Upcoming Work and Recommendations
Hello everyone, I hope you are doing well, and that you are managing to cultivate the virtue of hope in the middle of our civilizational meltdown.
I have been so astonished and gratified by the early response to Limits and Hope’s introductory essay, and must tell you: I could not have imagined a more auspicious beginning. I am grateful to all of you, and hope to become worthy of your trust.
With this, my first subscriber community thread, I hope to set the stage as to what you can expect to find in this space in the coming weeks and months.
As a general note, I’m afraid, however, that there may be a good bit more despair than hope. But remember: “hope is despair overcome.” And remember, too: we don’t choose the epoch we live in, so we might as well try to look for beauty in it … here, and not in the metaverse!
Upcoming work
The schedule of essays may vary, owing to the very fast unfolding of events, particularly in Europe, as I’m convinced that earthshaking news will come our way in the next few months. The number of countries being riven by very significant protests, just in the European Union, is large and growing. It includes the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Hungary, Bulgaria, Ireland and Poland. In non-EU Europe, and in Central Asia, protests have been seen in Albania, Macedonia, Moldova and Uzbekistan. In South America, large movements of anger have erupted in Ecuador, Peru, Argentina, Panama. In Africa, the same phenomena occur in South Africa, Guinea, Mozambique, Malawi, Madagascar, as well as, in South Asia, in Bangladesh, the Philippines, Malaysia, and of course Sri Lanka, the only one the conniving mainstream media has so far dared to notice. The Middle East is not exempt as well, with Lebanon facing extreme economic hardship with long lines forming in front of bakeries, and the Parliament in Iraq stormed by protesters twice in a week. In other words, brace for impact!
I fear, in particular, what will happen in the first cold days of November when Russian gas will stop flowing in to European households. It may well be that Europeans wake up, in winter, to the fact that the paltry martial pleasures procured by a proxy war to keep Ukraine alive — a war waged by their decadent elites on behalf of their grandiose American masters, and under the banner of The Empire of Goodness — are maybe not worth the cost.
While I’m working on my first long essay, expect, in the coming two weeks, an essay on health based upon a 2014 German dystopian novel, which has more to tell us about the sinister world we have been ushered into in the past two-and-a-half years than many ex-post facto commentaries.
The first long essay that will follow will be inspired by the early writings of Christopher Lasch and the analyses of Giovanni Arrighi on The Long Twentieth Century. More precisely, I will attempt to pin down the very remote origins of wokeness, which necessitates, I believe, a look back at the Progressive era. I hope to establish a connection between wokeness and the transformation of the United States, from a Democracy of small owners (as observed by Tocqueville) into an Empire. When the U.S. moved away from an exceptionalism premised on the idea of self-government and began, instead, to perceive itself as an Empire, there were deep ramifications to the elite class, which started, paradoxically, to mimic the European elites their forebears had fled. The result, as imperial proclivities have become ever more strident as the American epoch approaches its end, is this self-referential and power-hungry Empire of Goodness we are now seeing — a desperate rule based on empty symbols, strident abstraction, and virtue signaling that NS Lyons’s “Intersectional Imperialism and the Woke Cold War” and “Tyler Cowen and the Woke Cold War” exposs with his usual incisive brilliance. (these are the only pieces, to my knowledge, that analyzes the connections between foreign policy, diplomacy and wokeness).
This first long essay will be followed by the first part of a series of essays on the genealogy of neoliberalism, with an emphasis on its technological messianism — or, to paraphrase Paul Kingsnorth, neoliberalism’s insane project of attempting to recreate the Garden of Eden through technological means. This first part will focus on Walter Lippmann, the subject of a 2019 book by French philosopher Barbara Stiegler: Il faut s’adapter, Essai sur un nouvel impératif politique (You Must Adapt, Essay on a new Political Imperative). The second part of this essay will focus on the birth of the Welfare State, inspired by François Ewald’s magnus opus, L’Etat providence, an essential book in understanding the totalitarian potentialities of the Social State and our dystopian present[i].
