With the recent debates surrounding AI improvement and the somewhat imminent AI takeover, I thought it would be interesting to return to the 20th century to analyse the debates on the rise of the machine and what we can learn from it today.
The early 20th century marked a time when the technological revolution was in full swing. With radio, mechanised factory work, and the First World War marked the new era of mechanised warfare, the intellectuals of the day were trying to make sense of this new modernised society. With the speed at which the changes occurred, people’s conception of reality was lagging.
The machine has narrowed spaces between people – the car allowed people to traverse space faster, and radio and telephone brought closer and practically instantaneous access to one’s family, friends, and acquaintances. The jobs were mechanised and people, as idealised by Marx, had the potential of being the ‘mere minders of the machine’. We are now entering another era. A time when Artificial Intelligence has the potential to replace most jobs. This is what Fisher in Post-Capitalist Desire has considered an opportunity for a post-scarcity society. But is this possible? Or rather should we heed Nick Land’s warning in Machinic Desire where he advised:
“Zaibatsus flip into sentience as the market melts to automatism, politics is cryogenized and dumped into the liquid-helium meatstore, drugs migrate onto neurosoft viruses, and immunity is grated-open against jagged reefs of feral AI explosion, Kali culture, digital dance-dependency, black shamanism epidemic, and schizolupic break-outs from the bin.” (Land, Fanged Noumena, 2011)
But let’s thrust away the shatters of this neo-automation and return to 1912, the time when this has only just begun.
Gilbert Gannan, in an article for Rhythm, wrote:
“Life is far too good and far too precious a thing to be smudged with mechanical morality, and fenced about with mechanical lies, and wasted on mechanical acquaintanceships when there are splendid friendships and lovely loves in which the imagination can find warm comradeship and adventure, lose and find itself, and obtain life, which may or may not be everlasting.” (Gannan, 1912)
In a quasi-perennial argument, he claims that mechanical morality and mechanism, in general, will never replace the real deal – the real concrete friendships and those we love.
This is an excerpt from “Mayday! Mayday!”. To continue reading, visit The Mallard’s Shopify.
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The Reset Clause (same time next 25 years)
How did we get here, and where do we go? A lot of modern political questions can be summarised in those two simple questions. Our cultural and political zeitgeist has possibly become the equivalent of going out for a quick pint and realising sixteen hours later we have woken up on a flight to Mexico.
This literal cultural hangover event merely asks up to beg the question of where we go from here, now that everything has happened prior to our sleep walking and into the current awakening.
Legally, we might be more at home in Terry Gilliam’s ‘Brazil’, or One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, in being trapped within a world that both defies logic or order. A world ran by malicious people, albeit far too stupid to be truly Orwellian Big Brother figures.
As noted by Nicolás Gómez Dávila’s book Sucesivos Escolios a un Texto Implícito:
“Dying societies accumulate laws like dying men accumulate remedies.”
If such things are true, then how do we stop the accumulation? Are societies, as they get further complex and interconnected into themselves and the outside world, doomed to merely breakdown under their own weight? Do we end up investing more energy into systems with greater diminishing returns, until the project itself collapses (Joseph Tainter makes this argument in his book ‘The Collapse of Complex Societies’).
Alternatively, is collapse merely something that occurs when a nation or civilisation loses the fire it once had, and the cracks begin to show? Do we physically lose the will to continue with the same drive and passion that our predecessors had, or do we merely just burn out like Wang Huning often pondered?
Where are the get out of jail free cards, the mechanisms to stop the damage, how do we stop this strange death from approaching?
We often see images of political leaders placing their hands on religious texts, and then stating that they will protect the law of the land and uphold the constitution or whatever. This is nearly always a lie when you have people who neither understand nor respect the original foundations which the nation sprung from.
It was Edmund Burke that said society is a contract between the dead, the living and those yet to be born, and civilisation is an intergenerational struggle between the civilised adults and the little barbarians they have given birth too.
You just must domesticate them before the little barbarians become big ones. This social contract and corresponding obligations are not peer pressure from dead people, but an active handing of cultural responsibility in a civilisational relay race of life.
So, how do we remove these laws? The formation of which will only further hinder future generations. One idea is that of a constitutional reset clause being placed into the political framework of a country. A reset clause would allow for directly examining the new laws that have come into place over the course of every generation. This would allow for a new political class of individuals to look at what has occurred and decide what to do with it all.
