Subscriber Commentary and Review (#16)

Technology; Society; The Chinese Car Empire; 12-ft Tall Pagan Puppets of Syrian Refugee Children

Welcome subscribers new and old! This is the Upheaval Subscriber Commentary and Review thread, where I share some things I read recently that I thought were particularly interesting, and you can discuss whatever you want in the comments. It’s been on hiatus since May, but now it’s back. My stretch goal is to start keeping it concise so I can more easily put it out on the regular; I completely failed at that today, but I’ll keep working on it… Anyway, our big themes in this issue are: technology, community, and society. Enjoy. – N.S. Lyons

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Part I: The Troublesome Tribulations of Technology

Rod Dreher, “The Digital Apocalypse Is Here: Reading Anton Barba-Kay on the Meaning of Online Culture” (The European Conservative)

Dreher has written an intriguing review of a new book by American philosopher Antón Barba-Kay, A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Formation, which I think I will pick up to read myself. Barba-Kay’s point, which Dreher tries to get across, seems to be that collectively we have only begun to wrestle with the true depth of the transformation wrought by the digital revolution, including on how we humans conceive of ourselves, our place in the world, and the world itself.

Barba-Kay predicts that many of the cultural assumptions and institutions (including political institutions) that have dominated the West for centuries, and which we pre-digitals take for granted, were really the product of the age of the printing press, and are unlikely to survive the digital upheaval.

Why is digital culture so different from other technologies? Because, argues Barba-Kay, it acts directly upon us to capture and control our attention, and promising us that we can control the world by controlling our experience of the world. “Digital technology is a spiritual technology,” he writes. Why? Because “the digital era thus marks the point at which our concern will be mainly the control of human nature through our control of what we are aware of and how we attend to it.”

As he writes:

Never has such change been struck so fast. The printing press and firearms were technological watersheds with world-historical implications, but they took decades or centuries to assimilate. Digital technology has, by contrast, so changed human life within a couple of decades that teens are today growing up in an altogether new cultural environment – with different expectations, habits, and standard points of orientation from their parents’. There is now arguably a greater chasm between someone age twelve and someone age fifty (or forty, or thirty) than there ever was between people separated by a millennium of pharaonic rule in ancient Egypt. The fact that we must make a concerted effort to remember how we did things “before” digital technology bespeaks the abrupt and thorough extent to which it has captivated our imagination of the ordinary.

The digital is the advent of a new religion—not literally, but effectively. We live in a culture that considers technological advancement to be the greatest measure of progress. If we associate perfection with divinity, then, he argues, “digital technology will continue to occupy a role undeniably analogous to that of religion in other ages.”

“If the present technological age has a lasting gift for us,” writes the philosopher, “it is to urge as decisive the question of what human beings are for, what the point of us is at all.”

L.P. Koch, “The German Soul” (Substack)

This is a fascinating essay that is rather hard describe or even quote from, but which essentially argues the case that there was once a uniquely German way of viewing the world, and we might be able to learn something from it today. This “German soul” was:

[T]o a large degree, anti-materialist, anti-mechanistic, anti-positivist. Even in the face of the apparent successes of the natural sciences in the 19th century, the German soul couldn’t help but rebel against scientism: after the philosophical school of German idealism, to many Anglo ears the epitome of irrationality, the Germans went even further with their Lebensphilosophie—the philosophical movement that emphasized life, wholeness, organism as opposed to cold causality, materialism, and reductionism. This life-centered philosophy was everywhere in the early 20th century.

In particular, this approach, by rejecting a vulgar philosophy of pure causality as the root of true reason, was better able to grapple with and overcome the “disenchantment of the world” and other metaphysical challenges posed by technological development. In fact, the author argues, it helped propel a golden age of German science before the war, leading to such insights as quantum theory. E.g.:

You can clearly see this mindset in the work of Werner Heisenberg (of uncertainty principle fame), too. The great physicist jotted down his own philosophy and cosmology throughout his career, published posthumously under the title Ordnung der Wirklichkeit (“Order of Reality”). In it, Heisenberg explicitly follows Goethe’s work, painting a multi-layered picture of the cosmos where each level—physics, chemistry, biology, human consciousness, and the highest layer, “creative forces”—brings about entirely new planes of being that cannot be reduced to the layers below. Of the “creative forces” level, he said that it “can only be expressed in parables.”

