1.
Here on the banks of the Seine it can be hard to notice new trends in the Anglosphere before they have already arrived in the phase of their full flower. So please bear in mind that I live in a backward land, and forgive me if I’ve been a bit slow to report to deck in the analysis that follows.
Sam Bankman-Fried is in prison now, and he will stay there for the time it takes a whole new generation to grow up. But that generation will be one that takes for granted the reality and legitimacy of a world SBF himself did much to help birth. That world, the world of fully automated tech feudalism, as I see it now, has been in its gestation period for roughly the past decade, but we did not always see it for what it is. Around 2014 I first began to notice almost everyone in my circles and beyond them defaulting to prepackaged slogans, rather than even attempting any longer to articulate something resembling their own thoughts. The paradigm instance of what had replaced thought, one could already see, was the clickable scroll-down list: the full automation in question was going to include not just the automation of machine language, but of human language too. Or rather, these were going to fuse into one and the same thing.
For some years in the late 2010s it seemed to me that this new world was one that leaned discernibly, and tragically, leftward, and in consequence I, short-sighted as I was, began for a while to speak in the language of the dissident left, which overlapped significantly with the dissident right on the issue of freedom of speech, or even just freedom of the imagination; in any case it was dissident something-or-other to the extent that it had, at its heart, a deep revulsion to the way things were shaping up in our world in the most general sense. It also went by such forgettable names as “IDW”, and by the time it was mostly being called “anti-wokeism” it had hardened into something so thoughtless and dogmatic that its only vocal supporters were by now fairly obviously guilty of what Freud had called the narcissism of minor differences in the position they took up vis-à-vis their opponents. It turned out, in the end, that none of that was the real story, for the petulant slogan-mongering wokesters were really only the fetal form of our current regime of post-humanist, post-liberal automatism, which in its newer conformation, I expect, is going to be around much, much longer than, say, the pronouns that once distended so many e-mail signatures beyond any plausible utility.
Allow me to try to characterize this newborn babe. It is an unusual creature in that it cries a good deal less in its postnatal phase than it did while still in utero, and I suppose it is at least to be commended for smiling as much as it does. But as with any infant when it smiles it has no real idea what it is smiling about, and with this one, the longer you stare at it, the more its smile seems to contract into a precocious smirk.
There was that one tech-bro, for example, who said that novels are a waste of time because they do not have sufficient per-page “information density” to justify the effort. There was that other tech-bro who said it’s not so important what happens to films from before 1995 or so, in the uncertain future of digital archiving, since they were far too slow and nothing really happens in them anyway. SBF himself made the ultimate contribution to this rich new genre when he observed that Shakespeare is unlikely to be as “good” as everyone says he is, since there were so few people in the 16th century and it is therefore highly improbable that that century, rather than, say, this one, should have hosted history’s greatest English stylist.
I could keep adducing such examples until I hit my word-limit, but you get the idea. What I want to emphasize here is that my own parent discipline, philosophy, has by no means proved resistant to this new sensibility. In fact —credit where it’s due, I suppose— philosophy, or something calling itself by that name, has for once managed not to be irrelevant, and has played a key role in the birthing I am here attempting to describe. Until recently, as is well known by now, SBF had his own retinue of philosopher-courtiers from the “effective altruist” community. Finance capitalists, it turns out, absolutely love to hear articulate people explain to them new and theoretically sound ways to convert their wealth, after the manner of the potlatch, into even more status or an even clearer conscience. Yea, not since Descartes whispered his Papist plots in Queen Christina’s ear, and caused her to abdicate to Rome,1 have philosophers had so much influence in public life.
