Marc Andreesen is no Jack Kennedy, nor is there one waiting in the wings

As you may know, a couple of days ago venture capitalist Marc Andreesen – who, incidentally, is co-inventor of the MOSAI web browser – issued The Techno-Optimist Manifesto. I zapped over to take a look, but couldn’t bear to do more than skim my way through it. I’d seen it all before and judged it to be an artless collection of tech-progress tropes spun-forth on autopilot.

Now, you may think I’m being ungenerous. He, after all, is Marc Andreesen, tech innovator, VC extraordinaire, and all-around Rich Guy. But compare his manifesto to this speech delivered by another Rich Guy at Rice University in 1962:

There’s no comparison. Well, there is, there always is. And Andreesen comes up short, way short, all 6 feet 5 inches of him.

Marc Andreesen is no Jack Kennedy. He’s no Theodore Sorenson, either; for Sorenson’s the one that wrote the words that Kennedy delivered so eloquently. I have no idea what Andreesen’s speaking skills are, but he has neither the socio-political imagination nor the rhetorical skills that Sorenson had.

But I fear that even Sorenson couldn’t draft such a speech today. The cultural materials simply aren’t available. When Kennedy spoke late in 1962 American was riding high. The steel strike that lasted through the summer of 1959 had been successfully resolved, at least for the workers, and the Cuban Missile crisis hadn’t yet broken. And then the Civil Rights Movement intensified and the war in Vietnam became a quagmire that killed the presidency of Lyndon Johnson. OPEC called an oil embargo in the summer of 1973, which precipitated the implosion of the rust belt industries. In 1981 President Reagan killed the air controllers strike, which dealt a near fatal blow to the union movement. That, in turn, made a comfortable middle-class life a hard, sometimes impossible, reach for many blue-collar workers. The American Century was over.

Sure, the Soviet Union crumbled at the end of the 1980s. The internet went wide in the mid-1990s (enter Andreesen and the Mosaic browser), and now we’ve got AI all over the damn place. Fascinating technology, important technology; it could be, should be, transformative. Important issues are being discussed, alas, along with vanity issues like AGI and AI Doom. It’s embarrassing to watch. Along with this, climate change still looms. Wars in Ukraine, the Middle East – who knows, one day Taiwan – who knows where they might lead.

Now, as inspiring as Kennedy’s words are, we know perfectly well that he also had the Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union as the back drop for his speech (should you forget, just ask Neil DeGrasse Tyson). Those soaring words – “We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people” – were given wings by checks that were paying for technology that would keep us ahead of the Russkies. That Cold War rivalry made for an imaginatively and rhetorically simple world. Us vs. Them, and as long as we can keep that rivalry in the background, the positive rhetoric can soar.

Where’s the Us vs. Them story for today? Well there is one, and Donald Trump’s the one who is telling it. It’s not an inspiring story. It’s brought the Federal government to a stand-still.

Ross Douthat has written and talked about decadence. Whatever qualifications I may have, it’s a serious issue. Andreesen hasn’t confronted it, though I suppose he regards his manifesto as something of an antidote. He’s wrong.

I wish I could offer an alternative, a new mythology for the 21st century. I’ve got some thoughts – Welcome to the Fourth Arena – The World is Gifted, my Kisangani 2150 project (now on hiatus) – but that’s all they are, thoughts. That’s more than Andreessen has. I hate to think that he’s representative of Silicon Valley. Someone, please, show me that I’m wrong.

More later.

Ross Douthat defends real experience [Andreessen’s been out in the sun too long]

Ross Douthat has an important column, Decadence and Andreessen's Dilemma (Reactions, June 10, 2021). The piece begins:

Early in the pandemic era, the Netscape founder Marc Andreessen published a manifesto that was so on-point for the themes of The Decadent Society that I cited it in the paperback. His argument was that many of the institutional debacles in the West’s response to the coronavirus reflected a longstanding failure to build, a comfort with stagnation and sclerosis visible everywhere from our physical environment to our regulatory apparatus to our transportation infrastructure and education system.

