The Apotheosis of Hidden Power

The Apotheosis of Hidden Power:

Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe; Military, Inc; Absolute Destruction; Stalin as Warlord; Castleview

Why is the United States of America not governed by its military?

This question might appear surprising. Why should the United States of America be ruled by its military?

Yet if we think over the question in the light of history, things get rather murkier. And if we (as is often useful) rub out the lines of our familiarity with America, our unthinking assumptions about what America is and how it is governed, and merely treat it as a distant and foreign historical object, the reasons we might expect America to be a military state multiply rather quickly.

First, America has been since before its founding a remarkably militaristic society engaged in almost constant wars: beginning with the violence of settlement itself, the wars with France that defined the 18th century globally, extending into the Revolutionary War itself, leading into the numerous low-level "frontier wars" with American Indian tribes and tax rebellions and even more colonial conflicts with the British and French and Spanish, and climaxing in less than a century in the enormous, devastating mass-conscript campaigns of the American Civil War. The 20th century saw two back-to-back World Wars followed by the Korean and Vietnam Wars, the Gulf War, and ended with military interventions in Eastern Europe and Africa, while the 21st century so far has seen campaigns against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, ISIS, Venezuela, and now Iran, as well as significant proxy wars in Syria and Ukraine. 

For much of that time, America has been governed to a significant degree by military officials and in service of military goals. During the Revolutionary War, George Washington was effectively the dictator of all that existed of the American state--the principal reason why his relinquishing of power after the war was seen as so remarkable not just in America but around the world. Under Lincoln, the United States was a thoroughly military government, though one led by a civilian; and while the Civil War was still within living memory, Woodrow Wilson plunged the country into World War 1, in the process again transforming America into a mass-conscription military regime led by a civilian that reached deep into the most remote parts of the country to find soldiers, train them, equip them, and ship them across the world. 

A mere twenty years after WW1, FDR and Truman again exercised nearly dictatorial powers to build perhaps the greatest military-logistical system in global history, one capable of conscripting men and constructing goods in unthinkable amounts and transporting them rapidly more or less anywhere in the world on extremely short timescales. Of course, the "military-industrial complex" that emerged from this conflict was not an army as anyone before WW2 would have recognized it, but an entire society in itself, a largely self-governing institution capable not just of fighting wars but of organizing and directing entire civilian societies in economic and cultural and scientific production, recruiting and training and incorporating into the populations of entire continents, manufacturing buildings, goods, and equipment in unimaginable quantities, and bringing all of the above to bear in overwhelming force at nearly every point from the Philippines to France to the islands of the Pacific and back again.

Nor did this society go away when WW2 concluded: even as the United States of America gave back most of the territory it had conquered, let go some of its former colonies, and demobilized most of its own population, the basic infrastructure of American global military government, including factories and corporations and stores of munition and recruitment and training centers and ships and planes and military bases scattered across the world and capable of striking more or less every point within it, has continued to the present day, sustained by the Cold War and periodically built back up through the 1950s and '60s for mass-conscription wars in Korea and Vietnam and the more or less continual arming and funding of anti-Communist states and terrorist organizations and militaries throughout the Third World.

We tend to forget, now, that a lot of the fears of the post-Soviet-Union era in America centered around the idea that the end of the Cold War would lead to massive drawbacks in American military spending and competence--drawbacks that would not only prove devastating to the large sectors of America directly or indirectly dependent on the military-industrial complex, but might also leave America vulnerable to new, unimaginable threats. 

Of course, that hidden malevolence soon took the rather strange form of the elegantly-turbaned head and performatively unkempt beard of the heir to a Saudi construction company and founder of a CIA front against the Soviet Union. The transformation of the hunt for Osama Bin Laden into a generalized "War on Terror" provided once again a proper enemy for the American military to build guns and tanks and bombs and develop new technologies and employ security corporations and train and arm and fund terrorist groups to defeat. 

Still, what is by far most striking about the entire era of the "War on Terror" in retrospect is the degree to which, in popular imagination, the "enemy" against whom soldiers and cops and spies and superheroes struggled continued to be entirely amorphous. 

The relatively straightforward Islamist ideology of Sunni mujahideen groups like Al-Quaeda--whose roots rather paradoxically lie both in the Deobandi Pakistani madrasas and in the rival Salafi ideology of the Saudi Arabian state, but more immediately in the American government's anxious interest in sponsoring and funding anti-nationalist and anti-Communist strains of Arab thought during a period when Soviet-inspired Arab Nationalism and Ba'athism were at their height and the Soviet Union was looking to assert itself as a sponsor to the Arab world--was never that I can tell portrayed or addressed in American popular media, or even in middle-brow intellectual discourse. 