This series of essay will be followed by an introduction to the prolific, exhilarating and, alas, untranslated work of Philippe Muray, assuredly France’s most talented contemporary moralist. Among many genial inventions, Muray invented a new conceptual character — Homo Festivus — to embody the inhabitant of our maternal, de-symbolized and “full-of-itself epoch,” in which “la fête” rules supreme.
Also on the agenda: I can’t wait to plunge into the theological origins of transhumanism, with an exploration of Teilhard de Chardin’s Noosphere, which is the concept the Jesuit theologian coined to seal the marriage of theology and cybernetics. This will be perfectly complemented with an essay on Gnosticism inspired by Christopher Lasch’s five-part Notes on Gnosticism.
I am also preparing a series of interviews with heterodox and free-thinking French and American writers and thinkers, which I will interject between my own essays.
Recommendations
Michéa in English
A lot of references will be made in Limits and Hope to Jean-Claude Michéa, one of my heroes. To that end, I have compiled a series of links to articles, interviews, and books (whole or in part), which exist in translation. A very endearing thinker from the very rich French tradition of libertarian socialism, Michéa enjoys a special status in the French intellectual landscape, being the most eloquent heir of a French socialist libertarian tradition centered on self-government and small-scale communities. Only one of his books, the 2009 The Realm of Lesser Evil has been published in print in English, a real shame for such an important and joyful thinker. But I have found several texts translated and published online. My personal favorite of the available texts is The School of Ignorance and its Modern Conditions, a text from 1999, which is a very good companion reading for Patrick Deneen’s chapter entitled Liberalism and Liberal Arts in his magnus opus Why Liberalism Failed, as well as Christopher Lasch’s chapters on education in The Culture of Narcissism and The Revolt of the Elites.
Also available are large extracts of Michéa’s earliest book, Orwell, Anarchiste Tory (Orwell, Tory Anarchist), published in 1995, and his 2017 book Capital: Our Enemy, Notes on the End of Tranquil Times, in which Michéa develops one of the most eloquent cases against the complete obsolescence of the stale opposition between the left and the right to grasp what kind of world we are living in. On the day the book came out in France, Le Monde, then owned by “progressive” oligarchs Mathieu Pigasse, Pierre Bergé, and Xavier Niel, gave it no less than four pages of profoundly intellectually dishonest coverage. Obviously, Michéa must have got something right in this brilliant essay, which makes it all the more urgent to read.
Finally, also worth reading, are Michéa’s 2019 interview in Dissent, which I cited and quoted in my guest essay on NS Lyons’s The Upheaval, an interview of Kévin Boucaud-Victoire, who authored an outstanding introduction — alas untranslated — to the thought of Michéa, entitled Mystère Michéa, as well as a very honest article by Michael Behrent on Michéa as the emblem of France Anti Liberal’s Left.
The “Technocritique” Corner
I would like to recommend a fascinating look at the anthropologist Anya Bernstein (by Yasha Levine and Evgenia Kovda, writing jointly on Levine’s Substack) on the 19th century Russian Orthodox Christian Nikolai Fyodorov, considered the founding figure of Russian cosmism, a Russian precursor to transhumanism.
The interview also contains very substantial developments about the American transhumanist movement. I don’t have much to say at present about Russian cosmism, though I can see myself falling down a rabbit hole as I continue to explore it. And who knows, perhaps I discover secret affinities between it and Teilhard’s noosphere.
News from Georges Bernanos
I would like to draw your attention to a relatively recent republication, of George Bernanos’ justly renowned 1947 conference lectures, gathered together under the title Liberty, The Last Essays.
