So last week we talked about if—and it’s a big IF—AGI becomes something real, we will be looking at ourselves as if in a mirror and that these AGI machine/persons will be looking back at us. What will they see? The best of us, or the worst? So following John Vervaeke, I explored the implications of AGI becoming real as a pretext to examine what basis there is for these it to see anything good in us humans at all—anything that we could hope it would emulate.
I also traced how what we call today Transhumanism originated in the 1600s in what I call the Baconian Project. I spoke about how this marked a significant and unprecedented shift in the Western Tradition that came to see nature, rather than as shot through with the divine, as just stuff with no intrinsic value except as humans manipulate it to promote their material flourishing. This clears the way for both the Scientific Revolution and later Capitalism, which both come to promote the rationalist-materialism whose metaphysical presuppositions today dominate our public discourse.
These presuppositions are very hospitable to a Transhumanism that reduces the human being to a biological machine with all the nihilism that implies. So not only are we now at a point where Techno-Capitalism is working toward the creation of machines that are becoming more human-like, but also working toward the development of humans that are becoming more machine-like. And we all accept this as normal progress because we all accept more or less the logic that derives from the architecture of Techno-Capitalism. Intrinsic to this architecture is the idea that technological innovation should have no constraints except those determined by the market, no matter how destructive of other human values. Material progress is the only progress that counts. Moral progress? Not so much.
So I’m concerned about the human prospect. It’s not the technological advancement that scares me—it’s the people who are working so hard to promote the objectives of Techno-Capitalism. I fear that they, like Dr. Frankenstein, haven’t the moral maturity or integrity to unleash these powerful new beings on the world. And I worry because there is, as yet, no constituency organized and influential enough to check them by insisting that other ‘human’ values should play a role in shaping the human future. Techno-Capitalism takes the field unopposed.
There are lots of people of good will who would be part of an oppositional constituency, but we are all divided, and in being divided we are preemptively conquered. And I want to argue that if we are to have any hope for a truly flourishing human future, it must come from people who are invested in a rich, complex understanding about what human flourishing entails. And a purely materialistic, Transhumanistic idea of human flourishing is neither rich nor complex. It is one-dimensional.
What does my idea of rich, complex, human flourishing entail?
For me the fully flourishing human being is a ‘Full-Spectrum Human Being”. The Full-Spectrum Human Being is not one-dimensional, but three-dimensional, comprising a balanced mixture of three components—Body, yes, it shares that with the Transhumanists, but it adds to it both Soul and Spirit. The Full-Spectrum Human Being was the prevailing understanding of what a human being was until the mid 19th Century. It remains a deep, if latent, understanding of the human being even now. But it’s an idea of the human that does not serve the purposes of Techno-Capitalism, and so it has been de-legitimated. Today I want to explain why it has been de-legitimated and why a human future that runs on a cultural OS that excludes the flourishing of the Soul and Spirit cannot be a healthy one.
Because for now the only legitimate view of the human being that Techno-Capitialism recognized is of the one-dimensional human being as a biological desiring machine. If you want to give an explanation for any human behavior, you have to explain it in “science-y” materialistic terms and usually by some biological-evolutionary logic. I’m not saying that has nothing to do with what makes us human—our being material, emobodied creatures is essential—but it’s not all that makes us human, and it’s not the most important part. And we should not reduce our idea of the human to only what can be explained biologically.
Last week I also made the case that ‘Alienation ‘R us’’—and that we hate it. And that we will do almost anything not to feel it. And our desire for a remedy often results in our pursuing delusional projects. You know the Johnny Lee song—“Looking for love in all the wrong places”? It’s kinda like that. But because we don’t find a cure for alienation in all the wrong places, does not mean that there isn’t a right place. And that ‘right place’, I argued last week, is in coming to understand the Transcendent Good as foundational. That recognition is not derived from some assent to it as a propositional truth; rather for it to have any salience, it must derive from an intuition of the heart, or what I called ‘conscience’ quoting Rousseau at the end of the first lecture. The only true path out of our condition of alienation is the path of conscience, and conscience is only truly conscience if it has the capacity to discern the Transcendent Good.
