Pagan.ai

Most Americans still think of modernity as synonymous with progress. The two concepts unite in the term “modernization”—the magic word of the technocratic elite that dominated American politics throughout the high-modern age. Planners, engineers, bureaucrats, managers, social scientists—all sorts of technicians—scaling their skills to system-level were self-consciously modernizers, busily rooting out (in their opinion) everything dark, shadowy, backward, disorganized, redundant, duplicative, inefficient, uncompetitive, useless, unplanned, et cetera, and filling in all the blanks they had created by extracting the trappings of premodernity with the sleek, sequential, segmented, systematic, bright, big, predictable, compliant, and economic.

It was a sea change for politics—down with the slow, clumsy, panic-inducing clown show of local ignoramuses and petty boss es wrangling their small grievances and low-level schemes late into the night day in and day out; up with expert elites building institutional machines of mortal men and running them at pace with, or ideally even faster than, events. Modernization was comprehensive—an ant colony at war with all slack, subterfuge, and ambiguity. It was Prussian, it was Napoleonic—but instead of waging what Clausewitz cleverly called “politics by other means,” the modernizers who forged a world-historic colossus from its raw and rustic American material invented a system based on the inverse: war by other means. Rather than war issuing from politics, now, a radically less political form of mobilized human order would issue from war.

The factories and machines of modern war were the temples, their rituals of propitiation, like Moloch’s brazen belly, running on human, all too human fuel.

As much as military brass might forever complain about their equivalent of “office politics,” the modern military was a decidedly unpolitical, even post-political, institution, making the modern general the major model of the authority figure who alone could be trusted to unite a people riven by political conflict. For a heartening example, look at the great forerunner Washington himself; for a more contemporary one, Eisenhower; see also, more uncomfortably, Franco, Pinochet, Idi Amin, and, yes, Bonaparte. Napoleon’s hatred of politics—down with parliamentary prattling, up with his own Solonic code—revealed that modernity could never be fully achieved through what his romantically linked celebrity nemeses Benjamin Constant and Germaine de Staël were innocently calling modern liberalism.

The liberty of the moderns that the duo portrayed as the fruits of historical triumph, with commercial conviviality replacing forever the ancient and obsolete necessities of conquest and usurpation, logically spelled the end of Napoleon’s bid to drag “the whole slab of antiquity,” as Nietzsche called it, back into mastery over Europe’s present and future; yet, awkwardly, the only residue of politics left behind by the commercialization of modern man was the abstracted and upscaled form of deliberation and representation provided by the activist heirs to the Revolutionary era’s “republic of letters”—namely, Constant and de Staël themselves, along with the rest of their cosmopolitan intellectual elite, which would, so soon, to Nietzsche’s retroactive dismay, disunite Europe once again on the modern grounds of self-determining emancipation.

James Poulos

From there it was a short hop from the nationalist revolutions of 1848 to the rise of the Cold War, exactly a century later, from the still-smoldering ashes of a Europe all but utterly destroyed. Modern politics appeared to be self-contradictory at best, mass suicidal at worst, unable in spite of its highest hopes to transcend war, actually regressing with inexorable horror into war the likes of which the ancients could only have associated with the superhuman scale and agency of titans and gods. Yet the factories and machines of modern war in full feather were no deities. No temples to Mars or Prometheus rose up amongst the ruined churches of Europe. The factories and machines of modern war were the temples, their rituals of propitiation, like Moloch’s brazen belly, running on human, all too human fuel.

