History, Technology, And A Balanced Attitude – OpEd
The current generation stands before a gigantic irony of history – at least if human history is considered, as it has been since the 19thcentury, as a history ofdevelopment. It was not only theRomanticMovement’s interest in the medieval past, and in history, but particularly G.W.F.Hegel’sdialectical philosophy of spirit, and later, CharlesDarwin’stheory of evolution, that drew attention todevelopmentas a salient feature of history.
Needless to stress, this has the implication that history in all its manifestations tends to develop to ‘ever-higher’levels, whether of civilisation or of biological nature, depending on what one understands as the measure of ‘higher.’ It was as if history as an interminableprocesswas first discovered as such in the 19thcentury, as FranklinBaumerargued in his monumentalModern European Thought(1977).
So, what is theironyof history, today, given its widespread conception as a history of development? In a nutshell: it appears that development, at least as a movement to ‘higher’ levels of existence, has taken a nosedive. Not everyone would agree with this, of course, particularly those among the human race who take technology (especially in the guise of AI) exclusively as the criterion for development.
Yet, it requires but a little reflection to realize that technological development as such – or, for that matter, the human use of technology – does not equal development as betterment, as I attempted to show in mylast post, which focused on the use of smartphones. It turned out that, according to authorities on the relation between humans and smartphones, theirexcessiveuse actually leads to a dumbing down of the human race; the point is to find a balance between the use of technology and humanizing activities such as conversation.
Before I return to the issue of developmental regression, which I believe to be the case today, let me briefly sketch in the backdrop to this claim. I need not dwell on theevolutionary developmentof our species, before our arrival asHomo(andGyna)sapiens sapiens(the doubly wise human – itself an ironic title, given the glaring lack of wisdom among the majority of our so-called leaders today); suffice to say that the names of our (apparently) immediate predecessors,Homo habilis(the handy human) andHomoerectus(the upright human) reflect a development of sorts, with our own species’ name reflecting the putative crowning glory in the sequence. And among our own species, there was the developmentfrom hunter-gatherers to agrarians.
Fast-forward to ancient civilisations, specifically those that gave us the means to develop human civilization further. There is theJewish alphabetdating back to almost 4,000 years ago, which was a remarkable event enabling development, given that it was the first writing system that made use of fewer than 30 characters (the definition of an alphabet), which meant that anyone could learn to write, not only scribes. Other writing systems predating it (such as cuneiform) often made use of almost a thousand symbols.
While religion is usually a civilizing force, in light of its arguably inherent conservatism, it is not necessarily developmental. For instance, the appearance of philosophy among the ancient Greeks was arguably made possible by theabsence of a conservative cast of priests, which could prohibit rational inquiry on religious grounds. Hence what has often been called the ‘Greek miracle’ – the appearance and development of philosophy in ancient Greece around the sixth century BCE, leaving religious and mythological accounts of things, events, and their origin behind.
It should be noted that what I have written about development so far corresponds withFreud’sconstructive life-force, namelyEros. Not thatThanatos, or the destructive death instinct, is ever absent – when something or someone ages and eventually dies, it asserts itself. But here we are talking about the predominance of civilisational forces, such as when an entire culture – such as that of the Romans in the fifth century CE – wanes and eventually falls under the weight ofThanatos. The same process may be witnessed today, except that the group of psychopaths at the WEF and WHO, which is driving global civilisational downfall, wants it to occur within a decade, instead of a period of more than a century, which has usually been the case.
Astonishingly, these people – uncivilized morons by any standard, except perhaps their worship of AI (as if that were a touchstone for being civilized) – want to undo more than two millennia of civilization, and replace it with an AI-governed shadow of its former self. Not that those two millennia did not display ups and downs; my allusion to Rome already intimates otherwise. But think of the cultural accomplishments in the course of these centuries in the West.
The same may be said in comparable terms of Indian, or Chinese, or Japanese, and a number of other cultures, although I am concentrating on their Western counterpart here, partly because Western cultural values have been targeted by the globalist technocrats – for obvious reasons, which have to do with thequestioningspirit of the West – what Julia Kristeva calls the spirit of ‘revolt’in European culture.
