I wrote recently a blog post with reflections on thinking Christianly about technology. Your suggestion that power/control sits on the throne was surprisingly consistent with something I concluded. In my blog post I wrote:
"I have wondered if the flailing reaction of the elites to Covid has been at least as much temper tantrum as fear. Covid revealed the puny limits of our current technology and many in the west were insulted by that. The behavior of many bureaucrats has resembled nothing so much as wounded pride. Covid has delivered an unwelcome reminder that jettisoning the hierarchy of goods established by God, while subjecting all value judgments to "the science", has been a foolish trade. Our elites have behaved rather like someone who is horrified by the sudden realization that he has been swindled."
Your post also reminded me of this observation from C.S. Lewis:
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
This also explains a lot of the discourse around the countermeasures to Covid. "This is a technology we just developed, so it MUST work because we said so." It's impossible to admit that something is ineffective.
I am reminded of CS Lewis’s That Hideous Strength and having spent a (blessedly short) time in Washington I think you’re spot on. In the Bible we’d call it Principalities and Powers, and DC gives me the willies
I recommend CS Lewis’ The Abolition of Man. He described 75 years ago what we’re experiencing today with the ground cut out from under mankind and a small group of amoral, nihilistic men running everything. This is not a work of fiction but a series of lectures given during WWII.
This essay is perfectly in line with what Mattias Desmet is claiming in The Psychology of Totalitarianism, as the totalitarianism that is the ultimate historical end of The Enlightenment and a materialist interpretation of the universe.
This essay is brilliant. It definitely describes many of those who not only work in Washington, D.C., but are drawn to it in the first place. That said, I do think non-intervention once had a considerable hold on American elites (policymakers, intellectuals, etc.). Why? It was once integral to American identity to be above the worst habits of the Old World.
World War II is often seen as the beginning of the American Empire, but that strikes me as ahistorical. Consider a petition sent to the U.S. Senate in early 1899: "In accordance with the principles upon which our Republic was founded we are duty bound to recognize the rights of the inhabitants [of Puerto Rico, the Philippines]. Its signatories included the sitting president of Harvard (Charles Eliot) and an ex-president of the United States (Grover Cleveland).
America's turn toward empire began at the end of the nineteenth century with the war against Spain and the suppression of the Filipino rebellion. However, the imperialists also faced determined resistance from within the American ruling class. The Anti-Imperialist League came into existence almost overnight and its membership was a remarkable cross-section of American society. Opposition to the war(s) was probably the only time Andrew Carnegie and Sam Gompers saw eye-to-eye on anything (both men were vice-presidents of the Anti-Imperialist League.) Elite academics called on America to resist imitating the worst habits of the Old World, albeit for their own reasons. (William Graham Sumner found imperialism incompatible with laissez-faire capitalism, which he considered something akin to The Consensus.) Revulsion at a country born in rebellion ruling foreign populations even brought out the best in some politicians - Thomas B. Reed (R-ME) not only gave up the Speakership but quit politics altogether after the Treaty of Paris was ratified (with one vote to spare!) in February 1899.
I share the belief that changing American foreign policy any time soon is unlikely. But the future is, as always, unknown. It may take a century to return non-interventionism to a respectable position in elite circles. Or events in the near future may prove the ruling class, and its ideology, is far weaker than anyone suspects.
(Side bar: The most readable work I have seen on this issue is the chapter "End of a Dream: The United States, 1890 - 1904" in The Proud Tower by Barbara Tuchman)
This was a great essay. I just would give a bit of nuance when you write that Paul Kingsnorth would say money sits in the throne left empty since God was « removed » from it. He might have written it somewhere, although I don’t recall. But his whole thought is focusing on the « Machine », a formless system that is running on power and technological control, very much as you say in your own analysis. I know it’s a point of detail but Paul is a great thinker and I wanted to do justice to his work !
Excellent insight and overview of the sadly ascending (or is it really, descending) rungs of thought and action that conjure all the "unintended consequences" of good people trying to do the right thing. I think centering the system in control/power issues is on the mark and has been spelled out for us from the Faust legend to the more recent C. S. Lewis literature cited in earlier comments.