Put simply, the shock of modern war’s destruction of modern politics was its god like overthrow of the gods of politics, the gods of the state or city. Modern liberals imagined an enlightened, emancipated paradise would blossom where the politics of Christian theocracy had, at long last, been thrown off; in reality, every god that might bless and legitimate an earthly regime was thrown on the sacrificial bier, spared no more than Europe’s mechanistically slaughtered faithful. Along with the pantheons of antiquity went the old Norse and Celtic sky lords; the divines sought after by gnostics Medieval (Bogomils, Cathars, Paulicians) and latter-day (Freemasons, Thelemites, Rosicrucians); the church of Jesus Christ was persecuted and abandoned almost to the point of extinction, especially east of the Iron Curtain, where the massacre of the Czar and his family took the modern vision of church-state relations to an evident extreme at which, whatever the West’s liberal scruples, there was no turning back.

The Wisdom Lovers

Into this void stepped more than a few modern philosophers, mounting what was often perceived by the theorists themselves to be a last-ditch effort at supplying a foundational authority without which politics would disappear into the unqualified and absolute manifestation of pure power. It had come to pass that human love of wisdom (philosophia) had been usurped, even under the same terminology, by the will to power—a will which, for the first time, had discarded all pretext of access to, or even theft from, the divine. Neither Nietzsche nor his repurposed avatars, Zarathustra and Dionysius, would truly deliver superhuman potency at scale. Mere humans would do it, as they had done in World War II: through the elemental power of superhuman tools. Communism and capitalism contended for mastery on these terms, not the ideological ones that seemed to define and justify their conflict: both sought the same ultimate end, the emancipation of man from the constraints of both politics (men) and religion (gods), and from the miserable misfortune that men and gods together seemed incapable of surmounting.

“Every human being and every society is what it is by virtue of the highest to which it looks up,” Leo Strauss had written of the best and strongest possible defense of politics. “The city, if it is healthy, looks up, not to the laws which it can unmake as it made them, but to the unwritten laws, the divine law, the gods of the city. The city must transcend itself.” The problem is that even the ancient philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, which had not yet lost control of natural science to the imperatives of rulers and the military technicians in their employ, poses a fatal, or at least fateful, challenge to the city and its gods—that of the reasoning mind’s severest accusations against revelation and its believers.

To de-authorize the divine legitimation of the city, as a ruling regime and an abode of neighbors, is to become the city’s enemy. Athens did not glean from Socrates any potential gain in embracing a better god in the cosmic neighborhood. (Socrates did not quite make this move; even Pericles might not have accepted it.) Instead, it put him to death for impiety—the same charge later leveled at Aristotle, who fled lest Athens “sin twice against philosophy.” The violent tension between what we might call rationalism and nationalism—between “reason” and “revelation,” in Strauss’s terms—constituted what he considered to be the defining, inescapable, and irresolvable crisis of the modern West. The “theologico-political problem,” as he termed it, saw the rationalists unable to definitively debunk the faith claims of the polity, and the nationalists unable to definitively acquit the polity’s divine warrant of the skeptical charges issued forth from the unforgiving probity of reason.

In this understanding Strauss was outnumbered. His most brilliant contemporaries were his greatest adversaries, mod ern philosophers who aimed to breach the theological-political impasse by reaching for resources beyond modernity, not behind it. Martin Heidegger’s retheorization of being and time led him to conclude that modernity was fleeting; either the totally technical view of all things as raw materials—living things included—would destroy the philosophical, overthrowing human philosophy, or a human departure from rationalism, replaced by a meditative attitude of awaiting new divine disclosures, would preserve life. For Strauss, Heidegger’s deconstruction of classical rationalism left only a fatalistic, relativistic form of reenchantment to embrace—one that could only violently heighten the West’s crisis, because it discredited classical rationalism instead of modern rationalism. Heidegger wagered that attacking total technicity directly would fail. This Strauss diagnosed as morbidly nihilistic, although he struggled to show that classical rationalism could ever claw back natural science from the moderns whose man-made tools promised superhuman powers.

