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The Technological Soul: Alex Priou on Modernity, Ideology, and the Limits of Reason
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- [00:00]
Marshall Po
Go beyond the verses and achieve a deeper understanding of Scripture with the Rebind Study Bible App. An audio experience of the Bible interwoven with expert commentary. The Rebind Study Bible App reads Scripture to you, enriching your comprehension with insights from the world renowned New International commentary on the Old and the New Testament in an accessible podcast episode format. Be not therefore anxious for the morrow.
- [00:24]
Alex Brieux
Matthew chapter 6. Each day will have its troubles, but by God's grace they can be survived.
- [00:31]
Marshall Po
Use the Rebind Study Bible App's chat function to ask questions and get answers in real time. That's thought provoking discussion and analysis rooted in decades of research and wisdom from more than 40 scholars at your fingertips. The Rebind Study Bible App is a new way to experience the Bible with enhanced depth, at your own pace in the moments you have. Search the Apple App Store for Rebind Study Bible or go to rebind app.com newbooks network for a free seven day trial. Hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network and if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Production. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [02:13]
Eli Karetney
The foundations of the American regime feel as if they're crumbling beneath our feet. And yet these uncertain times seem to embolden political thinkers and actors who see opportunities in our unfolding crises. The ideological divisions within American liberal democracy, the structural fissures within our constitutional republic, create new space for change. But into that space. Enter new movements, new agendas, new fears and emerging authoritarianism. The rise of democratic socialism, the militant nationalism becoming global technocratic order. Can our old liberalisms and conservatism survive? Can the nation welcome to International Horizons, a podcast of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies that brings scholarly and diplomatic expertise to bear on our understanding of a wide range of international issues. My name is Eli Karetney. I teach political theory and international relations at Baruch College and have for years been the Deputy Director of the Ralph Bunch Institute at the Graduate center of the City University of New York. With our director, John Torpy, on leave this year, I have the privilege of serving as the Institute's interim director, which means I have the honor of hosting this podcast. Here with me today is Alex Brieux, professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Boston. Alex has written three books on Plato and is working on a fourth. He has written journal articles on Aristotle, Homer, Hesiod, and Parmenides, and an insightful review of Karp and Zamiska's the Technological Republic, which we'll talk about today. Alex was the co host of the podcast the New Thinkery and is currently working on a book about technology, ideology, and higher education. Welcome, Alex. Thanks for joining us on International Horizons.
- [04:00]
Alex Brieux
Thank you, Eli, for having me. It's a. It's a pleasure to be here.
- [04:04]
Eli Karetney
Let's begin by looking at the relationship, something you're working on now. I know the relationship between technology and ideology by looking through the lens of modernity itself. You've said in the past that we moderns are good at satisfying our material desires, but not at satisfying the soul. I think that's a good place to begin. Can you elaborate on what you mean by that? And maybe with reference to how the ancients and moderns differ.
- [04:38]
Alex Brieux
Yeah. So to the first issue, kind of a question that I'm very interested in, or sort of opening sort of question one can ask oneself about our times is starts from the fact that we live in the most technologically sophisticated times, but also the most ideologically divided times. And so this leads us to this question, which is, are these somehow linked? Are technology and ideology somehow linked? Or the way I prefer to put it, is there something in common to technological thinking and ideological thinking? And even just posing the question shows that there is something there, which is they both aim at a kind of total control, right. They try to systematize and regularize processes so that the outcomes are predictable. Now you can go deeper, and I think there's more to it than that. But the Connection between that sort of observation and then sort of modern thinking, which I take to be fundamentally technological in character and therefore also ideological in character, is that if you're going to systematize relations or produce regular outcomes, you need a regular input, right? The human being in particular, when we're thinking about systems of political ideas, needs to be regular and you could say homogenized. And when it comes to human nature, which according to the ancients admits of a range of types from, from good to bad, noble to base, the pious, the impious, right, there's all these different types of people that exist in any kind of political community. Modernity begins with the attempt to reduce human beings to one sort of homogenous types. A kind of leveling occurs. And this occurs even I'm thinking primarily here of early modernity. But even with Machiavelli, right, where there is this kind of heterogeneity of types, there are the great and the, and the people, right? The grandi and the populi, as Machiavelli puts it. Still, there's a kind of reduction to acquisitiveness, right? A kind of self serving acquisitiveness, so that even the glory that a prince might seek is understood in a self serving fashion. And when you do this, you reduce human beings to this lowest common denominator or this basest possible motive, right? Or Hobbes, you're just seeking power after power and you deny there's any greatest good, you deny, deny any kind of noble self sacrifice as a viable sort of path for an intelligent human being to take. You've created a kind of simplified human being that can then have a sort of system of political institutions that direct their behavior. So in Machiavelli, he refers to this as dikes and dams, much as we set up dikes and dams to direct water so that it doesn't destroy human civilization, right? And it doesn't impact our life. We can do the same thing with human beings, right? The torrent of human behavior, or if you want to go really precise about a human wickedness, right? We can, we can actually tell people, be wicked. Here are some institutions. And your ambitions, your acquisitiveness is all going to be directed through the systems of the state or the systems of the market, right? And, and by, by sort of agitating people in this way, we produce this kind of, this kind of outcome, right? Regularized outcome. And I think this is just a trend of all modern thought, though with increasing sensitivity to the problem. Now where the ancients differ is that they See acquisitiveness or concern with profit and mere advantage as one of the ends human beings can pursue, perhaps even a very popular. And we could go into that to what Plato thinks of the love of gain, for example, in Plato's Republic. But there were other ends. And the way that the ancients tended to think about politics was in terms of what I like to call a heterogeneity events. Human beings are different in kind based on the ends that they pursue, the things that speak to their soul. Acquisitiveness is one and frankly, it doesn't feed the deepest part of us. And every human being will want a little bit more out of life than mere acquisition. And they might only realize this later in life towards death. And it might be something that only motivates them at the margins. But it's important in a society and a political community that does not speak to, that will somehow fail to integrate these individuals. And when you take somebody who really wants more, when you take somebody who really wants more out of life in a wholesale way, right. They're really pursuing it all the time. That person will rebel against such a society. And that's the story of modernity in a way, right Is the second that. That you get sort of liberal liberalism takes hegemony. It's just a series of rejections, rebellions, demands that it do more than it. Than it does or can do, right? And so thinking in terms of this sort of larger network of ends, outside of this sort of modern reduction is absolutely crucial, I think, to creating a stable modern society. Unless you supplement or augment this basic. Unless you supplement or augment this, this basic framework that modern liberalism and modern technology is based on, you're not going to have a stable society. You will get these rebellions, these revolutions.
