Alex Karp, The Technological Republic 2

An essay on the crisis in American life

I’ve begun a four-part series on the way in which political conflict now concerns Enlightenment, our belief in rationalism. Read the first part below.

Part II
Entertainment

According to the plan of The Technological Republic, it would seem natural to go from the first to the third part: State the pattern of technological-political cooperation in American politics & then describe, demand, & advance a return to that consensus in the new circumstances. Update WWII or Cold War institutions for the new situation. No need for the second part—no need to talk about The Hollowing Out of The American Mind, much less to do so over five chapters! Yet, there is a need to understand what’s wrong with American elites & hence American education, since the future depends on them. Talent is scarce. The compulsion of technology is just not enough, whether the internal compulsion of public demand for improvements or the external compulsion of fending off or pre-empting rivals to empire. Unlike the people, the elites must be persuaded, not merely offered things or threatened with legal punishment. They must be willing to dedicate themselves to a national project for which they must bear most of the moral burden, because as elites they must act with a good conscience—they are giving orders, & therefore cannot simply leave it at being law-abiding.

Hence, we get an intellectual interlude, which includes a range of appeals, with Allan Bloom’s complaint concerning education in The Closing of The American Mind at the top:

Thus, openness has driven out the local deities, leaving only the speechless, meaningless country. There is no immediate, sensual experi­ence of the nation's meaning or its project, which would provide the basis for adult reflection on regimes & statesmanship. Students now arrive at the university ignorant & cynical about our political heritage, lacking the wherewithal to be either inspired by it or seriously critical of it.

That complaint implies this view of education:

The systematic expression and investigation of one’s own beliefs—the essential purpose of genuine education—remain our best defense against the mind becoming a product or vehicle for the ambitions of another.

While at the bottom, we have the plain statement of the inevitable political conflict:

The fifty most valuable technology companies in the world were worth a combined $24.8 trillion as of 2024. American firms accounted for 86 percent of that total value, or $21.4 trillion. In other words, the United States is responsible for generating nearly nine out of every ten dollars in value of the world’s top technology companies. & of those fifty firms, nearly all of the most valuable ones—including Apple ($3.5 trillion), Microsoft ($3.2 trillion), Nvidia ($3.0 trillion), Alphabet ($2.1 trillion), Amazon ($2.0 trillion), Meta ($1.4 trillion), & Tesla ($0.8 trillion)—have roots either in Silicon Valley or on the West Coast. & that level of concentration of wealth & influence—a level that has never before been seen in modern economic history—is only set to increase.”

In the end, the nation, this collective attempt at not merely self-governance but the construction of a shared & common life, if not purpose, will decide whether it wants Silicon Valley to believe in anything other than the power of its own creations.

In the middle of this range, not as crass as self-interest but not as lofty as wisdom, we find a suggestive portrait of the promise of liberalism & the difficulty of achieving the kind of education, the kind of institutions, & the kind of popular opinion required to defend freedom of the mind in America & in the world. The character of the effort is an elegy for the collapse of mid-century liberalism: Free speech, vigorous engagement with the urgent issues of American politics, an intelligent concern with world history & thought, the education or training of leaders whose ambition is yoked to the national project, the fostering of impressive individuals who make us proud to be American, not to say human. Liberals abandoned responsibility at the moment they attained institutional supremacy in America & the world.¹

The portrait of humane liberalism found in these chapters, as much in the stories of conflict & “intellectual courage” it recounts as in the questions it asks about the changing beliefs of American elites in the last three generations, is bound to be unpopular, since it attempts to mix respect for religion with dedication to new investigations, respect for authority with an insistence on making up one’s own mind, & respect for public opinion with opposition to conformism. One sign of this problem is that there are no interesting protagonists here; if anything, the focus is on antagonists—Edward Said, for example. There is no way to bring together a large middle class coalition around the project of criticizing the academic criticism of Western Civ. Perhaps there is then no hope of reforming higher education, which has collapsed into opportunism, a cynical worship of success signaled by elites desperately going into finance, at the same time as it has reduced the life of the university to hedonism & moralism, punishing the decent as well as the free-spirited for their refusal to submit to silly demands often expressed in hysterical histrionics.

Academia is not the only victim of this civil war within liberalism which reduced the quest for wisdom to merit in pursuit of profit, i.e. a financial oligarchy. The counter-culture of the ‘60s, the most famous reaction to the limits of mid-c. liberalism, was involved in this failure of confidence. It produced figures like Steve Jobs, not just musicians or drugs, who turned against the state & the national project, looking to redefine America by opening up a portal to the future through careful cultivation of the individual’s creativity or imagination, through consumer tech, especially software. This was perhaps the noblest attempt to bring together again liberalism’s mass appeal, or democratic legitimacy, with its elitism, or futuristic aspirations; but the result has been the consumer internet, which is powered by unusual talent trying to enslave the minds of Americans to apps. Powers previously undreamed of are not only dedicated to triviality, but aim to prevent seriousness in the most intelligent as in ordinary people.

Liberalism bet everything on the use of the mind to achieve prosperity & it has accordingly failed to develop the human mind, but also to produce enough prosperity to prevent massive social or political conflict. Parallel to culture shocks, we’ve had major economic problems since the late 1960s. We’re in danger of throwing away the acquisition of property in exchange for access to “experiences,” turning to a “gig economy” for anything from cars & homes to food & love. “There’s an app for that” turns out to mean managing downward mobility. But partisanship & polarization might be the same thing. Liberalism without free men is the contradiction we now must face. Happily, the neglected parts of human nature are now visible because of political conflict & disillusionment with the reduction of life to entertainment—it’s possible to be serious again at the very moment it is urgently necessary to do so. Popular & elite dissatisfaction could lead to a new coalition & a new politics.

1. My objections to Karp’s analysis of liberal collapse can be summarized thus: The collapse of the gov’t-tech relationship is less a consequence of intellectually corrupt hippies in academia & Silicon Valley, more a consequence of the loss of purpose that attended the end of the Cold War, itself the consequence, partly, of the unbelief of the elites—almost none of America’s leaders believed the Cold War could or should be won by 1989. Reagan is the great exception & he had some followers, but not many. Of course, the military suffered tremendously after 1989 as well, throughout California, not just in Silicon Valley. That was the end of the California GOP, too—what political scientist James Q. Wilson called “Reagan country.” Liberals armed the state for Cold War, won, & had no idea what the victory was for. &, too, along the way to victory, they lost the confidence to wage war, & hence they were not ready to understand the difficulties that would attend victory, since it came as such a surprise. One moves from history to a principle safest if one follows the politics, because that’s where American beliefs play out—beliefs about (1) the relation between the people & the elites, (2) beliefs about America’s place in the world, & (3) beliefs about the education of children.