Antihumanism
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Antihumanism
The common thread in our consolidating systems of social control
In 2009, one of Google’s self-driving cars came to an intersection with a four-way stop. It came to a halt and waited for other cars to do the same before proceeding through. Apparently, that is the rule it was taught—but of course, that is not what people do. So the robot car got completely paralyzed, blocked the intersection, and had to be rebooted. Tellingly, the Google engineer in charge of the autonomous vehicle program said some years later that what he was learning from the experience was that human beings need to be “less idiotic.”
Let’s think about that. If there is an ambiguous case of right-of-way, human drivers will often make eye contact. Maybe one waves the other through or indicates by the movements of the car itself a readiness to yield, or not. It’s not a stretch to say that there is a kind of body language of driving, and a range of driving dispositions. We are endowed with social intelligence, through the exercise of which people work things out among themselves, and usually manage to cooperate well enough. Tocqueville thought it was in small-bore practical activities demanding improvisation and cooperation that the habits of collective self-government were formed. And this is significant. There is something that can aptly be called the democratic personality, and it is cultivated not in civics class, but in the granular features of everyday life. But the social intelligence on display at that intersection wasn’t visible to the engineers, or didn’t seem salient. This, too, is significant.
The premise behind the push for driverless cars is that human beings are terrible drivers. This is one instance of a wider pattern. There is a tacit picture of the human being that guides our institutions, and a shared intellectual DNA for the governing classes. It has various elements, but the common thread is a low regard for human beings, whether on the basis of their fragility, their cognitive limitations, their latent tendency to “hate,” or their imminent obsolescence with the arrival of imagined technological possibilities. Each of these premises carries an important but partial truth, and each provides the master supposition for some project of social control.
Read the rest in the current issue of First Things.
This essay was originally delivered as the 2023 First Things Lecture in Washington, DC.
Antihumanism
"The precondition for the arrival of a post-political condition is the moral disqualification of the demos."
This really pins the tail on the zeitgeist.
And this is the linchpin or engine of our national dispossession:
"The white bourgeoisie became invested in a political drama in which their own moral standing depends on black people remaining permanently aggrieved."
One of the ironies here for me is that this revolution in values, where not just your actions but even your deepest thoughts and feelings about the "marginalized" Other becomes the entire axis of our moral universe, has been orchestrated mostly by Hollywood, whose denizens treat politics and morality like an Oscar gown (shiny and loud yet disposable) and journalists, who ambulance chase in between denunciations of the downscale and gauche, and who are as credible as the town whore giving the Sunday sermon. And just to add to the absurdity: all of these producers of weepy race porn and all these sleuths still on the case of Emmit Till live nowhere near black people, make sure to send their kids to school with few black people, and only know black people who've gone to the same schools and have the same worldview.
Black pain is the ultimate luxury good for upscale white liberals, it is like a Prada bag or Hermes scarf, which marks them out as special moral aristocrats. White Saviorism is the sacred belief that holds our liberal clerisy and ruling elite together, and it reigns unimpeded mostly because there are so few other sacred beliefs left standing.
WOW, this is amazing!!! 🙌