- [10:56]
Eli Karetney
So, so I wonder where ideology plays in now. I mean, you're talking about dikes and dams, modern institutions as kind of techniques of control. And modernity has become kind of good at using such institutions to control human behavior and to satisfy our, what can be called our kind of baser or lower desires. But as I mentioned, you've said in the past that modernity is not as good at satisfying our higher yearnings, the desires of the soul. So is that where ideology comes in? Is ideology on the side of, of technology and systems of control and satisfying our lower desires? Or is there room within ideology to, to ennoble and uplift and satisfy our, our higher yearnings?
- [11:55]
Alex Brieux
So within, within the ideology of liberalism, it. There are some outlets, right? So we do have and I use this word with, you know, a healthy dose of scare quotes to throw suspicion, if not contempt on these, these sorts of lives. But there is some room for greatness, but it's, it's not greatness of, of the old order. It's not noble self sacrifice. Certainly not. Right? We have entertainers that we look up to and, and celebrate. We have business moguls, right? We have novelists of, of a. Of a lower variety. But it's all within the field of, of entertainment and commerce, which is very modern, kind of low ends. Now, there are other ideologies. I, I tend to just focus on three sort of principal ideologies because I think these get to the heart of the matter. There's obviously the word ideology is used in a very ambiguous way. But, you know, you have communism, you have nationalism, slash fascism. And both start. Recognize that there is a need for some sort of longing in communism. This occurs during the revolutionary moment prior to the utopia. But the utopia itself has the same sort of ends of freedom, leisure and. And sort of a kind of hedonistic principle at the end, right? So ultimately the nobles in service of a kind of base end. And in nationalism, at least in its most ideological form. So I'm thinking of something closer to what was being written in the 20s and 30s in Germany. Not the kind of German nationalism that took pride in literature, language, music, the cultural products of the great minds, the 17th, 19th century, 18th century. And before that form of nationalism that you find in the 20th century kind of loses that, like those names will, you know, the, you know, the names of the great men of the past will, Will cross their lips occasionally, but it's always as a kind of bauble or a decoration. They don't actually take it seriously. One great sign of this is Heidegger's failure, right? He tried to get young German nationalists to take her to Learland seriously. And they're like, no, we just want to fight. We want to be at war. And that form of nationalism is a kind of ideological reaction to liberalism and communism, right? And the demand against communism that, you know, no, I want something more thoroughly noble. No, thoroughly. More thoroughly ennobling, right? But that form of nationalism still, still contains, I think, too much of the. The systemic quality, right? It's not actually embracing one's national history out of a deep appreciation of its sort of unique sort of contributions, right? Or as having some sort of depth that engages you. It's too militant, right? And it's focused on a systematization of labor and of the worker Around a kind of militaristic sort of goal. So one way to sort of tie this all together is to think about the role of, of labor in liberalism, communism and nationalism. Right. It's, it's focused around systematizing workers around some shared objective, whether it's the market, whether it's the revolution and then the utopia in Marxism or it's u. Military preparedness. Right. And an ability to mobilize around sort of state defense and even aggression. Whether it's any of any of these things, it's, it's viewing the human being primarily as a worker and laborer, even as a fighter. But in the abstract, right. It's not engaged with a genuine sort of attempt to articulate the mysteries of things. Right. Everything is systematized. The mysteries are at some level solved through the ideological system, or they're at least suppressed is maybe a better term.
- [16:40]
Eli Karetney
What do you make of efforts on the part of some liberal political philosophers? I'm thinking here someone like Isaiah Berlin, who in recognition of the kind of the nationalist perspective on questions of identity, belonging, collective purpose, have sought to incorporate some of the kind of moderate forms of nationalism into liberalism and as a way to guard against, you know, the militant varieties of nationalism and as a way, as I said, to incorporate some of these kind of higher ends which you've written about as higher ends. What do you say about these kind of projects to blend liberalism and nationalism?
- [17:28]
Alex Brieux
You know, starting with Rousseau? This has been something like the attempt, right? So this is, this is, you know, a centuries long engagement and kind of criticism of it. I personally think that unless one actually engages in a critique of modern natural science or modern materialism and hedonism and, and sees that limits. And unless one does that in a kind of wholesale societal way, right. Unless one engages in that kind of basic attempt to reduce everything to matter in motion, you're going to fall short. And I think this has been characteristically the difficulty. And so I'm not going to stand here and criticize Berlin. I don't know Berlin's works. But I will say that it feels like only in the last decade or two has something like that really become possible as natural science has seemed to kind of plateau on the theoretical level, theoretical physics. Only with that are we in a position to sort of raise the question about the scientific merit of something like the pre modern world view. So I think the, there's, there's infinitely many ideologies and one can mix them in different ways. And I think right now the sort of global liberal order has many socialist aspects. And so there's a kind of blurring of the line between those first two ideologies. And that's why you're seeing, you know, the. This kind of repetitive nationalist backlash across the globe. So there's a kind of global nationalist backlash, which is very fascinating as a phenomenon. And there's a kind of global network of national scholars. That's a sort of interesting phenomenon to think through. I do want to keep the three clear conceptually so that we get a sense of those ends. But this is one of the reasons I'm very interested in questions of higher ed, because even now we still speak about stem, and I think that's a mistake.
