And by the way I misspoke: I didn't mean nothing personal, I want ONLY personal. I just can't deal with hate right now. And I agree, there's a lot to be hateful about, but I don't think it's a path forward. Let's solve this problem by rising above it, analyzing it, and writing and creating communities that defeat it.
I think religious language tends to be the only vessel large enough to hold such problems fully so tend to understand it in those terms. However if you want an apropos secular-ish take I'd suggest John Vervake's "awakening from the meaning crisis" series. Collapse is the inevitable result of fragmentation of identity. A crisis of meaning. If I had to put my materialist lens on and give some macroeconomic cause I might just say it's the result of "excess". I certainly don't see the sense of unity and meaning getting better leading up to the 2024 election, but who knows...
I think the world is screwed up because with the decline in belief in a Christian god, people have lost their moral compass. The overwhelming belief in the power of self means that the only thing that matters is my own opinion, my desires and my rights: objective reality no longer counts. Without universal truth the world will continue to spiral towards the conclusion we have been assured awaits us. I believe only God has the power to change this, but why would he? Why do we even hope that he would do our work for us? There would be no freedom in that - what Jesus died for was for US to believe in Him, and incline our hearts towards peace.
It's clear I need to promote this to a post, but in the meantime I'm also interested in soliciting feedback/comments on identity politics. Not my area, to be sure, but I've been reading a fascinating book by Fukuyama titled Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment. The point--one of the points--is that the class-based left wing parties of the 20th century have been replaced by the "two faces of identity politics," nationalist or religious parties. He cites variously Putin, Turkey's Erdogan, Hungary's Orban, Poland's Kaczinsky, and finally Donald Trump in the United States. In a particularly memorable phrase, he says the message to be delivered to classes got delivered by error to nations. Fukuyama as many no doubt know is an interesting figure, and it's not clear from the book where his commitments are, other than to warn that identity politics is dangerous, and that it has spread everywhere (the book was published in 2017, and I suspect the message is even more pertinent today). I'd love to get thoughts. Yes, I will promote this to a post, and I'll attempt to tie it in with my field, technology or AI. I'm off to Spain in a few days for a speaking event and barely rested from the last foray to Europe for the same reason. Best, Erik P.S. I know it can be difficult, but I'd like to avoid personality thinking (I like Trump, I don't like Trump) and focus on the underlying ideas.
I've not read Fukuyama's book, so please forgive me if I'm inventing a failure from which his work doesn't suffer:
Something any serious account of identity politics should contend with is its origins in the politics of recognition. The latter started to flower with the 19th-century German philosophers J. G. Fichte and G. W. F. Hegel (inspired as they were by J-J. Rousseau) and flourished in philosophical debates of the 1990s and 2000s among Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, Axel Honneth, and others. Contending with this history, one will see that the politics of recognition is a reasoned, well-motivated project. (Which is of course not to say it's unassailable dogma or something.) And this is important to see because so many of those who today decry identity politics are decrying what I think is a neoliberal-cum-therapeutic deformation of what is, or was, a reasonable theoretical and practical undertaking toward a more participatory democracy.
I think Nancy Fraser's view is worth thinking through. (See her "Social Justice in the Age of Identity Politics: Redistribution, Recognition, and Participation," from 2003.) She stresses that as reasonable and necessary as a politics of recognition might be, we also need a politics of redistribution (of economic security and power), and that, indeed, they can strengthen each other. Needless to say, perhaps, her vision of a politics of recognition did not envision the game of identity politics that today's affluent classes participate in.
I've articulated what I suspect the problem is and how I suspect it originated. Assuming (just for the sake of argument) that what I suggest is correct, I think that means we need some pretty serious policy reorientation: away from deindustrialization, deregulation, de facto monopolization, knowledge-work, credentialization, and professionalization. There seem to be some pockets in Congress of bi-partisan interest in such policy-reorientatation.