With a typical generation being between twenty to thirty years, and twenty-five being in the middle (also fits well for being a quarter of a century), this could be a good way to start. We can take an original constitutional document like the United States Constitution. It is simple, codified, and adheres to higher values for what is expected of both citizenry and government.
Instead of feeling like original documents merely get chipped away with the passage of policy and time, such actions will help people to regularly reassess the direction we are going in. We start at a neutral original document point and let people naturally add further to the document, after twenty-five years we look at what has occurred and assess what has happened previously. The reassessment will allow people to critically examine what has happened and what laws we really need and what needs to be let go.
I sometimes fear we slowly walking into a South Africa-like situation, where we find ourselves with a constitutional document that does not benefit anyone; burdened with laws that only create issues for everyone down the line.
As a result, the problem with South Africa is that it eventually started looking like South Africa, we do not want this nor benefit from this if we continue down this path.
Until this happens one thing is certain, the slow progress of not just time but also law will eventually create a multigenerational leviathan that will ultimately have to be stopped, if left unchecked.
We could pick a date as a proverbial year zero, of which the original laws always remained, and you would then let it play out.
Although, the practicality of such ideas will never get off the ground, hypothetically we should be constantly examining the accumulation of laws and the quality of them moving forward.
In conclusion, what this might mean is that we must reform how we think and view law within our countries and the accumulation of it all. Are we slowly walking into a bureaucratic nightmare and if so, how do we escape from such problems, well and truly?
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A Response to Polly Toynbee
“Know thyself” is a most fundamental axiom of Greek philosophy that has been repeated into cliche in philosophy and religious studies classrooms around the world. And yet it is a concept that many seem to forget. To ignore our fundamental presuppositions and the grounding of our beliefs is foolish and to unwittingly seek to undercut them is ideological suicide.
These thoughts follow my reading of Polly Toynbee’s recent article in the Guardian which seeks to essentially de-Christianise the Christmas celebrations and throws around the terms ‘cultural Christianity’ and ‘humanism’ as a way to legitimise her thoroughly anti-Christian position as some kind of reasonable middle ground/self-critique. A contradiction for sure, as she lampoons the foundations of Christian belief and excoriates the actions of early Christians. If we attached power cables to Friedrich Nietzsche’s grave, his rolling would probably solve the present energy crisis our country is currently undergoing.
Cultural Christianity, at the very least, demands an adoption of Christian morality and admiration for Christian tradition and history that is ridiculous to maintain in lieu of actual religious belief and makes me wonder why one doesn’t go all the way to believe in God too. Perhaps we consider the morality of ‘love thy neighbour’ as not necessarily an exclusively Christian belief but the very mindset that the European and American lives in are framed by Christianity – from the Protestant work ethic to our preference for monogamous relationships. Believing in the morality, mindset and general worldview of Christianity without its origin and basis, the teachings of Christ and the existence of God is vapid and naive. Why is marriage a sacred, inviolable contract if its primary advocate is not even real? (or dead).
This mindset is ultimately pointless and shallow and seeks to provide its own moral foundation with an appeal to some kind of tradition, popularity, or history – merely copying a greater tradition than itself. Ms Toynbee’s self-critical cultural Christianity is further called into question as nothing more than a veneer in her decidedly un-historical diagnosis of Christianity as anti-philosophical, anti-mathematical and anti-intellectual. The church is aware of its failings as a human institution, our own doctrine expects this and our scripture reminds us to be constantly vigilant against sin and our nature. Unfortunately, examples in history can be dragged into scrutiny to illustrate the failures of our forefathers. Maybe certain Popes and church leaders resisted the progress of science, or maybe the condemnations of 1277 sought to strangle ‘heretical’ elements of Aristotelianism out of medieval philosophy, but it isn’t appropriate to attribute particular mistakes by fallible humans to the wider religion. To do so is to be blinkered to what Christianity has provided and what it stands for.