I argued that conscience and its recognition of the Good is repressed in our public life. It has a presence, but it is the presence of a phantom limb, so to say. But I think it’s possible to un-repress the central importance of the Good and to restore it from its phantom presence to real presence because whether most people think about the Good in these terms, all people of good will have an operational conscience and exercise it in their private lives. It just plays no robust role in our public decision making.
In the meanwhile, I see the cultural OS that defines Techno-Capitalism as a kind of jail—and we’re all living in it whether we want to or not. In a few minutes, I’m going to be talking about the 1999 film The Matrix. I don’t believe that we’re literally in that kind of a matrix, but we are in a figurative version of it, and it’s a powerful metaphor to help us understand our predicament. If you’ve got anything left of a soul or spirit, you want to find a way out of it. That’s why I call the underlying architecture that structures our cultural OS the Techno-Capitalist Matrix, or TCM.
Ok. So today I want to talk mostly about the insights of two secular thinkers to help us understand the nature of this jail or matrix from which we want to escape: Jean Baudrillard and Herbert Marcuse.
Baudrillard was something of a philosophical pop star in France in the 70s and 80s. And he even made it into American pop culture when his book Simulacra and Simulation made a came appearance in The Matrix. Baudrillard’s comcept of simulation is metaphorically represented in the film’s fictional Matrix.
The idea of being trapped in a delusional matrix is not new. It traces back to the question Rene Descartes asks in the early 1600s in his First Meditation: How do I know that the world that appears before me is real? Descartes even entertains the possibility that “a malicious demon with his utmost power and cunning has employed all his energies to deceive me.” He goes on—
“I shall think that the sky, the air, the earth, colors shapes, sounds and all external things are merely the delusions of dreams which he has devised to ensnare my judgment. I shall consider myself as not having hands or eyes, or flesh or blood or sense, but as falsely believing that I have all these things.”
Which is exactly the condition of the humans in the The Matrix. Agent Smith and his fellow agents are demon-like AGI bots who use their police powers and cunning to maintain the illusion that the Matrix is a real world.
And so this metaphor of the Matrix resonates, right? Remember the scene where Morpheus starts explaining things to Neo?
MORPHEUS:
As children, we do not separate the possible from the impossible, which is why the younger a mind is, the easier it is to free, while a mind like yours can be very difficult.
NEO:
Free from what?
MORPHEUS:
From the Matrix….Do you want to know what it is, Neo? It's that feeling you have had all your life. That feeling that something was wrong with the world. You don't know what it is but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad, driving you to me. But what is it?
Can anybody relate to that feeling? He’s talking about what we’ve been talking about—Primal Alienation.
MORPHEUS:
The Matrix is everywhere, it's all around us, here even in this room. You can see it out your window, or on your television. You feel it when you go to work, or go to church or pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.
NEO:
What truth?
MORPHEUS:
That you are a slave, Neo. That you, like everyone else, was born into bondage… kept inside a prison that you cannot smell, taste, or touch. A prison for your mind….Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself.
Then there’s the famous scene where Morpheus shows Neo the devastated landscape that is the real world after a war between the AGI bots and humans destroyed it. He says, “Welcome to the Desert of the Real.” a phrase coined by Baudrillard.
So Morpheus’s description of the Matrix resonates with us even though he’s describing what we know to be a fiction. But the movie’s fiction is powerful. It feels true. It feels like a plausible explanation to account for our feeling of alienation, or at the very least it’s an apt metaphor for it.
But Baudrillard and Descartes are not the first to notice this eerie feeling that somehow we are cut off from what is really real. I assume most of you are familiar with Plato’s “Allegory for the Cave”. And then in Buddhism there’s the idea of Maya. So humans suspecting that the world we live in isn’t the really real World goes back at least to the dawn of the Axial Revolution.