But what kind of building, Douthat wants to know? Building physical things in the real world, but also people and institutions, or cruising the internet to build in virtual reality?

This question divides anti-stagnationists: Figures like my AEI colleague James Pethokoukis or the bullish-on-America Bruno Maçaes tend to regard Silicon Valley and its virtual realities as integral parts of a more dynamic future, while people in the orbit of Peter Thiel are more likely to regard Big Internet in its current incarnation as an obstacle to real-world forms of industry and growth, and in need of some kind of political and social management to become a spur to dynamism instead. Personally I’m mostly on the Thielword side of the debate: Without going all the way to the Butlerian Jihad, I think human civilization needs to exert a kind of mastery over the internet and the virtual, a disciplining and putting-in-its-place, if we want to both preserve certain basic human goods and make non-virtual leaps forward more likely — because left to its own devices the internal techno-logic of the virtual realm will pull us deeper into decadence.

As important as the internet is to me – I suspect that it’s more important to me than it is to Douthat – I’m with him on this. He goes on to quote a recent interview in which Andreessen defends the coming primacy of virtual world:

A small percent of people live in a real-world environment that is rich, even overflowing, with glorious substance, beautiful settings, plentiful stimulation, and many fascinating people to talk to, and to work with, and to date. These are also *all* of the people who get to ask probing questions like yours. Everyone else, the vast majority of humanity, lacks Reality Privilege – their online world is, or will be, immeasurably richer and more fulfilling than most of the physical and social environment around them in the quote-unquote real world.

After giving Andreessen’s point due consideration, acknowledging for example that “I can find people who share my obscure interests in an instant” – Douthat argues:

But there’s a problem: There are a lot of experiences — call them “core experiences” — that people still prefer to have in the world of flesh and blood, ranging from the banal (real drinks >> Zoom drinks) to the transcendent (visiting Chartres Cathedral >> doing a virtual tour of Chartres Cathedral), from the excitement of travel or the thrill of concert-going to the physical-cum-emotional intensity of falling in love and having sex (not necessarily in that order). And there are core experiences that just don’t translate into virtuality at all: You can some kind of sexual intercourse on the internet, depending on how elastically defined, but you can’t bear and raise a child.

Now say what you will about 20th century America, but it did a pretty good job of democratizing these kinds of core experiences. Whereas while the age of the internet has clearly expanded the range of available experiences, for core experiences democratization sometimes seems like it’s in danger of going into reverse, with experiences in reality, from the museum to the ballpark to the classroom, becoming the high-cost “premium” experience, while a mediocre virtual equivalent is offered the masses and the proles.

Yes.

Why the internet is important to me

While I have a variety of interests and talents – I’m a good musician, and a good photographer, and have spent countless hours on both – I am primarily an intellectual, a thinker, explorer, and a writer. I got my Ph.D. in 1978 for a dissertation entitled, “Cognitive Science and Literary Theory,” years before anyone else in literary studies way paying attention to the cognitive sciences. I got a faculty position and The Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY, and was turned down for tenure in, I believe, 1985. I spent two or three years trying to get another academic post and failed. Since then I’ve continued doing my intellectual work while doing a bit of this and that to make a living.

The internet afforded me the opportunity to build an intellectual life that would have been impossible without it. Not only has it given me access to books and articles, but it has given me access to people and avenues for publication that don’t require me to jump through the hoops of academic convention, though I do publish in the formal academic literature every now and then.

Back in 2006 I started blogging at an academic group-blog called The Valve. I posted articles and commented on articles by others. The Valve went bust in 2012 or so, by which time I’d created New Savanna. But I remain in touch with some of my colleagues from those days even though we’ve never met in person. I’ve set up pages at three sites for the distribution of academic papers, Academia.edu, SSRN, and ResearchGate. And then there’s Twitter. And more, much more.

But I’ve made my point. Without the internet I would be an isolated intellectual. The internet has given me the means of actively functioning in an international intellectual community.

But none of these experiences compare with a core experience I had in graduate school. While I was enrolled in the English Department at SUNY Buffalo, I got my deepest education in the Linguistics Department under the tutelage of David Hays. I was a member of his research group for four years.

