Post-Heroic, Late Imperial
CrowdSource 6.24.2024
Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements, and national debates that have piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: Babies, empires, and the Mind.
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The Baby Bust
The political consequences of the looming depopulation of the industrialized world has inspired fiery debates — including this week.
A profile of Elon Musk reports that the Tesla founder supports pro-natalism groups, consistent with his 2022 claim that “a collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces, by far.”
The profile calls predictions of a demographic collapse a “fringe theory.” But population decline is an observed fact, as (among many others) Emma Green reported in 2017 and Anna Louie Sussman in 2019.
Lyman Stone, a pro-natalist demographer quoted in the Musk profile, responded with a link to his own pro-natalist manifesto.
Also this week, sometime adviser to heads of state Edward Luttwak suggests that falling birthrates have created a “post-heroic” age, in which families are unwilling to send their children to die in war. (He laments this.)
“No one should be having children right now unless they think about it in a global sense,” said philosopher Martha Nussbaum last month on Wisdom of Crowds, in an interview that earned global attention. Nussbaum’s view — influenced in large part by the 1968 book, The Population Bomb — was widely held until recently.
For an influential nightmare vision of a baby bust future, watch Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 film, Children of Men.
Are We the Soviets?
An Italian friend of Wisdom of Crowds once quipped, “The United States is a Soviet Union that works.” But what if the United States is actually like the original Soviet Union, i.e., the one that famously did not work? That’s historian Niall Ferguson’s thesis in controversial essay last week.
Ferguson writes: “It was a common liberal worry during the Cold War that we might end up becoming as ruthless, secretive, and unaccountable as the Soviets because of the exigencies of the nuclear arms race. Little did anyone suspect that we would end up becoming as degenerate as the Soviets, and tacitly give up on winning the cold war now underway.”
Conservative writer Jonah Goldberg thinks that comparison is wrong: “The problems of the late Soviet Union would have only been compounded if it returned to its founding principles. But we would go a long way to solving the problems facing ‘late Soviet America’ if we reasserted ours.”
Noah Smith also disagrees with Ferguson’s Soviet comparison: “You didn’t see Americans risking life and limb to try to move to the Soviet Union in 1985. And yet in 2024 you do see tens of thousands of Chinese people risking life and limb to get into America for the chance of a better life.”
Perhaps a more accurate take is Samuel Goldman’s: The USA has more in common with South America than Europe. And maybe the best analogy is between present-day United States and Paraguay under provisional president Félix Paiva of the Liberal Party — a respite between two periods of turmoil.
Can’t Get You Out of My Head
Does consciousness exist? Is the mind something different than the brain? Touching on these questions, an interesting observation by novelist Aaron Gwyn: “Watched an interview with Sam Harris a few days ago. He starts the conversation by repudiating Theism because he believes it rests on metaphysical rather than rational pillars. Then he goes on to talk about the supremacy of ‘consciousness’ using purely metaphysical terms.”
Sam Harris is a neuroscientist and podcaster, one of the so-called New Atheists of the early 2000s, who campaigned against belief in God, the soul, and every other metaphysical idea.
Literature scholar Tyler Austin Harper muses on Gwyn’s comment: “This is true in general of the entire rationalist set plus the tech (and especially AI) crowd it overlaps with. It’s metaphysics all the way down, saturated with a deep streak of mysticism they don’t even realize is mystical.”
Writer Sean Illing adds: “There are two kinds of people in the world: those who are honest about their metaphysical commitments and those who have to call their metaphysical commitments something else in order to feel smart and serious.”
Gwyn, Harper, and Illing make good points, but all imply that metaphysical beliefs are irrational or non-rational. That’s not necessarily the case.
Either way, there’s David Chalmer’s still-relevant “Facing Up to the Hard Problem of Consciousness,” which argues that the existence of the mind is a matter of common sense, not metaphysics.
From the Crowd
Derek Hudson, on the podcast episode “Phil Klay on Morality and War”:
Great episode. However, I’m surprised that the question of whether America would remain true to its high moral ideals in an existential war, is still up for debate. American nuclear deterrence policy explicitly states that it won’t.
Nuclear deterrence relies on America’s commitment to wage a vicious, violent, and potentially civilization ending nuclear war if pushed too far. Tens, if not hundreds, of millions of civilians are an acceptable casualty count should the US be pushed into a corner. As the saying goes, this is not a threat, it is a promise.
World order has balanced on this depressingly necessary oath of barbarism since 1945. Not even the long period of peace in the post Cold War decades was enough to roll back this wicked pledge. “We will do horrific things if provoked, so do not provoke us” is an assertion echoed by every nuclear armed nation on earth and is the perverse foundation that modern society is welded to.
Damir is simply right on this point. American barbarism is not off the table, and, unfortunately, rightly so.
See you next week!
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Aaron Gwyn doesn’t actually tell us what the interview with Sam Harris was, but I think it’s probably this one: https://www.richroll.com/podcast/sam-harris-838/
If so, I don’t think Gwyn’s representation of Harris is perfectly accurate. It’s true that Sam Harris repudiates theism, on fairly standard atheist grounds; he rejects the idea of taking anything on faith, and doesn’t believe that the Bible or the Quran is credible as a holy book. But Harris doesn’t actually cite the existence of metaphysical claims as his reason for not believing, and he’s clear that, when it comes to the idea of having a “spiritual relationship with that which we can’t understand” he is “just locat[ing] it in a different spot than classically religious people would locate it.” So when Tyler Austin Harper accuses Sam Harris of being one of those people with “a deep streak of mysticism they don’t even realize is mystical,” I don’t think that’s entirely fair. Harris seems to understand perfectly well that he has a mystical streak.
As for metaphysics, it’s true that Harris claims at 1:23:26 to be “not talking about the metaphysics.” It’s also true that Harris seems to think of metaphysics, as a subject, as being mostly a place where people make wild claims that aren’t credible. Specifically: “I don't follow people like Deepak Chopra into, you know, making metaphysical claims about, you know, how what you experience on acid or in meditation tells you a lot about cosmology or about what happened before the Big Bang, et cetera.” I, too, find Deepak Chopra non-credible, and can understand why Harris would want to distance himself from that sort of thing.
Later on, at 2:03:14, Harris states that he is “agnostic with respect to the metaphysics [of consciousness].” He then goes on into a lot of speculation that is, indeed, clearly metaphysical, but I think it’s fair to take those claims as existing under that caveat of agnosticism. I don’t think Harris is trying to say that all of metaphysics is off limits, merely that it’s a subject with a lot of uncertainty in it that we ought to be cautious of.
Wondering what you mean by metaphysics doesn't need to be non-rational? I couldn't have less respect nor more contempt for Sam Harris. He's just a narcissist fraud. But I whole heartedly agree, as I would understand/define it, with what I think you're saying some of the rebuttals rest on, which is that a description of the whole of existence can only be story time. It can take in more or fewer of the facts about the universe we're pretty confident in - say an agnostic physicist versus an orthodox Abrahamic theologian, respectively - but at the end of the day it's all stories. No one will ever be able to give a fact based answer to why existence. I'm wondering if I'm misunderstanding what you mean and am mentally rebutting a non sequitur?