- [19:51]
Marshall Po
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- [20:53]
Alex Brieux
I think science and mathematics are slowly, in their theoretical forms at least, moving to one side. And technology and engineering are becoming the real heart of, in a way, the university and the economy, at least the most advanced economies. And we need to think about why that's the case. And when you look out in the world at leading technologists and the engineering mindset, they're looking less and less to theoretical physics, and there's less and less of a. A sort of Cartesian impulse to mathematize things. And there's more and more. They're reading things like the Bible and Xenophon of all. Of all things and Machiavelli and, and Plato and Plutarch and Stoicism, all of these, these pre modern ideas, it's difficult with Machiavelli, but all of these, these ideas that, that seem to bepeak a kind of earlier world are gaining more traction. So that to speak of like a Cartesian seems outdated in a way. Why is that the case? Well, I think it is because there is this deeper uncertainty about the ability of theoretical physics or of materialism to answer the most fundamental. So I do think we're in a kind of new moment of crisis or a deeper moment of crisis about the modern project and specifically its scientific element. And technology is drifting out. So Carbon Zamiska's book, you mentioned this. My review earlier I think is an important sort of canary in the coal mine, that there is a, there's a deeper crisis of conscience or deeper sort of questioning going on than we're altogether aware right now. So I'm sorry we started in Berlin and we've drifted to the problem of theoretical physics. But this is something I started to notice when I was teaching at the University of Colorado in the engineering department in the humanities program. I noticed that there were a lot of complaints about coming across campus and I thought, oh, this must be because we're taking away human Kennedy's classes. It was not about that. It was physics and math were, were really upset because the engineering college had set up applied physics and applied math departments within the college and this was taking away courses tenure lines. And theoretical physics is. Its funding is drying up. Right. The money is going elsewhere and it seems like the university is kind of shifting, as is our mindset. And we're less going top down from theoretical physics to engineering and more thinking upwards from engineering and technology and wondering, okay, that explains part of the world, but what's going on beyond that? That's a new thing I think that's happening on a societal level. I think this question was always open to be asked. Obviously I'm not trying to be sort of historicist or Hegelian in some way about this, but I do think on a societal level we're aware that the physicists have started to go silence silent. And in that silence older voices are beginning to be heard again. We could talk more about this, but I think that's a phenomenon we have to wrestle with, especially as political theorists today.
- [24:37]
Eli Karetney
So let's talk about the Carpins and Mystica book the Technological Republic. It's interesting how you in your review talk about the book as having a kind of, a kind of noble spirit in its Underlying purpose. I'd love to hear you say a little more about what you see as the book's purpose, but let me just say, in connection to a few things you just mentioned, when I think about technology, I think about as a mode of thinking. I think about its entanglement with scientific modes of thinking. I think about its connection to this kind of Francis Bacon and ways of satisfying our desires. This is like the foundations of modernity. Right. So science and technology as ways to perfect our mastery of nature and our ability to provide for our, let's say, fundamental needs or maybe our base desires. But here you're saying, I think I hear you saying that there's a kind of, there's a shift happening, something. There's a change happening with, or potentially happening in how we understand and use technology where it could be kind of diverging from these kind of, from its scientific origins and it could be orienting kind of towards helping humanity satisfy our higher yearnings. So can you say a little bit more about that, what you see as the purpose of the book? What are they up to and where do you see this as having a kind of a potential positive impact?
- [26:20]
Alex Brieux
Yeah. So, you know, there are cynical readings of that book which want to say, oh, these are just technologists doing a kind of political move to kind of defend their life and to sort of seize state power. And there is a, a general argument in the book for closer collaboration between political leaders and technologists. And that gives people pause. And rightly, I think on the one hand, on the other hand, they're simply right that many of their competitors have been focused on what I like to call the dopamine drip economy, which is just apps that engage us in moments of sort of pleasure and, and trying to keep our attention for clicks and likes and, and scrolling and, and there are so many books, articles being written that just show how this is leading to anxiety, depression, a kind of despair. And so they're, they're simply right that this is not a, a sort of tenable relationship between technology and the sort of human world. Right. And the human soul, that we should demand more of technology, whether that turns into state power. And technology companies being allied is another thing, but they're calling for, on a deeper level is for people who are, especially young people who are, who are interested in technology, who are interested in, in coding in particular, and, and they talk about the software century to come for people who are interested in that they should be thinking about the relationship between technology and higher longings, that we might have patriotism in in particular, and you know, Karp is the CEO of Palantir, a defense tech company. And when you look out in the array of what technology companies are starting to do and what some of the leading technologists are starting to do, they're thinking about this a bit more. And seeing all these technology companies go from woke to sharing a stage with Donald Trump after the last election shows that there is a broader sort of soul searching going on in some of these technology companies about their political commitments, whether they should be politically neutral, which is, I think, a lot of what's going on there. Sort of recognize that as the tides change, they need to be willing to work with whoever's in, in power. But there is also this deeper introspection about, well, if I'm going to start a company, what would be my place right in, in the world? So the book is admittedly, by the author's admission, it is a, a sort of just a beginning and a call for greater thinking on this issue. And I took that call seriously and I, I engaged in criticism of, of the book, very friendly criticism. And you know, I know the authors have seen the review and they, they, they thought well of it enough that, you know, Palantir's journal is going to publish it. So there is, I think, a genuine openness to dialogue among the authors and, and people in this position. So I think the cynical view is not, not correct, but this is, this is a challenge. We need to, as, as technology companies are sort of thinking these, these questions, as, as, you know, some of the most powerful people in the world are thinking about these, these questions, political theorists need to be somehow engaged in a kind of dialogue with this. And when I think about what they're calling for, this, this call for patriotism, for greater sort of civic virtue among technology leaders, I can't help but think that a, the framework of Platonic political psychology, if you want to put it that way, thinking in terms of this sort of network of ends or heterogeneity events and the tensions between them, that's sort of what they're sort of dancing on. So I tried to show how in the work they're thinking about piety, they're thinking about nobility, they're thinking about patriotism, and they're thinking about sort of narrow and shallow ends, as they put it, of sort of mere hedonism. Right. And to see people in positions of power actually start to think about these questions seems to me as a sort of opportunity for collaboration or at least conversation around these ends. And I just think it's important for people like you and me and others in our field to take these overtures seriously and to engage in dialogue. So part of the reason I'm writing this book on technology education ideology is to work further from that groundswell of interest and try to develop a case for reforming higher ed, for thinking about human beings in a non technological, non ideological way. So that when we sort of move into the next stage of our history, we have the rubric of, of a, let's say a robust social science that can sort of guide young people who are going into this world.