(I should note that I agree with several commenters here that ours is not a purely material problem. But I think neoliberal-policy-driven economic and social arrangements have accelerated, if not precipitated, our spiritual or existential woes. The liberal state is supposed to let its citizens to discuss, form, and pursue their own conceptions of the good. When combined with neoliberal policies that funnel questions of value from the arena of public contestation to the private arena of market forces, though, the state ends up effectively letting the market (non-democratically) determine what citizens should value: namely, whatever is valuable in the market, which is, unsurprisingly, spiritually empty. And let's not forget the atomization, the community-disintigration, wrought by neoliberal policies. One of those pockets of non-political community that have suffered from the centrifugal force of neoliberal policy is religious community.)
Any meaningful policy reorientation will of course require Congress to get their shit together, which will require them to abandon the identity-political signaling and culture-war posturing. And they'll give that up when their constituents cease to care so much about it.
I think that day will be somewhat soon. Although it will stick around longer in the institutions, such as nonprofits, NGOs, and universities (which are, after all, made to be sticky), wokeness is over. Thus, anti-wokeness is looking more and more comically out of touch. And, of course, the person who has to go to McDonald's to access Wi-Fi never cared about that stuff in the first place. Identity politics is a game for the relatively privileged.
While refashioning policy will take a long time — but will be worth it — I think we can, in the meantime, accelerate and maintain the loss of interest in identity politics, the culture war, and other purely symbolic epiphenomena. And I think we can, in the meantime, re-acquaint ourselves with what it's like to exercise popular sovereignty. And I think there is something we can do that will address both of these at once.
The model I have in mind is laid out in John McKnight's book, The Careless Society: Community and Its Counterfeits. He shows how neighborhoods can heal themselves — how actual neighborhoods have healed themselves — without relying unduly on professionalized services and bureaucratic overseers. Such local cooperation not only piques the taste for popular control. It also does wonders for pushing purely symbolic differences to the background: face-to-face project-completion with others who share a stake in your own community — not a virtual or abstract community, such as progressives and tech CEOs like to invoke, but a spatially bound and concrete one — humanizes your neighbors and refocuses you on commonalities: common goals and common goods.
(And for a model of exercising popular sovereignty through one's local government in order to revitalize one's neighborhood — again, a tangible place, not an abstract one — see Seth D. Kaplan's book, Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society, One Zip Code at a Time.)
I love your comment, and believe me, my short response is just getting to the point. It's the lack of agency. Why is this different than the middle ages?
One answer to your query that comes immediately to mind is this:
Because of our history and our current place in it, we have imaginative and conceptual resources available that medievals did not, and so our disempowerment takes on a particular cast, and we feel our disempowerment in a particularly acute way. Knowing some form of institutionalized popular control is actually possible, we feel a particular pain and frustration when we lack it. Whatever lack of control the typical medieval felt, if he felt such a lack, he couldn't have conceptualized it as a lack of popular control, because the concept or vision of popular control as we know it wasn't a live possibility for the medieval. We today know there's an institutional potential for greater popular control — some of us still living lived through such a time. And because we can sense that potential, it's particularly distressing that it has been left to lie fallow.
It’s difficult to really flesh out your imaginative and conceptual resources premise for modern man in a comment section like this. I agree with you in general, but I think you are selling a bit short the medievals. They did have popular control in their traditions, for example, how many cart loads of wood they can gather from a forest for the coming winter. If they were denied that tradition, they had a mechanism in place for an appeal.
“Before Church and State,” by Andrew Willard Jones, is a terrific book on a highly functioning society in the 12th century that was both just and fair.
This is a good point, Alan, and I agree. There are important similarities. And I'm quite interested in that book — thanks for the pointer!
The conception of popular control at issue today, however, is not simply one of due process or of being able to appeal decisions by our superiors or treating subjects equally.
In terms of classical political theory, popular control is less like small-l liberal freedom and more like small-r republican freedom: freedom from domination (that is, from arbitrary power over which you have little say) and freedom to fashion the laws one lives by. (See Philip Pettit's book, On the People's Terms, for an explanation and defense of republican freedom as opposed to liberal freedom.)
