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I think the US Civil War points to an example of the extremist’s gambit failing–it consolidated the lower south but at the cost of losing Missouri, Maryland, Kentucky, Tennessee, and West Virginia. Arguably they would have won the war had they the full south behind them.
I have not read the essay in full, but here is what I will say.
First of all, an analytical essay does not need to have an obvious “so what?” or “here is what we should do” attached to it. Sometimes the author does not know what we should do; othertimes, they do not want their normative arguments to distract from their empirical ones. This is very important, because people will often run away from an argument where people state an offensive ought but are more open to a dispassionate overview of what is.
With that said, I think it is often very common for people to make disingenuous arguments for tactical reasons. Imagine the beltway consensus on acceptable arguments is on a sliding scale, maybe numbers 45-50. In that environment the person who thinks position 35 will be ridiculed as a pariah. So instead they will argue position 45 or maybe 43 or 42 very strongly in order to drag the consensus towards their actual position without being banished from the beltway.
This is incredibly common behavior. The biggest weakness of this dynamic is that the actual convictions and assumptions that lie behind many arguments are never properly analyzed because they are not openly articulated. If position 35 is actually the best position, I would like to here its merits argued fully. But I understand why analysts are afraid to do this–the consequences, social and professional, are high.
A reader sent me the following message on twitter DM:
I don’t think you should count “industrial dynanism” and “progress studies” as seriously as you may be. These aren’t real movements with lots of adherents. They are just VC / tech billionaire narratives that spread a lot on twitter. Even as far as “progress studies” goes, it is transforming into rather different versions as it encounters concrete problem spaces it wants to address
I guess i am warning away from reifying these narratives if you don’t like them, because they are much weaker than you’re making them out to be. Pieces like this serve the function of telling people what their selection space is. You’re also missing out on distinct narratives in crypto that were much stronger than any of these in the last 5 years, although somewhat depleted now
I do think that the crypto thing is missing from my version, and that may be a problem.
@Signfield–
The distinction between BAP and Lasch comes out clearly in discussions of the former’s most recent book (see here: https://mansworldmag.online/review-selective-breeding-and-the-birth-of-philosophy/).
In terms of that book, Lasch is 100% nomos against BAP’s phusis. BAP wants to liberate men from a culture that chains them; Lasch thinks that it is precisely the shedding of cultural formation that caused all this in the first place. BAP hates the feminine and the family; Lasch celebrates both, calling them a “haven in a heartless world.” BAP finds value in a narrow, genetically superior elite; Lasch believes that virtue can be widely distributed, is a fanatic for democracy, and finds whatever remnants of virtue are left in the lower, not upper classes. Lasch would happily return to Victorian sentiments and souls; BAP, disciple of Nietzche, would smart against that world as much as his master did. Lasch is on the side of Confucians, moralists, and all who believe that humans must be hammered into proper shape to act morally; BAP’s view is the opposite. BAP not only chooses nature over nurture; he views nurture as a feminine perversion, as an assault of inferior nature on its superiors.
They both detest the PMC, but for entirely different, and mutually contradictory reasons.
I’m probably on team Lasch here.
@Signfield–
“The defining characteristic of humanity is that we believe that there is Someone out there who will hold us accountable for what we do here.”
What a statement! And justified by what, though? Do the vast majority of humans who lived before monotheism believe this? You don’t find this belief in the Iliad or the oldest Greek writings. You do not find it in hunter gatherer tribes scattered across the Earth. This seems to be a mostly Axial age development that we are universalizing.
But if it is only one possible human route then we have something of a choice in whether we prefer this route to others. Thus I do not find Land compelling but revolting–it is one thing to build a God above us, another to build a Satan below, but Land’s path does not distinguish between the two one way or another.
@Andrew–
1.”If an uncontrolled superintelligence is created, there won’t be anything left inside the universe that will or will care to remember us.”
But of course that is our ultimate fate either way. On a long enough time scale–and not really *that* long of a time scale–both your deeds and mine, will be lost to the sands of time:
They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.You will die. I will die. We all will die. And that fact changes priorities–or it should.
Will it last? he says.
Is it a masterpiece?
