The boldness of belief, the timidity of technology

Ratzinger points to an exit from the soft despotism of the present. (Final installment of the vitalism seminar.)

Sometime around 1830, a young Frenchman of aristocratic family, with liberal sympathies, got on a boat headed to America. He wanted to see the new democracy in action. He travelled around and reported what he saw: a vigorous spirit of self-government that manifested in a hundred little ways. But he also got intimations of trouble down the road.

I refer, of course, to Alexis de Tocqueville. He wrote, “The despotism that I fear for the generations to come has no precedent in the world and lacks a name. I will call it administrative despotism for lack of anything better.” He proceeds to describe something very much like Heidegger’s “enframing”, Lewis Mumford’s “technics” or Kingsnorth’s “the Machine.” This entity (if that is the right word) is both political and economic in its reach, but more fundamentally it is psychic and spiritual.

After having thus taken each individual one by one into its powerful hands, and having molded him as it pleases, the sovereign power extends its arms over the entire society; it covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated, minute, and uniform rules, which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot break through to go beyond the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them and directs them; it rarely forces action, but it constantly opposes your acting; it does not destroy, it prevents birth; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, it represses, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and finally it reduces each nation to being nothing more than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

What Tocqueville calls “the government” no longer resides exclusively (or even primarily) in state legislatures, the capitol building in DC, or any such identifiable location. It is devolved and distributed, living largely in the servers. But we can recognize the description when Tocqueville refers to “this power [that] is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood.”

“Infantilization” would be one word to apply here. Better yet, recall the scenes with Nurse Ratched in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” She is regular, provident and mild, and must unman her wards on behalf of “health” -- because that is what the system requires if it is to function optimally. Tocqueville was among the earliest to detect that there is an antihumanism that lies just beneath the surface of grand projects for technocratic control, which are so often tied to a therapeutic mandate as well: the human subject must be remade into suitable material. Where does this imperative of control come from?

Nature is raw material that can be reshaped at will. This is the technological attitude, which posits that there is no mystery in nature that can escape our comprehension, and therefore everything lies open to manipulation. Man is himself a natural object, without any essence or purpose that must be respected. This second point is announced in a liberatory mood – we are free to re-make ourselves according to our will and imagination. But it follows that, like the natural world, the contents of our hearts and minds are then likewise open to scientific management. CS Lewis writes, “the power of Man to make himself what he pleases” really means “the power of some men to make other men what they please.” This is the logic by which you get from the technological attitude to the specifically modern form of despotism.

The technological attitude is an attitude to reality and truth, and the good news is that it is not the only possible one.

Joseph Ratzinger

Knowing as making; the feasible as the obligatory

In a challenging and exhilarating book with the deceptively modest title Introduction to Christianity, Joseph Ratzinger traces the road taken by the human spirit over the last millennium, and two decisive inflection points by which we got to the present. By historicizing the technological attitude, Ratzinger enables us to see it as something that has a beginning point behind which one can go, the better to get a critical view of our own metaphysics.

Like Leo Strauss, Ratzinger points to the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico as the first (in 1710) to formulate, in a “piece of bold anticipation,” the new concept of reality and truth that marks the arrival of the modern. Vico puts it in a formula consisting of a mere three word: verum quia factum. “That is to say, all that we can truly know is what we have made ourselves,” as Ratzinger glosses it.

Vico begins by following Aristotle in the idea that to know something fully is to know its cause. “But from this old thought something completely new is deduced,” Ratzinger writes. If I am the cause of something, because I made it, then I can know it fully. “Man did not produce the cosmos, and its bottommost depths remain opaque to him. Complete, demonstrable knowledge is attainable only within the bounds of mathematics [an activity of the human mind] and in the field of history, which is the realm of man's own activities and can therefore be known by him.”

We could call this Ratzinger’s first wave of modernity. Notice that it arises from an anxiety about what can be known; about how we gain access to the world. Then along comes Karl Marx, and with him the second great inflection point. Marx said, “So far philosophers have merely interpreted the world in various ways; it is necessary to change it.” If the activity of philosophy is now not interpretation, nor contemplation of permanent things, but action upon the world, it suggests that truth is no longer identified with what man has already made, as in Vico’s formula, but with what it is feasible to do going forward. Here there is no possibility of repose in a stable world, even one that is man-made and therefore ought to be intelligible on Vico’s grounds.

The formula coined by Ratzinger for this newer dispensation, riffing on Vico, is verum quia faciendum. If I remember my Latin grammar correctly, faciendum is the gerundive, which carries a hint of the imperative mood. So this formula identifies truth with “what is to be done.” The feasible here appears under the sign of an obligation of sorts.