Many of the greatest leaps in mathematics and science were accomplished by monotheists, algebra was pioneered and beautifully developed during the Golden Age of Islam and much of modern science owes its exposition and articulation to Christianity: Newtonian physics, Mendelian genetics and even the Big Bang Theory originate from Christian scholars. As for philosophy, while the discipline in the medieval period did develop in partnership with theology, the enlightenment saw the emergence of important secular thought among many Christian thinkers. For one example, Immanuel Kant, the father of modern philosophy, sought to use God to justify human freedom and escape relativism and nihilism; providing a philosophical framework that has shaped the European zeitgeist. There is a good case to be made that most Anglo-American philosophy that traces back to Hume is essentially a secularisation of the work of William of Occam; a Franciscan monk. Yes, certain Christians supported the barbaric practice of slavery but subsequent Christians spearheaded the abolitionist cause and rebuked their forebears. To accuse Christianity of being backwards because some nuns teaching children attempted to use theological themes to encourage good behaviour is intellectually immature. Ms Toynbee can chase caricatures and mistakes by certain people in order to try and hurry Christianity out the door as much as she wants but her arguments are largely rebutted by a cursory reading of history. There is no real correlation between Christianity and intellectual stagnation.
A point that is interestingly used to drive her case forward is to complain about the largely ceremonial title of Fidei Defensor, which our monarchs adopted as an ironic jest at the Papacy. It is a somewhat nickel and dime point to analyse the declaration of the Anglican church’s independence – remember that the monarch is also the (ceremonial) Supreme Governor of the CofE: a broadly ceremonial title. Surely then, in an institution that is allegedly racist and backward, we should be welcoming Charles’ declaration to defend all the faiths of all of his subjects even if he is styled with a ceremonial, historic title? Dwelling on the ‘the’ seems to be counter-productive. These nickel-and-dime points come across as the bread and butter of this article – We can see another example of these snipes in her discussion of assisted suicide. To say that life is sacred and that assisted suicide is a slippery slope somehow makes our elected officials dangerous radicals that are out of touch with the electorate. This polemic move is extremely dishonest. See the advancement of medically assisted suicide in Canada as an example of the practical risks associated with this policy.
Maybe this response article is also rising to the nickel and dime bait. The debate could rage forever, as glib anecdotes and controversies are thrown about to illustrate the evil of the ever-vengeful skydaddy and his charlatan prophet. But let’s not forget the message of Christmas in the Gospel – a message of love, hope and the salvation of mankind by God who loves His creation and wants nothing more than to reconcile our broken relationship.
So this Christmas remember that the secular values we associate with it – family, reconciliation, joy, giving and altruism – stem from a message of divine love and peace with a promise to end human suffering. Ms Toynbee’s vision of a secular winter holiday is not possible without the Incarnation.
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How the British Mentality is Being Taken Advantage of
Having travelled to the United Kingdom on many occasions and having interacted with British people all around Europe from Leeds to Tallinn, I can safely claim that the folk of those fair isles have one of the friendliest dispositions I’ve encountered on my many travels. This is a bold statement and may very well sound strange to any UK native. However, I’ve failed to find such a friendly, helpful and hospitable demeanour anywhere else. By now, I’ve lost count of how many pints I’ve been offered, whether by a good friend in an ice rink in Nottingham or a complete stranger in a small pub in Attercliffe.
Such a mentality is a credit to any people, but to avoid this essay sounding like too much of an adulation of the British, I have to point out that I’ve seen this jovial mentality evolve into a double-edged sword. My observation and subsequent thesis is that the British people are being taken advantage of in a frankly horrid way and mostly through no fault of their own. The stereotypical friendly attitude of the British towards their fellow man is being used insidiously to destroy the very society that created it, and by Britain’s own ruling class, no less.
What do I mean by this exactly? The way I see it, British friendliness has created not only complacency, but rather powerlessness in the face of people and ideologies that have no qualms asserting themselves, often violently. As an outsider, a foreign observer, I’ve witnessed this phenomenon repeated in several cases which I’d like to bring out here. Firstly, I’d touch on immigration and its consequences. When the arch-enemy of Britain, Tony Blair, figuratively threw open the floodgates, Britain has been the destination of wholly unprecedented numbers of immigrants from all around the world, especially from the third world. The consequences of this population shift have been equally unprecedented.
As many will know, mass immigration exacerbates already existing economic issues. Much like other Western countries, Britain is facing a housing crisis and wage stagnation. Furthermore, the public services of the country are under increased duress. Yet, immigration has not been slowed; quite the contrary in fact. In addition to economic woes, increased criminality, which at its worst has manifested itself in horrific instances of systemic physical and sexual violence, has already become commonplace to the extent that few are even shocked. As if all this wasn’t enough, the native British are being actively displaced within their own communities. London is an already infamous example of this, with White Britons already a minority within the city.
