Technological Stagnation

Thiel, Locklin, Yarvin, Kaczynski, and Strauss

I was writing a preface to this on my back and forth reflections on technological optimism / pessimism but it turned out to be its own essay…so you can look forward to that soon.

I. Peter Thiel and Scott Locklin on Scientific Stagnation

What follows are some introductory thoughts on scientific stagnation as well as some of the psychological / institutional incentives that may have played a role in bringing it about.

Peter Thiel was recently asked to speak about his first book The Diversity Myth (written in 1995). He begins, then, by discussing universities. When we think of what is wrong with universities, our minds immediately seize on the humanities. But Thiel insists that the diversity crazy humanities discussion is a red herring that captures our attention and prevents us from seeing other difficulties.

In Thiel’s words,

“Are we still living in an accelerating world in which science is fundamentally healthy and critical, with diversity of thought? It shouldn’t have required covid to be able to ask these questions, to notice that “science” has somehow gotten to be a very, very diseased thing. Most imagine a scientist to be an independent researcher who thinks for himself, and this figure may still appear in children’s books, but in practice the occupation mostly entails the enforcement of a fixed set of dogmas.”

Rather than going for the weak spot of universities and trying to win a sweet but ultimately ineffectual tactical victory, Thiel goes for the jugular, where universities think that they are strongest. He discusses technological stagnation in more detail elsewhere, and we can also turn to Scott Locklin for some evidence.

Locklin has long argued that the US has innovated very little since 1970. AI is all over the news with apocalyptic claims being made, but he reminds us that AI was supposed to have destroyed the world almost 10 years ago. Remember nanotechnology? Where are the breakthroughs there? Other examples:

• Military aerospace technology: The SR-71, out in 1961, is still the fastest manned plane.

• Commercial aerospace technology has regressed—remember the Concorde?

• Space travel? :’(

• Phones are better, but back in the day, if you were far from civilization, you couldn’t find a payphone. Now if you are far from civilization, you don’t have a signal… (and the phones do more than anything else to trick us into thinking that everything is getting more advanced.)

• There is no cure for cancer. What core medical breakthroughs have there been since antibiotics?

We might find ourselves more affected or enframed by the greater distribution or ubiquity of technology but the technology itself hasn’t changed all that much.

Of course, to deny that any progress has been made is a mistake. Nevertheless, the stagnation claim is put into stark relief if you compare the Faustian life-altering shifts that occured from say 1909-1959. As Locklin says,

“The rate of change between 1959 and 1909 is nothing short of spectacular. In that 50 years, humanity invented jet aircraft, supersonic flight, fuel-injected internal-combustion engines, the atomic bomb, the hydrogen bomb, space flight, gas warfare, nuclear power, the tank, antibiotics, the polio vaccine, radio; and these are just a few items off the top of my head. You might try to assert that this was a particularly good era for technological progress, but the era between 1859 and 1909 was a similar explosion in creativity and progress, as was the 50 years before that, at the dawn of the Industrial revolution.”

II. Curtis Yarvin and Ted Kaczynski on the Motive of the Scientist

Why is this happening? Why is stagnation occurring? This is not easy to answer. We sketch the start of an answer with the help Curtis Yarvin and then move into a deeper explanation with Leo Strauss’s account of modernity.

In an essay on progressivism called “Theory of Pervasive Error,” Among many other things, Yarvin tries to explain how scientific institutions might become corrupted in order to offer a metaphor for how a pervasive error such as progressivism could seep into a political regime.

He outlines how the desire to matter is a powerful emotion that is often in conflict with our desire to understand things as they are. And when we find ourselves not mattering enough, we seek shelter from those with power who do matter, and so we become more important by extension.

Climate scientists bring the problem to light. Would one wield more power, would one feel more important, if he could coerce millions or even billions of people into consuming less energy? The people involved might hate it, but if they buy into what the ruling class is doing, they become important. They are now morally beautiful and can signify their moral beauty to others just by not driving to work.

As Yarvin puts it,

“Who studies climate science, yet is not professionally loyal to institutions that will grow larger and stronger if the public worries more about climate change? Nobody, more or less. Hm.”

And he even proposes that if climate change is really a problem to worry about, we are probably better off putting our money and muscle into scientific innovation to find our way out. Which leads us to one possible or partial explanation of technological stagnation: a lot of people get to matter a lot more if we don’t innovate our way out of the problem.

Ted Kaczynski certainly wouldn’t agree with Yarvin about innovation solving climate change, but he would agree with respect to the motivation of the scientists. In Industrial Society and Its Future, Kaczynski finds it doubtful that most scientists are driven by “curiosity” or a “desire to benefit humanity.” Rather he finds it more plausible that they are principally interested in the fulfillment they get through exerting effort towards a goal. He includes money, status, or being part of a mass movement as other possible motives. Which is to say, in his view,

“…science marches on blindly, without regard to the real welfare of the human race or to any other standard, obedient only to the psychological needs of the scientists and of the of the government officials and corporation executives who provide the funds for research.”

To put this one more way—and perhaps in the most precise and beautiful way— consider Leo Strauss on the character of the sophist from his Natural Right and History:

“The sophist, in contradistinction to the philosopher, is not set in motion and kept in motion by the sting of the awareness of the fundamental difference between conviction or belief and genuine insight. But this is clearly too general, for unconcern with the truth about the whole is not a preserve of the sophist. The sophist is a man who is unconcerned with the truth, or does not love wisdom, although he knows better than most other men that wisdom or science is the highest excellence of man. Being aware of the unique character of wisdom, he knows that the honor deriving from wisdom is the highest honor. He is concerned with wisdom, not for its own sake, not because he hates the lie in the soul more than anything else, but for the sake of the honor or the prestige that attends wisdom.” (pg 116)

(for analysis of the quotation and the problem of motive consider this earlier essay)

III. Leo Strauss on Modernity

In his famous essay, “What is Political Philosophy,” Strauss offers a striking account of the goals of the modern political philosophers:

“[Machiavelli’s] lowering of the [moral] standards is meant to lead to a higher probability of actualization of that scheme which is constructed in accordance with the lowered standards. Thus, the dependence on chance is reduced: chance will be conquered. (pg 41)

Now, this is certainly not Strauss’s last word on the matter or his most comprehensive statement. But this account does serve to help us see how much is at stake in the technological project. Unlike classical or Biblical accounts, the moderns hope to bring about or actualize Heaven on earth through their own unassisted power. Technology is part of what provides the resource for the hopes that humans can bring about the best regime without having to pray for it.

It may well be the case that the hope that such great things could be actualized that forms part of the basis for why the moderns might also think that they can refute divine revelation or make people so comfortable that they forget about God and no longer need to say, “Give us this day, our daily bread.” In other words, rather than offering a theoretical refutation of revelation, the moderns attempted to offer a refutation through practice.

As one recent scholar puts this position:

“modern rationalism depends on having political or social hope. Thus, to conclude with our particular situation, we moderns become so distraught when things do not go our way, when they do not “progress” or when they “regress,” not only because things have not gone our way, which is only human, but also, on Strauss’s understanding, because there is no basis for our way besides our hope that things will go our way. For us, political setbacks are existential crises, since the only remedy we have for the deficiency of subjective certainty is the hope first kindled by Machiavelli. When the hope dims, we lose confidence in reason itself.”

So when we fail to bring about the promised utopia we worry that reason lacks a proper grounding. And Locklin proposes that once technological progress falters, we place more hope in social progress. As we have seen, the measures taken to try to concretely increase social progress have also assisted in furthering the stagnation difficulty (i.e., affirmative action, HR departments, etc).