I am reminded of a saying of Robert Oppenheimer. When asked why he would create such a terrible weapon of mass destruction, he is said to have answered, “when you see something that is technically sweet, you do it.” I always thought of this as a psychological statement about the intellectual pleasures of problem-solving. Such pleasures, internal to some technical practice, can short-circuit a reflection on the goodness of the end served by the practice. I still think that’s true. But Ratzinger shows that the compulsive character of technology is tied as well to an epistemic quandary that Western man takes himself to be in, rooted in skepticism about our access to being. It is a quandary he got himself into by the successive steps Ratzinger lays out.

The situation that Marx was responding to was this. The factual or already-accomplished, which is to say the history of man’s deeds, isn’t quite so accessible as it was thought to be in the so-called science of history in the 19^th century. There’s a lot of interpretation and dispute about history, and Marx wants to be done with all that.

“So the conviction was bound to spread more and more that in the final analysis all that man could really know was what was repeatable, what he could put before his eyes at any time in an experiment.” This is a standpoint that signifies “devotion to reality insofar as it is capable of being shaped.” We’ve gone from the made to the makeable.

Now, let’s slow down here. If you ask a scientist, he will surely say that the point of repeatable experiments is to discover an antecedent truth, not free invention. But to have repeatable experiments, you have to isolate and control all of the relevant variables, so that your hypothesis can be tested against its predictions. The difficulty lies in knowing what counts as a relevant variable, and in the process of isolating them. Any scientific hypothesis tacitly leans on a series of exclusions, simplifications and idealizations, for example the frictionless surface, the point mass, the perfect vacuum, the perfectly elastic collision. The world has to be idealized in order to make it more intellectually tractable, to the point that you can do mathematics on it. As Heidegger said, mathematical physics is “a projection of thingness which, as it were, skips over the things.” Another motto that I like comes from Jaron Lanier: “what makes something real is that it cannot be represented to completion.” The real can always surprise us. Fundamental considerations like these, as well as others that are more sociological in nature (pertaining to the institutional practice of science), surely underly the “replication crisis” that has spread through so many fields of science in the 21^st century. Sabine Hossenfelder finds the stagnation of fundamental particle physics (despite billions spent on ever-larger colliders) to be due to a retreat of particle physicists into the hermetic realm of pure mathematical invention.

Ratzinger seems to elide the distinction between science and technology when he says an emphasis on the repeatable experiment signifies “devotion to reality insofar as it is capable of being shaped.” But this elision is intrinsic to modern science itself, and indeed that is the whole point. Such elision, or what Ratzinger calls “a new correlation between science and praxis” is the basis on which modern science differs from ancient and medieval science/philosophy. The modern attitude posits that experience is an unreliable guide to reality, and this is the epistemic anxiety that leads to an imperative of control.

This obligation to shape and control applies to man himself. Ratzinger writes that after Darwin, man viewed himself as the result of a blind process. If for a while he felt “disillusioned by such knowledge and felt degraded, he does not need to be disturbed by this any longer, for now, wherever he comes from, he can look his future in the eye with the determination to make himself into whatever he wishes….”

But the reflexive pronoun in the phrase “make himself” obscures. It covers over the political consequences of this metaphysics of human plasticity. First man is reduced to a natural fact, and from there it is a short step to treating him as raw material to be manipulated. He becomes a “standing reserve” of human potential to be steered according to the vision of whoever holds the reins of propaganda, pharmacology, or the “engagement algorithms” of social media. The technological mindset underlies managerialism, a political form that carries with it an anthropological project. What is wanted is a generic self, maximally pliable to power, an “undifferentiated human material” or what Renaud Camus refers to as a “spreadable” post-humanity, like the smoothest type of peanut-flavored sandwich filling.

Belief

Ratzinger has shown a trajectory in which we turned, in our basic orientation, from the world made by God, to what has been made by man, to what it is feasible to do going forward, with man himself as something to be shaped according to the rationalist dreams of whoever holds power. He then shows us that outside of this dynamic of the made and the makeable, orthogonal to it, there is available to us an entirely different orientation to reality, what he calls belief. When a man says credo – I believe –

he is not primarily enunciating a program for changing the world or simply attaching himself to a chain of historical events…. [T]he act of believing does not belong to the relationship “know-make”, which is typical of the intellectual context of makeability thinking, but is much better expressed in the quite different relationship “stand-understand”.

