Chapter 1: Peter Thiel writes a libertarian escape mini-manifesto over at Cato Unbound.
Chapter 2: Mike Treder responds at IEET, with a vigorous critique of Thiel’s views.
Chapter 3: Michael Anissimov observes that Thiel and the Singularity Institute were mentioned in an entry over at ReadWriteWeb. He notes the recent dust-up over Thiel’s essay and asserts that the Singularity Institute is a non-political group, supported and staffed by people of a wide variety of political affiliations. He also makes the case that coming technological developments may render current political thinking less than relevant.
Chapter 4: Mike Treder leaves the following comment at Michael’s blog:
“The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in times of great moral crises maintain their neutrality.” – Dante Alighieri
Professing neutrality when faced with the moral repugnance of views like Peter Thiel’s is a sure ticket to a warmer climate.
Chapter 5: So this is where I come in. What follows is an annotated version of the comment I wrote in response to Mike’s comment.
Professing neutrality when faced with the moral repugnance of views like Peter Thiel’s is a sure ticket to a warmer climate.
Sheesh, if I wanted to see people get condemned to a lake of fire for all eternity for honestly trying to work out their position on complex issues, I wouldn’t typically come to this site. Maybe I’d go back to the Southern Baptist church camp in Alabama that I attended as a teenager.
But, no, come to think of, that’s not fair. The Baptists were never that judgmental.
One area where transhumanists consistently disappointment me is politics. We can talk about accelerating change and singularities and human enhancement and the possibilities are endless, but when the subject comes to politics, everyone seems to revert to one of a very small number of philosophical templates, most of them created in the 19th century or earlier. And for some reason those are inviolate.
But that’s not to say that technology has played no role in the recent evolution of political discourse. The rise of the blogosphere and sites like Daily Kos and Free Republic have established a new “accelerated” rhetorical framework for politics which now seems to be more or less universally applied. The basic assumption behind the framework is that there is Our Group and then there is the Other. Any ideas from the Other are subjected to a three-step analysis and response:
1. Hysteria / overreaction
2. Vilification
3. Condemnation
(See Kingraven, above.)
Okay, that bears some explaining. In an earlier comment, an Accelerating Future reader named Kingraven wrote:
It’s so unfortunate that an anti-immigrant, anti-welfare, anti-feminist, racist and oxymoronically gay billionaire is the sole source of funding for the SingInst.
I think the only one of those characterizations that unambiguously applies is “anti-welfare.” Thiel would likely argue the rest of those points. (I know that I would take exception to being labeled as “oxymoronically” heterosexual.) Anyway, Kingraven exemplifies point 2, above, perfectly. It is not enough to disagree with someone’s politics. The Other must be slimed with every label we can plausibly (or not) throw at him.
Okay, back to my comment:
This process has worked great for the political blogs in drawing in huge masses of eager readers, mostly the same people who think they’re up to date on current events because they watch The Colbert Report or listen to Rush Limbaugh.
Personally, I’d like to see a group such as IEET take a different approach. Maybe they could look for some kind of, oh I don’t know, Middle Way that transcends opposites? Or maybe that’s too ambitious. To use Brian’s analogy, maybe they could at least come up with a middle way that transcends Pepsi and Coke? Frankly, I would expect that sort of thing to be more in line with their world view than all this (both figurative and now literal) fire and brimstone talk.
Okay, another point of explanation: in an earlier comment, Brian Wang described the broad spectrum of political choice offered in the US as analogous to choosing between Coke and Pepsi.
As for calling on my IEET friends to be better Buddhists, that’s probably out of line. For one thing, I’m guessing they aren’t all Buddhists, and I have no idea (or concern about) what Mike Treder’s personal religious leanings or lack thereof might be. Plus I don’t know whether that idea about “transcending all pairs of opposites” is typically even applied to moral issues.
I can say that I would personally reject such a view of the world. I believe there’s a real good and a real evil and that the divide between the two can’t be transcended. So this is a potential point of agreement for Mike Treder, Kingraven, the folks who run the Baptist camp in Alabama, and yours truly. We just disagree on the particulars.
Yes, there is real evil in the world.
No, Peter Thiel is not it. (Nor is Michael Anissimov.)
More from my comment:
Forgive my reductionism, but there will always be tension between those who believe that the good of the individual is primary and that the good of the group must be subordinated to it, and those who believe that the good of the group is primary and that the good of the individual must be subordinated to it. A working system (as opposed to a lofty set of ideological propositions) will inevitably consist of a series of trade-offs between those two. Technology has the potential to ease the impact of some of these trade-offs, and even replace them with new trade-offs, but the tension will never completely go away.
Even without Michael’s super-intelligences (which will show up sooner or later) the introduction of an open-source universal assembler enabled by nanotechnology and potent narrow AI could do significantly more to liberate the world’s poor than any trickle-down economic growth model or redistributionist scheme. When technology trumps political theory, I go with the technology. The vital question: would such technology be made available through some big government push or through private efforts?
Either. Both. Neither. Take your pick. Maybe if we find a way to talk with each other about these things like reasonable people we’ll come up with a completely new model that’s better than anything we’ve tried before.
Sorry if that wrap-up strikes some of you as being a little Kum bah Yah side, but that’s just me. I have almost as much faith in the power of people working to get along with each other as my friends have in their various political philosophies.
Chapter 6: Wow, I wish I could write a blog entry here at The Speculist that commands the same kind of attention as the blog comment I wrote over at Accelerating Future. So far, that comment has been referenced in posts on:
Accelerating Future (not the original; a follow-up.)
Instapundit (Glenn originally referenced Mike’s IEET essay here.)
I’m assuming that my comments here mark the end of the Tale. But if there are additional chapters I’ll be sure and let you know.
UPDATE: Here’s the mention on Bruce Sterling’s blog that Michael references below.