Plato’s Cave, Buddha’s Maya, and Christian Original Sin are all different metaphors that point to something that humans have felt for thousands of years—that human beings are living in a world that is cut off from the really Real. And our being cut off is the source of our desire and longing, and so therefor desire becomes problematic. Desire is problematic in the TCM as well because it’s seen as constrained by traditionalist taboos, taboos that largely trace back to the practices of Post-Axial religions and philosophies. The TCM is all about obliterating those taboos and practices as a way of liberation it claims leads to overcoming alienation, which of course it doesn’t. More about this next week.
The Post-Axial Traditions, of course, reject such a crude understanding of the role of desire in achieving human flourishing. One solution is to eradicate desire, as in Buddhism. Another is redirect desire to the Transcendent Good, which is the approach embraced by Plato/Aristotle, Judeo-Chrisitianity, and Islam, particularly in Sufism. This is the idea we find in the scriptures that we must love God with all our hearts and all our being. The point is not to repress desire, but to direct it toward that which is most worthy of being desired. Such an idea, of course, makes no sense in the TCM and is often ridiculed.
And besides, it’s not easy to do even if one wants to. And those early Christians who wanted to take this idea seriously thought that they could not do it in society. They had to leave it, and that’s what the early Christian Desert Fathers like St. Anthony the Great did—they left the matrix of society and went out into the Desert of the Real.
I don’t expect there are many here in the audience tonight who have plans to take on a monastic vocation any time soon. But getting out of the Matrix was Neo’s first step—moving off the grid, and into the Desert of the Real. I’ll have more to say about why this metaphor is particularly resonant in this moment for us next week.
But why is Neo Neo? Why is he “the One”?
Once he becomes the One—once he’s brought back to life after Trinity’s kiss—he can go back into the Matrix and is no longer governed by the Matrix’s OS. He is operating with a higher ‘code’, and he brings it into the Matrix from outside the Matrix, and in doing so he subverts it. The goal is not just to escape the Matrix, but to destroy the rule of the Demon Bots and the OS that governs them.
The point here is that the subversion of an evil system is possible only from source or standpoint outside the system. The system cannot be subverted by the logic of its own code. Another higher code must intrude, and so when we think of our predicament in the Techno-Capitalist Matrix, the same logic applies. That’s why there is no solution for the crises posed by AI or looming ecological disaster from within the architecture of the OS as the TCM structures it. There has to be some way to stand outside of it, and then to bring a different code into the TCM to subvert it.
I have no problem with AI or AGI if it were to run according to a higher code grounded in ideas about the Transcendent Good and the Full-Spectrum Human Being. I have no problem with the idea of imagining a transhumanist future if it is developed in accordance with such a code. My problem is not with technology, but with the code that currently runs it. The TCM is not the code I see giving us a positive human future in any way.
This discussion of The Matrix sets up what I want to say about Baudrillard.
For many of the postmodern thinkers, humans are imprisoned in a linguistic matrix. They see language as setting the limits for human experience rather than opening up possibilities for its expansion. For many of them, the human being is his or her linguistic programming. The subject does not speak; rather, language speaks the subject. We’ll see how this plays out. Baudrillard agrees with this assertion and its corollary in the ‘death of the subject’, but he sees this as a cultural catastrophe—and not as something that was always true.
Baudrillard is influenced by Marshall McLuhan, but he reverses many of his slogans. McLuhan says that technology is an extension of the human being; Baudrillard says that the human being has become, or is becoming, an extension of technology. Humans don’t use technology; technology uses humans.
McLuhan talked about how technology was creating a global village and that we are affected by events half a globe away the way our ancestors were affected by what happened locally. But Baudrillard says that we don’t live in a global village, but rather in a global theater. We experience events half a globe away the way we experience a reality TV show.