The thought of Bernanos will appear, again and again, in Limits and Hope. In the meantime, here’s one of my favorite quotes from his, about the gigantic illusion that is Progress:
“Their idea — one might say the only idea they still have — is that the world goes its way like a locomotive moving rapidly along its tracks, and as soon as one asks them to change anything from what is to what might be, they speak of turning back. While we’re supposing, let’s suppose that tomorrow radiations which have been sent all over the globe by the factories of disintegration have modified these peoples’ vital equilibrium and the secretions of their glands so profoundly as to make monsters of them; they will adjust themselves very well to their condition as monsters, they will resign themselves to being born deformed, twisted or covered with a thick coat of hair like wild pigs, while telling themselves once more that they are not opposed to progress. The word “progress” will be the last one to escape their lips when the planet flies off into space in a million pieces. Their submission to progress is equaled only by their submission to the state, and it has absolutely the same character. Progress dispenses them from turning aside in a single step from the path followed by everybody else. The state dispenses them a little more each day from the responsibility of having to manage their own lives, while waiting for the next day — which has already arrived for millions of people, yes, right now — when it will exempt them from thinking.”
Progress Still Roars from Beyond its Grave
Mary Harrington, “Peter Thiel on the Dangers of Progress” (Unherd).
Finally, a very interesting analysis about one of Progress’s most histrionic and interesting cheerleaders, Peter Thiel, by one of its most ferocious critics, Mary Harrington.
One passage, in particular, struck me as a perfect example of how deep Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere has colonized recent thinking about Christianity:
“Those among us temperamentally sceptical of never-ending progress and growth may be shifting nervously in our seats by this point. Thiel seems unfazed by the idea that technology may infringe on what’s “natural”. How do we prevent runaway tech changes dragging us into some monstrously inhuman dystopia? Can we retain our humanity, I ask Thiel, in the context of just how transformative technology can be?
He seems to view this as a largely academic question, and not really in keeping with his understanding of Christian civilisation as fundamentally oriented toward the future. “I think of Christianity as deeply historical. Some sense of a certain type of progress of history is a deep part of Christianity.” And from this perspective, the notion that there exists an unchanging human nature doesn’t really fit with the Christian outlook, but belongs — as he puts it — more “in the classical than the Christian tradition”.
“The word ‘nature’ does not occur once in the Old Testament,” he tells me, while “the concept of ‘nature’ as something that’s eternal and unchanging” isn’t a Christian one either. “It seems to me that the Christian concepts are more things like grace or original sin.” From this perspective, Thiel argues, the problem with transhumanism isn’t that it seeks to remake humanity, but that it isn’t ambitious enough in this regard: “the Christian critique of transhumanism should be that it’s not radical enough, because it’s only seeking to transform our bodies and not our souls.” It appears, in other words, that while Thiel is unflinchingly realistic about what’s immediately achievable, he doesn’t see any given or self-evident limits to what we could set our sights on.”
And, as usual, Mary Harrington gives us plenty of food for thought in her conclusion, steeped as it is in a sense of tragedy (whose lack condemns so much contemporary social and cultural commentary to irrelevancy):
“And as I’ve argued, the alternative to such figures may not be democracy but governance by a decentralised post-democratic swarm (analogous, perhaps, to what Thiel calls “Chinese Communist AI”). Given these options, we may yet conclude that the political return of human lords and princes — however unnervingly untrammelled their power, or remorselessly tech-optimist their worldview — is far from the worst option currently on the table. The premodern world of aristocratic patronage was far from being a cultural desert, an achievement that contrasts sharply with the militantly anti-aesthetic (and anti-human) character of post-democratic swarm politics. If I’m right about the prognosis for liberal democracy in the digital age, the available options for our future may be culturally vibrant human-led neo-feudalism, or aggressively anti-cultural swarm governance. And in this case, even those of us who mourn the passing of the liberal world may yet find ourselves, however ambivalently, on the side of Caesar.”
[i] F. Ewald, L’Etat providence, Paris, Grasset, 1986. An abridged version has been published in English language, entitled The Birth of Solidarity: The History of the French Welfare State (Durham & London, Duke Univ. Press, 2020), transl. T. Scott Johnson, Foreword M. Cooper.
Excellent
Teilhard de Chardin’s works were prohibited by the Vatican. They contain a lot of heretical teachings, notably the heresy of modernism. He disobeyed his superiors’ orders to stop. He is the favorite of many New Age types.