Cyborgs, the Machine, Gnosticism, humanity (edited and expanded July 18th)

A couple pieces (by authors who are in dialog with each other) that have an interesting perspective on contemporary life and what is upstream of familiar issues.

Paul Kingsnorth 

How the Left Fell for Capitalism

Paul talks about how both progressive leftism and capitalism are part of what he calls "The Machine":

“We are living through a time of radical flattening, as this emerging global system, which I like to call the Machine, rapidly replaces previous ways of being with a new and novel global civilisation. Emerging from the industrial revolution and the dislocations of modernity’s revolutions, this Machine is now engaged in a project of deconstructing both human nature and wild nature, replacing them with a borderless world of etiolated, rational individuals, each of them equal participants in a global marketplace governed by algorithms, profit and dreams of universal oneness.

“ Progressive leftism and global capitalism, far from being antagonistic as some of us once thought, have turned out to be a usefully snug fit. Both are totalising, utopian projects. Both are suspicious of the past, impatient with borders and boundaries, and hostile to religion, “superstition” and the limits on the human individual imposed by nature or culture. Both are in pursuit of a global utopia where, in the dreams of both Lenin and Lennon, the world will live as one.”

Paul's blog is linked in the Archipelago.

Mary Harrington (in conversation with Alex Kaschuta)

Cyborgs in the Longhouse

Here is an excerpt from the conversation where Mary explains the reactionary feminist view of abortion. I have edited Mary's comments for readability. This section starts at 17.01 minutes.

"My thesis is that the point where we entered the contraceptive and the digital revolution is the point where we left the industrial era. We've been out of the industrial era for 50 odd years. The sexual revolution and the concurrent digital revolution was what precipitated our entry into the cyborg era because those were those were the twin things that enabled women to disaggregate ourselves from our reproductive potential and all of us to to unmoor ourselves from the physical.....

"Abortion is really the keystone of our entry into the cyborg era. The important thing is you have to see birth control and abortion as two sides of the same coin or as two parts of the same story. Once once you introduce reliable birth control you've introduced a technological fix to the problem of reproductive asymmetry.  The very straightforward and very difficult to avoid fact is that the costs of casual sex are orders of magnitude higher for women than they are for men. For millennia, for the entirety of human history up to the 1960s that was just a fact, and all of social mores reflected that.  What now gets painted as patriarchy, as the oppression of women and the desire to control their bodies was mostly a pragmatic recognition of the fact that the costs for women are considerably higher for men of casual sex and that fatherless children are a burden on society.  Everybody has to deal with that: it's not a problem you can individualize.

However once you introduce the technological fix into the picture, the whole dynamic changes. Suddenly, theoretically at least, it's possible to imagine that women can play the field to the same extent as men and that female sexuality can flourish and gambol free through the green fields like the sexuality of men. [We assume that this situation is going to be] brilliant [for everyone];  however no contraceptive method is foolproof. There are always going to be "oops babies". Even a 99.9 effective method fails 0.1 of times out of 100, so invariably you're going to get accidental pregnancies. I believe the data for America showed that in fact the total number of accidental pregnancies went up after the introduction of birth control, not down, because a lot more people were having sex with people they weren't married to, or with people that they didn't want to spend the next 18 years raising a child with. 

In any case the total number of accidental pregnancies actually went up, and in turn that created a growing feminist pressure towards legalizing abortion. If you're going to have mass casual sex, if you're going to normalize women having sex with people they don't plan to raise a child with for the next 18 years, you have to have a backstop. It becomes very difficult in that context to argue for the justice of normalizing the shagging and banning the backstop. That's just real and it's grossly unfair [to women]. This is roughly the liberal feminist position now. There are plenty on the [political] right who [argue for] personal responsibility and I think that it's not unreasonable to say to those people:  "You really just sound like you hate women."  Obviously I don't have insight into other people's minds but it certainly doesn't feel very just or fair. So that's the the liberal feminist argument for abortion.