The distinguishing claim of 'Islamism' as an ideology is simply that most existing secular and nationalistic Muslim governments are more or less illegitimate insofar as their laws are insufficiently based on Muslim Scripture and traditional Muslim jurisprudence. As it turns out, this belief is shared in some form or fashion by a huge number of Muslims around the world, and almost certainly by a sizeable majority of the citizens of most contemporary Muslim states--and is not easy to disentangle, as I have argued, from the more basic failures of the post-colonial state in general and Islamic Modernism in particular.

An America also facing a legitimacy crisis, with laws and methods and basic ways of life alike all challenged continually by both secular and religious critiques, might well have found in 'Islamism' a profound and perhaps transformative mirror and challenge; but, with a very few exceptions, did not. Instead, what America found in the 'War on Terror' was mostly just a faceless, nameless, utterly mysterious sense of threat--never better embodied than in the Joker as portrayed in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, a man from nowhere, with no face or name and no ideology, driven merely by a desire to 'watch the world burn.'

Of course, the truth is that one cannot understand an organization like Al Qaeda solely or primarily in terms of Islamist ideology any more than one can understand an organization like the United States military sole or primarily in terms of the doctrines of the Founding Fathers. Islamist terror organizations as we know them are more than anything else creatures of the modern, global military-industrial complex. They are hierarchical para-military organizations whose structure and activities are defined at every level by 1) easily-accessible and advanced weapons and explosives, 2) instant and untraceable communication technologies, 3) international financial institutions capable of transferring huge amounts of money instantly around the world, 4) the colonial and post-colonial adoption of modern Western military training methods and hierarchies, and 5) in most cases some form of direct assistance, training, or organization by Western intelligence or government agencies. 

In this way, too, the threat of Islamist terrorism might have been a profound challenge and mirror for America and the West: but also was not. For while American popular art again and again created narratives where the heroes and villains were similar sorts of militarized vigilantes, members of similar trans-national clandestine organizations, or in short more or less the same sort of people wearing similar clothes and wielding similar arms--they never that I can see ever seriously interrogated the reasons behind those similarities, or seriously questioned why one group of para-military vigilantes were the good guys and another the bad-guys.

All of this is not, of course, to deny that there are real and determining differences between Islamic and Christian societies, or even between Islamic and modern secular societies: and that these differences might have been the inspiration for a genuine popular war or even a religious or secular crusade against the Islamic world and/or Islamism. This, too, however, did not happen. 

In any case, the War on Terror ultimately wore itself out in the failure of America to successfully govern its new colonies of Afghanistan and Iraq, in the failure of the 'Arab Spring,' in the rise and fall of ISIS, and above all in the gradual, creeping realization, driven probably more than anything else by the disaster of the Syrian Civil War and resulting European migration crisis, that the simple narrative of the War on Terror might in fact be a mask for blundering interventions into an extremely complex and many-sided conflict among different Muslim groups, none of which were from an American perspective all that sympathetic--with the brutal secular-cum-military-cum-financial Sunni Muslim governments with which America has generally allied against Shi'ite Iran and various strains of Islamism being perhaps the least likeable faction of them all.

Still, as I write this in 2026, America is of course once again fighting a large-scale war in the Middle East--a war, however, that was launched on something approaching a whim, whose goals and justifications and proposed timelines have constantly changed and contradicted themselves, and where it is clear that not even the highest levels of American leadership, let alone elites or the populace at any large, has any clear idea of why the war is being fought or what for. 

The truth, then, is that for all the destruction and pageantry of the War on Terror, America has never in fact found a meaningful way to justify its conflicts with Muslim states and organizations--at least not one that has ever been acceptable to most of the population or even most elites.

All we have found, in fact, is a series of nameless, faceless, remote, alien enemies--enemies that are acceptable precisely because they are not opposed or understood in any consistent moral terms. And when one understands that, one begins to understand that the underlying reality here has nothing in fact to do with the Muslim world and its continuing and accelerating crisis of legitimacy and religious and political collapse, and everything to do with the American military.

To me, one of the most remarkable things about the United States of America as a society is how popular the American military has been and continues to be with the general public, and this despite the fact that, unlike during WW2 and its aftermath, very few Americans now live their lives in and around the institutions of the military or depend on the it for their livelihood. The total number of people to have ever served in the military at any time is now the lowest it has been since WW2 at around half of one percent--making this in almost an entirely different country from the mass-conscription regimes that defined 20th century American life.

Still, public approbation for the military has if anything only gotten stronger as people's direct attachment to the military has atrophied. As measured by Gallup, public confidence in the US military reached its absolute peak in 2003 and again in 2009 at 82%, and remained with one exception over 70% until 2020 before dipping again. In 2025, it held at 62%, a significant reduction that still leaves the United States military six times more popular than Congress (10%), more than twice as popular as the Office of President (30%) and the Supreme Court (27%), and easily crushing its more distant rivals organized religion (36%) and the police (45%). Indeed, polls show quite consistently that the US Military is the only governmental institution to be reliably trusted by a majority of the US population--a rather remarkable state of affairs.