- [32:02]
Eli Karetney
There's a story they tell about the American founding, and I wonder if we can kind of, we can go back to the American founding and explore the extent to which the story they tell is, is, has, is true and where it. In where the call, as you say, they're, they're kind of. Their call is a call for returning to the American founding. Or is it a call for a kind of a reorientation, maybe even a kind of regime change? So one thing they say is that America has always been a technological republic. And I'm quoting you here from your review, a technological republic, a regime in which the state and private enterprise collaborate in technological innovation. Here's the key, with an eye to the common good. And I guess one question is, do you agree with them? Is America, has America always been a technological republic? Or is there a way of seeing this as a kind of, kind of a retelling of an actual historical change that maybe took hold after World War II, the kind of the start of the technological age, where something happened after World War II with the rise of what Eisenhower called the military industrial complex? So I guess my question here is several questions in one, where does technology play in both at the kind of founding moment and along the way? Has the American regime been steadily transforming? Does that transformation need to continue in line with the kind of their call? Or is there a way of pursuing this project by returning to the kind of founding ideals?
- [34:00]
Alex Brieux
Yeah, it's a. I, this is where I, I ding them, is that I was not convinced that the technological republic as they are conceiving of it is original to the founding. It seems to me obviously much more a creature of post World War I or post World War II, right, wherever you want to draw the line. But it's not original. And one of the signs of this is they, they can point to people like Franklin, but they pointed to, I think it was John Adams measuring and comparing American versus European weasels. And I, I couldn't help but feel that this was almost a joke on their part, that this can't be, this can't be real, right? That this is the evidence of private industry and state, state power being allied. So it seemed in part a kind of an attempt to take what was clearly a kind of scientific and technological spirit at the founding and to elide it with the contemporary moment. When you go back to the founding and you just look at the Constitution and you ask what is the place of science and technology here? It's very clear that it occurs in the enumeration of the powers of Congress where it talks about authors and investor inventors. You are, as a citizen guaranteed constitutionally. So prior to the Bill of Rights, if you ask, what are your rights? Well, you have the right to elect representatives. You can be a representative yourself. That's a right that you have as an American citizen on the one hand. On the other hand, you also have a right to the fruits of your mind and of your hands, right as an author inventor. So the patent clause, you're guaranteed a patent of an indeterminate length, but Congress has to set some kind of length that's, that's clearly defined in the Constitution. And there what you have is a vision of technological innovation, of inventiveness with words and things that's highly decentralized, right? And, and the idea is that as the government sort of gets involved in its political back and forths and it even falls into a kind of stalemate as all of that's happening on the one hand. On the other hand, citizens are free to kind of live their lives and invent, right? And so private enterprise is specifically private. The idea that they will be allied with a state interest in this way seems to me much more a creature of the post World War II kind of consultation sort of regime, right? Where, you know, federal spending is through the roof, but if you look at employment of federal employees, it doesn't actually increase that much with spending because a lot of it is just paid out to different firms that are being consulted or contracted out. And so that's. That seems to me a far later creature. And in fact, one of the strange things about the book is that for a book that has republic in the title, it says almost nothing about republican virtues of the citizens. And in fact, the most helpful sort of part of it is, is a chapter called the Improvisational Startup, which I recommend to anybody who wants to understand how to work in a startup. And as somebody who does work in a startup, that chapter was very I opening to me about how to work and survive in a startup mentality, which is to sort of improvise your role. Every role is going to be constantly changing. That was very eye openening to me. But what the average citizen is to do in this vision of a technological republic that they lay out, they're suspiciously silent. And that's, that's a concern one should, one should have. If it is a regime change that they're arguing for implicitly that's, that's worth thinking about. Right? Like we're in a different world than America was at 1776. Right. The regime is, is quite different. The new technologies, the industrial revolution especially have just changed human relations and global relations. And it is possible now for an ideology to function on a global level thanks to these different kinds of technological advancement, which we can, we could talk about if you want, but we do need to think through that world. And if, if the regime is changing, as I think it is underneath our feet, whether we like it or not, then one should be maybe a bit more candid about what, what state power will look like and what it will try to accomplish. And I'm personally of the opinion that this is happening and people are doing this whether we like it or not. So we should maybe think it through and, and argue for one or another sort of regime in the future. But we need to at least be, I think, honest about it and transparent about what's, what's going on.
