Belief in Context
A big part of why I was so confident in my decision to quit my job and pursue my startup idea last summer was that I believed that I would be successful because I belived that my reverence would be sensed and appreciated by the broader technology community. After reading Paul Woodruff’s Reverence: Restoring a Forgotten Virtue over the winter, I realized that this was a virtue I had been haboring myself all my life — but I simply never had a word for it. I began to attribute this virtue to all my successes thus far in life, and I came to belive that so long as I embodied it, I would be able channeling some lost spirit of the West, some forgotten understanding of liberty.
This coincided with another belief: I also earnestly believed in the idea that technological progress is social progress, because I had convinced myself that reverence for life and technology are the same thing. Taken together, these instilled in me what amounted to near-religious compulsion to embark on the project.
Tragically, it was destined for failure, because the world doesn’t work like that. In fact, I ended up violating another cardinal virtue in the midst of chasing these ambitions: Prudence.
Losing Prudence
Reverence and prudence are not mutually exclusive, but in this case the former eclipsed the latter not unlike an equinox. By now, I’ve come to realize this confusion was primarily due to the stage I was at in my life — on in which I did not recognize who I was.
I had reached a point where I had forgotten to have self-respect, because I had neglected the maintenance of my own character. In turn, this made me vulnerable to base desires and imprudent behaviors, such as embarking on a very uncharacteristic journey out west. The irony here—that the essence of liberalism is freedom from such base desires—is not lost on me.
As that world came falling down, as I realized I needed to do some serious soul-searching to find out who I really am, and what I truly belive, I began to realize the fault in all my decisions until then. The main one, as I’ve written about before, was that I had for a long time failed to reflect on my experiences through writing, leading myself to delude myself into believing all sorts of things.
In cherishing a perhaps overly subtle interpretation of liberalism, the core thing I had ended up beliving in was a neoliberal perspective of culture—one in which a no-holds-barred approach to decision-making is appropriate—which I deluded myself into validating such nonsensical professional pursuits.
The other, ironically, was the idea that technological progress is human progress. It is not. Technological progress is not a proxy for human progress, full stop. In believing such myths, we spoil the ground on which liberalism is rooted. This is a topic for a much longer blog post, but this liberalism (as the founders and philosophers intended, as explored in Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed) is rooted in an acceptance that progress can only be achieved tangentially in the pursuit of liberation from one’s base desires.
This is the context in we must orient ourselves if we are to consider reverence a precursor for liberalism.
Reverent Redemption
I think it is possible to both accept that the human condition is itself irredeemable (meaning unable to fully liberate itself from base desires) and that certain virtues are needed for our collective psychic survival – but this sort of thinking is simply too complex for most modern communications media. It requires a subtlety of thought that is difficult to disclose in modern times, at least in comparison to how the ancients arrived at such understandings.
Perhaps this because the ways in which we internally relate to the world comprise functions of being of which we can only be dimly aware. This is the stuff of spirits, and this is the kind of thing we are not as comfortable speaking openly about. Nonetheless, to appreciate these limitations in the context of that which we cannot understand—our spiritual nature—is to be liberated from the trappings of the false liberal vision we now find ourselves stuck within. The question that reverence poses to us is how to best maintain this virtue in our own lives such that we can reify some of what was the original intention.
The rub is that it is entirely absent from social media, and so cannot be contained within this digital sphere. Because the culture of digital communications technologies were formed in the context of conquest–a twisted dream of capturing users’ attention not unlike the capturing of slaves–we find ourselves unable to operate virtuously within this digital architecture. It is within this vacuum of digital morals that we must consider our own compulsion toward signaling our virtues.
Because we find ourselves within a digital world that more closely resembles the neoliberal dystopia of modern reality, are compelled to signal our virtues in order to align ourselves in the most accurate tribes. Culture is primarily composed of a mode of being that offloads the emotional labor of truly virtuous to the market.
Sometimes we believe that we are able to signal our virtues through the market – but when we are not able to do that, we find ourselves needlessly signaling to ourselves, through social media, the virtues which we so desperately seek to possess. In this way we devolve into caricatures of the human condition, reducing the rich soup of existence to the thin gruel which fails to nourish our souls.
It may be only with reverence that we can be motivated by or even appreciate our sublime digital realities. If it is true that, in the words of John Gray, “nothing is more mundane than to claim technological progress has outpaced moral progress,” then it is from this vantage point that I at least set out. The idea here is to in some sense channel the myth of the brujo (as referred to in Robert Pirsig’s Lila: An Inquiry into Morals) to cultivate and deliver the wisdom of some self-imposed outcast, in hopes of restoring something that seems closer to what had been the plan. Perhaps there is some value to the whole deal. Who can ever know. Well, at least we can feel.