigorously educated not into critical theory (boooo!) but critical thinking (yaaaay!). The assault on all human institutions by intellectuals, intellectualism — and the fateful crossover from mere intellectual egotism or narcissism into the worship of intellect as the ultimate magic, smart power etc., etc., the principle that, even if smarts can kill, only smarts save — responded to the singularity of culture by undertaking a computer-age equivalent of the Manhattan Project, encasing all things spirit in a universal meta-cultural theater of smarts, an invisible networked system of satellites of the soul.

FROM METACULTURE TO METANOIA

As necessary as politics still might be — the distinguishing friend and enemy, the attacking and rolling back the enemy’s gains, the claiming and holding of territory visible and invisible — today’s total intellectual war of the world can not be won by an apocalyptic, mimetic race of intellectual arms. The circuit can only be broken — as the secular Oppenheimer, despite his rational fears of what he had unleashed, could never manage to do — by spiritual means: not only true faith in true God, but by the living out of faith in and through the experienced reality of God’s creating, saving presence.

Achieving this experience demands humiliation, not least the humbling of the intellect. It must be driven down from the head into the heart, which it must serve — or, rather, it must be remembered that the intellect actually resides in the heart. For just one of many accounts of the understanding of the Church and the Saints concerning the change of mind that must take place in the heart, see here:

purifying our nous, our intellection, and guarding our thoughts (those things that can enter into, or can dwell within, our heart) is not only for seeing outwardly, but also for seeing inwardly, and why the Fathers are so adamant in speaking about this.

For the saying is true, Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God!