To add a cognitive, neurological dimension, we have the recent the work of Iain McGilcrist (The Master and his Emissary, The Matter with Things) on the differing orientations to the world of the two hemispheres of our brain. He argues the bias of the Left Hemisphere is toward abstraction, stasis and control -- over and against the Right Hemisphere's affinity for more direct, wholistic, open-ended perception -- thus creating a cognitive-emotional tension which serves us well when properly balanced but when skew, as happens so easily when the cultural, bureaucratic cards are stacked in favor of the Left, we suffer a blinkered and quasi-schizophrenic loss about which we remain largely unaware. The Ring of Power (or Kingsnorth's "Machine") that creates and sustain bureaucratic norms has uncanny strength rquires a different kind of power and imagination to overcome. Your substack is a worthy effort and ally in that direction.. Thank you.
So appreciate Substack and NS Lyons! Essays like this are vital in trying to piece together what reality actually is in the 2020s. It’s like reality is a dark room and it’s not possible to just flick on the light to see it. Instead we have to feel around, taking in as many data points as possible to then stitch together a mental picture. This helps with that picture. Great nuance and perspective as always. Keep up the good work!
In my humble opinion, this is the most spot-on essay you've written. I've long thought that the average explanations given for the evils of, well, basically anything, are overly simplistic. Virtually everyone wants to believe they're a good person.
p.s. Second-to-last paragraph, "breaks" should be "brakes."
I read the echo of Bertrand de Jouvenel in this magnificent essay. Every one of N.S.' essays reaches new heights. After the tour de force on C.S. Lewis on Tolkien, this one is a superb development on the Blob. I felt in an intimate way everything that is illuminated in this essay when I was consulting for the international development industry. This piece opens new horizons for me to rethink that experience.
My fourth time reading this one. Our author is all together, correct. This is how the world works writ large.
I own a security guard company with over 5000 employees, $200m in revenue.
Our corporate culture, client relations, union negotiations, all exhibit the exact same characteristics, what Curtis Yarvin calls the “selective advantage of dominant ideas” and the “inability of recessive ideas to compete.” We have a “consensus” too. That is how it works, always and everywhere.
Our “Telos”, our throne, is occupied by my admonition to make it easy: EASY!
Easy means simple and honest; that is how I would wish to be treated if I were an employee.
I bet I have fired 100 management personnel in my 29years and spent millions of dollars in severance all because they couldn’t be honest and simple. People love to be fancy.
“As for forms of governance let fools contest: whatever is best administered is best.” Alexander Pope, 1688-1744.
I also hear echoes of CS Lewis, especially The Abolition of Man and The Inner Ring, but I am also reminded of this:
"The Dark Arts,” said Snape, “are many, varied, ever-changing, and eternal. Fighting them is like fighting a many-headed monster, which, each time a neck is severed, sprouts a head even fiercer and cleverer than before. You are fighting that which is unfixed, mutating, indestructible.” (I'm not generally given to quoting HP but the above bit seemed apropos.)
Yes, thank you for another trenchant and timely essay. The rise of AI seems similar with its accumulation of knowledge and patterns that provide now ever more sophisticated synthesis looking like real human creativity - I've been experimenting with Chat-open-AI because I know my students will soon be using it, if they aren't already, is but a piece of this confluence of power without brakes, technology without morality, power indivisible, and world without end. Amen. The question of questioning can't even begin because the throne is indeed empty. I just feel like it must all come down to how to survive this, much pain before we can heal or be reborn.
I wrote recently a blog post with reflections on thinking Christianly about technology. Your suggestion that power/control sits on the throne was surprisingly consistent with something I concluded. In my blog post I wrote:
"I have wondered if the flailing reaction of the elites to Covid has been at least as much temper tantrum as fear. Covid revealed the puny limits of our current technology and many in the west were insulted by that. The behavior of many bureaucrats has resembled nothing so much as wounded pride. Covid has delivered an unwelcome reminder that jettisoning the hierarchy of goods established by God, while subjecting all value judgments to "the science", has been a foolish trade. Our elites have behaved rather like someone who is horrified by the sudden realization that he has been swindled."