We met weekly at his house, Twin Willows, on the shore of Lake Erie. At the beginning of the meeting each participant, student, faculty or, for that matter, visitor, was allowed to put one item on the discussion agenda. We then moved through the agenda in order around the table. If we didn’t finish the agenda, the remain items went to the head of the agenda for the next meeting.

Depending on when we held the meeting in the morning or afternoon, we’d prepare and eat a meal together. Hays would search the kitchen for comestibles, point out what was available, and we’d set to work fixing a meal. When it was over, we’d wash the dishes. The shared meal was essential to the group’s functioning.

We accomplished real intellectual work in those meetings, unlike what happened in the graduate seminars I took, which, despite the small class ‘discussion’ format, were primarily opportunities for faculty to expatiate on whatever. I can’t imagine that happening in a Zoom meeting, or some similar online format.

And I certainly cannot imagine the kind of discussions Hays and I subsequently had, after I’d graduated, taking place online. We continued to work together. He’d left Buffalo to live in New York City, so it was easy to travel there from Troy, New York (where I remained after I’d failed to get tenure). We’d talk and talk, often in his apartment. But we’d also go to Fort Tryon Park nearby and chat while walking the park. As you know, peripatetic discussion is an ancient and venerable intellectual tradition. It works.

Our most profound interaction, however, took place when we were all talked out but had not been able to resolve matters. Hays would take a seat in one place, me in another, and we’d each lean back and think. And think. One of us would hazard a remark or a question, we’d have a little discussion, and that it was back to our reveries. When things went well, which happened often enough, but not always, one of us would have an idea that the other could take up. We’d toss the ball back and forth, reach some conclusions, and Hays would sit down at the computer and write up some notes. Then we’d break out the scotch – four fingers worth in a tumbler – and drink while preparing the evening’s meal.

I can’t imagine doing such a thing in a virtual meeting, I don’t care how high the visual resolution, how good the sound, or how fast the internet connection, you just can’t get the highly personal and idiosyncratic interaction that is necessary.

And then there’s music

It seems that I have been a musician all my life. Many of my deepest and most profound experiences, both joyful and, to be honest, a bit terrifying, have happened either while making music or listening to live performances. I will only mention two occasions and then let my band mate Rick Rourke speak.

In the early 1970s I played in a rock bank called St. Matthew Passion. It was out last gig. During the introduction to “She’s Not There” I went blank. The music got more and more intense until Wham! I felt myself dissolve into white light and pure music. It felt good. I thought about that experience for days, weeks, months, and years afterward. I might even say that I’ve never fully ‘recovered’ from that experience. What could ‘recovery’ possibly mean? It changed me.

In 1987 David Hays and I went to hear Miles Davis perform at Avery Fisher Hall in New York’s Lincoln Center. The band was hot, the performance was stunning, and Miles and his band left the audience in grateful shock. “Time After Time” was the strongest song in a set of strong performances. The tempo was slow, very slow, and the dynamics were low, mostly, for there were times when the sound swelled to fill the hall. But the music was so powerful it filled the hall no matter how loud or soft the sound. Even at its softest, which was very soft, Miles’ sound was so intense that you’d think it could suck sound right out of the air. When Miles and the band had finished performing “Time After Time” the audience was completely and actively silent. It took us a few moments to return sufficiently to ourselves so that we could offer up the customary applause.

During the mid-1980s I was a member of The Out of Control Rhythm and Blues Band. We gigged in upstate New York, mostly in Troy, Albany, Schenectady, and Saratoga Springs. We played small clubs and not so small clubs, private parties, weddings, and major concerts (e.g. opening for B.B. King). Here’s a video that Steve Rosenbaum, then of Our Town Television, now Managing Director of NYC Media Lab.

That’s me on trumpet (c. 0:29). We’re playing at The Metro, in Saratoga Springs, one of our regular gigs. A bit later Rick Rourke, who’d been on the road a number of years as a full-time musician, sums it up (c3:19): “It’s the closest you can get to really being feeling totally happy with yourself.”