My proposed answer — admittedly partial, of course, and susceptible to some measure of empirical refutation — is that we are feeling the political, economic, social, cultural, material, and spiritual effects of five decades of technocratic neoliberal governmentality. It's taken that long for the disease to manifest.
(This is my answer to the question: "Why are we now so disempowered and now so acutely distressed by this disempowerment?" I take it that's the spelled-out paraphrase of your question "But why NOW?" If that's not the question you were asking, I apologize.)
Thanks for your comment. This is roughly what I'm thinking too. It's a sort of accumulating problem. Or, as you put it, a disease that is manifesting over the last decades. This makes the question of reversal quite troublesome.
Thank you for exchange, Erik, and for posing the original question. I've learned a lot by thinking through the comments and replies that have been published here.
Humans are not psychically or spiritually equipped to be in nonstop communication with other humans, or to experience constant exposure to mass currents of sentiment. This affective exposure imparts a subjective sense of compromised agency, which we express to one another as the sort of bad vibes you’re picking up on.
As time passes, that inchoate condition manifests as functional incapacity and trained helplessness.
I too think that there's a link between compromised agency and let's say digital technology (the point wouldn't apply to a shovel). Tech centralizes, as well, which makes power differences greater. Someone will always be using tech to achieve ostensibly good ends (and much of it is), but also to monitor, surveil, and otherwise create systems of control we don't like.
very smart who are reading this and contributing, and that makes me feel really good, to be in such company. I want to hear from you. That's why I started it.
1) Complexity gives rise to superstition. Your area of AI is off-the-charts complex even for many of the people working on it - hence the mysticism that surrounds the language even coming from technologists.
2) Sociopathy at scale is enabled by social media. People can see the pathologies that seem to be accelerating within the culture and it fills them with (understandable) unease.
3) Technological complexity and information overload undermine our sense of human agency - like the world is beyond our ability to understand, cope or act according to our own interests. This is true in spades for the elderly but also for large numbers of younger people. This despairing of our own agency was compounded and accelerated by Covid and the way the institutions behaved. People are overwhelmed by complexity but also feel they have no institutional authorities they can trust.
4)ELIZA in the 1960's was an early warning system that humans can be deceived by talking objects. Language models have unnerved people in part, I suspect, because there is an ancient human intuition that non-human things that talk are malevolent (e.g. snakes in the garden, mirrors on the wall)
5) Tolkien's plot device of a palantir reflected the notion that there are things too great for humans to cope with the knowledge of. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the garden of Eden can be thought of as the first palantir, in that sense. I have wondered if the expansive window into human pathology which is available to all on social media has a palantir-like effect on the human psyche.
The various mass delusions that have taken hold are not, IMO, explainable in purely naturalistic terms. More is going on, I believe, than merely the kinds of things I have mentioned above. The list above may reflect some of the means, but those means do not, by themselves alone, account for all that we're seeing. The things that explain our current troubles are unlikely to turn out to have had a purely materialistic cause.
Hey Keith, you said so much I agree with here I'm not sure what I want to reply. Unlikely to have a materialistic cause. Let me fix on that. And thank you.
In summary, it seems to me that citizens lack control over important aspects of their lives and lack the power to change it, and they desperately feel this lack. Almost nothing important to our lives is a "res publica" anymore. This is the case along several scales.
At the individual scale. I'm just thinking here of Crawford's work on those economic and technological decisions, sequestered from democratic contestation, whose effect is the deskilling of the human person: the atrophying of judgment, of bodily competences, of joyful responsibilities.
At the political scale. Technocratic neoliberalism shifted policy-making from the public sphere to the private sphere, so the only political power citizens seem to have is the veto power of an electoral vote. (See: the 2016 election.) And even that is diminished in light of the juristocracy we are subject to, in which it's an endless stream of executive orders, lawsuits brought, legal punishments threatened — but no politics.
At the political-economic scale. That very same technocratic neoliberalism cyclopically sought efficient markets above all, which amounted, on their view, to the frictionless flow of capital across national borders. Workers in communities all around the globe lost their jobs, which meant they lost the real power to take care of their family and lost the dignity of a good day's work.