If, as I argued recently in this space, the United States is in the middle of a basic crisis of legitimacy, then it must be the case that, as the only governmental institution to possess anything approaching public legitimacy, the American military is the governmental institution most capable of exercising public political power. Hence, we would expect prima facie and a priori for the US military to take on more and more public power, and for something resembling a publicly and officially military regime to emerge in America.

Of course, things are not quite that simple. For one thing, it is very likely that a huge portion of the American military's popularity comes from it being the only governmental institution to not yet be drawn into the hyper-partisan symbolic warfare that has come to constitute the bulk of popular and elite political life. The Supreme Court had majority confidence, roughly speaking, until after Bush vs Gore; and the downfall of Congressional legitimacy cannot be disentangled from the constant, bruising public partisan battles and government shutdowns now endemic to the system. The military suffered a precipitous drop in public confidence during the conflicts over the Iraq War (from 82% in 2003 to 69% in 2007), when support or opposition for the war and therefore "the troops" was to a significant degree made into a partisan political issue; and it is difficult to see how a military regime could avoid being drawn into some kind of similar partisanship trap.

Still, even at the height of the Iraq War, the military retained something like 70% public confidence; and if polls are to be believed, it has regained most or all of that public confidence over the last few decades. 

Moreover, it is insufficiently noted that one of the main legitimizing factors for military governments around the world has been precisely their nonpartisanship, their separation from ideological and elite conflicts in the broader society. Not only need military regimes not be partisan, they have in fact normatively posed themselves precisely as unification governments bringing peace to internal quarrels and establishing a new unifying sense of national purpose. And with the continual rise in America both of hyper-partisan polarization at every level of government, and popular hatred of that polarization and of inevitably partisan liberal-democratic politics more basically, we have yet another reason to see a military government as likely.

And, of course, regardless of its popularity or lack thereof, the American military remains an almost unimaginably powerful institution, retaining among other things a status as arguably the primary driver of scientific and technological development in the world, a very effective global transportation and communication infrastructure, a vast surveillance and intelligence apparatus, a powerful industrial base, and, of course, a vast military force and direct control over nuclear weapons capable of killing millions and ending the world. If the US military as a collective force wanted to rule America and the world, they certainly would--though for how long, and how successfully, is quite another matter.

All of the works reviewed below bear directly or indirectly on the theoretical question of the role of the military in American life, as well as the more practical question of whether or if or how the military might come to dominate America and the world. In the process, we will travel very far afield indeed, to Pakistan, Stalinist Russia, Medieval Europe, and Fairyland; the question of the future of America and the American military is not, however, far afield, but present and immediate for every person in the world today. I ask you to remember this in all of what follows.

No Artificial Intelligence!

No Artificial Intelligence!

Recently, and intermittently for the past eight months or so, there have been what are called "No Kings" Protests. In my own neck of the woods, these have mostly consisted of small knots of sexagenarians lining the major roadway by my house, holding signs that say things like "HONK IF YOU HATE ORANGE CHEETO." In other parts of the world, including in adjacent downtowns, these have been impressively large: by one account, the largest single-day protest in American history. Like all protests for the last five years, though, they have had no political effect whatsoever.

This is, of course, not an accident, but almost entirely by design: for they were not conceived of as political protests. America, in the year 2025, has never been a less political country: and has never had a less political population. Indeed, people today, in America, are more or less incapable of thinking in political terms, or engaging in politics as people throughout history would have understood it.

I am still, after five years, in deep mourning over the catastrophic failure of the Black Lives Matter movement. It was the greatest spontaneous mass movement of my lifetime, and it did not achieve a single lasting political gain. All it sufficed to do was to inspire a backlash: or, perhaps, merely give one more pretext for a deeper and growing perversity in American society, an obsession with the techniques of power and punishment, a willful blindness to the suffering of the weak, a overwhelming indifference to justice.

I don't know who came up with the name "No Kings": if they were not a GOP political operative, I certainly hope they were at least paid by one. This person did more good for Donald Trump and the Republican Party than anyone since Joe Biden: they deserve to be paid at least as much as Kamala Harris profited off her losing political campaign.

A protest is really only an effective political tool, and indeed really only a political act at all, when it is clearly and efficiently tailored for a single end: rapidly applying public and media pressure to existing rulers to get them to immediately carry out certain political acts or make certain political legal or policy changes which can be relatively rapidly achieved.