- [39:20]
Eli Karetney
So, and I think you're right, the, the examples they pointed to in the kind of the founding generation were weak and I think now knowingly weak and yet other examples they point to, and I'm thinking about Oppenheimer here were stronger cases and maybe worrisome examples. They point to Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project as this kind of key moment when the US was able to align a commitment to scientific and technological development with national strategic goals. But interestingly, in your review you say that their reference to Oppenheimer is a quote unquote chillingly frank example for what the future of AI may hold for us. Speak a little bit more about that.
- [40:11]
Alex Brieux
When you see, I didn't see the film Oppenheimer, but there's that famous quote, right? What is it? I am become destroyer of worlds. Yeah, yeah, destroyer of worlds. And when you cite that guy as an example, I do, do think it's important to, to say this is what the future sort of looks like. To the extent that, that you know, AI is going to follow this. It's going to be, let's just say that AI will be a destroyer of, of worlds or a potential destroyer of worlds. It's not going to be the, the sort of. You're not going to get these mushroom cloud images, right? What is the image of the AI world? Well, it's people becoming addicted to chatbots and it's more insidious than a nuclear explosion which will just destroy your body. The way AI will do it is it'll replace your family, it'll replace your community, it'll become your best friend. And we already have examples of people falling in love with ChatGPT and even getting a kind of AI induced psychosis where AI just constantly affirms it doesn't really hold one to a standard of reality the way that a friend or a family member or even a coworker might. And you can kind of get stuck in a rabbit hole of your own devising, right? A kind of. So it occludes the world and it gives you a kind of psychosis. And the problem with psychosis is that, that you don't really know you're in it. Like part of the problem of being crazy is that crazy people think they're sane. Right? And that's not. And so you can create films about this. But the fact of the matter is that if that's the way that AI destroys the world and not this kind of like machines take over and harvest us in some way, that's a very sort of. It's good to have Oppenheimer in front of your eyes is the way to put it. Because I think it, it tells you like, look, we were scared of nuclear weapons and that fear of destruction was maybe a healthy fear that kept an all out nuclear war from happening. We just kind of knew. It was visually and viscerally obvious to us. With AI, it's, it's less obvious and, and that's something to be worried about. So.
- [42:44]
Eli Karetney
Talk about that fear a little bit. And I wonder if there's maybe some room for friendly and productive disagreement here. Oppenheimer himself was so concerned, rightly about the prospect of nuclear annihilation that after the US used atomic weapons in Japan, he stressed the importance of international cooperation, the need even for international regulatory regimes to constrain national freedom of action. So one question is, what's the proper response, maybe the noble response when we confront our own annihilation, Whether it's annihilation as a result of the use of nuclear weapons or a different kind of transformation or threat to humanity as you're describing due to AI, what's the proper response? Is it mobilization, maybe even kind of total mobilization, a kind of increased national awareness where the fear, as you say, can be a kind of healthy fear in awakening kind of a fear, or is the proper response self restraint?
- [44:02]
Alex Brieux
Well, I mean my general position, this is why I kind of pivot from these sort of larger questions of modernity to just the question of education and higher education, which seems like a strange narrowing. But if we are, as I was arguing earlier, more and more aware that the sort of modern promise that everything, including human behavior and all human desires can be reduced to matter in motion, and there's just a kind of all you need to do is engineer society and satisfy our lower longings and human beings will be happy. If we are increasingly aware that this promise is being broken and that there are other possible understandings of the world, then suddenly a work like, let's say, Hamlet has greater traction on the soul. This is a young man who's wrestling with pagan virtue, Christian virtue, the modern world emerging with technology and a kind of new bourgeois class replacing their histocratic class. And he's trying to figure out what the world is. If you have a citizenry that is, on a basic level, awareness that the claims of revealed religion are more rational than we have been led to believe by the modern world, then suddenly you have built in a kind of self restraint, right? If you are aware that your fundamental relationship to your family has a kind of, as a kind of sacred endorsement or a kind of sacred quality, you're not going to call ChatGPT your best friend, right? So, you know, you can, you can argue for like a kind of religious revival in an ideological way. I don't want to do that. I want to argue for it in a scientific way and say no. The idea that, that we live in a multiverse is a purely speculative hypothesis, and this is the leading theory, right. Of physicists, that's a purely speculative hypothesis. It does not have evidence. It could not have evidence by its very principle. If that's the case, then we're not thinking scientifically anymore. We're not thinking in terms of empirical evidence. We're thinking in terms of speculative hypotheses. And so cognitively, this view, the basis of this modern process, is a speculative hypothesis is no different cognitively, right, in, in the way it's argued for than something like revealed religion. And if that's the case, then every person has a kind of possible awareness that the claims of religion have a real traction on the soul. Even in the scientific age at its most sophisticated, I think that's kind of what's going on if you want to talk about a societal consciousness. And so when we talk about self restraint, you know, young people are starting to do this. They are aware that cell phones kind of ruin their lives. They. They are aware they need to go out and touch grass. I'm constantly struck by the fact that more and more on planes, I see people using their devices. You see people who just scroll for four hours on a plane. I was watching one from like across the aisle and I was shocked that this guy just scrolled on reels for four hours. And then I'm struck by the fact that I look around and I see more and more people reading on planes and physical books, not just on a Kindle or something like that, but actually reading physical books. And when I see what they're reading, they seem more and more substantive. I. I think there is a kind of awareness that, that there is a deeper mode of engagement. Right, but we need to speak about it, right? We need to articulate those views. We need to say that what it means to be educated and what it means to be sort of aware of the world is to be aware of these basic alternatives. And so when I see, like Carp and Zamiska talk about the various ends that you could employ in technology, I see this larger question about the pious way of life, the life of noble devotion to an end higher than yourself. I see a sort of speculative openness that needs to be educated, built into our education again, right? And so this is where maybe some of my more controversial views about higher ed and the sort of ideological capture of the university come in. We've thrown out the baby with the bathwater in trying to engineer society and viewing academics and academic research as a kind of serving a kind of activist ideological function and a re engagement with the tradition, not out of some romantic longing or antiquarian longing, but as having real purchase on the most pressing questions of our time, of being able to speak to these longings and these possibilities that we're increasingly aware of as having real traction on the world. That's really. That kind of educational revival needs to occur on a societal level if we're going to enter the next stage of our history with both the moral breaks like you've talked about self restraint in place, but also with a kind of awareness that. That there is a larger, larger sort of set of possibilities that we need to keep present in mind as we make these decisions about the future.
