The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West

by Alexander C. Karp

And for nations that hold themselves to a far higher moral standard than their adversaries when it comes to the use of force, even technical parity with an enemy is insufficient. A weapons system in the hands of an ethical society, and one rightly wary of its use, will act as an effective deterrent only if it is far more powerful than the capability of an adversary who would not hesitate to kill the innocent.

The challenge is that the ascendant engineering elite in Silicon Valley that is most capable of building the artificial intelligence systems that will be the deterrent of this century is also most ambivalent about working for the U.S. military. An entire generation of software engineers, capable of building the next generation of AI weaponry, has turned its back on the nation-state, disinterested in the messiness and moral complexity of geopolitics. While pockets of support for defense work have emerged in recent years, the vast majority of money and talent continues to stream toward the consumer.

The allure of pacifism, and a potential retreat from deterrence, is that it relieves us of the need to navigate among the difficult and imperfect trade-offs that the world presents. The broader question we face is not whether a new generation of increasingly autonomous weapons incorporating artificial intelligence will be built. It is who will build them and for what purpose.

Google, of course, along with any number of Silicon Valley’s largest technology enterprises, owes its existence in significant part to the educational culture, as well as the legal protections and capital markets, of the United States. The personal computer itself, as well as the internet, was the result of military funding and support in the 1960s from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a division of the U.S. Department of Defense. In her book The Entrepreneurial State, Mariana Mazzucato, an economics professor at University College London, calls out this collective amnesia in the Valley, noting that the U.S. military’s role has “been forgotten” by this era’s software titans, who have rewritten history in order to place themselves at its center and exclude and diminish the role of government in fostering and sustaining innovation. And in the absence of any larger project for which to fight, many simply turned elsewhere, not out of some moral failing, but because of the transformation of our most hallowed educational institutions into administrative caretakers, not vessels of culture.

William McNeill, for example, a historian who began teaching at the University of Chicago in 1947, argued that the construction of a unified canon of texts and narratives, if not mythologies, gave students “a sense of common citizenship and participation in a community of reason, a belief in careers open to talent, and a faith in a truth susceptible to enlargement and improvement generation after generation.” The virtue of a core curriculum situated around the Western tradition was that it facilitated and indeed made possible the construction of a national identity in the United States from a fractured and disparate set of cultural experiences—a

The substantive triumph of Orientalism was its exposing to a broad audience the extent to which the telling of history, the act of summation and synthesis into narrative from disparate strands of detail and fact, was not itself a neutral, disinterested act, but rather an exercise of power in the world. As Said himself explained in an afterword to the book, written in 1994, “The construction of identity is bound up with the disposition of power and powerlessness in each society, and is therefore anything but mere academic woolgathering.”

The critics were many, and came from every angle. For one, Said seemed less interested in documenting the similar systems of “power-knowledge” that had been developed in the East to justify the subjugation of various underclasses within the subaltern world itself. As Mishra has observed, “The book displayed no awareness of the vast archive of Asian, African, and Latin-American thought that had preceded it, including discourses devised by non-Western élites—such as the Brahminical theory of caste in India—to make their dominance seem natural and legitimate.”

It is also a reminder of how swiftly the culture moves, given that a claim such as McNeill’s would almost certainly require cancellation today. The species of historian who dared to make normative claims about culture, including the specific merits or lack thereof with respect to particular cultures, was essentially rendered extinct, or at least jobless, by the end of the twentieth century. Even modest attempts to point to the differences in economic output and military power between Europe and its former empires over the past five centuries or so have been pushed to the fringe of the cultural conversation.

The thin conception of belonging to the American community consisted of a respect for the rights of others and a broad commitment to neoliberal economic policies of free trade and the power of the market. The thicker conception of belonging required a story of what the American project has been, is, and will be—what it means to participate in this wild and rich experiment in building a republic. In this country and many others, membership in the community of the nation is at risk of being reduced to something narrow and incomplete, the loose sense of affiliation that comes from sharing a language or popular culture, for example, from entertainment to sports to fashion.

It was an era of innovation in Silicon Valley that was driven by a mistrust of national governments, as well as frustration with their delay in adopting progressive reforms at home and their grand experiments and military misadventures on the world stage. This was not the technological revolution of Vannevar Bush or J. Robert Oppenheimer, who through much of their lives saw the purpose of technology as extending and enabling the American project. The individual, and later the consumer more specifically, would emerge as the principal object of this new industry’s desire and attention.