We think the two are different—one reports a “real event” over there with real people; the other is a staged or scripted event. But on television the real is co-opted by the un-real. The horror and suffering half a world away becomes in a weird way entertainment. We relate to it in the same way we watch a disaster movie. Neil Postman makes a similar argument in—
This why our politics has become so insane. Politics should be boring, but it’s become entertainment. Our politics has become so astonishingly ineffective at solving real-world problems because politics now works as spectacle, like a sporting event. Hardly anybody cares about how policies actually affect the lives of real people anymore. If people are interested in politics at all, It’s for the cage match. And so too many people care only about whether their side wins—the Blue team or the Red—no matter what the policy consequences.
Baudrillard analyzes the 1968 student uprising in France. He argues that it failed because the students became mesmerized by the TV narrative and stopped dealing with the realities on the ground. The realities in real time and real space were coopted by the realities as they were presented on the screen. The students became role players in a drama they were no longer writing. The media were writing them their parts, and if they didn’t play those parts, they became irrelevant.
So to stay relevant they had to become actors in a show on the Global Theater rather than agents in the real local world of human conflict and exchange. What is really happening becomes less relevant than the way it gets pick up in the media narrative. This is the origin of the idea that politicians must “control the media narrative”, but that control easily morphs into just making stuff up that has nothing to do with reality and everything to do with controlling the narrative.
Ask yourself why you know more about national politics than you do about local politics. Until recently it was a cliche that all politics was local politics. So why is that no longer true? Baudrillard explains it: It’s because local politics is boring because it’s just about policy. It only becomes interesting when it’s a local version of the cage match being fought in the National Media Theater.
Baudrillard and Postman believed that it’s possible for you to resist being coopted by the media narratives, but you have to be awake to the forces that seek to co-opt you. We need to be alert to all the ways that media are lulling us to sleep and to all the ways they are increasing our passivity and alienation from the real by destroying even our capacity to want to know the difference between what’s real and what’s fake.
But there’s another level on which Baudrillard is important for the argument I want to make. He was a sociologist trained in Emile Durkheim’s school. The Durkheimians studied aboriginal cultures and derived a concept of the ‘sacred’ from observing their rituals of symbolic exchange.
Durkheimians saw capitalism as destroying what remained of these meaningful webs of human social/symbolic exchange in Western societies. And of substituting new webs of meaning that were divorced from these older, more soulful customs and traditions. They understood the chief agent of the destruction of these forms as capitalism in all the ways it disrupts the old in the name of innovation. They saw capitalism as a creative-destructive force that hollows out cultures and homogenizes them in such a way as to make them into clay that can be reshaped in their materialist consumer image where no idea of the sacred plays a role.
Baudrillard develops out this “school”. For him a sense of the ‘Real’ is lost to the degree that the sacred is no longer experienced in a communal symbolic exchange. It’s just not possible in a post-Baconian world where symbols no longer symbolize, where the world is just made of inert stuff whose value lies almost exclusively in its ability to be transformed into something that has utility or market value.
And Baudrillard traces this loss of the sacred in stages that culminate in our current media culture. In his 1981 book Simulacra and Simulation, he talks about this gradual divorce from reality in his idea of the ‘Precession of the Simulacra’. He lays it out in three stages:
First, the Premodern Symbolic Stage—in which the value of symbols and images lies in their power as sacramental signs, where they act as portals into a deeper, sacred reality.
Second, the Modern Commodity Stage—in which the value of images lies in their commodity or exchange value.
Third, the Postmodern Semiotic Stage–in which the value of images lies exclusively in their value as determined socially.
First let’s understand what he means by ‘symbolic’ and ‘semiotic’. A central role for the image or language symbol is to mediate dimensions of significance from the depths of the soul in sacred time, as for instance in ritual.
There is a dynamic interrelatedness between the symbol and the vitality that lies in the depths of the soul. The symbols are charged with the living force of something that people feel as deeply vital. In modern societies, too often you have the husks of ritual, but not the living force that first gave them their symbolic form. When they have no felt significance, they’re purely ‘semiotic’.
