The age of the techno-lords
The President of ISI, Johnny Burtka, is back with a new Project Cosmos discussion. As with the previous ones, I recommend listening: Here’s a number of people on the right discussing tech—it’s mostly Catholics; Protestantism is heavily outnumbered, the usual in the strange new situation of the 21st c., in a country that is & will remain much more Protestant than Catholic. A number of the gentlemen are friends, the Protestant Aaron Renn as much as the Catholic Michael Miller, so I was interested in hearing them out on the big questions & the outlook that they think brought us here.
Aaron is basically pro-American, he sees a lot more good than bad in modern technological developments, they’ve made America incredibly powerful & have given people choices they didn’t have before. He’s aware of the catastrophes that have followed the sexual revolution, but he doesn’t see it changing. There’s not much you can do—he think the political system is no longer capable of meaningful legislation, not even oversight or regulation. The options are growth or stagnation, he’s for growth. Moreover, he thinks China is breathing down our neck, so we don’t have the luxury of choice.
Michael is also a pro-American, pro-market guy, but he takes a somewhat different view. On the basis of Catholic teachings, he thinks technology is, in a qualified way, blessed by God. There is, of course, always the warning of the tower of Babel. So he distinguishes technology, which he favors, from the technological society, which reduces human beings to products to be bought & sold. He has a significantly darker view of where we are as well as where we’re likely to go, but is still in favor of technological innovations. He’d like to see some control over tech, in light of man’s divine destiny.
There are also anti-tech positions. Matthew Walther, also Catholic, is openly pessimistic & longs for a catastrophe that would force Americans to be serious again. He is scandalized by the profits elites make at the expense of the virtue of the working classes, in the sense that technological progress is tempting the poor into robot-enhanced slavery. Virtue is too expensive. Freedom is frittering it away.
Ross Douthat is about as pessimistic, but resigned to tech—he thinks it does more good than harm. But perhaps the difference comes from the fact that Walther has no interest in elites, but Douthat does—very clever people have to do something with their lives…
The Catholic agreement strikes me as built on incredibly weak premises. One of them is, capitalism can be traced to the high Middle Ages a thousand years back. It’s a kind of fate, but it’s not clear whether God is rewarding or punishing us. Consider the implications there, which involve problems foreign & domestic. Internally, the rise of capitalism, i.e. liberalism, has largely wiped out Christianity, which is now a minority opinion in Europe & America, without even the luxury of a Christian theocracy ruling over masses of indifferent or unbelieving mankind. Externally, think of China—at least the technological children of liberalism seem to prosper in alien lands where the Gospel has made small incursions. Catholicism is nevertheless far the greatest part of Christianity. You’d expect Catholics to take responsibility, go back into their history, search the tradition for the major resources for governing mankind with respect to virtue. One can hope for it, but it’s not happened yet. I cannot think of a single major Catholic organization publicly & plausibly devoted to this matter. Nor of any Catholic intellectual anyone is learning from—they’re largely irrelevant. For my part, I hope that some organization will take the challenge of digital technology seriously.
The Protestant position seems to me more cautious & might be more helpful now, because it doesn’t claim to unify human possibilities under, as Catholics now say, but did not previously, an anthropology. The Catholic theology of the human as a person gives Catholic thinkers a certain political advantage, dignifying democracy. Protestants leave more to freedom, but correspondingly acknowledge more dehumanization following from human choices, so they have a tendency to oligarchy. My independence versus your equality, one could say. But Catholics seem weakened by that orientation when it comes to dealing with technology, whereas Protestants seem largely able to make their smaller, less hierarchic, more changeable communities work much better in industrial or technological societies, which they’ve largely pioneered & developed. The split between the life of a religious community & the life of commerce works for Protestants, because the one is obviously oriented to the past, the other to the future. The industrious but also pious man is the type they favor. The difficulty is, Protestants, as I said, don’t make for major intellectuals or other leaders forming elite opinion. Let’s see how that goes…
Aside from the perpetual problem of intellectuals: Nobody at the table is saying what they want & how they think it might be accomplished—I got the feeling, listening to this conversation, that people are resigning themselves to chaos caused by tech, some more upbeat than others, all agreed that thinking & talking don’t really matter. Still, reality is worth considering, so let me lay out the basic options:
Get Congress to act by making friends with some important politicians, organizing hearings, using think tanks, conferences, & elections to articulate a constituency that can make demands in regard to tech. This was known in the olden days as “the consent of the governed.” Hearings, letters, oversight, regulation—there are options for action short of laws, or on the way to legislation.
A related political action: Demand the establishment of a presidential commission.
For the daring & eloquent, start lawsuits in the public interest.
Get the attention of techno-lords by organizing a conference of intellectuals who have serious institutional backing, publications that stand by them, & some degree of popularity on their side. That would require more organization of the intellectuals, a show of loyalty to each other, of public spirit, &, of course, competence in arranging the questions to put to the techno-lords.
Create a council of experts that would actually join some of the techno-lords to prove that tech can be humane, even open to wisdom, such as we have to offer.
Maybe there are others I’ve missed, so please let me know, but for things one can start doing today which would bear fruit already, say, on Inauguration Day 2029, these are your options as best I see them. Act accordingly. The only one I’ve personally excluded is (4), since my opinion of intellectuals is extremely low; the one I’m focusing on is (5), since I admire quite a number of techno-lords. At any rate, everyone should be judged by what they’re doing about what they’re worried about-