The closest you can get to really being feeling totally happy with yourself. That’s core experience.

If Andreessen doesn’t understand this, then he has no business talking and writing about the future of internet technology. He may be brilliant, he may be rich, but I fear that he is not wise. He doesn’t understand the limitations of his experience.

I hear he’s a tall man. Perhaps his brain has spent too much time too close to the sun and, like Icarus, he’s falling. Or perhaps he has spent too much time surrounded by people who defer to him because of his wealth and power. Whatever the problem, we cannot allow ourselves follow him and his fellow digerati down that rabbit hole to perdition.

Some videos that that need to be seen together: From Progress Studies to Progress, OR: Breaking out of the mid-20th century optimism bubble

War Boys contemplating the future.

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I'm gathering these things together in one place because I think they belong together. I'm working on it. I'm thinking.

Last year Patrick Collison and and Tyler Cowen sat down with Mark Zuckerberg to talk about accelerating human progress. Here's a link to the video (where you'll also find a link to a transcript of the conversation). Here's my post about the conversation, which confines itself to an exchange between Tyler and Cowen about the narrowness of the academy.

Collison and Cowen articulate the goal of Progress Studies (from their 2019 article in The Atlantic):

The success of Progress Studies will come from its ability to identify effective progress-increasing interventions and the extent to which they are adopted by universities, funding agencies, philanthropists, entrepreneurs, policy makers, and other institutions. In that sense, Progress Studies is closer to medicine than biology: The goal is to treat, not merely to understand.

What is required to plan and execute a course of treatment?

* * * * *

I've been thinking about human progress for decades (the work on cultural evolution I began with David Hays years ago). I'm all for it. But this current push feels to me like it's encapsulated in a bubble of mid-20th century optimism typified in this 1966 video in which Walt Disney presents his vision to an Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT) (starting at about 6:30):

From Uncle Walt's pitch:

Everything in E.P.C.O.T will be dedicated to the happiness of the people who live, work, and play here, and those who come here from around the world to visit our living showcase.

We don't presume to know all the answers. In fact, we’re counting on the cooperation of American industry to provide their very best thinking during the planning and the creation of our Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. And most important of all, when E.P.C.O.T has become a reality and we find the need for technologies that don’t even exist today, it’s our hope that E.P.C.O.T will stimulate American industry to develop new solutions that will meet the needs of people expressed right here in this experimental community.

Yes, Disney had his limitations, but count me among those who think he was a great man. The world he lived in is gone and his optimism is not adequate to the world we're living in now. That disparity is visible in two movies from 2015, Brad Bird's Tomorrowland, encased in Disneyesque optimism and George Miller's Mad Max: Fury Road, which I read as a mad and carnavalesque dash to escape dystopian visions of the future. I've written about the confrontation of those visions in War Boys in Tomorrowland, or: Mad Max Meets Disney. I'm currently thinking, but have not yet written about, that Kim Stanley Robinson may be pointing a way out of that bubble. In some ways it seems to me that his New York 2140 depicts a future in which the War Boys set out to reclaim Tomorrowland.

But, you may object, Robinson writes fiction. Yes, he does. And he knows it. As he remarked in a recent article in The New Yorker, "science fiction is the realism of our time. The sense that we are all now stuck in a science-fiction novel that we’re writing together—that’s another sign of the emerging structure of feeling." Disney's EPCOT was a fiction, and it didn't get built. The future he longed for and envisioned was a fiction. Robinson's fiction has been tempered by what has happened since then, the facturing of the American body politic, the OPEC oil embargo of 1973, the disastrous wars in the Middle East, the financial collapse of 2008, and so on.

* * * * *

Ross Douthat is arguing that the advanced nations are steeped in post 1969 decadence and decline. 1969? The Apollo moon landing. He sees that as a high point. Since then we've just been marking time, going nowhere. He discusses his current book, The Decadent Society, in these two videos:

THAT's what Progress Studies had to contend with: How do we avert the collapse of world civilization?

* * * * *

Progress Studies to the rescue?