“Semiotic” isn’t a bad thing. It’s just meaning without felt significance, like 2 + 2 = 4. Or the sky is blue. Or the kind of discourse you find in scholarly or scientific journals where the goal is to leave out subjective affect. Poetry and art and religious language, if they are working, retain this symbolic function. The problem with life in the TCM, however, is its becoming more difficult for us with each passing decade to encounter symbols that work symbolically.
Moderns still retain rituals and traditions, but too often they feel semiotic in this sense, i.e., alienated from the energies and feeling that once vivified them. Christmas, for instance, for many feels like going through the motions. It doesn’t feel festive the way it did when they were children.
That’s why Christmas is such a depressing time for so many people. It has become ‘semioticized’. The images/symbols no longer signify in any felt significant way. They have lost their symbolic vitality. There are still the forms, but the life for which they once functioned as portals is no longer accessible.
So in the first stage, which characterizes all premodern symbolic forms, as for instance aboriginal art and much of the art in Western antiquity through the Renaissance, the art produced performed this sacramental/symbolic function. The symbol is not the Life. It is a portal into the Life. It opens up a passage to it otherwise unavailable.
It’s important to point out that most of the art produced in premodern societies had religious significance and played a role in ritual. Its meaning was largely if not entirely determined by the role it played within these contexts. Take them out of these contexts, and they lose much of their meaning. Art from ancient Greece or the Italian Renaissance might be perceived to us now as aesthetically beautiful, but that does not mean we understand how the people in the societies for which these symbols were created felt their significance.
So this decontextualization is what characterizes the production of art in the second stage in the Precession of the Simulacra. The art symbol starts to lose its value as it becomes de-contextualized from its originary context as they no longer play a religious role. And in being ritually de-contextualized, they easily become commodified.
Art criticism becomes all about technique and about what’s novel—not about whether and artwork works effectively as symbol, i.e., whether it opens up a portal into the sacred. How can it when people aren’t looking for art to perform that function? And when nobody experiences the sacred anymore, nor do they expect to?
These artworks become reduced to their monetary exchange value. The original is worth more not because of its symbolic power but because of its scarcity value. DaVinci reproductions are a dime a dozen. But the original, because there’s only one, is worth millions.
Anybody know how much DaVinci’s “Salvador Mundi” sold for in 2017?
$450,000 million. The print is available on Etsy for $10.95. And the original was bought by a Saudi prince—talk about decontextualizing. An artwork when it works symbolically is priceless. But who cares about that anymore?
Baudrillard has a bigger point to make. The mechanical proliferation of these images changes our experience of what they represent in profound ways, and it’s these changes that mark the movement into the third stage in the Precession of the Simulacra—the Postmodern Semiotic. This occurs when embodied presence and our connection to it cease to matter. This is when the image becomes more real that the Real it represents. The image becomes “Hyper-real”, and the Real disappears.
Think about how you relate to photos. Let’s say you find a photo of a deceased loved one. The picture brings up all these memories and feelings. You know the photo isn’t the real loved one. At best it’s evocative of a richer experience of when you were in the living presence of him or her. And so the photo has real value in evoking something that has deep value for you. But clearly it would be better if the loved one were still a living presence in your life—not just an image.
So the value of the photo in this instance has not yet reached the hyper-real stage because the image has less value than the living presence of what it represents. You could say that it is still performing a symbolic function. So what do we mean by hyper-real?
Let’s say you see a photo taken in a beautiful public garden that you’ve never visited, and then you visit the garden and you are disappointed. It’s a beautiful day and the garden is in full bloom, but the garden itself is not as “impressive” as the picture of it. What does that say about the quality of your experience? And about what you are filtering out? What does it say about what is important and not important in your experience? This is what Baudrillard means by the image performing this hyper-real function. It’s when the image becomes more important or more valued than the real living thing the image represents.
In the Postmodern Semiotic stage, meanings are determined laterally rather than vertically, if by vertical we mean direct experience in the presence of something living and real. We no longer feel significance in a direct encounter with the “vertical’, deep reality of the garden, the living incarnate presence of it. It’s as if that vitality has become sealed off from us. We only experience the surfaces, and those surfaces are evaluated by criteria that are formal and abstract rather than living and embodied.