Introducing an ethnic component into immigration discourse has, in my opinion, been viewed with suspicion by the British public at large. This has, however, created a situation where a question of fundamental nature is rarely asked, namely: What is the use of (British) communities, when they are no longer inhabited by the British? Do those communities even exist then? A stroll through major cities shows an emergence of new communities created by people who, in their large numbers, have neither the need nor the will to become part of Britain. The ubiquitous religious centres and assorted ethnic food peddlers are just a symbol of a much more assertive culture against which the natives seem to be mentally powerless.
Another wholly wicked social phenomenon which has for some time already but which rose to the forefront again against the backdrop of the global “anti-racism” movement, is the self-flagellatory attitude towards British history and heritage. This attitude, espoused by the cultural and political elites will, in the long run, have the inevitable consequence of eliminating the last sheds of pride the British people have towards themselves and their past achievements. A heroic representation of a Victoria Cross recipient in Kabul must now have a plaque explicitly condemning the irredeemable evils of empire and military heroism. The statue of a well-known and respected local philanthropist is mercilessly torn down due to his connections to the slave trade. Britain’s most famous wartime PM is continuously vilified and demonised as a symbol of racism. To someone like me, who hails from a country that still largely values its historical heritage, this ultra-revisionism seems to be nothing more than a violent attempt to erase the historical achievements and links that still provide Britons with pride and legitimacy as a distinct people.
What then of the political class that facilitated these destructive social changes? The children of Thatcherite neoliberalism and Blair’s New Labour have combined to create a seemingly perfect storm which from one side creates economic deprivations and from the other destroys social cohesion. It seems to hardly matter which one of the nominally different parties is in power. My observations of British politics always lead me to a similar conclusion: the people of Britain are still confined to a binary choice which, at the end of the day, doesn’t make much of a difference. I admit, much of this is due to the structural shortcomings of the Westminster parliamentary system. However, despite the electoral process heavily favouring large established parties, there is another, more spiritual factor at work and this brings me back to my original thesis.
The British people are not sheep. At least I believe they are still very much capable of independent thought and are aware of their unenviable situation. The issue lies, however, in the expression of this independent thought. Instead of a roaring fire, it is rather a small ember which manifests itself mostly as quiet grumbling over a pint and the occasional protest. The glory days of the Miners’ strike seem to be long gone. This inability or unwillingness to mobilise discontent is, I believe, the unintended and unfortunate consequence of the British national psyche.
In addition to being friendly and agreeable at heart, which hampers reaction to even objectively negative developments, I’ve noticed among the Britons an exceptionally strong yearning for stability and respect for the status quo. An average Briton will often do his utmost to not cause a fuss. The British are clearly not content with their situation, far from it, but any fundamental and lasting change would require disrupting the status quo, rocking the boat so to speak and thus causing the dreaded fuss. Since the vast majority of Britons seem unwilling to do this, they are shamelessly taken advantage of by people who have no qualms about pushing their destructive social and economic agenda, disrupting the status quo clearly for the worse.
Let me be clear, this isn’t the fault of the British people at large. A national psyche is something that can be seldom changed. I would even consider Brexit to be largely within its confines. While it most definitely caused a fuss, tapping into the remaining sovereigntist spirit of the people, it has failed to address some of the more fundamental issues I touched upon earlier in this essay. Brexit seems more and more to have been a managed release of pressure, before the people were pushed too far.
When will the British be pushed over the edge then? To conclude, I’d like to hearken back to Kipling’s poem “The Beginnings”. It has, in my view, a very prophetic message.
It was not part of their blood,
It came to them very late
With long arrears to make good
When the English began to hate.
This verse captures the essence of my thesis. I do believe the British will someday react against those who have wronged them. This will most likely, and unfortunately, come at the expense of their inherent friendliness and hospitality, I fear. Perhaps a final loss of innocence is the last tool at their disposal. As someone who has enjoyed it on many occasions, I’m sad to see it go. But just as the Empire, maybe the old British mentality has its own epoch, which is regrettably coming to an end.