For this, the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s is an obvious exemplar. The NAACP carried on their campaign of popular protests and civil disobedience quite intelligently and tactically, deliberately picking fights that they could either win on the local level, or rapidly escalate and so translate into greater political leverage on a national level. In 1961, Martin Luther King made certain demands of the new President John F. Kennedy; when these demands were not granted, he accelerated protests to apply pressure. As a result, he was in the White House negotiating with the President of the United States less than six months after children faced dogs and fire-hoses on the streets of Birmingham. Less than a year later, the Civil Rights Act passed, after one of the most brilliant tactical acts of political pressure ever carried out, the March on Washington, sealed the deal. MLK and his allies certainly had their grand aspirations and utopian ideals; but they understood that protests were not a path to victory, let alone a decisive weapon, but in essence a negotiating tactic.

Another way to think about this issue would be to put in military terms: protests are a tactic, not a strategy. As a book I just read on the failures of the German Imperial military, Absolute Destruction, lays out very carefully, tactics is what wins battles, but only strategy wins wars: and strategy is inevitably and necessarily not merely military, but political. No war in human history has ever been aimed merely at military goals, or been won on the battlefield: rather, war is a political act aimed at achieving political goals, and military tactics, battles and advances and victories and defeats, merely one of many means for achieving those ends. As such, tactics are only effective where they are tailored to overall strategies and subordinated to clear political ends. 

Where militaries forget this, even tactical victories end up inevitably as means, not for victory, but for defeat. The Germans implemented a tactic of unrestricted submarine warfare in World War 1 knowing that it would inevitably bring America into the war against them: because it promised (and indeed in the short term delivered) a tactical victory over the British. Many wars have been lost by winning battles--including both World Wars, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the current Israeli war in Gaza.

The Black Lives Matters protests, to do them justice, were in their origins political: they were inspired by genuine, widespread anguish at the death of George Floyd, were aimed at applying pressure to politicians currently in power, and at achieving truly political ends of justice and reform. Where they failed was largely in translating their urge for justice into any widely acceptable and rapidly implementable policies and political acts. Most immediately, they lacked an agreed-upon, respected, politically astute leadership, capable of actually negotiating with those in power, as MLK and the NAACP had been able to do in the 1960s.

There was no Black Lives Matter Act passed by the national Congress; no Executive Order by the President; and precious little even in state laws or city ordinances. Instead, local governments and police departments, lacking guidance, took their own paths of least resistance, altering their policies and enforcement priorities and tactics in unwise ways to avoid conflict and bad PR--and then changed them back once the backlash set in.

The No Kings Protests have no chance of being anywhere near that effective. The BLM Movement had political ends capable, with sufficient political intelligence and will, of being translated into tangible political and legal reforms. The No Kings Protests do not. They have a slogan, a painfully parochial slogan that, if taken seriously, poses the entire movement, not as aiming at achieving any actual political goal, but merely at preventing a transformation of the United States government into a monarchy--a defensive act that is, depending on one's perspective, either fantastically early or much too late. 

Black Lives Matter started out as a hashtag: it was still a much better and more political slogan. It expressed a positive sentiment, one with obvious political implications, and demanded political action. No Kings expresses a negative sentiment, at best personal hatred of political figures, at worst a mere stubborn resistance to political trends.

I am told by reliable informants that numerous signs at a major northeastern protest seemed to be taking the theme literally--posing the entire protest in opposition to the British monarchy of the 18th century. As Chesterton pointed out, the American colonists were hopelessly parochial and out-of-date in thinking that the British monarchy still governed England, let alone America, in 1776, rather than committees of wig-wearing Whig businessmen. In 2025, one would think the American colonists would have figured this out. But perhaps they are right; perhaps it is King Charles II who still runs America today. After all, he is on television.

I am, of course, being facetious. I am well aware that, despite occasional whimsy, the "No Kings" slogan is merely an expression of a much more basic concept: commitment to democracy, by which people today mostly seem to mean respect for the orders issued by unelected federal judges. I am also aware that most of the genuine political energy of the movement is in fact generated by, and aimed at, expressing personal dislike for one or more current politician(s). Understood properly, that is the real significance even of the slogan: merely one more hazy way of expressing one's hatred for Donald J. Trump. 

Hating Donald Trump, alas, is not a political position. It is not even, in most of its typical forms, a political sentiment: which is why it mostly expresses itself, still, to this day, in various jokes about his skin color and hair and affect. It is most definitely not a clear legal or policy goal capable of being rapidly implemented by existing rulers: especially when those existing rulers are precisely the thing being protested.

Compare this, again, with a contemporary protest movement against an unpopular President currently going on in a country with many intellectual and cultural ties to the US--but a country that, almost uniquely in the Western world, still retains actual democratic politics. I mean, of course, France. As we speak, there are people on the streets all over France protesting Emmanuel Macron, the well-groomed, intellectually-pretentious, deferential-to-investment-bankers President of the Fifth Republic. These people, though, are not merely protesting Macron as an individual: his precious mannerisms, say, or his penchant for fashionable scarves, or his inability to communicate in plain, non-meandering sentences, or his marriage to his former high school teacher, or even his famously autocratic and insular way of making decisions. They are protesting actions, real and proposed, by his government. 