At the social-political scale. With policy-making power concentrated in the private sphere, and industrial power in that sphere concentrated in de facto monopolies (see: Big Tech), and with political power concentrated in executive and judicial spaces, our social structure lacks that virtue that Catholic social thought calls subsidiarity, where the larger, more distant governing body exists to subserve the smaller, more local one.
I think a lot of cultural polarization and the merely symbolic tantrums we throw are downstream effects of the political-social-economic alienation we feel, the sheer lack of say in how our individual and collective lives are going. And an undeniable contributing factor to all of that, I think, is the technocratic neoliberal decision-making of the past five decades.
I, for one, see a glimmer of hope. Certain of our Congresspersons on both sides of the aisle are getting more interested in trying to combat the neoliberal status quo ante, in breaking up undue concentrations of private and public power, and in redistributing that power — not money, but power; forget that pacifying UBI nonsense — along several dimensions: from the global to the local, from the C-suite to the worker, from the monopoly to the smaller business, from the judiciaries to the legislatures.
Gotcha. "I'm just thinking here of Crawford's work on those economic and technological decisions, sequestered from democratic contestation, whose effect is the deskilling of the human person: the atrophying of judgment, of bodily competences, of joyful responsibilities." I don't know if this is happening because of some inexorable force, or some demonic force (or some deliberate force). I can't figure it out.
I think it's largely the result of mostly well-meaning actors making decisions according to a mistaken ideology.
(E.g. as much as I disagree with its response to the 2008 financial crisis, the Obama administration, from what I can gather, was not looking to line the pockets of elites — even if that was an effect of its decisions — but genuinely thought it was doing the right thing by listening to economic technocrats.)
In my experience of day-to-day life, when ordinary human beings are tasked with making important decisions, they usually take it seriously and do their best. (I've served on juries in four different states — red, blue, and purple — and have been proud of how my fellow countrymen and countrywomen comport themselves when given the responsibility.) Bad results seem to come about not because of ill intent but because of bad ideologies giving rise to bad policy.
So, for instance, we have monstrous concentrations of private power and a relative lack of a countervailing popular power not because elites conspired against the people but because of bad policy decisions that eviscerated unions, national industry, and civic life, thereby creating a vacuum into which private power reasonably and predictably moved.
I adopt a principle of charity according to which I presume, defeasibly, that my fellow human beings are largely acting in good faith when it comes to materially consequential things. Sometimes I'm disappointed, but much more often I'm not. I've had fruitful discussions and learned a lot by adopting that principle. If I were to give it up and presume that my fellows were mean-spirited and incompetent, I feel like I'd be handing the anti-humanists Crawford talks about the victory they've always wanted.
Erik, we can only change & protect those we love and others in our orbit. Prayer, sacraments, witness, active charity, be joyful in the face of adversity. Tried and true practices. Small creative minorities - being embedded in one is key. Otherwise, this flood is going to sweep even the best of us away.
We were chosen for this moment. The larger picture is out of our hands - as is always the case. But what we can do in our immediate social sphere is immense.
Kevin, I agree with all you’ve said, but no longer believe that I can “change” anyone. God’s grace does that. All we can do is to imitate Christ to the utmost of our abilities and hope and pray that those we love will, too. And never, never, never despair. We were put here, in this time and place, for a reason.
True Alan. I should have used “guide, mentor, influence”. If we’re truly vessels of the Spirit, we’ll perform those tasks.
Despair is found in rejecting, rather than facing the challenge. We’re not called to be successful, but to be faithful. Agreed. Many saints wished they lived to see times like ours.
I agree with you. We have to figure out a way to say it.
And by the way I misspoke: I didn't mean nothing personal, I want ONLY personal. I just can't deal with hate right now. And I agree, there's a lot to be hateful about, but I don't think it's a path forward. Let's solve this problem by rising above it, analyzing it, and writing and creating communities that defeat it.