“Artists” can manipulate these formal abstract qualities and claim to be creating something new, but it really isn’t. It’s novel, not original, and it’s usually rather soulless, as in much of what passes for pop art and conceptual art. They might be clever or entertaining. They might get you think something you hadn’t thought before, but they are not working symbolically. They are rearranging the furniture in the room, not creating something genuinely original.
And regarding the garden, is it something that anybody is talking about on TikTok or Insta? No? Then why should I care? Especially now since actual reality presenting itself to me in the garden becomes unavailable to me, and so has no value for me.
This happens in our social relations as well. We see our lives and relationship as significant depending on how it maps to the lives we see in media. Our lives are measured by how they align or fail to align with the how media shapes our imagination of what is significant.
You may have a dramatic experience in your life and it means more because it maps to a movie you’ve seen or a song you’ve heard. Or the reverse—you have what should be a significant experience, but it doesn’t feel significant because you can’t map it to a movie or a song you know. You have the experience, but miss the meaning.
Or maybe you find yourself reacting to an experience not in a way that you feel, but rather in a way that you were programmed to feel by media. Like the French students in ’68. You say the words you are expected to say; you laugh at your boss’s unfunny joke. At work you find yourself using tired business buzzwords and phrases. It’s what’s expected if you’re to be perceived as a ‘team player’.
And because we want to compete in this world of superficial significance, we start reshaping our bodies so that they map more closely to the bodies of celebrities in media. And now with VR we can take on a body that isn’t even ours, and the really interesting life we live is in a game, and the really boring life we live in outside of it in the Real. The time in the VR game becomes sacred time, and our real lives become profane time. We are more awake when in the simulacral dream, and more asleep when living in the Real.
Why would anybody want to live in what has become the Desert of the Real? The Real has become a no-place. It has disappeared, or it is in the process of disappearing. This is where the post-Baconian project detached from some sense of a Transcendent Good inevitably leads. The Good becomes defined by whatever meets our entertainment or comfort needs.
So, to the extent that our lives are shaped by the ‘Postmodern-Semiotic’, we are living in something very much like the Matrix. But rather than being forced to live in it by demon bots, we are choosing it. We are choosing the Blue pill, like Cypher…
…but are we doing so without our knowing it? Are we just drifting into deeper forms of alienation because we’re becoming increasingly bored with the real world? And why have we become bored in the first place? Maybe it’s because of the way the TCM works so relentlessly to seal us off from what is more deeply significant.
Cypher knew that his going back into the Matrix was to go back into a delusional world. But it was a delusion in which he’d be more comfortable than in the Desert of the Real. Many of my students have a hard time understanding why Cypher is wrong to want that. Why would it be wrong for someone if he or she believed that human beings are just purposeless, biological machines? Why shouldn’t pleasure and comfort be the only things that matter? What else is there?
So you see how all this relates to the alienation theme we introduced last week, right? And it goes to what should be a fundamental criterion in our evaluating how we relate to new technologies: Are they increasing or decreasing our sense of being cut off? Are they connecting us to what’s real, or are they simply filling our need not to be bored?
Baudrillard was a Marxist earlier in his career. It’s de rigeur for any intellectual in good standing in France. But in his late career he became very pessimistic. He came to believe that meaningful political action was no longer a possibility. How could it be for people who live in a world where Reality has disappeared?
How can this be a world where real political change is a possibility? How can it be a place where the arc of history bends toward Justice? Who believes there’s such a thing as Justice anyway? And why worry about Justice in the Real World if you can hang out in a virtual one instead? Do you see how this kind of thinking meets the needs of the TCM to keep us enervated with bread and circuses?
So let’s turn to another important philosopher, Herbert Marcuse–
He was one of the more influential thinkers to come out of the Frankfurt School—Erich Fromm was also from that lineage. This was a group of German Marxist thinkers who sought to understand the pathologies associated with the emergence of Mass Society in the 20th Century. He was the philosopher most embraced by the Counter Culture in the 1960s/70s.
