The right has a clear idea of the world it wants to create, however revanchist and dystopian it might seem to its opponents. There is no similarly motivating spirit on the shellshocked left, at least outside of Latin America. Incremental change to a hated status quo is clearly insufficient, but progressives haven’t laid out a picture of comprehensive transformation that seems either workable or inspiring to most people.
In the the early 2000s as we were ramping up for the invasion of Iraq, I had one of those aha moments when I was reading Jacques Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present; 500 Years of Cultural Life. I'm too lazy right now to look up the exact quote, but his definition of 'decadence' was the key. He made clear that he did not consider the term as morally pejorative, but as a neutrally descriptive term describing when a society has lost any confident collective imagination of a morally progressive future. There were ups and downs during the last 500 years, but there was an underlying confidence that directed things during that time. But that confidence was shaken in the middle of the 19th century, and by the end of the Thirty Years War from 1914 to 1945, it had been utterly shattered.
Barzun takes pains to point out that during a decadent period people as individual moral agents can thrive; it's just that the society as a whole seems confused and lost because there is no central animating energy that inspires and organizes it. And that, of course, plays out in all kinds of toxic, chaotic ways in a decadent society's collective life.
My catch-all term for how this toxicity has been socially organized since WWII is the Techno-Capitalist Matrix. It functions as nihilist zombie culture, a bizarro opposite or parody or counterfeit of what a healthy culture should do in orienting humans more wholesomely toward a “good” future, i.e., a future oriented toward the Good. The zombie ideology of the TCM is Transhumanism. But we all accept it as normal, because what else is there that seems "progressive" in shaping our future. Tech is all about an ever-new, progressive, exciting future, right? But Good? Only in the most morally diminished sense of the word.
Again, the problem is not the tech itself. It's how humans interact with it, and at root, It's the toxic, dehumanizing, zombifying energies that are driving those humans involved in 'creating' the tech in the way that they are. They call it innovation; I call it possession.
Did you ever wonder why zombies are such a thing in the last thirty years? Well maybe that's because in our collective subconscious we all fear that we are becoming zombies–beings who look human but who are animated by energies that are anything but human, that are indeed anti-human. Is Elon Musk recognizably human anymore? Is Zuckerberg? They're like Gollum and the Ring. Ok, unlike zombies, there's a human in there somewhere, but it's being suffocated and dominated by something deeply malign.
So I could go off on a tangent here about how for so many people it's getting harder and harder to "feel" human anymore, and how this accounts for so much, but I'll keep it short today.
Read the entire Goldberg column. She shows that she understands the problem, and she’s right that what’s required is a “comprehensive transformation”, but neither she nor Ro Khanna, about whom this article is mostly about, have any real solutions. They cannot so long as they assume that something genuinely human be accomplished in our collective life within the presuppositions of the TCM, which they both accept uncritically. The Right, regressive though it might be, has a cultural political program that gets people excited. The progressive Left has no alternative that, to use Goldberg's language, is "workable or inspiring". All they got is some misplaced hope in tech.
My naming this blog ‘After the Future’ back in 2003 was largely inspired by my reading Barzun. The task as I saw it then, and even more so now, was to look forward in hope toward a new dawn. And over the years, I've tried to engage readers and students in an exercise of imagining an alternative, positive, collective, truly human future. And all along I’ve argued that in order to do that, while we cannot go native in the past, we must retrieve lost and forgotten treasures bequeathed to us from the ancestors. That's an essential part of it anyway.
Recently, I’ve been arguing that people like Taylor, Hart, and others are laying the groundwork for such a retrieval as a path toward developing an alternative positive future imagination. This is a long-term work. It's not something you hire McKinsey in to give you a plan. It requires a different order of thinking than what most people are used to or comfortable with. So over the next year, insofar as I have the time and energy for it, I'll be trying to translate what those thinkers and others are up to for an audience that is mostly unfamiliar with the Western philosophical tradition. This might be a heavy lift at times, and it will require some effort on your part. But I hope at least some of you will make that effort and work through it with me.
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