Mentalities of Power: A Response to Lourié's "Road to Transhumanism"
By Adam Webb
Prof. Svetlana Lourie’s “The Road to Transhumanism: How Man Became a Project,” published by Landmarks in August 2020, elicited a range of reactions. Her fears of a post-human techno-dystopian future that will be global in reach struck some as exaggerated, whereas many others found it right on target. Meanwhile, the role of China in all of this was hotly debated. For a reaction to Lourié’s controversial yet clearly insightful essay, we appealed to Simone Weil Center board member Adam Webb, whose ‘areas of expertise’ include both China and global cultural and political processes more generally. — Editors
Svetlana Lourié’s essay “The Road to Transhumanism” is in the vein of philosophy of history. It aims to make sense of seemingly scattered geopolitical and technological innovations, as advancing an amorphous and ultimately sinister “Project”: “the Man-God, who, with help from modern medicine and artificial intelligence, is being designed to live forever without having to know suffering or any other undesirable aspect of existence.” This project involves an accumulation of practices and sensibilities rather than conscious design. Still, both its false promise of liberation and its threat of dystopian control rest on a common misapprehension of the soul’s true needs.
Lourié devotes more space to interpretation than to examples. Her few examples sometimes deal more in extrapolation than in present facts. The “most disgusting features of electronic control” that she sees in China, such as the social credit rating system to reward and punish individuals, are still more patchy than she thinks. But just as Beijing indeed crushes the churches and other vestiges of civil society, she is right that it aspires to digital mastery of an atomized populace. And whether in Moscow’s “smart city” future of the obediently microchipped, or assorted uses of big data monitoring elsewhere, China’s sophisticated techniques of surveillance have an eager customer base among the world’s authoritarians and ready collaborators among Western technology companies.
The strength of Lourié’s account is that it shifts the frame from national interest to a more universal landscape of civilizations and values. For her, unlike for many other critics of the way the world is going, the story is not merely about defending national sovereignty against the designs of Davos, or the West against Russia or China, or vice versa. The categories penetrate one another. The fault lines in any society map on to a global clash of values, even if those values may prevail in some places and systems more than others.
While she gets the scale right, I want to suggest that to make sense of this dystopian prospect, we need a middle ground between a cabal of designers, on the one hand, and a diffuse force in History that somehow operates of its own accord, on the other. She rightly notes the mentality behind much of the “Project,” including that “the main thing to be repressed is any attempt to find a solid foundation for something.” But such mentalities—however sobering as an account of diffuse human weakness and temptation—really gain weight in history only when borne into power. Diffuse misguidedness animates actors, just as broader dystopia flows out of their actions. But the actors themselves and the institutional patterns that allow them to act need identifying properly. We can advance the alternative of “remaining human,” as she puts it, only if we can push back on the right pressure points.
MODERN POWER’S PRECEDENTS
In practice, the problem of the tightening dystopia manifests less as a late modern blindness to definite truths beyond the world, and more as a late modern wont to be easily impressed by too much definiteness of the wrong kind, within the world. A narrow and materialistic view of human wellbeing, and a hubristic impulse to monitor and discipline the populace, have been with us through the ages. They have only come together lately as such a sinister and overwhelming force because of a reconstitution of society and its dominant institutions. Yugoslav sociologist Milovan Djilas coined the term “the new class” in the 1950s to describe the cadres and managers who, based on a certain type of credentialling and expertise rather than either capital or inherited status, had taken command of large and complex institutions. To be sure, one can slice up the sociology of mobility and power in many ways. Christopher Lasch’s progressive “élites,” the “managerial élites” analysed by James Burnham, Michael Lind, and Patrick Deneen, and even the bourgeois bohemian “Bobos” detailed by Christophe Guilluy and David Brooks, are all variations on the theme. Structural factors are not uniform. The balance between state and market, and some channels of socialisation, do still vary from country to country. But the convergence of most societies on new class dominance, at the expense of traditionally plural bases of power and channels of aspiration, is a striking fact of late modernity.
“The strength of Lourié’s account is that it shifts the frame from national interest to a more universal landscape of civilizations and values …
The “Project” at which Lourié darkly hints becomes possible because key elements now coincide. Never before in history have we had 1) such a homogeneous ruling stratum across societies with a worldview rooted in its own peculiar experience, 2) funneled through education systems that reach deeply into society to hoover up narrowly measured talent, 3) shepherding centralized institutions that affect so much of life, and 4) gathering in its hands sophisticated technologies of monitoring and discipline.
To be sure, it has its forerunners. We would benefit from more attention to them and their operation, rather than the usual focus on the experience of the last generation or two. Two cultural histories are illuminating. Karl August Wittfogel observed that unlike feudal and bourgeois societies with their various channels of power, mobility, and honour, the history of much of Asia has seen bureaucratic despotisms with monistic hierarchies. In the latter, one misstep by an ambitious functionary could lead to the hammer of discipline coming down such that he lost everything. Norbert Elias traced the emergence of tight norms involving pacified self-control in European court culture, which then radiated out from such central institutions to a tamer modern populace. He briefly mentioned the Chinese scholar-officials as another such docile product of calculated conformity to power.