In particular, Macron insists that, to reduce France's deficit and attract outside investment, the government must cut pensions and raise the retirement age. The people affected by these actions, by and large, do not want this: and so they are in the streets protesting these government actions. Some of them, mostly on the Left, want billionaires to be taxed instead; some of them, mostly on the Right, want immigration restrictions. A large majority would prefer it if Macron resigned and allowed new Presidential elections to be held. But virtually all protesters are clear on what they individually and as a group want, and all parties agree completely on what they do not want, and view their protesting as a means to communicate that to the government. This is politics.

And it has, in fact, worked: after elections handed Macron a crushing defeat, and after multiple Prime Ministers were voted out by parties beholden to the protest movement for proposing budgets that slashed pensions and raised the retirement age, Macron has backed down. He has not resigned: but then, for the protestors, that was never the main thing. They have certain political goals they want to achieve; and they want rulers to either serve them, or get out of the way. And this, too, is politics.

Americans, once again, are the least political people on the planet. They do not view protests as political acts, aimed at communicating or achieving something: they mostly seem to view them as extensions of opinion polls and online product reviews, expressing their personal likes and dislikes for particular government services and service-providers. If a service-provider gets low enough ratings, they assume he will eventually, somehow simply disappear; but they have no particular plan for achieving that goal, let alone one into which protests fit in any obvious way. 

They also, increasingly, view protests as a social outlet, in a country that is getting lonelier and lonelier with each passing year. Themed protests have been a thing for a long time, rising in parallel with the inability of Millennials to attend actual themed parties. When I was in grad school, the local protest movement held rave protests and handed out ice-cream and snow-cones. Another way to process the "No Kings" hashtag, and accompanying puzzling anti-British content, is merely as a fun party theme. Protest King George! Wear your best wig and waistcoat! Pretend it's 1776! After all, it worked for the Tea Party--and progressive politics in 2025 are among other things an increasingly desperate copy of right-wing populist politics from ten years ago. 

I should be clear, however, that my disappointment in the "No Kings" protests is in no way based on an endorsement of Donald Trump. As President, Trump has done many unjust and monstrous things, and continues to do them: and it is eminently right for the populace to take action to stop him doing these things. I not only support protests with these ends: I encourage them. Nay, I demand them.

I very much support protests calling on Donald Trump to stop his campaign of mass deportation and deliberate terrorization of the immigrant population of America. I very much support protests calling on him to restore humanitarian funding to key projects in the developing world. I very much support protests calling on him to end the war in Gaza. I very much support protests calling on him not to let food stamp funding lapse on November 1st, plunging many American citizens into something approaching starvation.  I very much support protests calling on him to stop the wave of brutal repression meted out against the poor and homeless across America.

Certainly, some or all of these causes motivated many people who joined the No Kings Protest. Nevertheless, their voices were not heard; and their protest was in vain. Fearing apparently to offend anyone, we crammed a thousand disparate grievances against Trump, real and nonsensical alike, into one overall protest whose only publicly-accessible message was a statement against the symbols of 18th century Whig monarchy--a symbolic and political regime that has about as much to do with the actions of the American government in 2025 as the empire of Genghis Khan.

This is a proem, though, to another cause that I very much wish we could protest; a cause that has far more public and universal support than condemnation of deportations or even personal dislike of Donald Trump. It is also, importantly, a cause that could relatively easily achieve its goals given popular action.

This cause is, of course, the halting of the current AI technological regime and the economic and political dominance of so-called tech companies: who as we speak seem poised to crash the global economy and destroy the natural world for the sake of bad chatbot technology.

Don't Follow the News

[This is an old essay I wrote for a local Catholic publication a number of years ago. I am reposting it now for obvious reasons.]

Don’t Follow the News: A Manifesto

Don’t follow the news. Don’t watch it. Don’t listen to it. Don’t read it. Don’t engage with it. Don’t post about it or argue about it on social media. I have given this advice to friends, enemies, total strangers, Catholics, Protestants, and atheists. This is the most important advice I can give to Americans today.

Allow me to explain, in a somewhat roundabout and proverb-studded way, why I say this.

If you give a man a fish, he will eat for a day. If you’ve satisfied his hunger for a whole day, though, you’ve created a problem for all the people who also wanted to sell this man fish, or perhaps Hamburger Helper. Instead, try selling him a picture of a fish. When you come back to him ten minutes later, he will be even more desperate, even more fixated on fish, and his judgment will be even more impaired from the hunger. In short, he will be an even better customer than before. By the time the man finally dies of starvation a few months later, you will have had the opportunity to sell him an enormous number of pictures of fish, increasing the shareholder value of your publicly-traded fish media corporation to the greatest degree possible. Call this the economy.