From Progress Studies to Progress [A Ministry of the Future]

Back in July 2019 Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen called for a science of progress in an article in The Atlantic. The article generated a fair response, some in favor, some pushing back – Collison has collected some of the responses here – and people have begun conversing and gathering around the idea of progress studies. The purpose of this post is to take a quick look at what has been going on and a somewhat more considered look at what needs to happen if an interest in progress studies is to yield discernible progress.

A movement begins

Let’s begin with a passage from Collison and Cowen, “We Need a New Science of Progress”:

By “progress,” we mean the combination of economic, technological, scientific, cultural, and organizational advancement that has transformed our lives and raised standards of living over the past couple of centuries. For a number of reasons, there is no broad-based intellectual movement focused on understanding the dynamics of progress, or targeting the deeper goal of speeding it up. We believe that it deserves a dedicated field of study. We suggest inaugurating the discipline of “Progress Studies.”

Before digging into what Progress Studies would entail, it’s worth noting that we still need a lot of progress. We haven’t yet cured all diseases; we don’t yet know how to solve climate change; we’re still a very long way from enabling most of the world’s population to live as comfortably as the wealthiest people do today; we don’t yet understand how best to predict or mitigate all kinds of natural disasters; we aren’t yet able to travel as cheaply and quickly as we’d like; we could be far better than we are at educating young people. The list of opportunities for improvement is still extremely long.

Note the magnitude of the phenomena they point out: “the combination of economic, technological, scientific, cultural, and organizational advancement that has transformed our lives and raised standards of living over the past couple of centuries.” And so forth. The words are easy to comprehend, and those two paragraphs are relatively short. But they’re talking about human life on earth, all of it, going forward. They go on:

Those are major challenges. A lot of progress can also come from smaller advances: Thousands of lesser improvements that together build upon one another can together represent an enormous advance for society. For example, if our discoveries and inventions improve standards of living by 1 percent a year, children will by adulthood be 35 percent better off than their parents. If they improve livelihoods at 3 percent a year, those same children will grow up to be about 2.5 times better off.

After some discussion of what Progress Studies would be like, they observe:

An important distinction between our proposed Progress Studies and a lot of existing scholarship is that mere comprehension is not the goal. When anthropologists look at scientists, they’re trying to understand the species. But when viewed through the lens of Progress Studies, the implicit question is how scientists (or funders or evaluators of scientists) should be acting. The success of Progress Studies will come from its ability to identify effective progress-increasing interventions and the extent to which they are adopted by universities, funding agencies, philanthropists, entrepreneurs, policy makers, and other institutions. In that sense, Progress Studies is closer to medicine than biology: The goal is to treat, not merely to understand.

Given the scope of phenomena entailed in Progress Studies, just what would treatment entail?

Moreover, treatment is of course oriented toward the future. Thinking about the future is tricky. It is one thing for a physician to devise a treatment plan for an ailment that is well studied. It is quite something else to steer a society into a future that is unknown and unknowable. How do you devise and execute a treatment plan for that? I don’t know, but I’m sure that studying what has already happened, however necessary and useful it may be, is not sufficient. Something else is required, something more like fiction. Imagine a hundred futures, each in detail, pick the ones we like, and figure out how to keep on one of those courses.

How do you play chess with the Devil?

* * * * *

Jason Crawford is one of the people who was energized by the article. He hadsbeen blogging about The Roots of Progress since March 2017, and has been working on Progress Studies full-time, aided in part by a November grant from Cowen’s Emergent Ventures fund. While he’s continued blogging he’s also been organizing, and has put together Progress Studies for Young Scholars, which is an online summer program in the history of technology aimed at high school students. He also hangs out at a Progress Studies Slack, started by Jasmine Wang, who also maintains a database of people interested in Progress Studies.