Such foreshadowings among the servile bureaucrats and hubristic empires of the past—including, intellectually, among the Sophists, Legalists, and others—can shed light on cause and effect. A long view of history shows that moral foundations, virtue, and liberty all tend to die amid narrow ambitions. While the mentality that Lourié outlines has cropped up throughout history, usually such cases have been enclaves and moments rather than sustained social formations. The mentality in question has only vexed society at large when flows of talent and influence converge sufficiently. Today, because of scale and because of the disarray of counterweights to match it, the new class uniquely intertwines a threat to civilization and a threat to liberty. What used to be a quirk of one layer or sector or organ of power, here and there over the centuries, has now become the orienting axis of late modernity.
In this distinct modern social context, the “Project” of technodystopia may not just have become possible. It may also have become necessary, at least from some vantage points. If the orienting axis of society today revolves around the new class, it must still engage the majority of people who are not part of it. Throughout history, engaging has meant, variously, legitimacy, compliance, and conversion. The old civilizations claimed to offer insights into virtue and salvation that could speak to everyone, and orient them beyond an imperfect world. Crucially, however, truths beyond politics meant that even when the old élites told stories downward, so to speak, those stories were in principle not wholly of their own devising, and they too were expected to render account to something beyond society and their own interests.
Old elites … were expected to render account to something beyond society and their own interests.
When the new class thrust its own way upward into power in the twentieth century, the storytelling moved wholly into the material world. The rising new class tried, often with some success, to frame a wider alliance by invoking working class ambition and fairness against declining aristocracies. Sometimes such alliances took the form of social democracy, and sometimes they involved violent revolution, depending on the country. But as the various manifestations of social churning and rising mass prosperity and cultural upheaval subside, the promise of those wider alliances loses its purchase. Today, upward mobility is petering out. The ladders become harder to scale.
Since its arrival in power, the new class has come to look more complacent than hungry. Confident in its own enlightenment and expertise, it finds it all the more tempting to deploy technologies of control on the dumb masses, for their own good, and for the sake of efficiency and social peace. Perhaps a gradient of common aspiration to tie the interests of society at large to the new class is evolving into a gradient of regulation. The basic unit remains atomistic: raw utility and the impulses of the individual subject, usually involving health, safety, and a psyche well-adjusted to the narrow assumptions of a meaningless universe. While in the mid-twentieth century the techniques looked like taking exams, keeping up with the Joneses in suburbia, and saluting the flag, today they are more likely to involve panoptic social media, health apps on phones, and the orthodoxies of (in)tolerance. Lourié apparently foresees, a generation or two out, an alienated and microchipped mass of subjects. While we might debate the pace and the likelihood and the details of such scenarios, it is not wild-eyed paranoia to imagine them. A wave of domestication akin to that seen with early state formation is rolling toward us in this century.
TECHNO-COSMOPOLITANISM
While the who, why, and how of these trends are quite universal nowadays, does the where still matter? Lourié is ambivalent about the relationship among the West, Russia, and China, and how much each really embodies a different vision of the world. Indeed, this question about what, if anything, is really at stake in the rising tensions between the West and China, most visibly, has not yet been asked in quite the right way.
It is quite possible to read this clash as an existential clash of “worlds,” to borrow from Eric Voegelin’s 1961 lecture on world-empires at the height of the Cold War: “two different conceptions of existence, each trying to incarnate itself in visible dominion over territory and people.” While both the West and China are ruled by the new class, the régime in Beijing has fewer qualms about bloody-edged tactics. Its aspirations to hegemony also have a racial undertone that has faded somewhat in the West since the unravelling of empires and the rise of multiculturalism.
But from a broader perspective on the “Project,” the West has enough fellow travelers to suggest that Beijing’s vision of the world and its emerging technologies resonate more widely. The recent book Just Hierarchy, by Daniel Bell and Pei Wang, casts the Chinese Communist Party as a far-sighted potential steward of benevolent artificial intelligence, in contrast to the malevolent innovations that the profit-driven Googles are likely to generate. Invoking a hierarchical order based on measured merit, which deploys the power of a centralized state to advance the common good, is an old theme. Although the Western new class flinches at concentration camps and red flags, it is also comfortable with deploying surveillance and nudges to deal with everything from climate change to terrorism to public health. We might even suspect that a gentler and more cosmopolitan version of the régime in Beijing could quickly close its legitimacy gap in the eyes of the global new class. Perhaps it would need only to do more of the things the latter wants and wrap itself in the right rhetoric, and come to look more like those who govern in Singapore and Brussels.