What was the Counter Culture against? The way Post WWII societies were becoming large, impersonal, overly rational, soul crushing Technocracies in both the private and public spheres.
Marcuse is thought of by some as an advocate for the Sexual Revolution. Writing a book entitled Eros and Civilization and his being beloved by the New Left might lead one to that mistaken impression. But nothing could be further than the truth. He thought sexual liberation was largely was one of the most effective strategies the Technocratic Order deployed in keeping people docile and enervated. So a quick explanation why he thought this might be helpful.
Freud talked about the Pleasure Principle and the Reality Principle. Humans are desire-driven, and they want instant gratification. That’s the Pleasure Principle. The human experience is largely characterized by scarcity. So you can’t always get what you want. That’s the Reality Principle.
The Reality Principle requires that you repress your desire to do whatever you want whenever you want. It forces you out of what Freud called Primal Narcissism. If humans are to survive, they must learn to repress their desire for immediate gratification. They have to go to work. And they have to cooperate with other humans. Humans working in concert with other people to reduce scarcity and precarity is how civilizations get built. But it comes at a cost. We pay the price in repressed desire. That was the basic point of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents.
So Marcuse says that a basic level of repression is ok. You can’t live without it. And it creates the conditions for sublimating desire in a way that gives energy to human cultural projects. And then there’s always ‘deferred gratification’. Humans learn that to discipline their desire, to be patient, can lead to larger and more satisfying gratifications in the future. This is what sublimation means, and it’s the motive force behind artistic creation, progress, and technological development. So repression and sublimation is a good thing if you think creativity and civilizational progress are good things.
In hunter-gatherer societies, everyone shared more or less equally in the work and so equally in the repression. But also equally in the deferred gratification. You kill the buffalo, every member of the community gets their fair share. Decisions are made democratically, even if deference is given to the elders because of their wisdom and experience.
But as societies develop, so do hierarchies of dominance. Some people get more repressed than others. Some people do way more work than is their fair share, and others receive way more benefits than is their fair share. Those who do more than their share fo the work suffer what Marcuse calls ‘surplus repression’, chattel slavery being the most extreme form. But wage slavery in the early Industrial Revolution was not far behind—backbreaking work, and close to zero deferred gratification, and little to no leisure time for creative work of any kind, although the depth and beauty of the Negro spiritual is certainly an exemplary exception in this regard.
Now some people have argued that you need Surplus Repression if civilization is to advance. If some people aren’t given the leisure to think and create and innovate, civilizations cannot progress. So the Surplus Repression suffered by the many is justified by giving ‘leisure’ to an elite who produce art, philosophy, and new technologies.
But Marcuse is writing in the post-WWII economic boom of the 1950s and 60s. Scarcity isn’t an issue in the way it was in the 1930s and 40s. There’s plenty for everyone if society had the will to distribute it fairly. So why are the people who are still suffering all this surplus repression putting up with it?
Well, because they’ve been bought off.
The old theory—the one Marx assumed was a fundamental law of history—was that capitalism could only motivate people to work by threatening workers with starvation. The goal for Capitalists was to find the Goldilocks spot between keeping workers strong enough to work and immiserated enough so they would have nothing to live on if they quit.
Fordism before WWII is a game changer in this regard. Owners provide workers absolutely miserable, alienating jobs in factories—
But they pay workers well enough so they can buy the cars that they’re making. Instead of paying starvation wages, owners give workers some hope of deferred gratification. This is clearly an improvement, but it’s also the beginning of the Consumer Society and all its pathologies.
The second innovation that undermines the Marxist logic is the Sexual Revolution. Capitalist societies loosen up the ‘repressive’ Calvinist sexual mores. This makes immediate gratification of sexual desire permissible and easier to achieve—so long as it doesn’t interfere with work discipline. Hugh Hefner and the Playboy hedonic culture gradually become normative in film and TV and advertising. And sexuality becomes increasingly commodified.
