Peter Thiel in Cambridge, defense & Israel
Here’s America’s most thoughtful billionaire giving the latest version of his speech against the great stagnation, or the ongoing failure of Enlightenment. The difficulty we find with science nowadays is expertise on the basis of specialization—you end up wondering whether there’s such a thing as a physicist, given the many different specializations beyond the comprehension of any single mind, as well as the disagreements among the theories concerning the two foci of investigation, macro & micro. Never mind, is there such a being as a scientist. What if the people who have those titles, reputations, offices, & the money that comes with them are corrupt, morally & intellectually? How would ordinary people even know? This is Thiel’s attack on academia. The institution is not producing new geniuses nor any institutional equivalent.
Anyone who knows people with an elite education—the education, that is, which very many others envy & pursued but could not acquire—knows that this opinion is unthinkable for them, never mind disagreement or argument. Thiel argues that that is itself a sign of their nihilism. Ordinary people who are depressive believe there’s nothing they can do for a better future; elites who are arrogant believe there’s nothing they need to do; but the pessimists & the optimists are agreed on inaction & hence all other differences are less important. Listen to his argument, it’s the most important intellectual challenge to our liberal elites—it gets at a very important question, are these people even liberal—do they understand liberalism & are they convinced by its claims—is Enlightenment their life or merely an inconvenient mask?
I’d like to talk about three levels of the problem Thiel is dealing with & two difficulties involved in his efforts. First, Enlightenment politics requires a political science—if it’s not science, it’s not Enlightenment, but the same kind of crazy stuff we’ve always had, & if it’s not political, it cannot reasonably promote or take for granted popular agreement, but only deceptions & force—& therefore a specific kind of education for public activity. Thiel is far away the most political of the tech billionaires, which is somehow connected with his interest in Strauss & Girard, as he has proved since 2016 by his donations to the GOP, public support for Trump, & RNC speech. But in 2024, when several billionaire from Elon Musk to Mark Zuckerberg are making loud statements of support for Trump, Thiel seems depressed, inactive, & refuses to talk about his political activity. This seems unwise, not only apolitical, & unhappily at odds with the demands of Enlightenment, which nevertheless are his business.
You can see the difficulty in this speech in the Q&A section, when Israel comes up. Thiel explains to the elite students of Cambridge that they are mad, deluded that they’re in a position to govern Gaza from the comfort of their campus, judging & deciding how war should be conducted. He does it very politely, he’s pushed to it when a couple of students bring up the question of Israel, but he nevertheless insists that the political issue is civilization v. savagery, & Israel is civilized, its terrorist enemy Hamas is not. To miss that difference is to have become apolitical—that’s the pretense of moral elitism typical of the collegiate class, which makes Enlightenment impossible by denying that political activity is possible or needful, to be replaced by the tyranny of the wise global institutions staffed by bureaucrats. Student activists are deluded about the intentions of Hamas madmen, as well as about their own power to affect events. The defense of Israel is, intellectually, self-defense. But then how are they going to listen to the very reasonable, very tentative provocations Thiel has to offer? What urgent moral concerns do they share that they might need his guidance?
This brings us to the next level of the problem, the question of elite recruitment. People defer to the scientists, to the collegiate class among whom the scientists somehow rule, & therefore elite students have to find another orientation than popular expectation, since they hope to rise among those rulers. A kind of autonomy is needful to them, but not to the people who trust them. After all, Thiel isn’t wasting his time going to talk to ordinary people—only those with elite credentials, because they bespeak after all natural ability & a preference for clever speeches over work, as well as a kind of obedience to the institutions of Enlightenment over some other moral orientation which we could generally call pre-modern. Thiel’s argument is aimed at elites, since only the knowers can judge knowledge, only scientists can judge science. There’s a reason, if you feel sick, you go to a doctor—you believe he knows you better than you know yourself from an important point of view, since after all, your life might depend on it. Thiel, indeed, plays doctor, diagnostician. But he doesn’t seem involved in the work of curing. The world of elite-run institutions is artificial for most people who work in it, but it cannot have that character for the elites themselves. Therefore academic corruption is a much worse problem than either elites or those whose lives they administer realize.
Again, this leads us to a great difficulty you can see in the interruptions of the speech, first at about minute 7. Some hoodlum, to judge by his manners, shouts some criticism, I think of Thiel’s involvement in defense tech, Palantir, taking up a couple of minutes as he gets ejected; another heckler takes up another minute later one, I think talking about Gaza. Thiel says “If you’re evil, at least you’re not bad. In a world of incompetence, you’re even kind of good.” There’s something in the knowing way Thiel answers to the heckler that’s telling—a kind of humor, a kind of contempt: “What do you want, me to shout you down, to victimize you?” The audience is with Thiel, but then they’d be with more or less any speaker they get—it’s prestige even when it’s not fun. They’re not joining Thielism, though, & that organization doesn’t even exist anyway. What I’m getting at: Crazy lefties belong at Cambridge, as anywhere else in elite academia, & Thiel doesn’t—he’s just rich, or no one would invite him. This is the truth concealed in the exasperation at the inevitable happening. Perhaps it got to him—it’s not one of Thiel’s better performances. If you listen to the speech, you’ll also hear at some point a noisy crowd—that’s protesters outside. That’s the reality Thiel of course is aware of & is trying to confront. But how?
Thus, we end at the highest level of the problem, the civilizational question. What do we know & what can we do about it? Thiel offers a technical correlative of the famous Pascalian existential statement: We know too much to be skeptical, but not enough to be dogmatist. His heroes, he says, are men like Bacon, & his preference is for heroic scientists—Galileo. Are then all his contrarian speeches supposed to effect that rebirth of Enlightenment? His advice suggests that: Learn to program & deprogram people from their dogmatism. Maybe Elon is the builder, Thiel the deprogrammer. But the academic collapse shows that technical prowess is not even self-sustaining, much less overpowering. I came away from this speech worried that Thiel is himself somewhat depressive, inactive, even though he’s been so active so publicly for such a long time. His structural account of the civilizational problem seems right to me; to some extent, even his advice, if you want to know the future, make the future, makes sense—events are unpredictable, so we must act. But I can’t shake this thought: Why is he at the Cambridge Union in the first place?