In any case, the crucial point of contact between the temptations of technodystopia so evident in China and the broader moment of new class dominance around the world is a monistic logic. That logic manifests itself on multiple levels that mirror one another. It takes a narrowly utilitarian view of the self. It circles back all too often to the primacy of equal(ly atomized) citizenship, under an overbearing political sovereignty that is the preferred tool for tidying up antiquated and messy patterns in society. And it increasingly will rely on big data algorithms that reduce experience to one or another yardstick of reward and punishment. These tendencies all shrink an older and richer human experience, with its multiple dimensions of virtue and aspiration and engagement, to a focal point. It thus becomes hard for the political and social systems in motion around that understanding of the world to leave anyone alone, so to speak. Microchipping and social credit scores will cultivate the same psychology of fear that prodded servile court officials and eunuchs in despotic systems of centuries past.
DEFEATING ‘THE PROJECT’
I agree with Lourié that it is misleading to frame the stakes as a choice between Western liberty and Chinese tyranny, as some pundits today do. Each modern part of the world has its own hubristic blind spots. Carl Schmitt contrasted the Anglosphere’s capitalist sea-power logic with the rooted empires of Eurasian land-power. While there is some grain of truth in both, we have little hope of reclaiming humanity if our only choice is between those who know the price of everything and those who want a rule for everything. Either version is monistic in its own perverse way. And, not least, the merchants and the bureaucrats have ample meeting ground in places like Singapore, which will probably be among the first to turn a profit when the state starts microchipping subjects.
The conditions of human liberty and flourishing require the merchant and the bureaucrat far less than they require, for example, the mountain-dweller and the pilgrim. The mountain-dweller wants merely to be left alone, perhaps in a small community. The distance from power allows as much. And the pilgrim moves in circuits that cut across worldly power and interest, with his or her own higher purposes in mind. Merchants and bureaucrats not only have little use for mountain-dwellers and pilgrims. They also cannot understand them. They thus feel compelled to entice or crush them, one way or another. The tools have varied across time and space, from head taxes to make the self-sufficient join a cash economy, to restricting and monitoring movement, to imposing compulsory standardised education, to extracting professions of allegiance to Caesar above any other saviour.
A proper understanding of what social experiences and interests animate this “Project,” and what older human pursuits frustrate it, thus gives us a better point of departure for mapping out an alternative. Alternatives are not only about truth, after all. They are also about the weight that truth needs to make an impression on the world. Technodystopia will not be kept at bay by invocations of Western heritage or Christian salvation, though elements of each can figure in parts of the story we tell. It will require both a longer and broader view of the problem and the remedy.
Today, we typically see resistance couched in terms of restoring a fairly recent ideal of the democratic nation-state. The populist backlash mainly uses the national ballot-box as the symbol of ordinary people’s residual power, and the instrument for lashing out against rootless élites. But this short and narrow horizon also hampers more thoughtful critiques of the “Project” in its various manifestations. Whether it is a Lindian political bargain or a Deneenian reassertion of localism, such alternatives are mostly nested within the memory of the postwar (or, outside the West, post-independence) settlement and national civic life, before globalization supposedly ruined everything.
I suspect that, the legitimacy of many of the moral and social aims notwithstanding, such framing and strategy will be a dead end. The “Project” commands the widest horizons and will swat down resistance that confines itself within the political honeycomb of statehood. But the problem is not merely one of method. It is also one of vision. Quite apart from its territorial limits, the modern state is a qualitative problem, too. Its overbearing version of sovereignty has been perhaps the single greatest institutional force destroying the pluralism and depth of traditional life, even before the new class took over the levers of power to push further agendas.
A revival of pluralism will have to be civilisational in the broad sense, transcending the ramparts of the nation-state. The “guilds, wards, and congregations” of the Deneenian alternative are also part of global civil society. They will be stronger if modern ideas of sovereignty are unbundled by type and opened across a global space. The rich traditions of not only subsidiarity but also of sphere sovereignty have much to offer here, because they are more attuned to how the natural circuits of human life and commitment can settle on a variety of different scales and institutional spaces. Some will be smaller, some larger, than the nation-state. But they will be mostly different in kind, regardless. Such deeper pluralism is easy to overlook if we speak only the language of civic restoration.
To roll back new class dominance will require a much more radical and multi-pronged approach than merely restoring the imagined civic life of the mid-twentieth, or even nineteenth, century. It will mean fragmenting power in fundamentally non-modern ways. This will have a constitutional dimension, in that the flattening and disempowering of society has taken for granted the primacy of state and citizenship over other engagements. It will also have a societal dimension, probably requiring disruption of higher education and of the channels of socialisation and conformity that have reinforced new class dominance. But in both respects, it will not be able meaningfully to confine itself to national spaces or to conversations rooted in a relatively recent slice of modern history. For taking the battle to the widest horizons, it will have to draw on the experience of multiple civilisations and all their layers.
As the “Project” bears down, it is quite right to look for a rival story to tell in this century. But such a story will be most compelling if it can reach more deeply into the past, for origins and forerunners, and speak to humanity farther afield. Only then will it be feasible to reconstitute the world.