By Walt Garlington, an Orthodox Christian living in Dixieland. His writings have appeared on several web sites, and he maintains a site of his own, Confiteri: A Southern Perspective.
In the last essay we wrote, we touched on some of the hubris of President Trump’s inaugural address. After reading Big Tech leader Marc Andreessen’s ‘The Techno-Optimist Manifesto’, it seems likely that he is a powerful force directing Trump’s vision for the States (especially given the reports of Andreessen meeting with Trump multiple times).
A quick comparison between the inaugural address and the Manifesto shows some striking similarities:
Trump:
So, as we liberate our nation, we will lead it to new heights of victory and success. We will not be deterred. . . . The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation, one that increases our wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons. And we will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.
Andreessen:
Techno-Optimists believe that societies, like sharks, grow or die.
We believe growth is progress – leading to vitality, expansion of life, increasing knowledge, higher well being.
We believe we are poised for an intelligence takeoff that will expand our capabilities to unimagined heights.
We believe the global population can quite easily expand to 50 billion people or more, and then far beyond that as we ultimately settle other planets.
We believe the ultimate mission of technology is to advance life both on Earth and in the stars.
Trump:
And it’s the lifeblood of a great nation. And, right now, our nation is more ambitious than any other. There’s no nation like our nation. Americans are explorers, builders, innovators, entrepreneurs and pioneers. The spirit of the frontier is written into our hearts. The call of the next great adventure resounds from within our souls. Our American ancestors turned a small group of colonies on the edge of a vast continent into a mighty republic of the most extraordinary citizens on Earth. No one comes close. Americans pushed thousands of miles through a rugged land of untamed wilderness. They crossed deserts, scaled mountains, braved untold dangers, won the Wild West, ended slavery, rescued millions from tyranny, lifted millions from poverty, harnessed electricity, split the atom, launched mankind into the heavens and put the universe of human knowledge into the palm of the human hand. If we work together, there is nothing we cannot do and no dream we cannot achieve.
Andreessen:
Economists measure technological progress as productivity growth: How much more we can produce each year with fewer inputs, fewer raw materials. Productivity growth, powered by technology, is the main driver of economic growth, wage growth, and the creation of new industries and new jobs, as people and capital are continuously freed to do more important, valuable things than in the past. Productivity growth causes prices to fall, supply to rise, and demand to expand, improving the material well being of the entire population.
We believe this is the story of the material development of our civilization; this is why we are not still living in mud huts, eking out a meager survival and waiting for nature to kill us.
We believe this is why our descendants will live in the stars.
We believe that there is no material problem – whether created by nature or by technology – that cannot be solved with more technology.
Give us a real world problem, and we can invent technology that will solve it.
We believe that out of all of these people will come scientists, technologists, artists, and visionaries beyond our wildest dreams.
This is unsettling. Mr. Andreessen makes numerous statements in his Manifesto that are anti-Christian, yet he has the ear of the president. First is his view of religion, which he views negatively in contrast to the free market, etc.:
We believe the ultimate moral defense of markets is that they divert people who otherwise would raise armies and start religions into peacefully productive pursuits.
The universalism of the Orthodox Church, where all humanity becomes one in Christ Jesus, where all divisions are transcended (Galatians 3:28), is transferred to his preferred community, the ‘church’ of technology:
We believe technology is universalist. Technology doesn’t care about your ethnicity, race, religion, national origin, gender, sexuality, political views, height, weight, hair or lack thereof. Technology is built by a virtual United Nations of talent from all over the world. Anyone with a positive attitude and a cheap laptop can contribute. Technology is the ultimate open society.
Then we have overt occult references, made with positive connotations:
We believe Artificial Intelligence is our alchemy, our Philosopher’s Stone – we are literally making sand think.
He puts his faith not in the Holy Trinity but in AI, which has shown plenty of demonic tendencies:
We believe Artificial Intelligence is best thought of as a universal problem solver. And we have a lot of problems to solve.
He accepts evolution as an article of his techno-faith:
We believe in competition, because we believe in evolution.
We believe in evolution, because we believe in life.
Expansion and growth are the key virtues of his religious system:
We believe that since human wants and needs are infinite, economic demand is infinite, and job growth can continue forever.
Combine technology and markets and you get what Nick Land has termed the techno-capital machine, the engine of perpetual material creation, growth, and abundance.
Limitations on human wants/passions are an evil to be overcome:
We believe we should place intelligence and energy in a positive feedback loop, and drive them both to infinity.
We believe we should use the feedback loop of intelligence and energy to make everything we want and need abundant.
We have given short answers to some of those objectionable beliefs above, but we ought to answer the rest as well.
Vincent Rossi (Fr Maximos in monasticism) shows the errors of the theory of evolution using the teachings of St Maximus the Confessor.
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The Southern agrarian writer, Wendell Berry of Kentucky, gives his usual touching defense of limitations on human desires and actions, although tinged slightly with pantheism:
“We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. And this has been based on the even flimsier assumption that we could know with any certainty what was good even for us. We have fulfilled the danger of this by making our personal pride and greed the standard of our behavior toward the world – to the incalculable disadvantage of the world and every living thing in it. And now, perhaps very close to too late, our great error has become clear. It is not only our own creativity – our own capacity for life – that is stifled by our arrogant assumption; the creation itself is stifled.
We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and to learn what is good for it. We must learn to cooperate in its processes, and to yield to its limits. But even more important, we must learn to acknowledge that the creation is full of mystery; we will never entirely understand it. We must abandon arrogance and stand in awe. We must recover the sense of the majesty of creation, and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For I do not doubt that it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.”