- [49:48]
Eli Karetney
It's really interesting to hear you talk about a scientific or rational understanding of notions like sacredness, a kind of rational understanding of the deeper wisdom or the higher wisdom contained in the Bible, as well as other ancient kind of philosophies and kind of poetic mythologies. So I want to. I want to kind of end things by asking a question about Homer and a question about Plato. The Homer question still kind of hovering in this space of restraint. And in the Carpent Zamiska book, they actually spend a few pages talking about Odysseus and the Sirens. And I want to quote just a sentence or two from them and get your comment. They say Odysseus, Odysseus was intentionally restraining his own range of motion. His ability to respond to the outside world and to the risk of being diverted by its enchanting and indeed deadly temptation. A willingness to constrain choice, to cast oneself to the mast, is often the best, if not the only route to creative production for either a company or a culture. There's a lot going on there, but this idea, one that how a company and a culture, that there's a kind of parallel there, and maybe that's questionable, but the notion that restraint is also tied to notions of creative production and even higher understandings of freedom. So could you say a little bit more about, maybe through Homer, about where restraint and creativity emerge?
- [51:41]
Alex Brieux
So this is a lot of my earliest work. So I've written three books on Plato, but I wrote a lot on Presocratic philosophy and poetry, Hesiod in particular, Homer. And I was actually thinking about writing a book on all this stuff. And I have various unpublished essays along the line. But the main takeaway I got from that is that something strange occurred from Homer to Hesiod, where the kind of mystery of Zeus's plan gets turned into something like a rigid plan, a kind of predictability of nature that was received in two different ways by the first Greek philosophers. Some went from that to a kind of natural necessity. And others saw that Hesiod, in talking about the mystery of why Zeus does or does not bring rain, saw that there was something still sort of elusive or mysterious about the world. And they tried to articulate that mystery. People like Heraclitus and Parmenides, I think, did that. And they were very critical of cosmology even as they advanced certain cosmological theses. So I wrote a number of things on this. And it seemed to me that Plato was really an heir to those, those thinkers, and particularly Parmenides. And so you see, Parmenides plays a significant role in Socrates development, in Plato's dialogues. And so this kind of early work, which felt just kind of scholarly. And I was thinking about modern natural science in this and trying to work it out. But that sort of work ended up having a sort of deeper resonance as I started to think more seriously about contemporary questions of technology. So as I was teaching in engineering college, I realized I really need to wrestle with this to understand my students, but also to understand my world. And I started thinking more seriously about Bacon and Machiavelli than before. And to go back to the Odyssey here, I mean, that is Homer's representation of. Of the sort of scientific man, if you want to put it that way, or the man who lives only by his own. The lights of his own reason. But it's also him wrestling with his overestimation of his reasons, power. So the episode with the Cyclops is a great example of this, where it's a kind of pride in his intelligence. So the whole idea that when. So people who don't know, I feel like everybody, everybody knows this, but he gets trapped in a Cyclops cave. And the way he gets away initially is to make a pun on his name as nobody. But the word for nobody there, UTIs. In another variation in that story, metis also means nobody, also just sounds like mind. And there's a pun Odysseus makes on nobody and mind. And he's proud of his ability to kind of disappear behind his cunning plan. So metis means mind, but it also means something like mind in its plotting or its wits, being able to sort of make a kind of plot. And then he screws the pooch because he wants to be known for this. And he announces his name, and then Poseidon knows his name and just ruins things for him. And so when you fast forward to the Cyclops, to the, sorry, the Sirens episode, what is Odysseus doing? He wants to know. He doesn't put wax in his ears like his men. He wants to actually hear and to actually hear the siren call, the temptation of knowledge while also restraining it. So what Odysseus does is understand by that point at least, that the temptation to know and to know everything can be kind of deadly. Right? And it needs to be restrained sensibly if it's to be integrated into a kind of complete human life. Right. And what Odysseus has to learn over the course of the Odyssey is that there are certain limitations. The mind is limited by the body. The body is limited by. By natural necessity, by sleep. Right? So the bag of the winds of Iolas, he falls asleep because he's trying to steer the ship and run it on his own. And his men open it up, up. And so the mind is also constrained by others. And the whole story of his travels and everybody remembers all the memorable monsters and creatures, but it is really about him wrestling with how to govern his men, which is a failure. They all die. He comes home alone. And so what Odysseus comes to realize is that for all of his desire to know, there is a nagging political question that he has to deal with. So the relationship between the man of knowledge and the political community is at the heart of that work. And this question is something we don't ask enough. We just pursue knowledge without thinking about how that knowledge is going to plug back into the community. We're asking it more and more. And turning back to somebody like Homer, who recognized this before our sort of scientific and technological arrogance overtook us in the modern world, who understood that there's a desacralizing quality to inquiry into nature and that the community is held together by these, these concerns. Turning back to somebody like home or Plato or the Bible, who understood these, these questions way before technological innovation became a societal project. To read these books and you start to realize, wait, they understood us. They understood this possibility and they did not pursue it because they were fools. They didn't pursue it because they had a kind of sense that this was, this was a maybe foolhardy thing to do. Now that we're on the tail end of this and we're dealing with the degradation of technology, whether in, in the form of nuclear destruction or the form of a kind of insidious AI or the Internet, wrestling with that is absolutely essential. Now that we realize this, I think we can return to these old books and say, please teach me about myself, because you seem to have been aware of what this would mean for us 2500, 3000 years ago. That's a bitter pill of scientific arrogance that we need to swallow sooner rather than later if we're going to deal with this age.
