I wrote the other day about the need for a political alliance between conservatism & our techno-lords; indeed, civilization depends on it. Read below—it’s also an essay on the difficulty of learning politics, which is plaguing all of us.
But any political alliance demands full clarity about the underlying issues & the easiest way to get to clarity is to talk utopia. What does accelerationism demand, why, how is it supposed to work: All this is implied in a vision of the future offered by Elon Musk, mankind spread among the stars. Musk, of course, seems to be working every day of his life, so it’s unsurprising that he’s unable to articulate that vision poetically. But various accelerationists have been complaining over the last couple of years that there’s no utopia left—visions of the scientific future are invariably horrifying, the word of our times is instead dystopia, a rather unlikeable name for our way of life. The techno-lords are right, this tells us a lot about the madness running under the law-abiding surface of our society, but this is not to say that techno-lords will pay for poetic or philosophical visions of the future: They are philistines almost to a one; perhaps they don’t love money more than their own souls, but they certainly do not love the very artistic virtues necessary to achieve what they most want: For an example, read Bacon’s New Atlantis.
I cannot do more than outline the reasoning involved here, but this should be enough to judge the thinking involved in the various fantasies indulged by most aspiring accelerationists or other flatterers of tech. It’s possible & desirable to now popularize serious proposals for the sake of civilization; we should not leave matters to people who think it’s a popularity game played on social media or in corporate sophistry events.
Space travel would be a great idea for three interrelated reasons. First, as an education. As best we can tell, beyond the various shields of our planet, the cosmos is deadly to man. Acting beyond that limit would require a great focus of the mind away from suicidal luxuries like woke nonsense—toward the technological dealing with the necessity of surviving & thriving; a significant number of very serious problems would have to be solved to achieve space travel, which would serve as an education for entire generations of young men who can do math, but primarily enjoy thinking about engineering problems. Since modern life is entering a digital period in which experience & reflection are largely guided by computers, reexamining rationalism by connecting it to urgent, even unceasing problems, the permanent character of the cosmos, as best we can tell, will return us to an understanding of necessity. We will have to rethink our freedom in the process. From a certain point of view, the problem with our elite colleges is that they cannot offer young Americans anything reasonable to fear; the kids go mad because they fear unintelligently, apparently, their primary concern is the ghosts of the past & some future holocaust, utterly outside of their control. Their imaginations are out of control—neither their parents nor the politicians can do anything about it. Space offers a rational fear. Space is, finally, the achievement of the state of nature.
Space travel would next be the way to make a new kind of community. In a fully artificial environment, it becomes immediately clear, by contrast, how strange we are as human beings, since we are makers of machines very unlike ourselves. There are no climatic advantages or disadvantages to dominate our thoughts or habits, nor does the natural lifespan of man suffer terrible shocks, nor is there any invasion to fear. The fellowship & justice that bring everyone together on the way to establishing a secure way of life must impress itself on every man, woman, & child as the distinctly human characteristic. It would be very surprising if common activities did not lead people to ceremony in recognition of that freedom. The achievement together of survival would make everyone part of the decisions that affect everyone, leading, generation after generation, to a kind of trust that is almost unheard of among us, except perhaps in some monasteries or similar communities. Our ongoing catastrophe follows from not taking seriously our technological advancement; this has caused the emergence of the wokies, who serve no purpose, & therefore hate the modern world, but also of all the angry men who feel they cannot get to work because the popular imagination turns to luxury instead—a double unseriousness.
