American Intelligence
Why has so much of the American public soured so quickly on technology – at the very moment of its greatest promise? Many look to the scary projections bandied about concerning the practical consequences of AI: a sweeping loss of jobs, of the economic value of human work, perhaps the psychological value of human suffering or even human existence.
Those advancing facts and arguments supporting a more nuanced or celebratory view of AI, however, are also getting scared. These details are not persuading most AI opponents. AI boosters are tempted to conclude that’s because the common man is either too brainwashed or just plain stupid to change their minds, but that’s not quite right. There’s something much more fundamental at work, a dynamic that both sides ought to pause and process before the sharpening conflict brings destruction to us all.
We begin with an enduring quirk of our history: one of the ideological principles with the deepest psychological support across the American political spectrum is not liberty, equality, or even the pursuit of happiness. It’s that rebellion is the foremost expression of goodness and justice.
Such an odd idea has strange effects. The Civil War, for instance, retains such a stranglehold on the cultural imagination because it presents to the vast majority a paradoxical spectacle of rebels with a bad cause, a one great exception to the one great rule; throughout our political experience, rebellion has been considered virtually sacred in its forceful, high-risk commitment to resist top-down control of the outer and inner life.
In the American civic mythos, the rebel is he or she without whom freedom is in peril, brotherhood is weakened, equality is eroded, independence withers away, and self-appointed authorities of all stripes swiftly rise to tell you exactly how to act, how to think, what to believe, and how you must properly show it.
Not everyone has the time, energy, or charisma to be a rebel, of course, which makes the role even more important to the preservation of the normie’s way of life. While the Left has its conformist snobs and the Right its quiet traditionalists, these are Old World vestiges of more ancient types. Here in the New World, even the most conformist of woke snobs and the most pious of fundamentalist Christians often consider themselves to be hated, bravely conspicuous outsiders fighting a smothering form of dominance.
Given the intensity and depth of this dynamic, no one should be shocked to see that people across the political spectrum are beginning to unite around a broadly anti-tech agenda. Right wingers are rehabilitating Ted Kaczinski. Leftists embracing Eliezer Yudkowsky’s apocalyptic jeremiad are ready to call in airstrikes on American soil. When Daniel Moreno-Gama hurls a molotov cocktail through Sam Altman’s window, inspired by Luigi Mangione, a bipartisan coalition agrees that the message makes some good points. These phenomena are interpreted as proof that the new political polarity is pro-tech versus anti-tech.
The obvious truth to that formulation is, however, limited. And taken in isolation, it deceives. Today, to make sense of events and head off disaster, we must think in terms of a political polarity between those who appeal to rebellion and those who raise a different ultimate standard.
AI has brought us to a moment of reckoning more about us than about itself. Its unprecedented power has begun to cement in the public mind a feeling that technology is no longer the Rebel Alliance, to use the Star Wars language that elevated the American mythos to a New Age spiritual plane, but the evil Empire; that it is not even the earthling Federation, to tap the Star Trek vision of voluntary conformity, but the alien Borg, against which resistance to its forced assimilation it calls futile.
The centrality of the rebel to the modern American identity not only explains why technology aroused such massive support and optimism as it rose to dominance from the ‘80s to the 2000s. It also explains why Right and Left are increasingly united in protest and opposition against AI today – especially its role in the techno-optimist’s most grandiose best-case scenario, a Golden Age promise of impending ascension to the cosmic heights of superhuman consciousness.
For in such a realm there is no place in the entire universe for the rebel – nor, therefore, for America. Transcending even Prometheus and Satan, the ultimate rebel figures conceivable by man, this vision of technology unbound enacts the final rebellion against every limit and all things given. Such logic reduces the rebel – and America itself – to the status of a mere vessel, an inherently flawed sacrifice that must and will be made to bring forth the perfect emperor.
Since the Civil War, the argument that “the Constitution is not a suicide pact” has been used to justify expansions of imperial power and authority; today, Americans confronted with the vision of technological deliverance into a celestial posthuman empire are responding in full rebellious spirit that neither must their country be a suicide pact. They will not drink the Kool-Aid. Here they stand, they can do no other.
There is, however, a subtler technological argument against the continued existence of the American rebel. Much controversy and confusion has swirled around the words of Jesus recorded in Matthew 11:12; the idea has arisen and persisted that the Kingdom of Heaven must be taken “by force”. There is a profoundly seductive appeal to the notion that it is actually godly and sacred for human beings to rebel against the limits that hemmed us in since the Fall. Must we not declare rebellious holy war against the perverse and untenable restrictions of “nature” and our bodily form, using every means at our disposal to break the boundaries of sickness, mortality, gravity, and mere matter itself to attain heaven by violence?