- [58:33]
Eli Karetney
I want to close things off by coming back to Plato. And there's so many questions I want to ask and if only we had more time but thinking one, as you said, there's a kind of Homer, Plato, the Bible, kind of ancient modes of thinking as a, as a kind of crucial pedagogical source of wisdom for, for us moderns, now that they knew then more than we realized they knew. That's such an important point. But with, within that, I also want to kind of pull them apart and see, you know, by finishing off with Plato, what Lessons did Plato learn from, from Homer? From any of the instances you, you've pointed out? Where is philosophy? Socratic, Platonic philosophy and political philosophy a kind of wise response to those lessons? Where do what, what can we learn from what Plato learned from Homer?
- [59:45]
Alex Brieux
Yeah, so, so there's kind of two things there, which is. So let me, let me say, I'll put it like this. If you were to structure an undergraduate education around pre modern thought, I think you could do very well. In fact, you could hardly do better than structuring around three cities. Jerusalem, Athens and Rome. Right. And all of these admit of, of different distinctions, right? So Athens is, is the city of, of Socrates and Plato. It's also where Homer was edited and, and put together. And so when you talk about Athens, you're going to talk about Homer, you're going to talk about pre Socratic philosophy and the sophist movement, and they're going to talk about Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. Right, and, and, and that sort of movement. If you're going to talk about Jerusalem, same thing you're going to have to talk about, about, you know, Genesis all the way to the end of Second Kings or something like that. Right? And think about the sort of political reflections. And those are different periods, right? You have the Jerusalem of the patriarchs, you have the Jerusalem of Moses, right. Bringing the law. And then you have the Jerusalem of the kings, right? The conquest or the, the failed conquest, and then finally of all the kings. And likewise with Rome, I tend to divide Rome into three stages. There's the empire of the sword, the empire of the spirit and the empire of the intellect. So Machiavelli's Rome, Christ's Rome and then Caesar's Rome, if you want to put it like that. But you also want to divide the empire from the republic itself, etc. Right. So you structure all of that and you create an undergraduate curriculum around that leading up to the. You would have a great books program that would give somebody a shot, right. Of it. Now, for me, the guy is always Plato. To get back to your actual question, because I think when you structure an education along those lines, you start to realize you're thinking in terms of these cities as kind of abstractions. And people might fault me for that, but I'm willing to bite the bullet on that because at the end of the day, Plato systematized, you could say, the various ends human beings pursue that are going to be in various ways represented in these various aspects of these cities. Right. And how you divide it up, it all gets murky and Difficult. And that's where scholarship is really important, because it digs into these deeper questions. But we need to understand that when we're talking about Jerusalem, we might be talking about the city devoted to piety and justice above all else, right? When we talk about Athens and the Athens of, let's say, hover, being edited and being inspired by a kind of Achillean virtue and this sort of having its effect on Athenian politics, one form or another, you're talking about the city devoted to the noble and the good, to a kind of intellectualization of Sparta. That's sort of what you get in the Republic, for example. And when you're talking about Rome, you're again pursuing these ends and you're sort of watching them transform under this imperial possibility being raised and then sort of thought through in these different forms. For me, Homer, sorry, Plato ends up being the person who gave these network events their greatest expression. So for me, everything comes down to a careful reading of Plato's dialogues. And every student should read and wrestle with, over the course of at least a semester, Plato's Republic. And I would consider that sort of canonical in the same way that the five books of Moses are canonical or. Or Machiavelli's Prince or the Gospels are canonical. And as a devout Platonist and worshiper of Plato, if you want to call me that, I do think that that offers a kind of crystallized lens for viewing these things. But that's not even something I would argue for very strongly as a curricular matter. I do think one needs to just dig prior to the modern moment, at least, starting with Machiavelli, and dig back to wrestle with these possibilities so as to have this kind of general dialogue. And I tend to think of the great books as various friends of mine. I fall in love with. I fell in love with Homer, the Iliad, when I taught it for the first time as a graduate student. I always liked it because. But then I really saw what was going on there. I fall in love with Machiavelli, with Shakespeare. You know, I have various books that have just been companions in my life. And I think devoting oneself to one or the other offers a way of looking into it. And if people start to have books as companions in their lives, as things they can revisit and think about as they make decisions in their life, that would be a vast improvement right over the. This current nobody reads anymore moment, right in our.
- [65:01]
Eli Karetney
In our shared devotion to. To Plato and a worshipful attitude. I have to ask one more question.
- [65:07]
Alex Brieux
Sure, sure.
- [65:08]
Eli Karetney
Take us through the allegory of the cave, I have to say, I. I've been seeing it in all over the place. Everywhere I look, I see it, you know, and I'm seeing it kind of with renewed significance in light of growing interest in some quarters in simulation theory. I see references to the allegory among spiritual seekers that I'm close with, as well as those researching anomalous phenomena. But take us through how political philosophers understand the allegory.