Erik J. Larson
I think religious language tends to be the only vessel large enough to hold such problems fully so tend to understand it in those terms. However if you want an apropos secular-ish take I'd suggest John Vervake's "awakening from the meaning crisis" series. Collapse is the inevitable result of fragmentation of identity. A crisis of meaning. If I had to put my materialist lens on and give some macroeconomic cause I might just say it's the result of "excess". I certainly don't see the sense of unity and meaning getting better leading up to the 2024 election, but who knows...
"I think religious language tends to be the only vessel large enough to hold such problems"
Beautiful comment.
I think the world is screwed up because with the decline in belief in a Christian god, people have lost their moral compass. The overwhelming belief in the power of self means that the only thing that matters is my own opinion, my desires and my rights: objective reality no longer counts. Without universal truth the world will continue to spiral towards the conclusion we have been assured awaits us. I believe only God has the power to change this, but why would he? Why do we even hope that he would do our work for us? There would be no freedom in that - what Jesus died for was for US to believe in Him, and incline our hearts towards peace.
right on brother
It's clear I need to promote this to a post, but in the meantime I'm also interested in soliciting feedback/comments on identity politics. Not my area, to be sure, but I've been reading a fascinating book by Fukuyama titled Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment. The point--one of the points--is that the class-based left wing parties of the 20th century have been replaced by the "two faces of identity politics," nationalist or religious parties. He cites variously Putin, Turkey's Erdogan, Hungary's Orban, Poland's Kaczinsky, and finally Donald Trump in the United States. In a particularly memorable phrase, he says the message to be delivered to classes got delivered by error to nations. Fukuyama as many no doubt know is an interesting figure, and it's not clear from the book where his commitments are, other than to warn that identity politics is dangerous, and that it has spread everywhere (the book was published in 2017, and I suspect the message is even more pertinent today). I'd love to get thoughts. Yes, I will promote this to a post, and I'll attempt to tie it in with my field, technology or AI. I'm off to Spain in a few days for a speaking event and barely rested from the last foray to Europe for the same reason. Best, Erik P.S. I know it can be difficult, but I'd like to avoid personality thinking (I like Trump, I don't like Trump) and focus on the underlying ideas.
I've not read Fukuyama's book, so please forgive me if I'm inventing a failure from which his work doesn't suffer:
Something any serious account of identity politics should contend with is its origins in the politics of recognition. The latter started to flower with the 19th-century German philosophers J. G. Fichte and G. W. F. Hegel (inspired as they were by J-J. Rousseau) and flourished in philosophical debates of the 1990s and 2000s among Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, Axel Honneth, and others. Contending with this history, one will see that the politics of recognition is a reasoned, well-motivated project. (Which is of course not to say it's unassailable dogma or something.) And this is important to see because so many of those who today decry identity politics are decrying what I think is a neoliberal-cum-therapeutic deformation of what is, or was, a reasonable theoretical and practical undertaking toward a more participatory democracy.
I think Nancy Fraser's view is worth thinking through. (See her "Social Justice in the Age of Identity Politics: Redistribution, Recognition, and Participation," from 2003.) She stresses that as reasonable and necessary as a politics of recognition might be, we also need a politics of redistribution (of economic security and power), and that, indeed, they can strengthen each other. Needless to say, perhaps, her vision of a politics of recognition did not envision the game of identity politics that today's affluent classes participate in.
Let's do some no b.s. here, and the comments I am so grateful for. How do we fix it? Tell me. What's the first step?
I've articulated what I suspect the problem is and how I suspect it originated. Assuming (just for the sake of argument) that what I suggest is correct, I think that means we need some pretty serious policy reorientation: away from deindustrialization, deregulation, de facto monopolization, knowledge-work, credentialization, and professionalization. There seem to be some pockets in Congress of bi-partisan interest in such policy-reorientatation.