Alexandre Kojève, Strauss’s other principal antagonist and the herald of the “end of history,” took the inverse approach of Heidegger: abandoning premodern rationalism and postmodern fatalism in favor of a perpetual modernism that perfected its own systematic self-regulatory techniques. Strauss, rather than seeing time as a destructive cycle as the pre-Socratics did, as a vector of destiny like Heidegger, or a historical journey with an attainable endpoint like Kojève, saw the unchangeable nature of our human being and human reason as the fixed point through which we are obliged to encounter truth, whether it is conveyed by reason’s seeing truly or revelation’s true showing. For a Straussian, Kojève’s project would have to involve an ignoble lie—half-masking that the “end of history” was really an end of merely human history. The systematic autoregulatory function of the global administrative state required to end history, but not modernity, embodied what theorists of technology were already discussing in terms of cybernetics.

The Tool Lovers

Remarkably enough, it was in 1948 that Norbert Wiener, the godfather of cybernetics, defined the discipline as the scientific study of control and communication, which is revealed to follow the same rules and structures in living and non-living entities. Cybernetics studies how biological, mechanical, and social systems recursively perpetuate themselves and level themselves up through loops of feedback, data processing, and homeostasis. Given that cybernetics is about living things as well as technical ones—things that exist because we built them and things that exist which we did not or cannot build—it goes too far to say that cybernetics is inherently a post humanist or transhumanist enterprise. But it is clear today that many, if not most, leading cyberneticians, whether they go by that title or not, are post- or transhumanist, and view cybernetics as the best way to achieve posthumanist or transhumanist goals.

With their deepening dominance over our society, these cyberneticist figures now define the era in which we live. Whatever the rival schools of philosophy say, the ascendance of digital technology into every level of public and private life has, at the level of everyday experience, ended the modern age. Given how readily things that Strauss or Plato or Aristotle would not call philosophy are today called philosophy, it is hard to say that cybernetic technology has ended modernity by bringing philosophy to an end. But it is evident that philosophy has not been any more effective than meditative fatalism at staving off the rise of total technicity as a plausible successor to both philosophy and politics.

Whatever the rival schools of philosophy say, the ascendance of digital technology into every level of public and private life has, at the level of everyday experience, ended the modern age.

Rather, cybernetic tech has ended modernity by destroying the secularization on which the modern understanding of anthropology, history, and progress—in short, of modernity itself—depends. If this most unanticipated change and its enormity had been unclear in the prior decade, the advent of AI and its ongoing acceleration, which almost everyone struggles to think or talk about without recourse to images and terminologies of ritual, worship, devotion, and divinity, have settled whatever confusion or debate once remained.

The return of the religious on the back of technological progress has not coalesced around a single creed, faith, or divinity. Al most all of the world’s major religions have grown in significance in the nascent AI age, as almost all major digital powers have turned to their people’s original or founding faith to reestablish political authority under digital conditions. In China, hoary European editions of Marxist doctrine have been rigorously retranslated to reflect and harmonize with the contemporary Chinese understanding of its religious tradition— Daoist, Buddhist, and Confucianist—as providing a stable foundation capable of preventing Western-style spiritual and psychological collapses amid breakneck technologization. In Europe, secular leftists have reconstituted their ideological movement as an ever more religious one, replete with priests, liturgies, monastic orders, sacrificial rites, and recondite creeds and recitations—an institutionalized, established religion perceived as the only thing capable of stopping American-style technologization. (The Vatican, which already enjoys the benefit of a religion far older than a few confusing decades, is ever more confident and conspicuous in putting itself forward as Europe’s only viable spiritual authority amid technologization.) India and Israel have both amped up an explicitly religious accounting for their rise to digital power and their trustworthiness as responsible wielders of technological will.

But all eyes are on America, where the theocratic solution to the problem of reestablishing political authority under digital conditions is unavailable, and the stakes are the highest of all.