Your post also reminded me of this observation from C.S. Lewis:
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
Thanks for writing.
You should share the blog post!
https://www.keithlowery.com/technology-and-christian-priorities/
I read your essay and it’s brilliant.
subscribed!
You a fan of Jaques Ellul, or at least acquainted with him?
I know who he is/was. Haven’t read any of his work.
I rather liked his seventy - six questions we ought to ask of any new technology:
https://geezmagazine.org/blogs/entry/jacques-elluls-76-reasonable-questions-to-ask-about-any-technology
Many of them, anyway.
This also explains a lot of the discourse around the countermeasures to Covid. "This is a technology we just developed, so it MUST work because we said so." It's impossible to admit that something is ineffective.
I am reminded of CS Lewis’s That Hideous Strength and having spent a (blessedly short) time in Washington I think you’re spot on. In the Bible we’d call it Principalities and Powers, and DC gives me the willies
I recommend CS Lewis’ The Abolition of Man. He described 75 years ago what we’re experiencing today with the ground cut out from under mankind and a small group of amoral, nihilistic men running everything. This is not a work of fiction but a series of lectures given during WWII.
Excellent work. This is why I subscribe.
This essay is perfectly in line with what Mattias Desmet is claiming in The Psychology of Totalitarianism, as the totalitarianism that is the ultimate historical end of The Enlightenment and a materialist interpretation of the universe.
Yes, I think so. I touched on this in the Lewis/Tolkien essay.
This essay is brilliant. It definitely describes many of those who not only work in Washington, D.C., but are drawn to it in the first place. That said, I do think non-intervention once had a considerable hold on American elites (policymakers, intellectuals, etc.). Why? It was once integral to American identity to be above the worst habits of the Old World.
World War II is often seen as the beginning of the American Empire, but that strikes me as ahistorical. Consider a petition sent to the U.S. Senate in early 1899: "In accordance with the principles upon which our Republic was founded we are duty bound to recognize the rights of the inhabitants [of Puerto Rico, the Philippines]. Its signatories included the sitting president of Harvard (Charles Eliot) and an ex-president of the United States (Grover Cleveland).
America's turn toward empire began at the end of the nineteenth century with the war against Spain and the suppression of the Filipino rebellion. However, the imperialists also faced determined resistance from within the American ruling class. The Anti-Imperialist League came into existence almost overnight and its membership was a remarkable cross-section of American society. Opposition to the war(s) was probably the only time Andrew Carnegie and Sam Gompers saw eye-to-eye on anything (both men were vice-presidents of the Anti-Imperialist League.) Elite academics called on America to resist imitating the worst habits of the Old World, albeit for their own reasons. (William Graham Sumner found imperialism incompatible with laissez-faire capitalism, which he considered something akin to The Consensus.) Revulsion at a country born in rebellion ruling foreign populations even brought out the best in some politicians - Thomas B. Reed (R-ME) not only gave up the Speakership but quit politics altogether after the Treaty of Paris was ratified (with one vote to spare!) in February 1899.
I share the belief that changing American foreign policy any time soon is unlikely. But the future is, as always, unknown. It may take a century to return non-interventionism to a respectable position in elite circles. Or events in the near future may prove the ruling class, and its ideology, is far weaker than anyone suspects.
(Side bar: The most readable work I have seen on this issue is the chapter "End of a Dream: The United States, 1890 - 1904" in The Proud Tower by Barbara Tuchman)
Great book, had forgotten most of that, will have to reread. It's sad how quaint the idea of a leading politician quitting the game entirely is.
This was a great essay. I just would give a bit of nuance when you write that Paul Kingsnorth would say money sits in the throne left empty since God was « removed » from it. He might have written it somewhere, although I don’t recall. But his whole thought is focusing on the « Machine », a formless system that is running on power and technological control, very much as you say in your own analysis. I know it’s a point of detail but Paul is a great thinker and I wanted to do justice to his work !