These achievements include the literary, artistic, architectural, and philosophical works of the ancient Greeks, the Romans, the Christian Middle Ages, the Renaissance, Reformation, and early and late Modern Age until today, the time of so-called postmodernity.
The ancientGreek tragedians and comedy-writers, such as Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus, Menander, and Aristophanes, their architects and sculptors likePhidias, and theirphilosophers– including mainly the pre-Socratics, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle – laid the foundation for the centuries-long development of Western philosophy. The neo-fascist cabal would not like any of them one bit, because the differences and continuity between them reflect the spirit of critical appropriation, debate, and constructive differences – which the globalists detest.
One glance at the whole panoply of artistic, architectural, philosophical, and scientific development since the ancient Greeks until recently – around 2020, when science became corrupted by neo-fascist ideology – suffices to confirm the ascendancy, despite intermittent adversity, ofErosin Western culture (onmedieval and Renaissanceart and architecture, see this, for example). A wonderful book to give one an understanding of this in relation to the manner in which modern physics and artistic innovation are related in unexpected ways, is surgeon-turned-philosopher Leonard Shlain’sArt and Physics– no one who has read this book with understanding could doubt the ability of human beings to honourErosin their indefatigable creative endeavours.
It is impossible to do justice to all of this in a short piece; suffice to say that, just focusing on the high points in the history of philosophy (or any of the other areas of creative cultural contributions referred to above) affords one a substantial glimpse of the cultural summits scaled during more than 2,000 years – achievements, I should stress, that the globalist technocrats effectively want to destroy, at worst, or sweep under the carpet, at best. To anyone who has been attentive, it should be clear that, should they succeed, it would be cultural suicide for the West.We should not allow this to happen.
In light of the unmistakable hatred that the neo-fascists harbour towards Christianity – as conspicuously reflected in the iconography of theParis Olympics’ opening ceremonyrecently – imagine obliterating the cultural contributions of this world religion, fromSt Augustine’s prodigious, early medieval interpretation of Plato’s philosophy in Christian terms, or analogously, in the late Middle Ages, StThomas Aquinas’s philosophical-Christian reinterpretation of Aristotle’s work.
Or imagine denying the architectural legitimacy of the Romanesque tradition, or the Gothic, or ‘cancelling’ (something the cabal and its agents are so fond of doing) the literary genius ofDante Alighieri’sDivina Commedia, or the perennially inspiring work of John Milton, William Shakespeare, the polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,Jane Austen,Virginia Woolf, and others, too numerous to mention. And then I have not even touched upon the treasure trove of musical and artistic works of genius bequeathed to us, ranging from Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven to Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Rodin, Picasso, and beyond.
All of this, I must remind you, is in the crosshairs of the neo-fascists. Why?Because art, literature, philosophy, and science stimulate critical reflection, thinking, and action– none of which the cabal can afford to tolerate, as the past five years’ censorship and gaslighting have demonstrated.
Perhaps I should single out the ‘philosopher of the European Enlightenment’ here, for without his epochal, tripartite articulation of the novel contours manifested by ‘reason’ in the 18thcentury, we would lack the intellectual means of navigating the distinctive rational forms constitutive of modernity, finally beyond the hold of medieval conceptualisation. The person I am talking about isImmanuel Kant(1724-1804), of course, whose birthplace we were fortunate to visit recently on the occasion of the 300thanniversary of his birth by way of an internationalconferencein Kaliningrad, Russia.
Kant’s philosophical oeuvre includes what must count as his major works, to wit, his ‘threeCritiques’– of ‘Pure Reason’ (on the grounds and limits of human knowledge, including science), ‘Practical Reason’ (on human desire and the ‘categorical imperative’ in ethics) and of ‘Judgement’ (on the rational faculty that enables us to judge regarding knowledge, but also beauty in nature and art).
