A Tech Republic in Search of a Soul

Theologian and social critic Os Guinness observed in his essay, “Our Civilisational Moment,” that “the world is fast approaching one of the great turning points in history.” The West, he says, is “on the wane,” living off “memories” of its animating ideals. “Renewal” of those ideals and the West, “is as possible as decline,” he writes, “though highly demanding because of what it requires.”

In The Technological Republic, Palantir co-founder and CEO Alexander Karp, aided by his co-author Nicholas Zamiska, applies a similar critique to Silicon Valley. He contends that American elites, and tech leaders in particular, have abandoned any notion of advancing the national interest or addressing “the most pressing challenges that we collectively face” in favor of a shallow and single-minded obsession with “solving everyday consumer problems.” This misallocation of talent and lack of focus leaves the United States vulnerable, he argues, because the balance of hard power in the twenty-first century will be determined by supremacy in emergent AI technologies focused on military applications.

Karp posits that we must “rise up and rage against” this vapid consumerism. But fixing Silicon Valley lies outside our grasp so long as our tech elite—and culture more broadly—adheres to a “thin version of collective identity, one that is incapable of providing meaningful direction to the human experience.” Rebuilding a “technological republic” in which science and engineering protect US interests and push civilization “up the hill,” requires “an embrace of value, virtue, and culture, the very things that the present generation was taught to abhor.”

Karp, however, stops short of identifying the deepest sources from which value, virtue, and culture can be drawn and defined. He describes the effect of cultural drift and its influence on the tech sector but fails to engage the ongoing debate over whether the West can experience renewal without reconnecting with its historical moorings in the Christian faith.

Karp begins his argument by pointing to two trends that, working together, have undermined the West’s prospect for maintaining an advantage in hard military power. First, the state has “retreated from the pursuit of large-scale breakthroughs,” such as the Internet, ceding such efforts to the private sector. Second, “the Silicon Valley giants that dominate the American economy have made the strategic mistake of casting themselves as existing essentially outside the country in which they were built.”

He contends that this divergence of the tech sector from the public interest is not historically determined. Many of the Founders, such as Jefferson or Franklin, were inventors. The United States emerged from World War II as the world’s preeminent superpower in part due to the efforts of scientists like Robert Oppenheimer and Vannevar Bush, whose technical brilliance pulled the United States into the atomic age. “This was the American century,” he writes, “and engineers were at the heart of the era’s ascendant mythology.” That mythology has since disintegrated, however, and Karp argues convincingly that Silicon Valley has embraced a kind of nihilism, leaving its leaders “often unsure of what their own beliefs are,” or whether “they have any firm or authentic beliefs at all.”

This critique of tech elites is reminiscent of C. S. Lewis’ description of “men without chests.” They are highly intelligent and competent but driven by desires beneath the realm of moral virtue. Many of the tech workers in Silicon Valley blithely believe “the relative safety and comfort in which they live are the inevitable consequence of the justice of the American project, not the result of a concerted and intricate effort to defend a nation and its interests.” Karp argues that this detachment from the national interest comes at a dangerous moment, as the emergence of military applications of AI presents a “crossroads that connects engineering and ethics,” forcing us to “choose whether to proceed with the development of a technology whose power and potential we do not yet fully apprehend.”

The Technological Republic is at its best when it explains how the erosion of a shared vision for Western civilization has impacted our ability and willingness to innovate to solve our most pressing social problems.

Rather than build with a higher end in mind, however, Karp contends these “technological agnostics” build merely “because they can, untethered from a more fundamental purpose” beyond the acquisition of wealth, status, and the power of their own creations. He traces this impoverished sense of purpose to movements beginning in the 1960s and ‘70s which aimed to deconstruct a common conception of the West cohering “around a set of shared practices or traditions that made possible, and indeed, bearable, collective existence at a grand scale.” In place of this coherent system, we now have a “thin conception of belonging to the American community” based on a vague sense of “rights” and neoliberal economics, and an impoverished community centered around entertainment, sports, and popular culture. Our culture is a “balloon cut loose,” as it were, from its historical moorings.