Here, belief is not an incomplete or provisional form of knowledge, the kind of thing that in principle could one day be verified or refuted. Instead it is something you do, in the present, a kind of loyalty.

Ratzinger writes,

belief operates on a completely different plane from that of making and makeability. Essentially, it is entrusting oneself to that which has not been made by oneself and never could be made and which precisely in this way supports and make possible all our making. [70]

…meaning that is self-made is in the last analysis no meaning. Meaning, that is, the ground on which our existence as a totality can stand and live, cannot be made but only received. [73]

Ratzinger would have us simply step aside from the epistemological anxiety that has driven the great drama of modern thought. But, unlike the vulgar forms of existentialism, he does not offer as a remedy for such anxiety a cult of the will. He is not suggesting one make a heroic decision to believe, which after all would be an incoherent thing. Imagine someone who comes into a room and announces “there’s not a cloud in the sky outside, but I believe it’s raining,” hoping we will admire him as a man of conviction.

For Ratzinger, belief is not an act of will, but a response to something received. Note that the basic orientation to the world that we call “technology” is one that has little room for reception and thus for gratitude, which would seem to require an outside world that is not under one’s control and not of one’s own making.

The push for rational control has been with us for some centuries, but has lately entered an especially frantic phase, and a jealous determination to leave no area of life untouched by this libido dominandi. Indeed, to trust in fate, or divine providence, or fortuna, is to be downright irresponsible. It’s not safe, for one thing. There is a fearful timidity to the rationalist soul.

Ratzinger offers an alternative, both by his critical genealogy of the technological mindset, and by the positive account he gives of receiving the world, as against making it.

Experiences of serendipity, and of entrusting oneself to the world, feel a bit scarce in contemporary culture, and the language for articulating them seems to be fading from common use. We have a vision of the future in which there would be little scope for such moments; the most authoritative voices in commerce and technology express a determination to eliminate contingency from life as much as possible, and replace it with machine-generated certainty. That’s what automation does, whatever else it may accomplish. More broadly, a need for certainty is expressed in the project to expand rational control over domains that remain intolerably wild. At times, this project comes untethered from any utility-maximizing logic and looks more like a compulsion. It reveals a metaphysical orientation that seems a bit cramped, or timid.

The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga found the origin of civilization to lie in play. He wrote, “To dare, to take risks, to bear uncertainty, to endure tension—these are the essence of the play spirit.”

Let’s place that thought beside another. Ratzinger points out that the Hebrew word “Amen” has a rich variety of meanings. They include truth, firmness, firm ground, ground. Also loyalty, to trust, entrust oneself, take one’s stand on something, believe in something. He writes that the “amen” is “a trustful placing of myself on the ground that upholds me, not because I have made it and checked it with my own calculations but, rather, precisely because I have not made it and cannot check it. It expresses the abandonment of oneself to what we can neither make nor need to make, to the ground of the world as meaning….”

Is there then something bold and life-affirming in faith, as there is in play? This “trustful placing of myself on the ground that upholds me” would seem to be a kind of existential courage. Maybe that is why people of easy and resolute religious faith seem light-hearted, as the courageous do.

As we explored in the previous seminar session, to trust in providence relieves one of anxiety for the future. To believe that the fundamental ontology of the world, being itself, is somehow trustworthy would seem to be something further in the same direction. It relieves one of anxiety for the present. That’s real abandon. A person in that state is in possession of a gift, and he shines. I suppose this is what “charisma” means. It is from the Greek word for grace.

I have broken a lot of bones over the years while riding motorcycles. When I have pressed my luck, heedlessly as it were, and that fleeting glimmer of some new finesse happens on a canyon road, it does feel like a shining state of grace. It is heedless of hazard, but also heeding a call of some kind. Can it be accessed more reliably, this courage that makes one outrageously, luxuriously free?

Ratzinger writes, “What is belief really?” Let me close with a few lines taken from Introduction to Christianity.

“To believe as a Christian means in fact entrusting oneself to the meaning that upholds me and the world; taking it as the firm ground on which I can stand fearlessly…. [It means] affirming that the meaning we do not make but can only receive is already granted to us, so that we have only to take it and entrust ourselves to it.”

“Christian faith lives on the discovery that not only is there such a thing as objective meaning but that this meaning knows me and loves me….”[80]

Phew. To those of you who have stuck it out through this seminar, thank you. I expect I will be returning to lighter, more topical essays shortly. But first I will take a short hiatus because I am travelling quite a bit over the next month (including to Chile, which is exciting). I also have two engines that need building before I pack up my whole operation and move to Winnipeg, a colossal undertaking that will further slow down my posting. — Matt

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