Participants in mass political discourse have an unfortunate tendency to define their own beliefs simply as the negation of their enemy’s. Just say the opposite of what the bad guys are saying, and you must be right. Witness how many “never-Trumpers” wound up becoming progressive Democrats to spite the “Orange Man” or how the desire to “own the libs” has become almost the only recognizable quality of most “conservative” Internet figures.
For the last half-century at least, the left has defined itself largely in opposition to the inherited political, social, and cultural traditions of the Western world, in what Roger Scruton called a “culture of repudiation.” Anything that can be identified as a product of “white,” “European,” “Western,” or “American” values is suspect at best—the outgrowth of a hegemonic power structure that maintains itself on the backs of the oppressed. Such an attempt (more on that later) to reject their cultural inheritance wholesale has distorting effects—not just on their own minds, but also on their opponents’. One such effect is that anyone who declares himself in favor of Western civilization or America is perhaps too readily embraced as a worthwhile voice.
But not all who cry “Lord, Lord!” will enter the Kingdom of Heaven. And not all who cry “Western Civilization!” are actually friends of the civil order, culture, and freedoms that Western countries have been blessed to enjoy. Enter the tech bros.
Palantir executives Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas Zamiska have written a book that bemoans the rejection of Western civilization. It argues that patriotism is important. It is critical of wokeness. It makes a case for greater emphasis on humanities education. For these reasons, The Technological Republic has found admirers—mostly among conservative readers. But while it may recognize several troubling trends, what it offers in response is a toxic blend of collectivist politico-morality and crony capitalism draped in an American flag.
Ostensibly about the lack of public spirit in Silicon Valley, the book does not hesitate to make more sweeping claims about what ails society, often channeling the pseudo-conservative observations of Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind. Tech companies are too hesitant, they argue, to do business with the federal government—primarily the military. This is bad in part because it will mean a strategic imbalance when it comes to America’s geopolitical rivalries. But more importantly, they see it as a crisis of identity and a sign of a lack of purpose.
Silicon Valley’s hesitancy comes not just because of activist employees and customers, but because their leadership has been raised in an environment of moral atrophy. They have been taught to repudiate traditional sources of meaning that, in the authors’ minds at least, find their fulfillment in a robust commitment to a national mission: “The grand, collectivist experiments of the earlier part of the twentieth century were discarded in favor of a narrow attentiveness to the desires and needs of the individual.” For the authors, war—particularly manifested in the Manhattan Project—is the model of political activity, with each part of society willing to play its part in the national symphony directed by the state and made possible by the brave new world of technological mastery.
The alternative to this model, they suggest, is a low consumerism that distracts the public with frivolities. Much is made of “Farmville,” the vapid, web-based game that enjoyed a brief period of intense popularity in the early 2010s. That example is meant to symbolically represent any tech advancement not made with and for government. This, they say, is what “the market” produces: digital trinkets that offer entertainment or convenience but nothing that gives us meaning and purpose in our lives.
Thus, the premise of the book hinges on the crucial and pervasive error that seems universal today: namely, that there is a binary choice between, on the one hand, loose individualism centered on passing desires and, on the other, a commitment to a collective national vision. There is no suggestion at all that human beings may find meaning and purpose beyond their own appetites in anything other than politics.
Their concern for the humanities and the cultivation of the mind, for instance, is rooted in a fear that people aren’t thinking hard enough about what our grand national mission should be, and they may not have the mental vocabulary to drum up the thumos to give oneself over to the cause: “An overly timid engagement with the debates of our time will rob one of the ferocity of feeling that is necessary to move the world,” they worry. Religion is only briefly mentioned, but it turns out the authors want God only for his instrumental value in bolstering the state: “If contemporary elite culture continues its assault on organized religion, what will remain to sustain the state?”
The book studiously fails to question any of the conceits of collectivism or even point to its limits. The authors frequently speak of what “we,” “the nation,” and “the public” have done or must do, as if those are all unitary thinking, willful beings. For instance, they claim that “we have … ceded direction over our interior lives … to the market.” (Speak for yourself.) In one telling phrase, they even address culture in the same way: “We have, as a culture, decided.” This isn’t all that uncommon in casual discourse, but it is revealing. Culture doesn’t think, decide, or act. And the solution to a corrupted culture is not simply to hope that, as a whole, it will think, decide, or act differently.
The radicals of the ’60s were the fruits of the previous generation, a golden age of national vision that untethered its people from traditional authorities aside from the state.