The modern incarnation of Silicon Valley got its start in the midst of this period of deconstruction. Indeed, Karp proposes that it was self-consciously built on a desire to escape the strictures of institutional business and government cultures and to embrace individualistic identities. This desire for individual empowerment, divorced from any thick overarching purpose or meta-narrative, morphed into an obsessive focus on serving trivial consumer ends at the expense of tackling “broader and more significant endeavors.” While embracing the free market, Karp objects to the “shallowness” of the tech sector’s “ambition and abdication of everything beyond the light hedonism of the moment.” Much like the Final Pagan Generation of Fourth Century Rome described by Edward Watts, tech elites are spending down the vestiges of a lost cultural heritage with nothing to replenish it.

That is not to say that Silicon Valley lacks any redeeming qualities. Karp pauses to consider the innovative organizational culture that enabled the tech sector’s “domination of the modern economy.” He praises tech firms with internal hierarchies echoing improvisational theater and honeybee swarms, in which status roles can morph moment by moment as actors “play” different parts, all “without an overbearing and unnecessarily centralized mechanism of control.”

These organizational qualities, in Karp’s view, can empower an “engineering mindset” endowed with the creativity, responsiveness, and non-conformity that is badly needed in American life. At its best, the Silicon Valley model is a subculture that enables creative non-conformists to escape the rigidity of traditional corporate life and exercise a “voracious” and “ruthless pragmatism” that is willing “to bend one’s model of the world to the evidence at hand, not bend the evidence.”

Karp posits that to rebuild a technological republic, we must direct Silicon Valley’s engineering mindset “toward the nation’s shared goals, which can be identified only if we take the risk of defining who we are or aspire to be.” This requires marrying the “engineering mindset” with a resurrected “sense of national and collective identity” oriented toward human progress. That objective faces several hurdles, however. The modern Left has, in the name of inclusivity, “so hollowed out the national project that one could argue that there is no longer much of substance into which anyone might be included.” That is not to say that the Left has fully abandoned any overarching narrative, but its bare “commitment to capitalism and the rights of the individual, however ardent, will never be sufficient; it is too thin and meager, to narrow, to sustain the human soul and psyche.” In the author’s telling, “an aspirational tolerance of everything has descended into support of nothing,” leaving the Left “unable to offer an affirmative vision of a virtuous or moral life, whose content it long ago stripped away to the bare essentials.” We must, Karp writes, “take seriously the possibility that it will be the resurrection of a shared culture, not its abandonment, that will make possible our continued survival and cohesion.”

Diagnoses of the West’s slide into decadence, stagnation, and ennui have been frequently chronicled, such as in Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence and Ross Douthat’s The Decadent Society. Karp provides a similar critique but narrows the aperture to focus on tech as a specific, and exceptionally influential, segment of society. Elsewhere, he frequently comments on the dominance of the US tech industry, noting in a New York Times interview that “86 percent of the top 50 tech companies in the world just by market cap are American.” A staggering fact, to be sure. His concern, however, is that this dominance will be squandered as competitors like China race forward with developing military applications for AI, while the United States fritters away its advantage as its leading tech firms focus obsessively on building trivial applications to serve the “whims of late capitalist culture.”

His frustration with this “misallocation” of resources leads him to demand that tech leaders come clean about their priors. He develops this argument in a passage worth quoting in full:

We believe that the reluctance of many business leaders to venture into, in any meaningful way and aside from the occasional and theatrical foray, the most consequential social and cultural debates of our time—including those regarding the relationship between the technology and the state—should give us pause. The decisions we collectively face are too consequential to be left unchallenged and unexamined. Those involved in constructing the technology that will animate and make possible nearly every aspect of our waking lives have a responsibility to expose and defend their views.

Karp seemingly attempts to do those tech leaders the favor of taking this step for them. Much of The Technological Republic is an exposé and critique of our “current era of innovation,” which is “dominated by the indiscriminate construction of technology by software engineers” who are building untethered from any purpose directed toward the common good. That untethering was driven by the intentional hollowing out, largely by the political Left, of a robust concept of national identity or a cohesive set of universal values and aspirations that could hold the broader body politic together, short of a thin veneer of “tolerance” for all views. But, in Karp’s words, “the problem is that tolerance of everything often constitutes belief in nothing.”

Karp capably diagnoses the icy, effective pragmatism and metaphysical emptiness that lie at the center of Silicon Valley’s culture. And he points up the dangers of casting such a powerful industry—one that has achieved a “level of concentration of wealth and influence … never before seen in modern economic history—adrift from the national project. “We have made the mistake,” he writes, “of allowing a technocratic ruling class to form and take hold in this country without asking for anything quite substantial in return.”