(I should note that I agree with several commenters here that ours is not a purely material problem. But I think neoliberal-policy-driven economic and social arrangements have accelerated, if not precipitated, our spiritual or existential woes. The liberal state is supposed to let its citizens to discuss, form, and pursue their own conceptions of the good. When combined with neoliberal policies that funnel questions of value from the arena of public contestation to the private arena of market forces, though, the state ends up effectively letting the market (non-democratically) determine what citizens should value: namely, whatever is valuable in the market, which is, unsurprisingly, spiritually empty. And let's not forget the atomization, the community-disintigration, wrought by neoliberal policies. One of those pockets of non-political community that have suffered from the centrifugal force of neoliberal policy is religious community.)
Any meaningful policy reorientation will of course require Congress to get their shit together, which will require them to abandon the identity-political signaling and culture-war posturing. And they'll give that up when their constituents cease to care so much about it.
I think that day will be somewhat soon. Although it will stick around longer in the institutions, such as nonprofits, NGOs, and universities (which are, after all, made to be sticky), wokeness is over. Thus, anti-wokeness is looking more and more comically out of touch. And, of course, the person who has to go to McDonald's to access Wi-Fi never cared about that stuff in the first place. Identity politics is a game for the relatively privileged.
While refashioning policy will take a long time — but will be worth it — I think we can, in the meantime, accelerate and maintain the loss of interest in identity politics, the culture war, and other purely symbolic epiphenomena. And I think we can, in the meantime, re-acquaint ourselves with what it's like to exercise popular sovereignty. And I think there is something we can do that will address both of these at once.
The model I have in mind is laid out in John McKnight's book, The Careless Society: Community and Its Counterfeits. He shows how neighborhoods can heal themselves — how actual neighborhoods have healed themselves — without relying unduly on professionalized services and bureaucratic overseers. Such local cooperation not only piques the taste for popular control. It also does wonders for pushing purely symbolic differences to the background: face-to-face project-completion with others who share a stake in your own community — not a virtual or abstract community, such as progressives and tech CEOs like to invoke, but a spatially bound and concrete one — humanizes your neighbors and refocuses you on commonalities: common goals and common goods.
(And for a model of exercising popular sovereignty through one's local government in order to revitalize one's neighborhood — again, a tangible place, not an abstract one — see Seth D. Kaplan's book, Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society, One Zip Code at a Time.)
bad ideologies is part of the key, I agree. No one wants to discuss it but it's killing the commonwealth.
Yep. We don't have a vocabulary yet.
Hi Eric,
I love your comment, and believe me, my short response is just getting to the point. It's the lack of agency. Why is this different than the middle ages?
One answer to your query that comes immediately to mind is this:
Because of our history and our current place in it, we have imaginative and conceptual resources available that medievals did not, and so our disempowerment takes on a particular cast, and we feel our disempowerment in a particularly acute way. Knowing some form of institutionalized popular control is actually possible, we feel a particular pain and frustration when we lack it. Whatever lack of control the typical medieval felt, if he felt such a lack, he couldn't have conceptualized it as a lack of popular control, because the concept or vision of popular control as we know it wasn't a live possibility for the medieval. We today know there's an institutional potential for greater popular control — some of us still living lived through such a time. And because we can sense that potential, it's particularly distressing that it has been left to lie fallow.
It’s difficult to really flesh out your imaginative and conceptual resources premise for modern man in a comment section like this. I agree with you in general, but I think you are selling a bit short the medievals. They did have popular control in their traditions, for example, how many cart loads of wood they can gather from a forest for the coming winter. If they were denied that tradition, they had a mechanism in place for an appeal.
“Before Church and State,” by Andrew Willard Jones, is a terrific book on a highly functioning society in the 12th century that was both just and fair.
This is a good point, Alan, and I agree. There are important similarities. And I'm quite interested in that book — thanks for the pointer!
The conception of popular control at issue today, however, is not simply one of due process or of being able to appeal decisions by our superiors or treating subjects equally.
In terms of classical political theory, popular control is less like small-l liberal freedom and more like small-r republican freedom: freedom from domination (that is, from arbitrary power over which you have little say) and freedom to fashion the laws one lives by. (See Philip Pettit's book, On the People's Terms, for an explanation and defense of republican freedom as opposed to liberal freedom.)
I gotcha. And great comment. But why NOW? That's what I'm wondering.