But meanwhile…

[A] very different mindset emerged in the Anglo world. Analytic philosophy, with its reductionist approach to philosophical concepts, took over and stood in stark contrast to the German focus on wholeness. And of course, Darwinism, tightly linked with eugenics as well as a general secular, naturalistic program to eliminate all traces of the mystical or supernatural, originated in Britain. The neo-Darwinian “modern synthesis” was Anglo-driven as well. The rest, as they say, is history…

The German soul was twisted and corrupted by the Nazis, who succeeded in “paradoxically turning the Romantic anti-modernist impulse into modern bureaucracy, technology, and earthly socialist ideas” by exploiting a longing for community and transcendent rebirth, in addition to adopting Darwinist ideas. Then the Anglo-Americans took over and post-war Germans turned into the stereotype of hyper-technocratic, bureaucratic automatons most of us think of them as today.

Spengler’s fear and longing, stripped of its cosmic, transcendent essence, strikes again: fear not of soul death, longing not for connection between the inner and the outer world, but a deeply paradoxical fear of man-made technology, and longing for more man-made technology to fight old man-made technology. Of all the great things a healthy German soul could have contributed to the world, this crippled, crippling constellation turned out to be our most successful export.

The author argues, however, that this old “German soul” is today making a comeback by necessity, echoed for example in the work of Iain McGilchrist on the dangers of overreliance on a mechanistic, “left-brain” dominated world. There’s a lot more here, as well, including a very interesting discussion of “the German way, for better or worse, of dealing with authority,” and some especially fascinating correspondence between Max Planck and a young Heisenberg on the best way to resist Nazism. I recommend reading the whole thing.

Morgoth, “Ruminations By A Vegetable Patch” (Substack)

Behind me is an old cabinet with smaller planters — swedes, and the aforementioned turnips are waiting impatiently to rejuvenate the wasteland in the centre. Isolated and alone in a separate planter entirely stand the radishes. I contemplate the celery once more, kneeling down in wet dirt and gently inspecting the multitudinous stalks and contrasting to supermarket celery and images on the internet. A thought flits across my mind. I could nip back into the house and look quickly on the phone at images or do a brief Google.

Oh God, the phone, the internet, notifications, and messages. No, I don’t think I will.

I shall weed instead. After weeding I decided to thread a few of the creeping pea vines which came loose back onto the shambolic trellis I constructed.

This is my favourite reality.

Relevant and beautifully written…

Back inside and logging into the digital realm, the first images I see are enormous lines of young people queuing to have their retinas scanned in order to access a cryptocurrency called ‘‘Worldcoin’’. The eye scan proves to the Machine that they’re human. The symbolism of this grandiose techno-grid being unable to determine what a human is without such intrusive measures is almost palpable as they dance and scan their way into a future that seems utterly at odds with what being a human is.

This is my worst reality. The gamified world of unlocking and progressing, unlocking and progressing sits at the core of digital logic whether that be Skyrim, a digital ID, or gaining access to crypto. I, and I believe many others, are half in and half out of this grid — trapped between two portals, and sooner or later the tension between the two will result in a break. A few years ago such a scenario would have concerned me far more, but now I view it almost as a liberating event — the turning away will be set, and the city intellect and those who will become the Fellaheen will have chosen their separate destinies.

Centuries ago men sat content tending to gardens. Centuries in the future, if there is a future, men will still be feeling content as they enjoy the fruits of their labour. What happens in between is an aberration to be endured and survived.

This kind of essay is what makes me love Substack. But I wonder if “Morgoth” has considered changing his name, given that the Lord of Technique doesn’t really seem to fit anymore. Maybe Oromë would suit better, perhaps? Just saying. Also, this all sounds suspiciously German for an alleged Brit, to be honest…  

Vincent Kelley, “Ted Kaczynski and the Paradox of the Postwar Predicament” (Substack)

How do I describe this essay? It’s about the 2003 film The Net: The Unabomber, LSD and the Internet, and hippies, and techies, and the American security state, and The WELL, and cybernetics, and how pseudo-humanism and the 1960s New York art scene helped destroy the world. I guess you’d probably better just read it.

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Part II: Social Studies

Palladium magazine has just published its 11th issue, on the theme of our “social apocalypse.” I found two of its essays to be especially powerful.

Ash Milton, “The Triumph of the Good Samaritan” (Palladium)

Describing the ongoing “uncivilization” of North American urban life that he’s watched first hand in the places he’s grown up, Ash Milton reflects on the nature of this decay, and how there is really only one way through: “By building up strong social bonds that are disciplined by a tangible common purpose… You escape the process of uncivilization by targeting a healthy form of life and cultivating that instead.”

He recounts in this essay how it was only “in the walls of a little Byzantine church” that he began to visit that over time he really “learned this valuable lesson.”