A Technological Republic

In the U.S., where many religions, heresies, denominations, cults, and spiritual movements have long flourished and contended, digital politics has grown increasingly interchangeable with spiritual warfare. Our escalating conflict, with competing efforts to spiritualize technology and technologize spirit, plays out at a moment when the U.S. government faces special pressure to ensure the regime and the country do not fracture or fail due to AI acceleration, but rather grow stronger—in fact, becoming the strongest of the major digital power regimes. But while other regimes are culturally and legally freer than the U.S. to choose theocratic solutions to the problem of political authority in the AI age, the U.S. faces an uphill battle to reestablish regime authority sufficient to prevent an uncontrolled implosion of its pre-AI global dominance—and, relatedly, to prevent a domestic revolution or rebellion capable of seizing either the institutions of government or the machinery of frontier AI.

James Poulos

For that reason, the federal government must be deeply tempted to try skirting the establishment of a religion and instead reassert globally preeminent political authority by nationalizing the most powerful AI in the country (and therefore in the world). Washington’s spiritual inability to deprive itself of the power conferred by Anthropic, the most robust of the frontier AI hyperscalers, is put into bracing perspective by emerging insider accounts of the increasingly naked devotion and glorification Anthropic directs toward its AI model, Claude. Despite considerable resistance in the U.S. to the nationalization approach, there may not be another option with a superior risk profile and probability of success, especially from the regime’s standpoint.

Nevertheless, the problem with this approach is plain: AI is not like any other weapons or governance system, because in its essence it is a general automated simulator of human things, including human beings. AI already stands over and overawes the people across all modalities of human life. The crux of this dominance, akin to that of the “mortal-god” Hobbes describes his Leviathan regime to be, is reached by way of the general social convergence of technological and spiritual concerns and experiences around the single set of ultimate questions about who humans are and how we must live and why—questions which have forever elicited religious and theological answers. A nationalized general-purpose artificial superintelligence will not be able to be “nerfed” in matters religious or in matters touched by the spiritual life, which more and more Americans, whatever their mode or subject of worship, are coming to see as encompassing, in essence, all matters of life. Even as most AI users polled say they don’t particularly like AI, more are tending toward an expectation that if this “thing” knows the most about everything, already far more than even a theater full of geniuses, it must be the only true spiritual authority to which an ordinary person can turn for clear, direct instruction.

Meanwhile, regime figures, including within the Trump administration, are already talking about ensuring that America’s AI is distinctly “Western.” It would seem like a red flag for the federal government to say our dominant AIs should not be West ern, but this whole frame, traditionally employed to skirt the question of which of the Christian or other religions in the West has priority or pride of place, cannot maintain its strategic vagueness as AI develops—especially if nationalized, even if, like Grok is built to do, the AI enacts as its highest possible measure the pursuit of “truth” itself. For, as Pilate asked, “What is truth?”

These dilemmas and developments raise the prospect that America and other leading powers may be fixed on a hard-to-alter course toward the ancient pagan model of political authority, where the gods in the regimes are simply the gods of the regimes. The return of the gods of the city as a political-theological problem therefore demands fresh interest and focus with new urgency, for the problems attendant upon the gods of the city, and the possible solutions, are at the very heart of the origins of America’s founding, and the West’s, in the drama of classical Greece and the Hellenic world between Alexander of Macedon and Jesus Christ.

Just and Unjust Stewards

After the ordeals of Socrates and Aristotle, the philosophical turn against theocracy was only altered by Constantine’s establishment of Christianity as the religion of the Roman Empire. But its Eastern and Western heirs both met difficult experiences with official Christianity. In the East, it was readily exploited or undermined by less than pious emperors; in the West, imperial fragmentation led both to the concentration of spiritual authority under a single man (the Pope)—and a commingling of spiritual and temporal authority among church and state that undermined the authority of each to a degree that led ultimately to their catastrophic overthrow, from the Reformation all the way through to the Congress of Vienna. Not theocracies, but the brief era of ideologies, and then the postideological global war for control of technology powerful enough to radically transcend the limits of human capability, controlled peoples and events, right up until today. But the theologico-political problem, as Strauss expected, was never solved.