My proposed answer — admittedly partial, of course, and susceptible to some measure of empirical refutation — is that we are feeling the political, economic, social, cultural, material, and spiritual effects of five decades of technocratic neoliberal governmentality. It's taken that long for the disease to manifest.
(This is my answer to the question: "Why are we now so disempowered and now so acutely distressed by this disempowerment?" I take it that's the spelled-out paraphrase of your question "But why NOW?" If that's not the question you were asking, I apologize.)
Hi Eric,
Thanks for your comment. This is roughly what I'm thinking too. It's a sort of accumulating problem. Or, as you put it, a disease that is manifesting over the last decades. This makes the question of reversal quite troublesome.
Thank you for exchange, Erik, and for posing the original question. I've learned a lot by thinking through the comments and replies that have been published here.
Humans are not psychically or spiritually equipped to be in nonstop communication with other humans, or to experience constant exposure to mass currents of sentiment. This affective exposure imparts a subjective sense of compromised agency, which we express to one another as the sort of bad vibes you’re picking up on.
As time passes, that inchoate condition manifests as functional incapacity and trained helplessness.
So yeah, I guess I blame tech.
Hi Matt,
I too think that there's a link between compromised agency and let's say digital technology (the point wouldn't apply to a shovel). Tech centralizes, as well, which makes power differences greater. Someone will always be using tech to achieve ostensibly good ends (and much of it is), but also to monitor, surveil, and otherwise create systems of control we don't like.
very smart who are reading this and contributing, and that makes me feel really good, to be in such company. I want to hear from you. That's why I started it.
I want personal stories. Those are the only ones that actually matter....
Hi Kevin, thanks. Does it get worse in the near term, or better, and when you see it bottoming out and resetting?
Thanks for your comments,
Best,
Erik
Some ideas that rattle around inside my noggin.
1) Complexity gives rise to superstition. Your area of AI is off-the-charts complex even for many of the people working on it - hence the mysticism that surrounds the language even coming from technologists.
2) Sociopathy at scale is enabled by social media. People can see the pathologies that seem to be accelerating within the culture and it fills them with (understandable) unease.
3) Technological complexity and information overload undermine our sense of human agency - like the world is beyond our ability to understand, cope or act according to our own interests. This is true in spades for the elderly but also for large numbers of younger people. This despairing of our own agency was compounded and accelerated by Covid and the way the institutions behaved. People are overwhelmed by complexity but also feel they have no institutional authorities they can trust.
4)ELIZA in the 1960's was an early warning system that humans can be deceived by talking objects. Language models have unnerved people in part, I suspect, because there is an ancient human intuition that non-human things that talk are malevolent (e.g. snakes in the garden, mirrors on the wall)
5) Tolkien's plot device of a palantir reflected the notion that there are things too great for humans to cope with the knowledge of. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the garden of Eden can be thought of as the first palantir, in that sense. I have wondered if the expansive window into human pathology which is available to all on social media has a palantir-like effect on the human psyche.
The various mass delusions that have taken hold are not, IMO, explainable in purely naturalistic terms. More is going on, I believe, than merely the kinds of things I have mentioned above. The list above may reflect some of the means, but those means do not, by themselves alone, account for all that we're seeing. The things that explain our current troubles are unlikely to turn out to have had a purely materialistic cause.
Hey Keith, you said so much I agree with here I'm not sure what I want to reply. Unlikely to have a materialistic cause. Let me fix on that. And thank you.
In summary, it seems to me that citizens lack control over important aspects of their lives and lack the power to change it, and they desperately feel this lack. Almost nothing important to our lives is a "res publica" anymore. This is the case along several scales.
At the individual scale. I'm just thinking here of Crawford's work on those economic and technological decisions, sequestered from democratic contestation, whose effect is the deskilling of the human person: the atrophying of judgment, of bodily competences, of joyful responsibilities.
At the political scale. Technocratic neoliberalism shifted policy-making from the public sphere to the private sphere, so the only political power citizens seem to have is the veto power of an electoral vote. (See: the 2016 election.) And even that is diminished in light of the juristocracy we are subject to, in which it's an endless stream of executive orders, lawsuits brought, legal punishments threatened — but no politics.