But of course once you have abortion, then it becomes the cornerstone for a whole series of arguments which are followed subsequently about what a person actually is: which is to say that for both men and women, the reproductive potential is switched off by default.  All of us [become] a sort of sexless interchangeable human being with body parts that we can plug in or unplug or remove or remodel as we see fit. All of us have now entered this desexed, increasingly mind-body dualist but really sort of gnostic fantasy of what a human person is.  Furthermore, the absolute foundational cornerstone of that is the idea that no unchosen obligations are legitimate.  That's true to the extent that we're willing to kill a potential life that's growing inside a woman if that unborn baby is an unchosen obligation. Unchosen obligations are so bad that defending the right only to

choose our obligations goes as far as being able to just to snuff out another potential life. It's the cornerstone of a radical individualism, what I call bio-libertarianism: the idea that our embodiment should be wholly subject to our individual choosing. That is the reactionary feminist position on abortion.

Mary’s blog is linked in the Archipelago.

Carlo Lancelotti (in conversation with Alex Kaschuta)

Del Noce and the problem of atheism

In this excerpt Alex and Carlo talk about desire, choice, equality and how technology affects all three. This was my first introduction to Prof Lancelotti and I found him a lovely, intelligent and perceptive man. I recommend this conversation strongly. While I am focusing on the interviewees in this blog, I want to give Alex herself credit as a gifted writer and interviewer. She asks very provocative questions. This is a longer transcription because honestly their whole interview was so interesting that I find it hard to just pull a couple of quotes. As before, I have edited for readability. This segment starts at 30.04.

Alex: Equality is a very fuzzy term. It is the [foundation] of what one can expect from the liberal regime; the problem is that in reality and nature no human beings are equal in in any dimensions.  Whatever graph you want to take there's going to be inequality by just by the sheer randomness of genetics and environment. I think the space where you can have equality is as the "homunculus behind the eyes" where you're reduced to pure autonomy and you just decide. You're running on instinct. I feel like that's that's probably the space where you have the most freedom: the perspective where we're all the same behind the meat suit and [in our minds] we are trying to fulfill the promise of equality that's not possible in the real world, on earth. In this gnostic realm we're given more permissions, more degrees of freedom if we're just a rational chooser behind the eyes without being encumbered by all these unchosen bonds in the real world. It's also the promise of radical independence to some extent. 

Carlo: Cutting all bonds, all ties: that's another way of incorrectly expressing freedom. [It assumes] freedom is  the cutting of bonds, the cutting of ties, while a simple examination of our experience shows that we are [more] free the more bonds we have.  Family bonds, social bonds, religious and church bonds: Human beings are the creation of their relationships.  We are our relationships; we are our memories.  Gnosis is more nihilism if you try to cut the human being from its relationships.  There is nothing left and that's manifested in the first epidemics of mental illness. It cannot be by coincidence that there's all this mental fragility.  The idea of the independent, atomic individual is completely abstract and completely ideological. It doesn't work and we are seeing the effect of that.

One of the ways of describing modernity is in terms of this idea of happiness.  [Del Noce] opposes it to the traditional of beatitude. The idea of beatitude was that human beings flourish if they in some sense conform to the order of being, of creation.  There is a certain order, a cosmic order and the problem of life is to fit. What I mean is you harmonize yourself with with this [order]. But the modern idea  [focuses on] worldly happiness.  The individual can multiply his or her experiences and achieve a kind of subjective emotional happiness which is unrelated to any outside transcendent order.

The Augustinian idea that our heart is restless and will never be satisfied until it rests in God gets transposed into this never-ending quest for more experiences, the never-ending quest for more goods, for more consumption. There is this perverse mechanism by which [Del Noce] says the human being finds himself in the world without being asked for permission and then he wants to get  infinite possession of the world.  Of course he disagrees; he thinks that this is not going to work. That's where he sees the infinite desire at play in our society, in this horizontal secular transposition into a quest for greater and greater consumption for greater and greater experience and [quest for] vitality. You have to be more and more vital and of course sex is a is the sphere in which this desire for

perpetual novelty expresses itself, for example.