Crawford recently gave an overview of the current state of the emerging progress studies movement:

I have no intention of summarizing it here as I’ve got other fish to fry, but I will note five things:

• Progress Studies, as called for by Collison and Cowen, is about the organization, creation, and dissemination of scholarly research on progress. It calls on a wide range of investigation in the social and behavioral sciences, history, and the humanities.
• However, Progress Studies also has a practical focus. Thus we need a dedicated journal, a general interest magazine, think tanks, and institutionalized sources of funding (foundations).
• Progress Studies encompasses social and cultural factors as well as technology.
• Progress Studies is a long-term effort, requiring decades.
• Progress Studies is not politically partisan and has participants with a variety of ideological commitments.

Note that last point, that Progress Studies does not seem to be particularly partisan. That’s important. It is quite possible that the long-term possibilities for success in America depends on it as partisan politics seems dangerously deadlocked.

Rekindling will and desire, a political problem

In April of this year venture capitalist Marc Andreessen delivered himself of a St. Crispin’s Day speech in the form of an essay, “It's Time to Build”. He started with America’s confused and anemic response to the coronavirus pandemic and went on to a general condemnation of rot at the core of Western society:

You don’t just see this smug complacency, this satisfaction with the status quo and the unwillingness to build, in the pandemic, or in healthcare generally. You see it throughout Western life, and specifically throughout American life. … The problem is desire. We need to *want* these things. The problem is inertia. We need to want these things more than we want to prevent these things. … And the problem is will. We need to build these things.

Let’s repeat, throughout Western life, and specifically throughout American life, that’s the range of Andreessen’s complaint. And the problem? We’re afflicted with inertia, we’ve lost the desire to build, achieve, improve, we’ve got no will. That’s an indictment as abstract as it is broad. Just who is this “we”, each of us individual by individual, each and every one of us, is Andreessen thinking about institutions and organizations, about a collectivity? Yes, I know that Andreessen is speaking figuratively and thus that these questions are beside the point. I ask them as a way of dwelling on and digging into what he’s saying.

If the goal of Progress Studies is to treat as well as understand, is this what we’re talking about treating? Socio-cultural will and desire?

Ross Douthat on decadence || the Space Age || I've been wrestling with a longish post, working title: From Progress Studies to Progress

And I think I've finally got an overall narrative/logical shape for the piece. Some Ross Douthat's thoughts on decadence have been helpful. I'm thinking they'll get me over the hump. We'll see.

* * * * *

Douthat opens his current book (The Decadent Society) by referencing the first Apollo moon landing:

The peak of human accomplishment and daring, the greatest single triumph of modern science and government and industry, the most extraordinary endeavor of the American age in modern history, occurred in late July in the year 1969, when a trio of human beings were catapulted up from the earth’s surface, where their fragile, sinful species had spent all its long millennia of conscious history, to stand and walk and leap upon the moon.

“Four assassinations later,” wrote Norman Mailer of the march from JFK’s lunar promise to its Nixon-era fulfillment, “a war in Vietnam later; a burning of Black ghettos later; hippies, drugs and many student uprisings later; one Democratic Convention in Chicago seven years later; one New York school strike later; one sexual revolution later; yes, eight years of a dramatic, near-catastrophic, outright spooky decade later, we were ready to make the moon.” We were ready—as though the leap into space were linked, somehow, to the civil rights revolution, the baby boomers coming into their own, the transformation in music and manners and mores, and the hopes of utopia percolating in Paris, Woodstock, San Francisco.

Mailer’s was a mystical take on history, but one well suited to its moment. For the society that made it happen, the Apollo landing was both a counterpoint to the social chaos of the 1960s and the culmination of the decade’s revolutionary promise. It proved that the efficiency and techno-optimism of Eisenhower-era America could persist through the upheavals of the counterculture, and it represented a kind of mystical, dizzy, Age of Aquarius moment in its own right. As much as anything that happened here on earth, the fire on the moon helped make the summer of ’69 seem like a beginning, not a peak—an opening into a new era, in which the frontier would no longer be closed, the map no longer filled in, and human beings would expand their explorations, their empires, their arguments and imaginations and ambitions into the very stars.

This was the space age, which lasted for about thirty years: from Sputnik in 1957 to the space shuttle Challenger explosion in 1986. And we who live in its aftermath have forgotten just how confidently it was expected to continue.