A fool and his money are soon parted. Unfortunately, the money actually possessed by any given hungry and stupid man is finite. As an alternative to this system, consider one where a third party gives you money every time you manage to momentarily catch the man’s attention. Call this advertising.

There is nothing sadder than the death of a clown. A single clown, wearing the same outfit and performing the same set of tricks, possesses only a limited ability to catch and hold the same person’s attention. Also you have to pay the clown. Instead, consider getting people to send you pictures and videos and texts describing random things that may or may not be happening or have happened anywhere in the world. Using all of these, you should be able to attract the fool’s attention a great deal longer. Call this journalism.

Everyone is special. It turns out that not everything in your pile of random media is equally effective at catching and holding the fool’s attention. Perhaps you should consider constructing a robot to sort that pile into an infinity of smaller piles, each one associated algorithmically with a particular group of people. Use this robot’s findings to more effectively attract and hold your fool’s attention. Call this targeted advertising.

Sex sells. So does self-righteousness and homicidal rage. Thanks to your personal targeted advertising robot, you will soon discover that some types of content, and some types of human emotion, are more successful at attracting and holding your fool’s attention than others. Put simply, you want to be manipulating emotions that are easily activated, intense, overpowering, and self-reinforcing. You want to be able to hold up a picture and have your fool be instantly and intensely focused, resulting in a fool who is more pliant and receptive to similar content for all time thereafter. Call this, depending on the precise emotions targeted, pornography, advertising, political action, or the news.

Truth is stranger than fiction. It turns out that if you show a man a picture of his best friend being beaten to death by his oldest enemy, you will attract his attention very strongly. However, you will also produce any number of other highly incalculable effects, such as wailing and gnashing of teeth, intense depression, ritual acts of mourning, and so on, most of which stand in the way of attracting his attention again soon. Instead try showing him a picture of someone he has never met, who slightly resembles his best friend, being mildly to gravely inconvenienced by someone else he has never met, who has some random feature in common with his oldest enemy. It turns out that while this distant and possibly fictitious scenario produces a similar emotional reaction and gets the man’s attention just as effectively as a truthful account of a meaningful personal disaster, his reaction will be much more repeatable and manipulatable. Call this the news cycle.

Despair is the opiate of the masses. If you show someone a grave act of injustice happening to people they care about a few feet from them, odds are they will want to do something about it, whether that involves stopping the injustice in progress, punishing it, or perhaps creating a systemic societal revolution to prevent it from happening again. Show someone a grave act of injustice happening to perfect strangers half a world away, and they are much less likely to either want or be able to do anything about it. Show them five-hundred such injustices consecutively over the course of twenty-four hours, and they will enter a state of functional despair where the impulse to do anything meaningful in response to any injustice anywhere has totally disappeared. Minus hope, your fool’s reactions to injustice will become, as if by magic, shallow, manipulable, self-deluding, and selfish. Call this, depending on the personality of the man in question, either blackpill or entertainment.

It is expedient that one man should die for the people. Even when constantly subjected to injustices about which he can do nothing, your subject will still react to visual stimuli, building up a great deal of tension and anxiety and anger and stress. Given enough time, the man is capable of doing any number of regrettable things with these feelings, including acts of violence, rituals of mourning, psychological breakdowns, disengagement from mass media, religious conversion, or connection with other human beings. To stop these unprofitable trends in their tracks, do everything in your power to associate each and every injustice he is made to witness with groups of his fellow human beings. This will provide him with an outlet for his emotions, particularly if you can provide at the same time an arena where he can performatively and self-righteously condemn such people and be randomly cruel and hateful towards them. Find a way to monetize that, and call it social media.

Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upwards. Follow this process to its logical conclusion and you will have produced a society full of despairing, isolated individuals whose time, attention, and energy is totally and continually taken up with passively absorbing media that preys on their emotions and/or being randomly cruel to each other on the Internet. Meanwhile the stock market flourishes. Call this, in a final flourish of black humor, politics.

I repeat myself: nevertheless, don’t follow the news. Don’t follow the news because it’s trying to monopolize your attention for ad dollars. Don’t follow the news because most of what it shows you is either false or is deliberately designed to prevent you from doing anything about it. Don’t follow the news because it will consistently appeal to your basest instincts. Don’t follow the news because it will train you to be totally inactive and despairing in the face of injustice. Don’t follow the news because it will isolate you and teach you to hate your fellow human beings. 

A Catholic is called to live a virtuous life, a life in which through habitual action, aided by divine grace, his immediate, unthinking reactions to people, places, and things are more and more conformed to the true, the good, the beautiful, the just, and the charitable. A virtuous person does not react to injustice except so as to mourn it or work towards setting it right through  prayer and virtuous action. A virtuous Christian does not give himself over to hatred or contempt for fellow human beings, but works for their salvation through prayer and charitable action. All this requires, however, a great deal of training and retraining of our basic habits and affections. And this training requires, as its absolute sine qua non, that one not spend all one’s time and energy on a training regimen with precisely the opposite purpose.