When you arrived on a Sunday morning, you pushed past the metal gates at the entrance, headed up porch steps, and moved through the front door into what would have been a living room. There, you crossed from earth into heaven. The golden glow of candlelight reflecting off icons, the rhythms of chant, and the slow undulation of a crowd on its feet let you know that you had entered the vital core of something active and alive. The liturgies were full immersions into a total way of living, thinking, and being. Everything had meaning.

It was the beautiful services that first brought me to the little church. What sticks with me to this day was seeing a collection of people with different strengths, temperaments, and backgrounds—often with little else in common, and occasionally ones that might have been foes elsewhere—transform into a single body.

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This openness did not entail a lack of obligations. In a small community, things only happen because people do the work. Someone has to bring the food for common meals. Someone has to chant and read and assist at the altar. Someone has to prepare the eucharistic gifts. There was no central directive for most of these things. Instead, people took them on through personal callings and individual encouragement. I was surprised that it was sometimes those dealing with the greatest personal struggles who were the most dedicated to their roles, which became stable anchors in their lives.

Many people found strength in confession and spiritual direction with the priest. Those who undertook this received religious solace, but also more direct individual instruction on how to correct or better shoulder the disorders in their lives. It was largely not a place of dramatic transformation or flashy, instant healing. Instead, people formed deep roots over time, drew strength from those around them, and grew. Sometimes, they found themselves becoming central, supporting figures in the community.

This could not have been more different from the process playing out in surrounding streets, he notes (with a twist):

This experience was completely different from what I had seen elsewhere. Having become used to the dissolution, it was a shock to become immersed in a body of people so obviously alive, with its form and ligaments exhibiting health and vitality. On those occasions when people still slipped away, it was an obvious failing and a pain to those who knew them.

But another aspect of it all surprised me as well. The rhetoric about the love of neighbor was something I had seen beyond the walls of the little church. Rather than health and life, it had been in the service of something chaotic and destructive.

He goes on to explore the difference between real and false or parasitic social community. Ultimately, he aims to remind us that cultural dissolution presents a vacuum that can be filled by better things, if we are willing to put in the work to cultivate them from the ground up.

The ongoing dissolution of bonds across mainline society is not merely a sign of social death. It is also an opportunity to establish a new and more functional basis for loyalty, cooperation, and the development of social capital. When the world around you is increasingly dysfunctional and the people are scattering to the winds, your ability to create something functional and unifying has a far greater impact.

Wolf Tivy, “Don’t Learn Value From Society” (Palladium)

Many of my friends from high school are dead. The worst instance is the loss of two of my best friends that I spent countless hours of adventure with. Those dead also include the brothers, sons, boyfriends, and girlfriends of those close to my family. It includes the guy I looked up to in sixth grade, who mentored me in my social development. Not too unexpectedly, it includes that one kid in elementary school with a single dad. Unexpectedly, it includes that promising and beautiful girl who gave a great speech at a rally. They aren’t the only ones.

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We reflect together on what went wrong. We have few answers. We agree that the parents were ignorant of all this. They had only distant sanitized relationships with their children. Their children could not participate in their parents’ society, so they found their own, which killed them. There were neighbors, but none with the insight or authority to correct us. The official authorities all had their hands tied by procedural boundaries. Anyway, they were just another distant system of prison wardens to be evaded. All anybody could do was wring their hands.

In some older books, we read about societies with a thick multigenerational social fabric, and the freedom to talk about and act on their problems. If something was wrong, an intervention could hope for the support of neighbors and family friends close enough to be helpful. But that all sounds very alien to us. We never saw anything like that. The best we got was a desperate intervention by single parents, or implicit moral guidance from having parents with their own solid networks. Still, it made the difference for some of us.

Tivy examines our ongoing societal disaster and concludes that what destroyed so many people he’s known is the fact that they have no source from which to acquire real values that can structure their lives in a coherent and healthy way. Instead, they have “false value sold to them by institutions and subcultures that have no structural reason to care about their real interests.”  

In a healthy social fabric, people talk to their kin and neighbors, who mostly have similar interests and share direct experience of what works for them. They maintain traditions of wisdom inherited from past generations. This makes for a trustworthy supply chain to form a robust social perspective. They can easily reject false value and keep each other grounded. This is what our neurotic friend with the vulnerable son lacked. This is what we lacked growing up. Trustworthy social perspective formation is what is missing in our society, and it is this that explains our strange social problems. For a variety of historical reasons, our social fabric is substantially weaker than it should be.

Without being able to triangulate to a trustworthy shared social perspective, you are stuck between getting taken for a ride by propagandists and collecting kooky conspiracy theories. No matter how hard you try to be rational, you simply lack the logistical backing necessary for precision. Your social ideas will be crude and misfocused. You’ll scream at your friends and family, not knowing who you can trust. You’ll double down on crazy lifestyles, get deceived by false value, get lost in drugs, and die in your own vomit at a disturbingly elevated rate.