Excellent insight and overview of the sadly ascending (or is it really, descending) rungs of thought and action that conjure all the "unintended consequences" of good people trying to do the right thing. I think centering the system in control/power issues is on the mark and has been spelled out for us from the Faust legend to the more recent C. S. Lewis literature cited in earlier comments.
To add a cognitive, neurological dimension, we have the recent the work of Iain McGilcrist (The Master and his Emissary, The Matter with Things) on the differing orientations to the world of the two hemispheres of our brain. He argues the bias of the Left Hemisphere is toward abstraction, stasis and control -- over and against the Right Hemisphere's affinity for more direct, wholistic, open-ended perception -- thus creating a cognitive-emotional tension which serves us well when properly balanced but when skew, as happens so easily when the cultural, bureaucratic cards are stacked in favor of the Left, we suffer a blinkered and quasi-schizophrenic loss about which we remain largely unaware. The Ring of Power (or Kingsnorth's "Machine") that creates and sustain bureaucratic norms has uncanny strength rquires a different kind of power and imagination to overcome. Your substack is a worthy effort and ally in that direction.. Thank you.
So appreciate Substack and NS Lyons! Essays like this are vital in trying to piece together what reality actually is in the 2020s. It’s like reality is a dark room and it’s not possible to just flick on the light to see it. Instead we have to feel around, taking in as many data points as possible to then stitch together a mental picture. This helps with that picture. Great nuance and perspective as always. Keep up the good work!
'The place is busily fighting a holy war against the terms of existence.' in search of meaning. That brings it full circle.
In my humble opinion, this is the most spot-on essay you've written. I've long thought that the average explanations given for the evils of, well, basically anything, are overly simplistic. Virtually everyone wants to believe they're a good person.
p.s. Second-to-last paragraph, "breaks" should be "brakes."
Thanks, good catch! I've fixed.
I read the echo of Bertrand de Jouvenel in this magnificent essay. Every one of N.S.' essays reaches new heights. After the tour de force on C.S. Lewis on Tolkien, this one is a superb development on the Blob. I felt in an intimate way everything that is illuminated in this essay when I was consulting for the international development industry. This piece opens new horizons for me to rethink that experience.
My fourth time reading this one. Our author is all together, correct. This is how the world works writ large.
I own a security guard company with over 5000 employees, $200m in revenue.
Our corporate culture, client relations, union negotiations, all exhibit the exact same characteristics, what Curtis Yarvin calls the “selective advantage of dominant ideas” and the “inability of recessive ideas to compete.” We have a “consensus” too. That is how it works, always and everywhere.
Our “Telos”, our throne, is occupied by my admonition to make it easy: EASY!
Easy means simple and honest; that is how I would wish to be treated if I were an employee.
I bet I have fired 100 management personnel in my 29years and spent millions of dollars in severance all because they couldn’t be honest and simple. People love to be fancy.
“As for forms of governance let fools contest: whatever is best administered is best.” Alexander Pope, 1688-1744.
Very scary and revealing. It's good to have an insider like you on our side, whatever that might be.
I also hear echoes of CS Lewis, especially The Abolition of Man and The Inner Ring, but I am also reminded of this:
"The Dark Arts,” said Snape, “are many, varied, ever-changing, and eternal. Fighting them is like fighting a many-headed monster, which, each time a neck is severed, sprouts a head even fiercer and cleverer than before. You are fighting that which is unfixed, mutating, indestructible.” (I'm not generally given to quoting HP but the above bit seemed apropos.)
A wing nut here. As Dylan so aptly pointed out “you have to serve somebody”. Power. Pure power. I fear for the future.
Yes, thank you for another trenchant and timely essay. The rise of AI seems similar with its accumulation of knowledge and patterns that provide now ever more sophisticated synthesis looking like real human creativity - I've been experimenting with Chat-open-AI because I know my students will soon be using it, if they aren't already, is but a piece of this confluence of power without brakes, technology without morality, power indivisible, and world without end. Amen. The question of questioning can't even begin because the throne is indeed empty. I just feel like it must all come down to how to survive this, much pain before we can heal or be reborn.
Or self immolate
Only on Thursdays.