Will generation after generation
Turn with reverence to the page?Birdseye scholar of the frozen fish,
What would he make of the sole, clean, clear
Leap of the salmon that has disappeared?To be, yes! — whether they like it or not!
But not last when leap and water are forgotten,
A plank of standard pinkness in the dish.2. “but to me this sounds like a death-cult villain from a movie?”
Well, yes, that is exactly what Land is. Historical inevitability leads naturally to cultish sorts of beliefs.
The question here is how inevitable Land’s vision really is. We stopped nuclear power… but not the absurd boomlet in nuclear weapons.
You’ve read Alexander’s “meditations on Moloch”? Land’s position, as I understand him, is that Moloch cannot be beat.
Lasch’s basic theory is that the PMC are unreformable, and the problem is not how to change them but how to change the socioeconomic conditions that allow them to exist.
The best summary of Lasch’s ideas–in particular, how both his ideas on the PMC/political economy and his ideas on narcissistic personality types join together, not otherwise obvious–is this article right here: Russel Nieli, “Social Conservatives of the Left: James Lincoln Collier, Christopher Lasch, and Daniel Bell.” You can find it on sci-hub for free. The last third is about Lasch and does a very good job of summarizing his thought on the questions relevant to your post (though he dismisses the aspect of Lasch I find most important — his definition of freedom. See my “Pining for Democracy” for more on that).
I do not think I agree with either the characterization of Andreeson’s manifesto nor with the SpaceX logic.
On Andreeson first: it is a manifesto. The point of the manifesto is not to tell people what to believe, or to establish an orthodoxy (ala a traditional Christian creed). Manifestos are calls to arms. They basically say “This is what I believe–and everyone who believes likewise, come join me now so we may fight for these things!” The point is not to convert people who do not believe, but to gather those who already do. It’s purpose is to inspire, not to argue. The arguments are entirely incidental.
This is true for most manifestos–including some very famous ones say, the Declaration of Independence. The men of ’76 had few illusions about the force of their argument staying Parliament’s hand. That was never the point. The point was to stiffen spines for the fight to come.
On technology and Musk:
I think the “how many years” way of looking at things is wrong. It assumes that there is an end teleology that technology inevitably evolves to. I see no evidence in human history whatsoever that this is true. My wager is that sans Musk there would be nothing like SpaceX or its competitors. The competition arose because other entrepreneurs saw what SpaceX was attempting to do, realized that it was potentially profitable, and decided they could do it better. (Or at least, they could do it better in a specific niche application). Without SpaceX most of these other folks would not be trying—and even if they were trying, they would not be funded. (For similar reasons Silicon Valley is full of people claiming their company is the “Uber for X” — the problem is not just that they are copycatting a past innovation, but that if they cannot present themselves as doing so they have trouble getting funding).
One could make this point about many technologies. Technologies are not like math proofs, existing out there as platonic ideals just waiting to be discovered. They products of specific human societies designed to solve problems specific to that society. Absent the specific problems faced and the visionary few who see truly novel ways to approach them, many lines of technology would not develop at all, or would develop in drastically different forms.
What citation would you like? This is obviously the rationalist program — imaginary utils always boil down to real questions of pain and pleasure, both in causes they endorse (animal suffering, the fate of future ems) as well as the pattern of their personal lives (polyamory).
I think the meta commentary is fine–as many people do not actually know enough about Israel/Gaza to say something intelligent, there is little harm for them to stick with what they know best.
I tend to see the reaction to all of this as confirming the idea that old woke agitation is on the way out. This is a problem that fundamentally splits the left coalition. All of the sudden we see cancel culture tools turned against leftist activists, university students pleading to have their names removed from statements, and all manner of leftists groups twisting themselves in pretzels over whether the true intersectionalist cares more about anti-semitism or Islamophobia. The further that coalition cracks apart the less coherence it has as a foundation for mass cultural or political change.
Again, a trump victory would change all that. But that’s about it at this point.
I am not as frustrated with this essay as you are. I do think the 1920s was probably the transformative decade in American history, and I deplore almost all of the changes.