I note that there was no greater evangelist for the Space Age than Walter Elias Disney, aka Walt, who died in 1966.

He goes on to reprise a version for Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier thesis that America's political, social, and character was formed by pressing against the frontier. That came to a halt at the end of the 19th century. But then, Douthat argues, the Wright brothers first became airborne in 1903 and just under seven decades later we set foot on the moon. And then we stopped. OPEC declared and oil embargo in October of 1973 and America's car culture got a rude shock. And 1973 is when economic growth began to slow down, giving rise to what Tyler Cowen has called The Great Stagnation in his 2011 book of that name.

A bit later Douthat says:

It is not a coincidence that the end of the space age has coincided with a turning inward in the developed world, a crisis of confidence and an ebb of optimism and a loss of faith in institutions, a shift toward therapeutic philosophies and technologies of simulation, an abandonment of both ideological ambition and religious hope.

Of course, this shift might have happened anyway, even if Mars were closer and more habitable or light-speed travel a more realistic possibility. The existence of a frontier does not guarantee that it will be a destination, and past civilizations have given up on exploration for essentially internal reasons, even when new horizons were very much in reach. (The abandonment of major sea voyages by China’s Ming dynasty, in the same era as Columbus, did not come about because the world’s oceans were too wide but because of the empire’s changing intellectual fashions and political priorities.) Already when Neil Armstrong took his first small step, there were many voices making the case for the wastefulness of NASA’s voyages, for the pointlessness of “whitey on the moon,” and some of the turn toward pessimism preceded the realization that we would not be sending astronauts to Jupiter by the year 2001. A great deal of post-1960s thought—postcolonial, environmentalist—is premised on the idea that Western expansion was mostly cancerous, and this critique has been extended even to the idea of galactic colonization, with the exact same sort of ideological language applied. When the nonagenarian space optimist Freeman Dyson wrote hopefully about stellar exploration in a 2016 issue of the New York Review of Books, three letter writers chastised him for not counting the ecological cost and warned that “a human-designed outer space ‘teeming with life and action’ sounds like a nightmare out of Joseph Conrad.”

Still, sometimes this application of anti-imperialist and environmentalist ideas to space travel feels like a kind of excuse making—that like the fox in Aesop’s fable, we enjoy telling ourselves that we wouldn’t want the fruit anyway, or that eating it would be immoral, so as to soothe the pain of knowing that it’s there but out of reach.

Either way, whether the closing of the stellar frontier somehow caused the West’s post-1960s turn toward pessimism or simply interacted with trends already at work, it remains a turning point in the history of the modern world. Before Apollo, it was easy to imagine that “late” was a misnomer for our phase of modernity, that our civilization’s story was really in its early days, that the earthbound empires of Europe and America were just a first act in a continuous drama of expansion and development.

Since Apollo, we have entered into decadence.

And so Douthat goes.

Douthat, Ross Gregory (2020-02-24T22:58:59). The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success. Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster.

* * * * *

Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institution discusses The Decadent Society with Douthat The discussion begins with Douthat's invocation of the Apollo lunar landing.

This discussion between Robert Wright and Ross Douthat is worth thinking about. Tyler Cowen comes up 10 or 15 minutes in and Douthan references Andreeseen's "Build" manifest in the final section, which is about the Covid-19 pandemic.

Has "civilization" entered a phase of decadence?

That's what Ross Douthat argues in his new book, The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success, which Damon Linker reviews in The Week, February 13, 2020. Decadence?

By calling us "decadent," Douthat doesn't mean that we're succumbing to imminent decline and collapse. Following esteemed cultural critic Jacques Barzun, Douthat instead defines decadence as a time when art and life seem exhausted, when institutions creak, the sensations of "repetition and frustration" are endemic, "boredom and fatigue are great historical forces," and "people accept futility and the absurd as normal."

