On “The Technological Republic” by Karp and Zamiska

A review essay of an important new book.

I.

The spirit that animates The Technological Republic, by Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska,¹ is manifestly noble. It is a moral and political exhortation to business leaders, especially those in the technology sector, to otherwise private men, to eschew “the trivial and ephemeral,” the “narrow consumer products” of online advertising, shopping, and social media, and to accept rather their obligation, their duty, their public responsibility to concern themselves with the political (xiii). Their concern for the political requires rebuilding America’s technological republic after a long hollowing out both of it and of the American mind, and to do so in a spirit of entrepreneurship and innovation. This book is, therefore, and by its authors’ own lights, a “political treatise,” an admittedly “unusual” work for such men (xv). But nonetheless they have written it, moved as they are by the obvious and pervasive narrowness and shallowness that surrounds them and by a quiet call to leadership, patriotism, and even the heroic that must reside within them—and which they now, with this book, seek to replicate in their fellow leaders and, I suspect, the nation as a whole. In its unflinching willingness to speak in lofty language without irony or affectation, despite generations, if not longer, of intellectual elites sneering at such terms, the exhortation this book contains justly deserves our praise.

At the core of Karp and Zamiska’s argument is an insight into the primacy of the political. Business leaders fancy themselves cosmopolitans, free from the parochial, even retrograde concerns with which state and nation would constrain them. In this, they remind one a bit of Xenophon’s caricature of a certain type of human being who fails to recognize that he depends on the political community at least for the security of his body, if not also to fulfill other, less obvious hopes and desires.² Such individuals fail to realize that it is the political conditions of the regimes in which they and their businesses reside that make their way of life possible. It is, in other words, necessary for them and for us to attend to the political. But one should do so not simply by attending to justice, understood here as the egalitarianism of liberal democracy, but by looking “beyond a firm and uncontroversial commitment to liberalism and its values” for some shared purpose that might bind us together and guide our communal activity in the long term, perhaps even for another thousand years (xv). Nothing less than the future of the West and of the American project hangs in the balance. So, too, our minds. It is part and parcel of the book’s noble ambition that it responds to a hollow mind by rebuilding the regime.

II.

Machiavelli advised that a regime’s fullest lifespan—really, anything’s fullest lifespan—is best achieved by returning it to its beginnings; for its later success implies that there must have been some good in it at the outset. It could be said that Karp and Zamiska’s call to rebuild our technological republic constitutes just such an attempt to return the American regime back to its beginnings in a spirit of Machiavellian rejuvenation. But the call to rebuild the technological republic rests on the premise that America always was, from the outset, such a regime. We do not hold this premise to be self-evident. Is the regime to which the authors are called, and would call us in turn, America’s Urstaat? Or is it a more recent modification? Does the book call for rejuvenation or regime change—and if the latter, does it do so knowingly or not?

The argument that America was always a technological republic, a regime in which the state and private enterprise collaborate in technological innovation with an eye to the common good, both in defense and otherwise, rests on some unconvincing examples. The authors invoke the august names of such Founders as Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, and Adams, as well as the example of Roosevelt the elder, in defense of their vision of combining state power and technological innovation (Chapter 1). Among the specific evidence the authors provide in making their case is Madison’s comparative dissections of the American vs. European weasel (see 5), a humorously ironic example—intentionally so, perhaps? Whatever the case, a longstanding American penchant for tinkering, be it with electricity or with weasels, does not a technological republic make. One suspects, therefore, that the place of science and technology with respect to government has not always been the same or even roughly similar. It was not the men of 1776 but Eisenhower who coined the term “military-industrial complex.” And DARPA have been impossible at the Founding, when even the notion of a national bank was notoriously controversial.

Lurking in the background here is the question of whether technological innovation should be, or even could be, centralized in the state. Bacon’s New Atlantis envisions a highly centralized and secretive regime committed to technological innovation, so centralized indeed as to stretch credulity: the unpredictability of innovation and the magnitude of labor involved require, as Locke and Descartes recognized, that scientific inquiry occupy a decentralized place in markets, in corporate entities, in universities. Descartes, in particular, seemed to recognize the possible independence of such corporate entities from the state and, consequently, their potentially global status.³ In response, Karp and Zamiska seek to bring corporations down from the heavens and back into political communities, in a collaborative spirit. But it is difficult to see this half-Baconian, half-Cartesian vision as part of the American Constitution, where the patent clause in Article I’s enumeration of powers requires Congress to secure the strictly private rights of those innovating in the arts and sciences to their innovations, making no further obligation upon them to collaborate with the state, however lucrative that might be. The Constitution seems to assign innovation a more Lockean or market-oriented place in the regime.