At the political-economic scale. That very same technocratic neoliberalism cyclopically sought efficient markets above all, which amounted, on their view, to the frictionless flow of capital across national borders. Workers in communities all around the globe lost their jobs, which meant they lost the real power to take care of their family and lost the dignity of a good day's work.
At the social-political scale. With policy-making power concentrated in the private sphere, and industrial power in that sphere concentrated in de facto monopolies (see: Big Tech), and with political power concentrated in executive and judicial spaces, our social structure lacks that virtue that Catholic social thought calls subsidiarity, where the larger, more distant governing body exists to subserve the smaller, more local one.
I think a lot of cultural polarization and the merely symbolic tantrums we throw are downstream effects of the political-social-economic alienation we feel, the sheer lack of say in how our individual and collective lives are going. And an undeniable contributing factor to all of that, I think, is the technocratic neoliberal decision-making of the past five decades.
I, for one, see a glimmer of hope. Certain of our Congresspersons on both sides of the aisle are getting more interested in trying to combat the neoliberal status quo ante, in breaking up undue concentrations of private and public power, and in redistributing that power — not money, but power; forget that pacifying UBI nonsense — along several dimensions: from the global to the local, from the C-suite to the worker, from the monopoly to the smaller business, from the judiciaries to the legislatures.
Gotcha. "I'm just thinking here of Crawford's work on those economic and technological decisions, sequestered from democratic contestation, whose effect is the deskilling of the human person: the atrophying of judgment, of bodily competences, of joyful responsibilities." I don't know if this is happening because of some inexorable force, or some demonic force (or some deliberate force). I can't figure it out.
I think it's largely the result of mostly well-meaning actors making decisions according to a mistaken ideology.
(E.g. as much as I disagree with its response to the 2008 financial crisis, the Obama administration, from what I can gather, was not looking to line the pockets of elites — even if that was an effect of its decisions — but genuinely thought it was doing the right thing by listening to economic technocrats.)
In my experience of day-to-day life, when ordinary human beings are tasked with making important decisions, they usually take it seriously and do their best. (I've served on juries in four different states — red, blue, and purple — and have been proud of how my fellow countrymen and countrywomen comport themselves when given the responsibility.) Bad results seem to come about not because of ill intent but because of bad ideologies giving rise to bad policy.
So, for instance, we have monstrous concentrations of private power and a relative lack of a countervailing popular power not because elites conspired against the people but because of bad policy decisions that eviscerated unions, national industry, and civic life, thereby creating a vacuum into which private power reasonably and predictably moved.
I adopt a principle of charity according to which I presume, defeasibly, that my fellow human beings are largely acting in good faith when it comes to materially consequential things. Sometimes I'm disappointed, but much more often I'm not. I've had fruitful discussions and learned a lot by adopting that principle. If I were to give it up and presume that my fellows were mean-spirited and incompetent, I feel like I'd be handing the anti-humanists Crawford talks about the victory they've always wanted.
Erik, we can only change & protect those we love and others in our orbit. Prayer, sacraments, witness, active charity, be joyful in the face of adversity. Tried and true practices. Small creative minorities - being embedded in one is key. Otherwise, this flood is going to sweep even the best of us away.
We were chosen for this moment. The larger picture is out of our hands - as is always the case. But what we can do in our immediate social sphere is immense.
Keep the faith Erik!
You got it. Thanks, Kevin.
Kevin, I agree with all you’ve said, but no longer believe that I can “change” anyone. God’s grace does that. All we can do is to imitate Christ to the utmost of our abilities and hope and pray that those we love will, too. And never, never, never despair. We were put here, in this time and place, for a reason.
True Alan. I should have used “guide, mentor, influence”. If we’re truly vessels of the Spirit, we’ll perform those tasks.
Despair is found in rejecting, rather than facing the challenge. We’re not called to be successful, but to be faithful. Agreed. Many saints wished they lived to see times like ours.