Douthat goes on to refine the definition:

Decadence refers to economic stagnation, institutional decay, and cultural and intellectual exhaustion at a high level of material prosperity and technological development. It describes a situation in which repetition is more the norm than innovation; in which sclerosis afflicts public institutions and private enterprises alike; in which intellectual life seems to go in circles; in which new developments in science, new exploratory projects, underdeliver compared with what people recently expected. And crucially, the stagnation and decay are often a direct consequence of previous development: the decadent society is, by definition, a victim of its own significant success.

Douthat certainly isn't a favorite of mine, and I've got problems with the word "decadent", but that description is consistent with my own view, based on the theory of cultural ranks that David Hays and I developed,  that we're exhausting the cultural resources we've inherited but have not yet managed to invent new modes of thinking, feeling, living, and exploring.

Near the end Linker observes:

Interestingly, one way to describe the populist insurgencies taking place around us is to say that they're a rebellion against the decadence of the post-Cold War world — the sense that history came to an end in 1989, with all significant ideological disputes resolved and politics reduced to the fine-tuning of liberal democratic government. Francis Fukuyama's own high-level punditry on the subject was actually far more ambivalent than it's usually credited with being. Although Fukuyama argued that liberal democracy triumphed over communism because it was more capable of fulfilling humanity's material and spiritual needs than any other political and economic system, he also worried with uncanny prescience that a world in which liberal democracy was the only available option could be marked by boredom, repetition, and sterility — and that the intolerable character of such decadence could inspire anti-liberal movements that aimed to restart history once again.

Douthat's book can be read as a melancholy sequel to Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man that confirms the author's darkest predictions but without endorsing (or seriously wrestling with) any of the concrete efforts going on around us to overcome our own malaise by breaking away from decadent liberalism — whether it's Donald Trump's MAGA presidency, the Catholic conservatism of Poland's Law and Justice Party, Marion Maréchal's National Rally in France, the National Conservatism spearheaded by Yoram Hazony, or Viktor Orban's anti-liberal and pro-natalist populism in Hungary. Given that Douthat is a conservative who longs for renewal, rebirth, and revitalization — for an end to the decadence he thinks plagues us — it's surprising that he has so little to say about these efforts in the book. [...]

Douthat sees a lot, and far more than most of our less profoundly discontented commentators. That makes him an excellent pundit — maybe the best of our moment. But in his new book he also avoids a forthright confrontation with the political correlates of his own moral, aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual dissatisfactions. In its place we find idle speculations about alternative realities. Which may mean that, for all its strengths, Douthat's book about decadence is more than a little decadent itself.

That is to say that Douthat is himself trapped in the same exhausted cultural forms. 

Who among us isn't?

* * * * *

See Douthat's recent NYTimes oped (Feb, 7, 2020):  The Age of Decadence. Here's now it opens:

Everyone knows that we live in a time of constant acceleration, of vertiginous change, of transformation or looming disaster everywhere you look. Partisans are girding for civil war, robots are coming for our jobs, and the news feels like a multicar pileup every time you fire up Twitter. Our pessimists see crises everywhere; our optimists insist that we’re just anxious because the world is changing faster than our primitive ape-brains can process.

But what if the feeling of acceleration is an illusion, conjured by our expectations of perpetual progress and exaggerated by the distorting filter of the internet? What if we — or at least we in the developed world, in America and Europe and the Pacific Rim — really inhabit an era in which repetition is more the norm than invention; in which stalemate rather than revolution stamps our politics; in which sclerosis afflicts public institutions and private life alike; in which new developments in science, new exploratory projects, consistently underdeliver? What if the meltdown at the Iowa caucuses, an antique system undone by pseudo-innovation and incompetence, was much more emblematic of our age than any great catastrophe or breakthrough?

The truth of the first decades of the 21st century, a truth that helped give us the Trump presidency but will still be an important truth when he is gone, is that we probably aren’t entering a 1930-style crisis for Western liberalism or hurtling forward toward transhumanism or extinction. Instead, we are aging, comfortable and stuck, cut off from the past and no longer optimistic about the future, spurning both memory and ambition while we await some saving innovation or revelation, growing old unhappily together in the light of tiny screens.

The farther you get from that iPhone glow, the clearer it becomes: Our civilization has entered into decadence.