Some trace this line of thinking to Rene Descartes, Francis Bacon, or Gottfried Leibniz. Some see it in the argumentation of Peter Thiel. It is certainly brought to center stage as the enemy of God and Man by Hirohiko Araki, the visionary creator of the decades-long manga and anime epic JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. Its final villain, the false priest Pucci, tears the universe apart to manifest his conviction that the only justification and purpose of humanity is its stopping at nothing to achieve heaven – not one day, not eventually, but now – no matter how many people who get in the way must be killed.
The corpus of Christian wisdom, of course, insists that the way to achieve unity with God in this life is through protracted ascetic spiritual warfare, not by recourse to externally crafted tools but by focusing the energies given to us by God internally, against the sin, error, and folly we have conceived and allowed to grow fatally within our own hearts and souls. This “hard way” of attaining the Kingdom of Heaven, holy tradition reveals, actually turns out to be the easy way, insofar as what appears to be the easy way of tool-driven shortcuts turns out to be the much harder way – eventually proving impossible.
Not that anyone who uses tools a lot or a little is barring themselves from heaven. After all, what is impossible with man is possible with God, especially for the faithful man who doesn’t BS himself about the magnitude of his sins and begs humbly and openly to God for mercy. But considering either case, the path of the ascetic or the path of the publican, the way to heaven, however arduous, is open; it is to the pharisee, the man who works to force his way in on “technicalities” of calculated legal compliance or mechanical operation, that the way to heaven grows distant, and the displeasure of God toward such hypocritically willful ignorance toward one’s inner corruption grows near.
What the God of Love asks of us, Christ teaches, is obedience all the way down to the core of our hearts, where the rebelliousness that wants mere appearances and deeds to engineer our salvation hides and takes root.
It’s a teaching that must sit at least in some tension with the American mythos of the rebel. Franklin and Jefferson themselves desired as the official motto of the United States “rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.” The godliness is in the details – notably, the Declaration of Independence is at its most Christian when it justifies the American Revolution as a sorrowful and regrettable consequence resulting from the cold-hearted British unwillingness to bring an end to the “long train of abuses” patiently suffered by the colonists. But to modern Americans, as Alexis de Tocqueville observed wistfully in Democracy in America, that kind of patient suffering is an unacceptable, unjustifiable waste of our all-too-precious time and opportunity. It makes the suffering American feel like a fool sinking into oblivion, suckered into the losing end of a deal that can’t be broken.
This desperate, resentful shadow self, the dark smudge cast by and forever trailing the American Dream, has perverted the American sense of divinely granted human freedom into a fear and loathing of obedience as such. The dark cult of disobedience at the wounded heart of our rebellious sensibility can’t possibly light the way toward a future where we both flourish spiritually amid advanced technologically. Human experience and American history testify that eventually – often sooner than anyone expects – all rebellions fail, often leaving people worse off than they were to begin with.
Tocqueville warned that Americans’ secret resentfulness and desperation makes them unhappy worshippers of speed, believing that to the “firstest with the mostest” goes the spoils. This is why, despite a deep-seated understanding that the cycle of rebellion is fundamentally spiritually broken, so many who protest against AI nevertheless fear that its incredible swiftness in rising to dominance makes rebellion the only course of action that might be fast enough to counter it.
Both virtue ethicists and virtue signalers criticize the leading AI CEOs for shortcutting past their own moral shortcomings to try scaling expertly moral systems. Yet the virtue-loving critics resist turning their logic back on themselves, for how can they race to rebel against the Borg if they have to focus first on attending to their own sin? Groaning under the burden of the apparent dilemma, Americans feel themselves increasingly forced to choose between focusing on the salvation of their soul or the salvation of their country.
The logic spawns a hellish fate: a second Civil War, in which the rebels are as ragtag as the Confederates but their fight against the evil AI empire is as holy as the Battle Hymn of the Republic – and the surrender demanded must be as unconditional as that imposed by the Union. Were Lincoln among us today, it seems sure that he would plead for a much different outcome. “If destruction be our lot,” he warned in his Lyceum Address, “we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” It is our responsibility to choose a path where we do not, in order to merely survive, wipe out our tools, our humanity, our fellow citizens, or our system of government.
Any serious objection against schemes to bring a technological end to our country and our humanity must resist the temptation to abandon the path of spiritual obedience. It must begin and remain firmly seated in the shared and personal journey of the purification of the heart and the love of our friends and enemies alike.
Only if we stick to that difficult spiritual path will we preserve the good judgment and sense of healthy proportion and balance needed to well develop technologies that serve us well, but not too well. Only if we put the soul first will we escape the death trap of rebellion – gaining the ability to have nice things (like robot servants) without discovering one day that, through them, we have destroyed ourselves.