I concede that it is not impossible to follow the news in a virtuous, charitable way. One can learn about evils happening a world away, and pray for those affected. One can learn about evils happening close to home, and work to correct them. To a limited degree. 

We live, however, in a society of addicts, and when dealing with addicts, moderate approaches are seldom effective. Which is why en masse, on balance, I would say to my fellow American Catholics: don’t follow the news. 

The AI Revolution Already Took Place

 The AI Revolution Already Took Place

The most interesting thing about modernity is the degree to which it depends, for its basic functioning, on generating a constant sense of novelty. 

On such novelty depends not only such trifles as human life and livelihood, but also "the economy," "politics," and, perhaps most importantly of all, the ever-growing Internet-conspiracist-Take-Worker sector of the global economy.

To easily grasp what defines "modernity," I often point out to students that in Latin, as in most ancient languages, the term "new" normally has negative connotations--and can be otherwise translated as "strange" "rash" and even "revolutionary." In itself, this is far closer to a sort of human baseline response to novelty as such. Most ancient societies realized that "new things" were almost by definition disruptive things, things that created complications for the social networks and institutions they valued so highly and thus hardship and suffering and conflict. Families and institutions and Empires alike run on the old, and are thus largely and inevitably run by the old--especially in Rome, but increasingly in America as well. And as the recent disgusting wall-to-wall press coverage of the anniversary of overturning Roe v Wade reminds us, for institutions and established powers of all kinds, new things, and new people, always cause problems.

Merely saying that contemporary societies are the opposite of this, and regard novelty and the new as positive, though, is insufficient and somewhat deceptive. Certainly, modernity features any number of "progressive" narratives and theories and philosophies and theologies whereby what is new is always and by definition good, no matter what. Many popular works of progressive narrative and theory are, in fact, nearly comical in the degree of religious and moral fervor which they openly show and glory in the enormous conflict, social and familial disruption, and even violence that result from a given new trend, while still dogmatically insisting on that trend's goodness and the absolute moral necessity of embracing it and encouraging it and never questioning it at all. Yet even here, it would be easy to misunderstand the actual content and basis of the belief. 

To understand the history of the last few hundred years, one has to understand, first and foremost, that the negativity and conflict generated by modernity and modern trends is, in practically every case, not the result of "anti-modern" or "reactionary" or even "conservative" forces, but merely the inseparable twin and means of modernity itself. It is not, as one might expect, consistently and inevitably the progressive forces that advocate for novelty and portray it in positive terms, and the anti-progressive forces that portray it in negative terms. Rather, in almost every case, the novelty and its reaction are simultaneous and inseparable.

To give an obvious example, science-fiction taken as a whole is without a doubt a "progressive" and "modern" genre, yet the bread-and-butter of science fiction since its first days has been horror stories about technology and its negative consequences, demons and mad clones and evil androids and nuclear apocalypse and genetic engineering and Morlocks and erasing your family from the timeline. Frankenstein is the first modern science fiction novel precisely because it is nearly the first work of art to make extensive use of the terminology and concepts of modern science for primarily aesthetic purposes: and the aesthetic purposes to which it puts science are silence, distance, isolation, fear, and incalculable moral horror. 

Dystopia is not an opposite narrative mode to utopia, composed by different authors for contrary purposes. Nor is science horror opposite to science excitement. The Twilight Zone and Flash Gordon, Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury, Ray Bradbury and Ray Bradbury, George Orwell and L. Ron Hubbard, Gene Wolfe and Gene Wolfe, Star Trek and Black Mirror...all accept the radically new in science and technology as powerful and inevitable and beyond any rational control or regulation; all use this assumed reality both for aesthetic strangeness and horror and for aesthetic excitement and novelty and positivity. The same society, the same genre, even the same people produce both modes.

And in just the same way, a conspiracist or alarmist narrative about how a new technology or social trend will destroy the world is not, in practice, the opposite of a progressive or "pro-science" narrative about how a technology or social trend is "cool," must be embraced at all costs, and/or will save us all. The two are in most cases sponsored and paid for by the same tech companies, run in the same outlets, consumed by the same people, even at times created by the same people.

Again, there is a sense in which all this is distinctively modern, but also a sense in which it represents simply a universal human reaction to the truly and radically new, which always offers powers and possibilities and experiences and threats we have no prior experience with and so do not understand and so are not morally and intellectually equipped to handle, and so always to some extent moves us into an aesthetic space of excitement and horror and distance and alienation and strangeness. 