As for never-ending technological innovation, he has few kind words for it:
The paramount doctrine of the economic and technological euphoria of recent decades has been that everything depends on innovation. It was understood as desirable, and even necessary, that we should go on and on from one technological innovation to the next, which would cause the economy to “grow” and make everything better and better. This of course implied at every point a hatred of the past, of all things inherited and free. All things superseded in our progress of innovations, whatever their value might have been, were discounted as of no value at all. (Source)
As industrial technology advances and enlarges, and in the process assumes greater social, economic, and political force, it carries people away from where they belong by history, culture, deeds, association, and affection.
The latest technology is not always good for anything except to the producers of the technology. (Source)
St Basil the Great (+379) also has not a little disdain for the exaltation of the material and the denigration of the spiritual:
Examine what sort of being you are. Know your own nature, that your body is mortal but your soul is immortal, and that our life is twofold in kind. One kind is proper to the flesh, quickly passing by, while the other is akin to the soul, not admitting of circumscription. Therefore be attentive to yourself, neither remaining in mortal things as if they were eternal, nor despising eternal things as if they were passing. Look down on the flesh, for it is passing away; take care of the soul, for it is something immortal. . . . Do not fatten the body excessively and do not seek a lot of flesh. For since “the flesh lusts against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh” [Gal 5:17], and these are opposite to each other, see that you do not add to the flesh and grant great power to what is inferior. For as in the turning of scales, if you weigh down one side you truly make the opposite side lighter, so also with body and soul, the increase of one necessarily produces a decrease in the other. For when the body enjoys well-being and becomes heavy through much fleshiness, the mind is necessarily inactive and slack in its proper activity; but when the soul is in good condition and through care of its own goods is raised up toward its proper greatness, following this the state of the body withers (‘Homily on the Words “Be Attentive to Yourself”’, On the Human Condition, Nonna Harrison, translator, St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, Crestwood, NY, 2005, pgs 96-7, with help from this site).
The lessening of the earthly part of man and the strengthening of his soul allows him to find the true Infinity of intelligence and energy through his union with God’s energies:
Vision, deification and union with God are the things which offer man existential knowledge of God. Then man possesses real knowledge of God. The deifying gift of the Holy Spirit, which is a mysterious light, transforms into divine light those who have attained it and not only fills them with eternal light, “but also grants them a knowledge and a life appropriate to God” (3,1,35;CWS p.89). In this state a person possesses knowledge of God. In reply to Barlaam’s teaching that God is known by the greatest contemplators, the philosophers, and that knowledge of God transmitted “by noetic illumination…is by no means true” (2,3,78), St. Gregory Palamas declares: “God makes Himself known not only through all that is but also through what is not, through transcendence, that is, through uncreated things, and also through an eternal light that transcends all beings”. This knowledge, he says, is offered today as a kind of pledge to those who are worthy of it and which “illuminates them unendingly in the unending age”. That is just why the saints’ vision of God is true, “and he who calls it false has strayed from the divine knowledge of God” (2,3,78). Thus anyone who ignores and disregards the vision of God, which offers true knowledge, is in reality ignorant of God (Metropolitan Hierotheos of Nafpaktos).
We will point out one more fallacy of Mr. Andreessen, that an economy must run on money/the free market/self-interest and not love:
We believe markets do not require people to be perfect, or even well intentioned – which is good, because, have you met people? Adam Smith: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages.”
David Friedman points out that people only do things for other people for three reasons – love, money, or force. Love doesn’t scale, so the economy can only run on money or force. The force experiment has been run and found wanting. Let’s stick with money.
We believe markets, to quote Nicholas Stern, are how we take care of people we don’t know.
The saints of the Orthodox Church show us precisely the opposite. Because of their union with God, made possible by their love for God and their neighbor, they are endowed with the Grace of the Almighty God to produce an abundance of goods out of scarcity. We see this throughout Church history: with Elisha and the multiplying oil (II Kings 4:1-7); the Lord Jesus Himself, Who empowers the saints, Who fed the 5,000 with five loaves and two fish (St Matthew 14); St Euthymius the Great of Palestine who multiplied his monastery’s stores of food to feed pilgrims, etc.
We are entering upon a time of year when many major Celtic saints of the Orthodox Church will be honored: St Brigid of Kildare (1 Feb), St David of Wales (1 March), St Patrick of Ireland (17 March), St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, England (20 March). So it is in that direction that we turn for one more example of the abundance that comes from self-denial. In Cogitosus’s recounting of the life of St Brigid, we find the following miracles of multiplication:
On one occasion she was moved by pity to give the pork that she was cooking in the cauldron for guests to a dog that came fawning and begging. But when the pork was removed from the cauldron and was divided up for the guests, it was found to be complete, as if nothing had been taken from it. . . .
Once when bishops were coming together as her guests she had nothing with which to feed them. But her need was richly met in the usual way by the manifold grace of God. She milked a cow three times in a single day, contrary to custom. And on this marvelous occasion she gained from the one cow what she would normally have expected to get from three of the best cows (‘The Life of St. Brigit the Virgin by Cogitosus’, Celtic Spirituality, Oliver Davis, translator, Paulist Press, New York, 1999, pgs 124-5).
The ultra-materialist ideology of the Tech Bros, such as Marc Andreessen, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, et al, who are all clinging closely to Donald Trump, is at war with the Orthodox experience of the deification of man and the cosmos in and through the Divine-human, theanthropic, Body of Christ – the Orthodox Church. Mr. Trump is off to a good start in some important ways. However, if his goals align with those of Mr. Andreessen and the rest of his techno-religion practitioners, and there is ample reason to believe this is the case, then in the end all will have been for naught.
We stand instead for the Orthodox way of St Brigid.