Abortion is legalized in ’73. Swinging, open marriages, and wife swapping become a think in the 70s. All the old taboos are gradually eliminated. I’m not here to evaluate the moral consequences of these changes so much as to point out how well adapted they were to the homogenizing, totalizing, tradition-killing project of the TCM. It’s where all the ethnic Irish, Italians, Jews, and others go to get homogenized into the TCM, i.e., where they get their particularity and cultural vitality gradually bleached out of them. Sure for many, and for good reason, this feels like liberation, but it’s liberation into a wasteland. As the TCM mutilates all the old traditions and customs, it replaces them with a new ethos where sex and consumerism become the primary remedies for the boredom, alienation, and anomie that ensue.
And so this sex-as-therapy ethos fits perfectly with the new consumer-choice culture that is the throbbing pulse of the post-WWII order. Having multiple sexual partners and treating them as exchangeable commodities becomes ok. The hook-up culture becomes normative among young people. Sexual performance and sexual attractiveness become critical in commodifying oneself. If you resist this new self-commodification ethos, you are seen as repressed, uptight, and hung up. You need to see a therapist who will help you to adjust to life in the brave new world that the TCM has created. It is this mutilation of culture and its effects that the Frankfurt School thinkers address themselves to.
Marcuse calls this liberalization of sexual mores ‘repressive de-sublimation’. Along with Fordism, it was far more effective strategy for pacifying the workforce than immiseration. You keep people politically docile by channeling—de-sublimating—all their energies into sex and shopping. We’re all homogenized into this soulless world of comfort and pleasure.
This is a strategy that’s as old as the Roman ‘Bread and Circuses’. Keep everybody from starving, and keep them entertained. Keep them docile and passive as in the folks depicted in Pixar’s WALL-E—
The Technocracy must keep everybody from thinking too much about how bored and miserable they are in their soul and spiritual lives. So what do you do between the hours when not at work or having sex or shopping? You have to be continuously developing new distractions, new ways to keep people docile and submissive. Otherwise, they might get restless and want to change things.
Can’t have that. The TCM wants passivity, and the culture wars are the perfect way to channel all that frustration without it threatening the fundamental architecture of the system. Let them fight about guns and abortion and transcending the gender binary. Let them beat one another to a pulp in a war neither side can win by political force. It gives combatants the illusion of purpose in their performative righteousness and in doing so keeps them divided and conquered. What better way to keep them distracted and so from getting in the way of where the TCM wants to take them?
Marcuse saw the pathology here as reinforcing an economically unjust system, but more importantly he saw it as destroying people’s souls, of robbing them of their freedom by infantilizing them. The consumer ethos gave people the illusion of freedom—look at all my consumer choices! But they were being manipulated all the while, being distracted all the while, from paying attention to what is more important. They were directing their energies and desires toward the vulgar, rather than to something that would be more worthy of their desire.
Even to suggest that humans have a destiny that is higher and more spiritually noble seems absurdly, naively idealistic. What world are you living in?
Is there no wonder that a snake-oil salesman like Trump has been so effective in this environment? He’s the reductio ad absurdum of repressive de-sublimation. He’s the poster child for its worst excesses, the perfect exemplar of how the strategy works. But he doesn’t feel absurd to so many Americans. Why? Because repressive de-sublimation has made him a hero of repressive de-sublimation. And he de-sublimates everyone who joins his norms-crashing crusade in the name of saving America from the Liberals.
So here’s the final thought for tonight. Maybe you think the idea of the Transcendent Good is nonsense and that all these great civilizations made it up so they could feel better in a world that is fundamentally meaningless. If so, maybe you should ask yourself if perhaps your thinking follows by your having become inured to life within the Techno-Capitalist Matrix—because that’s exactly what the TCM wants you to think. The worst thing that could happen for the nihilists who benefit most from Techno-Capitalist Matrix would be for the Transcendent Good to play a subversive role in their Brave New World.
Leave a Reply