What the authors encourage seems, therefore, to be a modification of, rather than a return to, the original American regime; more precisely, it is a return to a post-industrial modification. And this understanding of the regime was advocated not by the Founders but by later figures, most powerfully by Ernst Jünger and, under his influence, Martin Heidegger. Jünger laid out his vision nearly a century ago in seminal form in his essay “Total Mobilization,” which cast America as the victor of the First World War thanks to its capacity for what he termed total mobilization, that is, for organizing its workforce and industry in service of the military. The regime Jünger describes in his essay retains the flexibility of liberal democracy’s workforce, while having in addition a highly centralized or top-down organization that seems anathema to the reluctant federalism of the Constitution. A sign that Karp and Zamiska’s liberal egalitarianism does come with serious limits, as indeed it must if it is to be properly ennobled, is that they have sparingly little to say of the republicanism of the technological republic, very little to say, that is, of the ideal form of organizing the people, and much more to say rather of the technologists and their ideal form of organization, what they call the improvisational start-up.

I should mention a third alternative to rejuvenation or modification, namely, that the Founders were pressed to adopt the posture of reluctant federalism, that they planted the seeds for the expansion of the federal government’s powers at the expense of states’ rights—with the necessary and proper clause, for example. Such ironic posturing would have been necessary under the pressures of the Anti-Federalists, just as it was with slavery. In any case, the flexibility of the Constitution to such an expansion of federal powers has played no small role in America’s rise on the global stage. Circumstances, then, if not also great political foresight, forced the modification that Karp and Zamiska rightly note we have in recent years rashly and largely abandoned.

It is difficult, then, to argue that this is not the path we must take going forward; we are driven down this path by certain necessities, both political and historical, and so we must come to terms the risks that attend it. And the authors are alive to the risks. Among the most striking passages in the book is their invocation of Oppenheimer, a chillingly frank example for what the future of AI may hold for us. They offer consolations to skeptics that their worries are “premature” (25), though I imagine those worriers might respond that when destruction is on the line a “mature” worry likely comes all too late. Occasionally, the authors console with the language of deterrence, perhaps having in mind the failure of doomsday predictions of the nuclear annihilation of humanity to come to true, though that risk came with real and shocking footage of mushroom clouds to chill us into humility (consider 28). Does AI offer a comparably visceral image of its destructive potential? Or would its doomsday be quieter, more incipient, less visible?

III.

So far, I have attempted to clarify the authors’ vision of the regime and to pose some of the questions that arise when taking their ennobling patriotism seriously. Yet we cannot stop here, for this book contains not just the historical argument about our technological republic, considered above, but an investigation into the principles that could serve as the basis of any technological republic, including our own. This is not obvious at first glance. Because the historical argument informs the book’s structure, the investigation into principles is scattered throughout the work. But this is, in fact, the most remarkable feature of the book and the one that makes it most deserving of careful reading. For they recognize that it is not enough to give an historical account, an account in reference to beginnings, an account of how we became what we are, but that one must also provide a principled account, an account in reference to the essential structure of human life, specifically, to the heterogeneity of ends that give it its peculiar problems.

They are aware, for example, that, for all their attempts to ennoble the regime, there is nevertheless an abiding tension between the just and the noble and good. As noted, they do not attempt to overcome liberalism and its highly egalitarian understanding of justice; they rather seek to preserve it. Yet they are sensitive to the fact that justice so understood, perhaps even however understood, is not in simple harmony with the other, higher ends men pursue. They rather spend one quarter of the book, Part II, on how liberalism, or an especially insidious form of it, is to blame for “the hollowing out of the American mind.” Such an analysis is required, if we are to return to our origins and take up the “rebuilding” to which the last part of the book, Part IV, calls us. By the final pages of the book, the authors have grown bold enough to distill our error into a powerful proposition: “the right was pursued while the good was abandoned” (216).

It is to the good life especially that the authors ultimately and correctly attend. It is the theme from which they depart in the Preface and to which they return: “The vital yet messy questions of what constitutes a good life, what collective endeavors society should pursue, and what a shared and national identity can make possible” (xiv), the “more thorny questions,” beyond those addressed by our “ethical universalism,” questions “about what constitutes a life well lived, the boundaries and content of national identity, and the human search for meaning” (213). “What virtues,” they ask, “what conception of the noble or indeed the exemplary life, are we willing to advance and defend in the place of the ones that have been jettisoned in the name of inclusivity?” (215) The tension between the just, on the one hand, and the noble or the good, on the other, remains ever in the background of this book.