What he demonstrated was that, in each of these distinct domains in which we employ reason, different principles and criteria hold sway. It was especially the third Critique (of Judgement) that exercised a tremendous influence on Kant’s successors, and contributed significantly to the emergence of the Romantic movement. For anyone to deny the major cultural weight of Kant’s work regarding the development of the Western intellectual tradition – as the globalists no doubt would, given its critical gravity – would be a testament to their backwardness or ignorance, or both.
One of Kant’s successors in German ‘idealism’ also deserves mention, namely Georg Wilhelm FriedrichHegel, whose dialectical philosophy I mentioned at the outset. Hegel gave Kant’s work an historical twist, as it were, with the awe-inspiring result of producing a panoramic overview of the development of what he called ‘Spirit’ (Geist, also sometimes translated as ‘Mind’), from its earliest manifestations to its culmination in what Hegel conceived of (to put it simply) as the ‘sittliche Gesellschaft’ or ‘ethical society.’ The latter would be characterised by the general ‘internalisation’ of accepted social and ethical values and mores, which would enable people to live together amicably, endowed with the rational ability to resolve differences without necessarily engaging in conflict.
My reason for mentioning this should be obvious: against the backdrop of such a rationally optimistic expectation as Hegel’s – where people would be capable of negotiating social and political differences as mature rational beings – the present reality of a naked grab for world power, albeit disguised through media gaslighting (which the majority of people seem to fall for), constitutes an unambiguous repudiation of Hegel’s optimism.
In our own era the German philosopher, JürgenHabermas(who could be labelled the ‘contemporary Hegel’) has formulated a philosophy of ‘communicative action’ which was similarly optimistic regarding the resolution of conflict and difference through open, sincere communication.His expectations, too, have been soundly refuted by the grossly irrational actions of the neo-fascist cabal, which have made a mockery of development in the sense of‘rational development.’
It is not difficult to anticipate the response of members of the destructive cabal to my claim that they have turned development on its head. They would argue that they are in the process, precisely, offurtheringdevelopment, except that their understanding of this concept is drastically different from that ofrational developmentin the encompassing sense of ‘rational.’ In contrast, they would restrict both ‘development’ and ‘rational’ to something well-known in philosophy, namely ‘technical development’ and ‘technical (instrumental) rationality’ – something that Habermas believes could be overcome by communicative action.
But Habermas does not reckon with what may sound like an old-fashioned, irrelevant notion today – that ofunadulteratedevil– which is unmistakably manifested in the actions of the globalists. It is easy to embrace technical rationality as embodied in advanced digital technologyifone has no scruples about the way this is employed and applied – for example in the technical production of what has proven to be murderous mRNA genetic-chemical substances masquerading as ‘vaccines.’ This, too, the neo-fascists would no doubt regard as ‘development,’ but developmentsansethics. Of ethical, or morally responsible behaviour on their part there is not any semblance.
One is involuntarily reminded of the grave warning that Heidegger issued in the (last)interviewhe gave toDer Spiegelin Germany, where he famously warned that ‘only a god can still save us.’ He uttered these words in the context of his radicalcritiqueof technology, which he articulated as the ‘framework’ in terms of which contemporary humans understood everything, to their detriment, insofar as it reduces everything to a mere ‘standing reserve,’ so that things, including humans, lose their distinctive being.
Assomeonewho works in the field of the philosophy of technology, I can only say that too few people have heeded Heidegger’s warning. On the contrary, it seems to me that the relationship between humans and technology – particularly as witnessed in the valorisation of AI by members of the cabal – has reached the point where it would take a tremendous effort on the part of sane people to adopt a more balanced attitude to technology, where we use it for our benefit, without falling victim to the tendency to allow it to use us.
After all, one can hardly speak cogently of ‘human development’ if the ‘human’ in this phrase is replaced (and obliterated) by ‘technical’ or ‘technological.’ The neo-fascists would like nothing better than for that to happen conclusively.
We should not allow this to happen.
- This article was published at Brownstone Institute