Have you not noticed this new cohort of cocky lads, who so proudly speak the language of the calculus of expected utility, who will not hesitate to tell you when it’s time to update your priors, or which path is most likely to help you max out your utils?2 What is all this? Why did they have to start talking this way? I mean, I like Bentham and Mill well enough —in fact Bentham is the sort of absolute freak who cannot fail to win my heart—, and I would not begrudge anyone their commitment to the tradition these men founded, were it not accompanied today by a scorched-earth revolutionary fervency that sincerely believes this single school of thought is rich enough by itself to go it alone indefinitely into the future, and that we can therefore dispense with any idea of philosophy as living tradition, involving, in part, like all traditions, due reverence to ancestors.
Thus the genial Amos Wollen, after making an incomprehensible (to me) contrast between Alvin Plantinga’s “good” writing and Kant’s “bad” writing, suggests that a possible way for philosophers to avoid the “bad” kind is to stop reading historical texts. Wollen does not in fact think this is a feasible proposal, but also cites some less moderate colleagues who truly seem bent on erasing the past, including Hanno Sauer, the author of a remarkable peer-reviewed piece from 2021 entitled “The End of History”, which argues that we should not waste time on historical texts on the grounds that they tend not to warrant “credence” (as if that were why one reads!). And he cites another fellow calling himself “Bentham’s Bulldog”, who likewise complains that the study of the history of philosophy amounts to a dynamic whereby “Kant will say some inane nonsense, and people will treat him like he’s Jesus Christ.” Surely the lifetime laureate of these cocksure, presentist, proudly monoglot gamins is Michael Huemer, who runs the Fake Noûs Substack and who maintains that “[h]istorians of philosophy… are expending a great deal of intellectual energy on questions that do not matter.”
Again, I could keep adducing examples, but let me proceed to the statement of my principal point of difference with the school of thought in question: history matters because every single word you use is shaped by history, and if you don’t know what that history is you literally don’t know what you’re saying. I am a Dobzhanskyan, in fact, about both natural history (i.e., evolution) and civil history: nothing makes sense except in the light of it.
Anti-historicism comes in waves in philosophy, which of course the presentists themselves will not know or care about, given that the previous waves necessarily happened in the past. The current wave is the largest one I have seen in my career, which began when we were still recovering from the previous great wave, which occurred in the mid-20th century with the rise of logical positivism. Cocky in our own way, along with some esteemed co-editors and fellow contributors we thought we were putting the last nail in presentism’s coffin when, in 2011, we edited a volume entitled Philosophy and Its History. The book was received politely enough, as expected, but did not exactly succeed in changing the larger course of things.
The logical-positivist wave itself followed the one I’ve spent the greater part of my career studying, namely, the philosophical rupture that occurred in the 17th century under agitation from the self-styled novatores, who liked to imagine they were starting from scratch, but in truth were all so effortlessly learnèd that we can almost excuse them for pretending with straight faces they had not read Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. The novatores of today are for their part not effortlessly learnèd, but only effortless; they make no effort at all to take the measure of how much they don’t know. One worries, moreover, that the technological moment at which they have appeared practically ensures that theirs will be the last and final wave. It’s presentism from here on out. Philosophy has come together with the culture that sustains it, rather than sticking to its traditional and far more noble role of standing apart from its culture and considering it with a critical eye. This is the culture, namely, of non-stop content, of the daily production of hundreds of exabytes of data around the world, of data-mongering and of generalized post-literacy.
For a while now the right, along with the class-first left, have enjoyed skewering the “PMCs” [the “professional-managerial class”]. But look, friends: whether you are using your spreadsheets to keep track of your daily net utils, or instead to keep track of attendance at your institution’s mandatory diversity training sessions, either way you are not doing the work of an intellectual. Intellectuals spend their time reading Ptolemy’s Almagest and Le Chanson de Roland and stuff like that, and they just keep reading and reading until they’ve read so much that eventually, if things work out as hoped, they manage to come up with a compelling and at least partially original narrative account of some dimension or other of the human condition. Of course I’m lapsing into caricature here, but the point stands: if you don’t even recognize this as a respectable model of the work of the intellectual, it might be because you are yourself, like the PMCs, not an intellectual at all, but some sort of desk-clerk.
Nudes below the fold.
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