Space travel, finally, would lead to a new science. The problem with science as we are aware of it nowadays is twofold. There’s a useful kind of science that goes into our various technological achievements, but it is a modest, or even a contemptible sort of science, since it seems to serve nothing but whims—consumer products are mostly embarrassments, which is why, however many fortunes they make, they never reorient our thinking—& accordingly its success is a matter of chance. Applied science sometimes seems more impressive than consumer products, because it obeys the necessities of the materials it works with, but this is a delusion caused by our clinging to the very prejudices applied sciences are bent to indulging. In short, Americans in 2023 live like it’s still the ‘50s. Globalized capitalism does not involve a new science. It is premised on an understanding of human being that can only debase efforts at improvement. This is partly why it’s impossible to get the smartest people among us to take capitalism or industry seriously. We have not achieved supermen, but laziness & madness; we have not mixed intelligence with love of danger, but instead have turned everything around to a despotic, effeminate, bureaucratic laziness; instead of the moral seriousness of daring men, our prosperity has led to fat people complaining about their impotence—we’re not reaching the stars, but decaying on earth. But there is another, useless kind of science, which does not seem to take its bearings from our prejudices, our fashions, or even our existence. Modern physics, based on mathematics, would seem to be our one pure achievement, without the agonizing or enervating downsides of our other innovations, though it seems to teach that human beings do not exist. It could almost be called theoretical science, except that it doesn’t seem to claim that it can understand the cosmos. One is struck that we have no scientists to brag about nowadays. We have no theoretical breakthroughs & no programs to produce any, no schools famous for achieving a more fundamentally adequate awareness of our relation to the cosmos. Space travel would put man in the cosmos, aside from the delusions we now cherish, & resume the quest for knowledge at the origin of the modern revolution in thought. Somewhere in the mid-century, our ambitions & our hopes for technological & scientific improvement, to achieve a new coherence of man & cosmos, were defeated, then corrupted, then lost, & now seem almost forgotten. This is obvious above all in two ways. The practical sign is this, our technology no longer involves personal power based on a more scientific understanding of the world; it tends instead to make people powerless, at the mercy of systems that have no room for human action. The ordinary man understands himself as human primarily when he is the victim of what he tends to call an accident, since he cannot quite understand machines & is horrified by the inhuman implications of modern physics; the ‘human factor’ is a problem, not a solution. The very idea of scientific education, once at the core of the Enlightenment promotion of public education & the press, has been betrayed most enthusiastically by the part of the collegiate class most eager to associate with it, the softest & cruelest people we have ever produced. The theoretical sign: The people among us who are reputed as experts are mere specialists with no capacity to speak intelligently about the fundamental connection between their expertise & the character of modern science itself, much less their connection to the intelligent, educated part of the community; these experts are so corrupted that they cannot see the need for & the intellectual dignity of wisdom; generalists among us are dishonored if they ever show up & punished rather than rewarded in our economy, replaced by a class of mass-appeal gurus who know nothing compared to the intelligent among us. The new science needed would fix this problem by fixing our attention on things greater than ourselves, that is, the cosmos, & thus free us to be what we are, finally uniting us & restoring order to self-understanding.
This then is the content & this character of the utopia needed by our techno-lords; it should be polemical in order to conquer the weak but hysterical types that pass for intellectuals nowadays, but it should be focused on science in order to achieve the distance necessary to avoid the angry fantasizing typical of those who oppose the intellectuals. Such a mixture would help cultivate the taste & the judgment necessary to evaluate our predicament & rescue rationalism from its sorry situation now. It would be good, in looking clearly at utopia & what it can teach us, to come to see how much of what passes for scientific thought is a delusion. That liberation of the mind is the noblest aspiration of the accelerationists
Recently Elon expressed a very Pascalian thought in one of his tweets:
"We are microbes on a dust mote in a vast emptiness overwhelming dominated by the sun"
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1731343887598305514
What might we make of that? Pascal would agree that "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me", but would add the question:
"When I consider the short span of my life absorbed into the preceding and subsequent eternity, like the memory of a one day guest, the small space I fill and even can see, swallowed up in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which knows nothing of me I am terrified, and surprised to find myself here rather than there, for there is no reason why it should be here rather than there, why now rather than then. Who put me here? On whose orders and on whose decision have this place and time been allotted to me?"