But WJB point is a good and necessary one. From about 1875 to 1910 a whole host of Americans tried very hard to not let the 1920s happen. They failed. It is one thing to pinpoint the 1920s as a critical transition point in the death of one order and the birth of another; it is another thing entirely to explain why the opposition to that order could not avert it.
It would be especially interesting for Compass to take up this challenge because they are traditionally the big defenders of the Whig-Republican system that created the very order they seem to decry here. There is a contradiction here–a contradiction that comes from seeing the 1920s as the birth of our era instead of the conclusion of another one.
Andrew–
Thanks for the comment.
An interesting question is how important we think figures like Sam A actually are to the AI apocalypse around the corner. If there was no Sam Altman, would be where we are today? I feel pretty confident that if there was no Elon Musk we would not have anything like SpaceX today. On the other hand, if the Google bros died in a car accident in 2001, I am sure we would have a search engine about as good.
So what is the modern AI models — more like SpaceX rockets or google search?
If the former, then there is a good chance that Sam being inspired about AI’s ultimate potential by reading the lesswrong forums makes eminent sense. On the other hand, if it would have happened on the same time scale regardless of Sam’s involvement… ten lesswrong starts to matter less as a potential vector of inspiration.
A lot of people assume that technology progress is inevitable and somewhat natural. I don’t. So my bias is towards the first view. But I may be wrong there.
@Avery–
Are you familiar with Thiel’s “Crypto is libertarian, AI is communist” comment? There is a side story here of people switching their tribal allegiances from one tech billionaire patron to another.
Two books I have not read but have seen referenced many times (the second I own but have yet to get to):
Becoming Japanese: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation
Becoming Taiwanese: Ethnogenesis in a Colonial City, 1880s to 1950s
Both are about essentially the same thing, just different parts and strata of Taiwan: the way Taiwanese identity evolved under the Japanese colonial regime.
USSR collapse:
first half here https://scholars-stage.org/soviets-cybernetics-and-china-a-reading-program/ and few books here https://scholars-stage.org/leninist-politics-a-reading-course/
China’s political economy:
-Andrew Batson’s blog is doubleplus great: https://andrewbatson.com/
–The neoliberal response to Weber’s book is Julian Gerwitz’s Unlikely Partners: Chinese Reformers, Western Economists, and the Making of Global China . See also Coase and Wang (yes, that Coase), How China Became Capitalist.
Naughton’s Growing Out of the Plan is the grand-daddy of all such works.
Chris Miller’s The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy is actually a comparative history of the Chinese and Soviet economies in the 1980s, though you would not know this from the book blurb.
Sign–
This is very interesting. At some point I want to do a review of Slezkine that thinks through exactly the questions you are bringing up.
1. One of his other deficiencies is that he doesn’t properly explain another kind of religious extremism — the religious activity of the hermit, saint, or monastery that attempts to wean themselves off “the world” through abstention, seclusion, and esoteric ritual. But I do not think these people adequately fit into the Apolian/Dionysian dichotomy either. They are not about libidinal release, per Dionysus, but they are also not about rational contemplation (per Apollo), but a direct experience of the divine.
Likewise, my own faith tradition–the LDS church–is a curious mix of Apollian and Dionsyian elements; so much so that I don’t think it can be described as either.
2. “Why has it been filled primarily by new Dionysian religions and not by new Apollonian religions?”
Have you read much by Christopher Lasch? I was reflecting this week how it is strange that so many on the right favor both him and BAP when it is quite clear that they have diametrically opposed views of what ails us and what make fix us–especially on the question of nature vs. culture.
The Dionysian energies on the right make sense because they lost the overculture. This automatically puts them in the position of rebels. Where previously they argued that the rules of culture were expressions of man’s inner nature, now they argue that culture is a perversion of nature that we must be liberated from.
The woke stuff is more thoroughly caught between Apollo and Dionysus, having strong Dionysus intellectual roots but now accepted by the overculture. A lot of the cultural weirdness of the present moment simply comes, IMHO, from the fact that the left’s cultural scripts presume the enemy has cultural hegemony, and the right’s scripts presume the reverse, but in fact it is the left that now owns the upper middle class and the right that represents the outcast. Very hard for people born in one era to match their original scripts with the realities they now face.