To mitigate this, he calls for the reanimation of a “shared culture, language, history, heroes and villains, stories, and patterns of discourse” as a means to bind the West together. This path “will involve a reconciliation of a commitment to the free market, and its atomization and isolation of individual wants and needs, with the insatiable human desire for some form of collective experience and endeavor.”

But Karp does not prescribe how to reconstitute collective experience and values, or what specifically can fill that void. He nods toward the “set of ideals” that drove young people to embrace the Silicon Valley subculture: “freedom to build, ownership of their success, and a commitment above all to results.” And he approvingly recounts the “old means of manufacturing a nation,” including such “civic rituals” as “an educational system, mandatory service in national defense, religion, a shared language, and a thriving and free press.” In this, he calls for a revivification of an American, and perhaps Western, civic religion of sorts. Unanswered by Karp is how this revivification will be catalyzed. What spark will reignite the flame of Western culture after decades of deconstruction? Karp puts the question, and a possible answer, as follows: “If contemporary elite culture continues its assault on organized religion, what will remain to sustain the state? What have we built, or aspired to build, in its place?” In asking these questions, he peers over the edge, but does not enter, a robust conversation about the role of organized religion in sustaining Western institutions.

Karp’s book, in the end, is a search and cry for a cultural OS that will power the killer app of market capitalism and free liberal society into the future.

In his magisterial book Dominion, historian Tom Holland traces the development of Western civilization as an outgrowth of Christianity, its basic assumptions, values, categories, and concepts intimately interwoven with Christian values. In his telling, whether this debt is acknowledged or not, the West is “firmly moored to its Christian past.” Karp briefly acknowledges this, quoting professor James K. A. Smith, who said that “‘Western liberal democracies have lived off the borrowed capital of the church for centuries.’”

Several thinkers have gone further and acknowledged the substantial benefits that a strong Christian church and widespread faith entail for the social order. In his book Cross Purposes, Jonathan Rauch—himself an avowed atheist—has called for a renewal of what he calls “thick Christianity.” Christianity, he contends, provides the background condition that allows liberal society to flourish: “There is no secular substitute for the meaning and grounding which religious life provides.”

Prominent academic Ayaan Hirsi Ali, herself a recent convert to Christianity, has compared Western culture divorced from Christianity to a “cut flower” that maintains its shape and beauty momentarily, but ultimately will fade, having been disconnected from its source of sustenance. Much like Holland and Rauch, she observes in her essay, “Our Christian Inheritance, Western Civilization, and My Personal Journey,” that the features of our liberal society we take for granted—recognition of equal human dignity, fundamental rights, respect for the rule of law, and limited government—are direct lineal descendants of Christian theology.

At the core of these ideals is the belief that humans possess dignity not because of their capacity to compute, use language, reason, or meet other performance-based metrics, but rather because of who and what we are: created in the image of God. Or in the words of the Declaration of Independence, that “all men are created equal.” This framework offers a possible response to Karp’s concern, for example, that AI will overtake humanity as we build with no purpose in mind. The concept of imago Dei necessarily distinguishes humans from non-humans, including AI. Moreover, consistency with human rights and true human dignity derived from the imago Dei cabins the uses for which AI may be deployed.

Karp quotes Robert Oppenheimer as saying, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it.” A Christian ethic responds to the impulse of “building because you can.” You build for the good of humans.

The Technological Republic is at its best when it explains how the erosion of a shared vision for Western civilization has impacted our ability and willingness to innovate to solve our most pressing social problems. Karp powerfully explains how the deconstruction of shared collective experience, purpose, and identity has resulted in the trivialization of our tech sector to serve purely consumerist ends. He articulates how recapturing those collective goods is essential not only to social cohesion but also to technological advancement and national security.

His contribution, however, must be viewed alongside the broader ongoing conversation over the need to renew religious institutions as an integral support to a liberal order that embraces human dignity, fundamental rights, and the separation of powers. As part of that conversation, Jonathan Rauch recalls John Adams’s words: “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Echoing Adams, Ayaan Hirsi Ali has compared Christianity to an “operating system” for Western society. Karp’s book, in the end, is a search and cry for a cultural OS that will power the killer app of market capitalism and free liberal society into the future.