But the pursuit of the noble comes with risks of its own. When seeking a higher purpose or end, it is very easy to fall into “blood-and-soil conceptions of peoplehood” (198). The authors reject this grounding of nobility whole cloth. But about that perennial, superhuman source of unity of purpose, and hence of noble self-sacrifice, namely, religion, faith, or piety, the authors are rather of two minds. There is, for example, a whole chapter with the title “Piety and its Price” (Chapter 16), whose tenor is echoed in the following chapter when Karp and Zamiska describe the United States as “a nation in which membership means something more than a shallow appeal to ethnic or religious identity” (193, emphasis added). Here blood-and-soil and religion are placed on equal footing. Nevertheless, they recognize the need for “mythology” and “shared narratives” (199). In one remarkable passage, they go so far as to recognize the necessity of something they believe imaginary, and they do so in exceedingly plain language:

A commitment to participating in the imagined community of the nation, to some degree of forgiveness for the sins and betrayal of one’s neighbor, to a belief in the prospect of a greater and richer future together than would be possible alone, requires a faith and some form of membership in a community. (200, emphasis added)

Some readers might fault the authors for speaking of faith so strongly and weakly at once, but this would, I think, be a mistake. Serious concern with issues of such a magnitude as they raise requires an honest look within to one’s genuine opinions, hopes, and longings, and the contradictions and tensions we find among them. To describe the political community as “imagined” while calling its basis a “faith” is simply to speak in language all serious thinkers have to some extent been forced to use since Machiavelli criticized all ideal regimes as imaginary, including that governed by God. Most authors attempt to hide such crises of conscience from their readers, whether knowingly out of shame or unknowingly out of a lack of self-awareness. Karp and Zamiska, however, recognize that overcoming the incipient nihilism of the age—for that is, they rightly claim, the challenge we collectively face (see 214)—requires describing what our hopes actually are, yet with candor about the obstacles we inevitably encounter in our attempt to take them seriously and satisfy them.

IV.

In short, The Technological Republic recognizes the current crisis and responds by calling for, and beginning to engage in, a two-fold investigation into the genealogy of that crisis and into the principles of a properly ennobling political life. It is to the authors’ credit that their position of power and comfort does not lull them into a state of complacency, that they rather do what all serious modern men have had to do once they have observed how base modern motives are and how effective we have become in satisfying them—how impressively successful we are at being shallow and narrow, to borrow the authors’ language. For centuries now modern man has been called to recover the exalted language of pre-modern man and then to justify it. But if this is the true calling, then the authors’ vision of a revival of the technological republic of the early-to-mid-20^th-Century will likely not answer our deepest longings. The core question the authors need to face, but do not in this book, is whether we could ever reconcile the building that they call for in our common endeavors with the tensions they exhibit in considering our principles. The perennial problems we face in reconciling the good, the noble, the just, and the holy—are they not, as problems for action in general, problems also for the particular act of building? Is it even possible to be an anti-ideological technologist? Is not rather the case that ideology is the queen of technologies? To respond to or overcome these difficulties would require situating progressive natural science, with its emphasis on material and efficient causes, within a stable nexus of the basic problems and alternatives—or, to use more fashionable language, the trade-offs—human beings necessarily face, always and everywhere, when considering the heterogeneity of our ends—the just and the unjust, the noble and the base, the good and the bad, and so on. Such a stable nexus might perhaps rise to being a metaphysics; it would, at a minimum, be a philosophic anthropology. At any rate, its stability would resist the nihilism at the heart of natural science, while its articulation of problems and alternatives would possess the flexibility to accommodate the concerns that the innovations of researchers and builders inevitably raise. It is to the authors’ great credit that their exhortation reminds us of and calls us to this all-important task.

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Further Reading:

I’ve written some longer essays on these subjects, most relevantly “Modern Science and Classical Liberalism” and “Nature, Education, and Freedom.” See, also, the “Overture” to Defending Socrates.

1. Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West (Crown Currency). This essay is based on advanced, uncorrected proofs. Page numbers and quotes may therefore vary.

2. See Xenophon, Memorabilia II.1, especially 13–15.

3. I discussed this briefly in my recent post on H1B visas.