In an essay on human aggression published in 1947, Parsons observed that many men “will inevitably feel they have been unjustly treated, because there is in fact much injustice, much of which is very deeply rooted in the nature of the society, and because many are disposed to be paranoid and see more injustice than actually exists.” And he went further. The feeling of being “unjustly treated,” Parsons noted, is “not only a balm to one’s sense of resentment, it is an alibi for failure.”

The casual and unrelenting pressure to revert to the mean, to do what has been done before, to eliminate the wrong types of risks from a business at precisely the wrong times, and to avoid confrontation is everywhere and often tempting.

In 1841, Ralph Waldo Emerson published “Self-Reliance,” his enduring broadside against religious dogmatism, in which he railed against individual weakness in the face of institutional pressure. “For nonconformity,” he reminds us, “the world whips you with its displeasure.” Emerson made clear that the desire to conform not merely to those around you but to one’s prior views on a subject can be just as limiting and indeed hobbling.

It is a willingness to respond to the world as it is, not as we wish it might be, that has been a principal reason that the latest generation of Silicon Valley behemoths have come as far as they have.

But why must we always defer to the wisdom of the crowd when it comes to allocating scarce capital in a market economy? We seem to have unintentionally deprived ourselves of the opportunity to engage in a critical discussion about the businesses and endeavors that ought to exist, not merely the ventures that could.

The tragedy is that it has often been far easier and more lucrative for Silicon Valley to serve the consumer than the public, and certainly less risky.

The world looks the other way when confronted with the princely sums paid to those in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street, as well as the hedge fund managers and traders who allocate capital in our market economy. But an uproar arises when a retired navy admiral, one whose efforts provided us with the most significant development in naval warfare of the century, reveals his vanity and lack of judgment when dealing with a defense contractor. Had he broken the rules? Perhaps. But there are costs as well to such a strict and unwavering adherence to such protocols, and limits to the comfort that a narrow procedural justice can provide. Our desire for purity is understandable. We cling to the hope that the most noble and pious among us will also have the ambition to seek power. But history tells us that the opposite is far more often the case.[*]

This is, perhaps, the modern left’s most glaring strategic mistake. It claims to be committed to curbing the excesses of the market, but its unwillingness to reckon with and take seriously the good that can come from a national culture or shared identity has only enabled the very excesses it purports to oppose.

A singular emphasis on the acts and thoughts of lone individuals, in assessing a sweep of human affairs that was also driven by economic and political forces, among others, was undoubtedly misplaced. Many may also be unable to look past the reference to men at the exclusion of women. But why are we incapable of disavowing the sexism and parochial sentiment without jettisoning any sense of the heroic as well? Our shift away, as a culture, from this type of thinking, from veneration of leaders, is both a symptom and a cause of our current condition. We have grown weary and skeptical of leadership itself; the heroic has for most gone the way of the mythological—relics of a past that we tell ourselves are irredeemably rooted in a history of domination and conquest.

The essential failure of the contemporary left has been to deprive itself of the opportunity to talk about national identity—an identity divorced from blood-and-soil conceptions of peoplehood. The political left, in both Europe and the United States, neutered itself decades ago, preventing its advocates from having a forceful and forthright conversation about national identity at all—an

In 1882, Ernest Renan, a French philosopher who was the descendant of fishermen, delivered a speech at the Sorbonne in Paris that was titled “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?” (“What Is a Nation?”). He was among the first writers to attempt to distinguish the concept of a nation from a more limited or narrow sense of ethnic or racial identity, noting the “graver mistake” occurs when “race is confused with nation.”

The challenge is that a commitment to participating in the imagined community of the nation, to some degree of forgiveness for the sins and betrayal of one’s neighbor, to a belief in the prospect of a greater and richer future together than would be possible alone, requires a faith and some form of membership in a community. Without such belonging, there is nothing for which to fight, nothing to defend, and nothing to work toward. A commitment to capitalism and the rights of the individual, however ardent, will never be sufficient; it is too thin and meager, too narrow, to sustain the human soul and psyche.

Our persistent unease with broader forms of collective identity must be set aside. To abandon the hope of unity, which itself requires delineation, is to abandon any real chance of survival over the long and certainly very long term. The future belongs to those who, rather than hide behind an often hollow claim of accommodating all views, fight for something singular and new.

He concluded that “a large ownership stake by descendants of a founding family” alone was insufficient to affect a company’s value on the market; it was rather firms that maintained a founder at the helm that reliably outperformed over time.

Our challenge, both in the United States and in the West more broadly, will be to harness and channel the creative energies of this new founding generation, these technical iconoclasts, into serving something more than their individual interests.