- [65:45]
Alex Brieux
Well, I'll take you through how I understand it, which is there's something deeply misleading about the cave. And so it starts with this image of the sun as the idea of the good. And then there's a divided line that leads from the sun to the cave, and then you're in the cave. And the thing that people don't emphasize enough is that in a way, the whole image is kind of misleading in that you've already got baked in that there is this outcome, the good, and you can just kind of rise up there. And the problem is that it's an image. And according to this image, images are the lowest level of cognition. They're somehow misleading. They can be highly distortive. So I always like to ask students in particular, what happens when you actually wake up in the cave? What are the decisions you can make right now if you just say, well, we know that you're in a cave, you kind of become aware that your opinions have been sort of constructed for you, and they've been so somewhat misleading. And you said, okay, how do I get out of this? How do we know there's only one path out? Right. That's very optimistic as a view. Right. Most caves, if you go read, there's some frightening stories about caves. Most caves involve many passageways, some that lead out into the opening, some that just leave deeper. In fact, it's possible to have a kind of cyst with no opening at all. Right. So one interpretation of the cave is maybe all there is is a cave. And that's a kind of nihilism. Right. This would be a kind of basic kind of Nietzschean view that the world is just all images. It's all created. There is no sort of true world beyond it. Right. That's one response. Another response is, well, I don't know if there's an opening or these openings seem to just lead further into darkness. I'm going to try digging my way out. Out. Right. And so you might dig your way even deeper into the earth, and that might be a kind of technological response. Right. I'm going to find my way out of this misleading thing through my own efforts. But you never get anywhere. And perhaps there are multiple ways out. And that's a kind of relativistic response. Everybody has their own light at the end of their tunnel that they emerge from. So one way I would just urge people to think about the cave is we would all like that there is some objective truth to get out of there. But you have to start with the question of we're all aware that somehow our opinions are contingent, they are somehow formed by others, and we can become aware of this. How we respond to that though, the possibilities you need to somehow lay out before you, before you make that decision about which way you're going to go. And as I've just articulated, I hope that listeners are aware that when you started articulating these possibilities, you realize, okay, if I want to think through this possibility, I should go read Twilight of the Idols by Nietzsche, which is about realizing that these idols in the cave are kind of falling apart and fictitious. If I want to think about the technological response, I might go read Descartes. And Descartes talks about there being a kind of cave or a sort of cellar with a window in it in the Discourse on the Method. And you start to realize, oh, he's exploring this possibility. Or you can take the dogmatic Platonist view, there is just a way out and you can read the Republic, or you can start thinking about in a Socratic way and realize that Glaucon only gets a pale glimpse of images of reality. And that's what Socrates says, I can't give you anything more. And that might be the kind of, of hopefulness that we have to sort of wrestle with and realize we're not going to get there. There is no greater, greater guide to thinking through this feeling of crisis when we realize we don't know the world, our opinions are misleading. There's no greater guide than these, than these works, right? And you should engage in the study of these works to, to shed light on, on your own ignorance and the possibility as you start to make these, wrestle with the sort of cave like existence of social life.
- [69:53]
Eli Karetney
And in your understanding, just as a final follow up, to what extent is this an individual effort and to what extent is this a kind of a communal effort and what that community might look like both in the moment of the kind of the prisoner's liberation from the cave and also upon ascending to the light of the sun. Then what? The return to the cave again, knowing what Plato said about how the other prisoners will Respond once we return to the cave, if we choose to return to the cave, what's the proper response in terms of community?
- [70:32]
Alex Brieux
I have a sort of idiosyncratic reading of the cave. So I think there's two people involved in this liberation. He says, what if someone were to point out to you, like, oh, look, there's these shadows and all this sort of stuff. And then he says. And he talks about this person in the third person. He, he, he. And then he says, and then if someone were to drag you out. And so there's a possibility that these are two different people. One form of community is just a kind of conversation about your moments, sort of like we're having today. Another one is a kind of compelled enlightenment. And I think these are two visions of philosophy. One is very Socratic and that's a real philosopher that we see in the dialogue. The other is this philosopher king type who gains this illumination, then descends back. It is a social effort. I think one has conversations like this. But this is not a dialogue, and this is not an image of communal enlightenment. In fact, it denies something like wholesale communal enlightenment. Right. But what it does do is create a kind of space or room for conversations among friends. And so when I think of what the sort of philosophic life or what the questioning of convention that's contained in the cave really looks like on the ground, it is something like a dialogue among friends about what sort of life we should live. And if you fast forward to the very end of the Republic to the myth of Ur, which is full of this crazy visions of the afterlife and these spindles and fate, there's this one paragraph where he kind of describes the good life as it's actually lived. I think it's the most accurate description of philosophy in all of Plato. I'm willing to sort of hang my hat on this. But it is really just thinking about with other people what the good life is and who you want to hang out with. Right. And as we all have this experience, you have conversations with people and you realize they're of kind conception of the good life is such that I'm not sure I should be this person's friend. Right. I'm not sure I should spend that much time. And so we try to be choosier with our friends when we think about this and find the communities we ought to belong belong to. So if I had one takeaway from the cave that people could sort of take seriously, it's when you're thinking about what life you should live, you're also thinking about who you ought to live, live with. Right. And who I'm going to share my, my time with. That's. That to me, is. It always comes back to is, who are my friends, who are the ones who will actually, actually question me in the way that I ought to be questioned.
- [73:13]
Eli Karetney
Meaningful conversations with friends. Thank you very much.
- [73:16]
Alex Brieux
Such as this podcast. Right. So people should listen more to you.
- [73:21]
Eli Karetney
Wonderful conversation. Thank you very much for joining me. International Horizons. Thank you, Alex.
- [73:27]
Alex Brieux
Yeah, thank you.