The obvious solution is to rebuild real social fabric, or otherwise systematically provision trustworthy social perspective. This is easier said than done, but not exactly new technology either. Many churches pull off partial solutions every day, and we all have our networks of trusted friends. Besides, a large amount of power is sitting on the table for whoever can do it properly.

That last point is particularly important. America’s so-called conservatives could learn more lessons for crafting a strong and coherent strategy for building political power from these two essays alone than from the last hundred years of the Wall Street Journal editorial page. So of course they won’t. But more on this topic another time… I recommend checking out these two essays and the others in this exceptional issue.

Kruptos, “The Loss of Community and the Role of the State in a Mass, Market Driven Society” (Substack)

Speaking of community, this essay on the subject is also particularly insightful.

Community. This is one of those words which gets thrown around all the time. There is a kind of mystique to it. A sense of longing. We all seem to want it. We all claim that we are a part of some community or another, even if it’s just an online community. But one gets the sense that we talk about it so much because so few of us experience real community any more. It seems like the kind of thing that, if you have it, you don’t need to talk about it. So what is community? What are its characteristics? How do we know it when we see it? And why is it so important to understand what a community is and the role it is supposed to play in society? If we don’t, we cannot properly understand the role that our political institutions—that is, “the state”—must play in today’s mass society.

“Kruptos” has also done the hard work of putting together very interesting series diving into the work of French Philosopher Jacques Ellul on the impact of technology on society, which is immensely relevant and which I regret only reading after finishing “The China Convergence.”

Martin Gurri, “The World Before the Thaw” (Discourse)

Separately but somewhat relatedly, Martin Gurri argues that the defining problem of the political and social world today is not any zealous ideology, but a total lack of ideas that are not thoroughly “dead.”

A pseudo-ideology is designed by the people in power to keep them in power. It is blatantly self-serving and artificial. Far from grappling with big questions, pseudo-ideology rests on a foundation of avoidance. Far from seeking to overthrow the establishment, it demands its perpetuation unto eternity. A world justified by pseudo-ideologies must lapse into the political equivalent of suspended animation. That is our world. All around us, decrepit regimes cling to power by default. Dead ideologies are digitally exhumed and cannibalized. Absent the ferment of new ideas, the flow of history has frozen solid.

This describes the democracies as well as authoritarian nations. Everywhere, a mutinous public struggles in vain against a glacier of mendacity. In the twisted echo chambers of the web, the public can only rage impotently against the ice age while waiting for a thaw.

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History will resume again when an authentic ideology is proclaimed that will overwhelm the spurious narratives of the old regime. The missing element today isn’t equality or wealth or power but imagination. The reformation of democratic politics and society must first be conceptualized before it can be carried through. And there’s no telling where change will come from or what it might look like…

I’m not sure I fully agree, but it was an interesting read.

Brink Lindsey, “Life under ‘an immense and tutelary power’” (Substack)

As an honorable mention, reader Brink Lindsey has written a thought-provoking essay comparing and contrasting my work along with that of Matthew Crawford and Tanner Greer, critiquing it from a liberal perspective.

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Part III: Miscellanea

1. Apropos to nothing, this is a stunning graph:

From here.

I mean seriously, just try to take the reality of the speed and scale of change here. This is what a world-changing economic shift looks like; already it’s shaking up geopolitics as the Europeans react with particular horror. It’s also a good reminder that while China now faces many mounting economic challenges, it’s still a determined and very capable giant.

2. Let me just check in real quick on how the old campus is doing…

harvard

A post shared by @harvard

Oh, right. Of course.

Seems related: Louise Perry, “We Are Repaganizing” (First Things)

3. Poetry Hour: “Mooring at Qinhuai” (泊秦淮), by the late Tang Dynasty poet Du Mu

煙籠寒水月籠沙，夜泊秦淮近酒家。

商女不知亡國恨，隔江猶唱後庭花。

Roughly translated as:

Mist veils the cold stream, and moonlight the sand,

As I moor in the shadow of a river-tavern,

Where girls, with no thought of a perished kingdom,

Gaily echo ‘A Song of Courtyard Flowers.’

But the expression rendered here as “thought of a perished kingdom” (亡國恨) is more accurately translated, as Geremie Barmé reminds us, to something like the “regrets of a vanquished kingdom” or “agonies suffered by a nation.” Or most literally: “sorrowful outrage at losing one’s homeland.”

Ah, I think I know that feeling a little bit too Du Mu, and now understand what you mean.