Alex: [We also] borrow desire from the people around us; we reflect each other's desires. What you have at the moment is the technological layer on top of all our desires. A hundred years ago the maximum desire ratchet that you could engage in was the one in the small circle of people that you would see directly. Now you're part of this global memetic apparatus where you compare yourself with with all the people in the world and all the people you have access to: the rich, the famous, the beautiful.  [Previously] people couldn't even imagine or dream of of striving to match those. I think the problem that we have at the moment is that it's it's easy to get off the hedonic treadmill when desire is capped, when you reach the end of the desire trap and then you see the abyss open up in front of you and there's nothing really on the other side. But now because the promises and the levels and the directions that you could go and the degrees of freedom that you have with your desires are so infinite, the horizon is constantly receding.  You can always be on the hedonic treadmill because there always is a promise of something better something more: a younger model of you, a better vacation, a slimmer physique. Whatever is interesting to that particular individual is now also facilitated through very sophisticated marketing algorithms where they really know what you want. It is hard to get over that mountain if you don't realize at one point that "I've been doing this for xx amount of years and and now it's time to get off [the treadmill]."  It feels like a more complicated mousetrap.

Carlo: There is a mass manufacturing of desire. We are a very advanced society which manufactures desires because that's how you sell stuff.  If you want to sell more stuff you have to create the desire for that stuff and so our society does excel at manufacturing desires.  But we know that ultimately the deeper human desires are still there.  There is still a deep desire for unity with other people; there is a deep desire for meaning; there is a deep desire for beauty in many forms.  To the extent that these desires have to be set aside to make space for all these pneumatic desires as you call them that again generates alienation. It generates a new kind of alienation because people deep down know that there is something missing. I'm pretty confident that they do. Going back to all the epidemics of depression and mental illness, I think that is in part due to this denial of the deeper desires.

Alex: I think the hard part about the deeper desires is that they're they're contextual. For example if you have a multi-generational family home where you take care of you know the elderly and they take care of your children that's kind of a different type of context than, for example, the revealed preference of each having our own home where we don't have to live with our grandparents.  Some people do move in back in with their parents for either spiritual reasons or monetary reasons but [overall it seems] people want to drift apart from each other. Then the problem is you cannot reach beatitude in those conditions because you're not made to live alone eating frozen tv meals every night in a cubicle somewhere. But it seems to be the revealed preference,  and then people get stuck in that and i think it's it's it's hard to go back.  The problem is there's a lot of sacrifice in living with people who are not your generation. This is just one example. Living with with elderly parents, taking care of them: we've slowly divested such things from our culture and those were things that people would find worthy sacrifices.

"[You used to have to go] to the bakery to buy bread; [that was replaced] by the supermarket. Now the bread comes to you.  All of the places where you had that social friction, where you had to be sociable, where you had to cultivate the skills to actually interact with people, not make them upset at you: [those are more rare than they used to be]. You didn't want to have conflicts with your butcher because that's where the meat comes from. Those skills are out the window and I feel like a lot of people are at a bit of a desperate point where they they don't have the resources to bootstrap themselves back into a situation where they where they get to have all of that interaction.  I think it's hard for a lot of people to see exactly what is wrong.... [There is also] the game theoretic problem because if you want to be very friendly with your neighbor but he thinks that you're just very creepy and he doesn't want to have anything to want to do with you, then it's going to be hard to be a sociable and nice creature. I think there's there's quite a few levels to this and it's very hard to see how you walk this back together.

Carlo

It is becoming more clear. We are at the end of an era. Maybe it is more obvious in places like the USA where the current era started earlier. There are some places in Europe which are still being Americanized. ...There is a totalitarianism of disintegration which is an interesting formula. Everybody has to become the atomic individual or you cannot live here. But now as I was saying we can talk about it in a way that we could not have talked about it 20 years ago.  20 years ago we were [in the shadow of] the cold war. [The conflict was] was freedom and democracy versus communism.  Then communism an the clash of civilizations was over.  You know, the end of history. Now people, at least some people, are much more aware of what happened what happened in the last 50 years. When you can start seeing things in retrospect that often means that the end [of an era] could be approaching. The question is: How will the end take place? Of course we don't know that.

Alex's channel and website are linked in the Archipelago.