This is not in itself what makes modernity modern. What makes modernity modern is that both the "goodness" or "positivity" assigned to new things, and the "badness" or "negativity" assigned to new things, do not follow the typical senses of those words, which in most human languages and contexts emerge from morality and/or human comfort and/or prosperity and/or health and/or happiness and/or aesthetic preference. What defines modernity, rather, is precisely the sense that these novelties have truly and permanently and almost definitionally eluded the grasp of any human understanding or reason, and so cannot be properly categorized in terms of goodness or badness at all.

Hence, the concepts of goodness and badness applicable to these novelties end up representing something much closer to a metaphysical or definitional claim. What is new is good not in the sense in which, say, food or drink or shelter are good, or Star Trek Generations is good, but more in the sense in which a metaphysical principle or a law of physics or an ancient Mesopotamian god is good. Likewise, what is new is bad not in the sense in which, say, being mean to your sister is bad, or Marvel Avengers Infinity War Endgame is bad, but more in the sense in which a metaphysical principle may be bad in its implications for your own life, or a law of physics may cause you to fall unexpectedly off a cliff, or an ancient Mesopotamian god may wipe out your city and your family in an excess of spleen. Or, in other words, and in both cases, because it is fundamental, because it is inevitable, and/or because it is powerful. 

At the heart of modernity, then, is a kind of worship of inevitability and power as such, derived ultimately from a sort of immanentization into history of a metaphysical divinity transcending human reason and morality and identified with novelties good and bad. 

Here, though, is the problem with the worship of novelty, power, and/or inevitability as such. Metaphysical principles and laws of nature and even Mesopotamian deities are things that, by their nature, tend to be transcendent, not just temporarily but permanently beyond our reach and comprehension. Novelty, power, and inevitability, on the other hand, are things that can inhere in anything and everything, and things that by their inmost nature do not have much of a shelf-life. Something is divine forever; it can only be novel for a few minutes or a few days or perhaps a few years at best.

Most new things are only new in one respect, and then not new for very long; most inevitable things are not really inevitable at all, only very probable, and in constant danger of becoming un-inevitable; powerful things are only powerful to some limited degree, and usually only from one angle or one context. As fundamentally aesthetic phenomena, all suffer enormously from the basic hedonic treadmill effect. Maintaining a sense of novelty or power or inevitability at the center of a personality or a culture, then, requires an enormous and constant expenditure of time and attention and resources to find these qualities, demonstrate them, and finally give up on the current entity and start the process all over again.

And then, of course, even then most of the time finding actual genuine novelty power or inevitability is too hard, and in practice people simply settle for the aesthetic effects that suggest it.

Technological Criticism

Technological Criticism

To be unable to criticize technology is to be insane. This particular kind of insanity is the hallmark of modern society.

Allow me to justify the preceding statements. 

The Logos of Techne

It is difficult to think of a word for what we call "technology" in any ancient tongue or culture. In fact, it occurred to me recently that the word is rather bizarre in itself--something approaching a contradiction in terms. Logos and techne were fundamental categories to the Greeks and especially the Greek philosophers, but they existed in strong contradistinction to each other. Logos is the realm of knowledge, of discourse, of accounting for a particular reality, whether by means of abstract philosophy, mathematical calculation, or narrative. Techne, in contrast, is the realm of craft, of skilled practice aimed at creation and action.

It is by this time a very old intellectual-history commonplace to point to the connections between magic and technology, even to say, as C.S. Lewis did, that the main or only distinction between magic and technology is that one worked, and the other did not. There is truth in this, but it is nonetheless somewhat deceptive. Techne or craft in the pre-modern sense is in fact closely allied to magic, precisely because by its very nature it defies logos in the sense of pre-determined abstraction and calculation. The magician is a practitioner of a craft, but like many pre-modern craftsman, his craft cannot be neatly set out in a mathematical simulation or technical manual; he operates on a mixture of innate skill, honed practice, habit, planning, improvisation, and technique. Wizardry operates on the guild system, with masters and apprentices; there is no magical proletariat. Books of spells or alchemical texts read much like the Byzantine recipes for paints and metal alloys that I translated earlier this year: succinct sets of directions for already skilled and practiced craftsmen to achieve practical ends, given in imprecise proportions, with many options and lots of freedom to alter and experiment baked in.

Technology, though, is not techne. It is not a skill inhering in a skilled laborer operating on technique and instinct beyond the realms of abstract knowledge and calculation. It is, by its very nature, totally calculated and determined in advance, through the distinctively modern and scientific obsession with applied mathematics. 

Neither, though, is technology logos in the general sense of that word. Plato in many of his dialogues provides what could be rather more fittingly described as technologies: that is, rational accounts of techne in general and its particular species, describing their rational ends, the skills involved, and how to become a better practitioner. Technology, while totally calculated, is aimed emphatically at merely practical and immediate ends; it is rarely analyzed in philosophical or moral terms, and no practitioner of technology would regard such analysis as essential to its nature or operation.