As for the dangers of collectivist thinking, the authors never consider whether the government may be its own kind of consumer, with its own kind of base and selfish desires to fulfill when it gets in bed with big business. It is almost always treated as the straightforward advocate of “the public interest.” There is little or no discussion of how that substantive “public interest” is to be determined other than that “we” ought to decide it. There is no concern that their prescription would merely result in crony capitalism, leading to a farcical game in which industries, particular companies, and their political allies try to outdo one another in showing how their interests are vital to the “public good.” They do seem to recognize that China is largely operating on their model and using it to pursue terrible objectives. But we would never do those things.
Their collectivism also extends to morality. A moral life, they suggest, is defined as having “grand belief structures” and “affirmative conceptions of what a collective life could or ought to be.” Those who are skeptical of such visions, the authors label “amoral.” This sort of “grand plan” morality implicitly denigrates both human freedom and traditional checks on personal behavior, both of which fall before the demand that we play our part in re-creating the world according to the commanding vision. One of the West’s greatest civil achievements has been its demonstration that a moral life is compatible with—indeed, made possible by—freedom from a commanding vision.
Perhaps the most glaring flaw, however, is that for all the insistence on this grand political vision, Karp and Zamiska never bother to formulate what that vision really is. The phrase “political project” is peppered across the pages as the key to breaking out of “our” malaise. They also recognize that there is no naturally occurring unity across America, and thus the national or civilizational purposes they seek must be consciously “constructed” or “manufactured” through a uniform education system, forced conscription, or national service. But what exactly we’re pursuing is left vague. It’s clear enough that conquering nature is more their speed than purifying morals or equalizing outcomes, but the main point seems simply to be that we need some national project—any national project. As long as humane technologists are in charge, their refined imagination will surely come up with something.
There is certainly much to critique about Silicon Valley and the vapid products its companies hawk. And the success of “Farmville,” Instagram, and other examples is at least partially due to the hollowed-out minds and chests of modern man. But this is not the product of free markets or any perceived decline in belief in the nation. Far more important has been the erosion of overlapping social authorities that once contributed to the formation of character at the local and personal level.
And nothing did more to undermine these sources of social authority than the pursuit of national missions. The full-blown culture of repudiation was not born fully formed and armed from the head of Abbie Hoffman. It came only after decades of twentieth-century nationalization across Western countries (the very decades Karp and Zamiska yearn for) had eroded, absorbed, or politicized the role of churches, local communities, and private associations. The radicals of the ’60s were the fruits of the previous generation, a golden age of national vision that untethered its people from traditional authorities aside from the state. As the children of this generation came to see the failures and hypocrisies of the various national “projects” that had replaced those authorities, they saw the only reasonable response as a rejection of everything.
Conservative readers—of this book and of social commentary more generally—would do well to recognize that a self-declared commitment to Western civilization is not in and of itself indicative of a salutary teaching. When so many enemies of civilization are upfront with their hostility, perhaps it has become too easy to forget that draping oneself in the flag isn’t any guarantee of pure motives. There is still no shortage of deceptive wolves in sheep’s clothing, and no shortage of bad visions for civilizational “renewal.”
In fact, even the culture of repudiation itself is a kind of debased civilizational project, even if its advocates would blanch at the suggestion. The culture of repudiation was not entirely a foreign virus that infected Western civilization out of nowhere. It was, rather, a distortion of and overreliance on certain elements of the very tradition the radicals thought they were rejecting. Political toleration and self-criticism are distinctive qualities of Western civilization. In grasping on to these and similar values and attempting to make them universal, commanding principles, these radicals inadvertently established a new set of hegemonic Western values.
Indeed, the left-progressive or “woke” cause quite often manifests a haughty civilizational chauvinism in how it depicts and engages with non-Western civilizations, reflecting the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” It is only the West that is enlightened enough to reject its cultural inheritance.
Which is to say that Western civilization is a house with many mansions. And attempting to single out a particular value or principle—whether it is self-criticism or the spirit of scientific discovery—and make it the centerpiece of a political “project” is not the way to renew civilization. That will only build a house on sand. Earlier this year, The New York Times reported that Karp’s company, which has acquired nearly $1 billion of government contracts recently, would be working on data consolidation for the government that could easily translate into a master database on every American. That sort of information in the hands of the state would seem to be a significant threat to the liberties that Western countries have held dear. But there is nothing to fear—the CEO in charge has read Allan Bloom.