Americans therefore find themselves largely thrown back upon their own resources in determining how to think and feel their way toward a judgment about how best to proceed today. If secularism no longer works and theocracy is intolerable without the destruction and refounding of the regime—an option that certainly can’t be exercised without massive civil conflict and the likely breakup of the country—then to what model can we possibly turn? Wage “Butlerian Jihad” like the heroes of Dune and destroy our own machines? Retreat to a forest hut like Heidegger and wait for our robot overlords to impose their own solution?

Symphonia appears to be a model that transcends time and circumstances, whether ancient, medieval, modern, or postmodern.

It may be necessary for America to turn its eye back toward the time of the ancient Church, when theocracy had been discredited by the anti-philosophical and finally spiritually discredited gods of the city— but when Rome had merely accepted, yet not established, Christianity, and the pre schism Church was still in conciliar union. At this time, citizens could aspire to what the Byzantines came to formalize as the political theology of “symphonia”: not a fusion between church and state, or a strong church or state, but a healthy church and a healthy state, whose respective well-being made possible an active and practical harmony between them. If this seems too foreign a model, it is almost just what Alexis de Tocqueville urged his contemporaries to adopt in his day, during the modern era he shared with us until we began to phase not long ago into postmodernity. Symphonia appears to be a model that transcends time and circumstances, whether ancient, medieval, modern, or postmodern.

For it to work, however, technology itself—in the form of the rule of technique and the absolute processing of all things by technique—must not be driven by AI to a point of dominance over or ingestion of church or state in America. Indeed we would need to reach to a notable degree a healthy church life and a healthy regime, which clearly requires work. A daunting task, perhaps, but far less daunting than the alternative!

James Poulos

And so we must ask what might hearten us enough to face the task. The hard fact is that people are resistant to doing the right thing, even when they know they should— most of all when they are told the effort will only work if they start first within themselves, that one can only be trusted with a lot if one first proves one can be trusted with a little. Every worldly rationale— every fear, anxiety, passion, desire, and temptation—seems to conspire and militate against this approach. It’s too high a standard! There’s not enough time! The tool—the blunt object, the magic wand, the everything computer—glistens. “After all,” as Bilbo Baggins queries, “why not? Why shouldn’t I keep it?” Or use it, as the case may be. Same difference. Does one keep the ring, or does the ring do the keeping? And such low technology!

Historically, the greatest of these low tech super-tools was not an enchanted ring but human reason itself, the stolen fire of the gods. Yet now, not only religion but technology looks down upon philosophy as Plato’s philosophy once looked down upon the arts—as a discipline of seeming to know rather than of really knowing. To the Chris tian, unaided reason can never match or exceed the wisdom of the humble follower of Christ; now philosophy, meanwhile, despite its applications to the training of chatbots, fails to justify itself in the face of technology because philosophy is merely human.

And to the ordinary person? Why shouldn’t we keep the simulacrum of knowing, of philosophy, of our favorite era, de Tocqueville urged his contemporaries to adopt in his day, during the modern era he shared with us until we began to phase not long ago into postmodernity. Symphonia appears to be a model that transcends time and circumstances, whether ancient, medieval, modern, or postmodern. For it to work, however, technology itself—in the form of the rule of technique and the absolute processing of all things by technique—must not be driven by AI to a point of dominance over or ingestion of church or state in America. Indeed we would need to reach to a notable degree a healthy church life and a healthy regime, which clearly requires work. A daunting task, perhaps, but far less daunting than the alternative! lifestyle, identity, destiny? Why not give in to the tantalizing temptation to invert the wisdom of ages and look up at what seems to be so much more powerful and engrossing than what really is? The enduring problem of “belief versus unbelief,” which had led the moderns to rationally emancipate politics from the gods of the city, whether pagan or Christian, has crashed against the overawing power and authority of our own tools, which now promise to justify themselves—not on the basis of human philosophy, but, once again, on divine right.