rescue me, O Leviathan

Mary Harrington:

Bukele’s approach adumbrates a postliberal future of leaders who will operate in parallel thought-worlds: both the analytic, policy-based register of long-form literacy, whose expressive mode is logic, and the enchanted, monarchic register of secondary orality, whose expressive achievement is friendship. For a ruler or small elite able to code-switch, there need be no choice between the king and the swarm. Such a leader, rather than be subsumed by the swarm, will serve as its head or formal cause.

As AI agents improve to the point of shrinking the administrative class, we may find that what actually has the power to destroy the twentieth-century technocracy is not free markets and personal responsibility, or even anons posting memes, but developments in AI. If so, classical liberals may be disappointed to discover that just as “civil discourse” is not coming back, what comes after the deep state will not be a return to small and limited republican government. It is more likely to be big government mediated by big data, crunched by machine agents in a now almost entirely digital swarm. Should this outcome be realized within the legacy democratic paradigm, it will inevitably result in governance that is still more impersonal, less accountable, and less capable of friendship for those ruled, than the impersonal, unaccountable bureaucrats it has rendered obsolete.

If this happens, and I think it will, the return of the king will be not only possible but urgently necessary. Left headless, an algorithmically swarming regime of machinic proceduralism would represent the most monstrous pseudo-democratic tyranny of all. Our best safeguard against this fate is the ordering power of a human ruler, with a human head capable of prudence and justice, and a human heart capable of friendship.

Mary Harrington’s frank longing for a king — an authoritarian leader who will dictate to us the terms according to which we shall be happy — is very consistent with the mood of First Things over the last few years, shaped as it has been by Rusty Reno’s interest in what he calls “strong gods.” This is certainly what Harrington wants here: a godlike human — he is the “formal cause” of the swarm after all, if not the First Cause — who serves as a Hobbesian Leviathan, our “Mortall God.” Indeed, we could call Harrington’s vision Leviathan 2.0.

Or we could call it The New Caesarism, according to the first Augustus’s definition of the role of Caesar: he is the one who uniquely (“I alone can fix it,” someone once said) unites virtu and fortuna, and is thus the single perfect instrument of the gods’ will. See Charles Norris Cochrane’s book Christianity and Classical Culture, which I summarize here. Cochrane also shows how that model cannot survive the encounter with Christianity and especially with St. Augustine, but I don’t think that’s something Harrington would be interested in.

The best diagnostician of this particular desire is Auden. His diagnosis appears throughout his work in the 1940s, which makes sense because his ideas arise from the war between democracy and authoritarianism, a war in which democracy temporarily allies itself with totalitarianism. Auden certainly had no illusions about what the Soviet Union was all about, nor did the other figures I wrote about in The Year of Our Lord 1943: they understood the strength of the temptation to fight despotism with a temporarily nicer despotism, because after all Desperate times require desperate measures. (This is the defining proverb of those who long for Leviathan. It’s an accurate précis of Harrington’s argument.)

In Auden’s The Age of Anxiety our misery arises from our belief that we once had such a wise and kind Caesar but he has now departed. In one section of the poem — published separately as “Lament for a Lawgiver” — the characters sing a great dirge for him: “Mourn for him now, / Our lost dad, / Our colossal father.” With you gone, “Who will dust / The cobwebbed kingdoms now?” Dad has passed on, and we want him to come back, and until he comes back, we don’t know how to sort ourselves out. We are anxious, and long for Dad to return to save us — or for a new paterfamilias to arrive; in either case, Father knows best — because we know we can’t save ourselves, and (this is essential) we don’t trust that God will do it in a way that we recognize as pleasingly salvific. See 1 Samuel 8:7: “And the LORD said to Samuel, ‘Heed the voice of the people in all that they say to you; for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected Me, that I should not reign over them.”

Auden anatomizes this desire more specifically in his slightly earlier poem, The Sea and the Mirror. There we see two groups of people: one commonplace, one unusual — more aesthetic, more intellectual. All of these people feel that they have reached a dead end and cannot save themselves, and are looking for a strong King or God or God-King to save them. But the ordinary people think it’s a matter of going back to the good old days:

Carry me back, Master, to the cathedral town where the canons run through the water meadows with butterfly nets and the old women keep sweet-shops in the cobbled side streets, or back to the upland mill town (gunpowder and plush) with its grope-movie and its poolroom lit by gas, carry me back to the days before my wife had put on weight, back to the years when beer was cheap and the rivers really froze in winter. Pity me, Captain, pity a poor old stranded sea-salt whom an unlucky voyage has wrecked on the desolate mahogany coast of this bar with nothing left him but his big moustache. Give me my passage home, let me see that harbour once again just as it was before I learned the bad words. Patriarchs wiser than Abraham mended their nets on the modest wharf; white and wonderful beings undressed on the sand-dunes; sunset glittered on the plate-glass windows of the Marine Biological Station; far off on the extreme horizon a whale spouted. Look, Uncle, look. They have broken my glasses and I have lost my silver whistle. Pick me up, Uncle, let little Johnny ride away on your massive shoulders to recover his green kingdom, where the steam rollers are as friendly as the farm dogs and it would never become necessary to look over one’s left shoulder or clench one’s right fist in one’s pocket.

The smaller group, the rarer group, the more aesthetic and intellectual group, don’t long for the past, because the past is particular: they long for the realm of pure abstract Good:

Deliver us, dear Spirit, from the tantrums of our telephones and the whispers of our secretaries conspiring against Man; deliver us from these helpless agglomerations of dishevelled creatures with their bed-wetting, vomiting, weeping bodies, their giggling, fugitive, disappointing hearts, and scrawling, blotted, misspelt minds, to whom we have so foolishly tried to bring the light they did not want; deliver us from all the litter of billets-doux, empty beer bottles, laundry lists, directives, promissory notes and broken toys, the terrible mess that this particularised life, which we have so futilely attempted to tidy, sullenly insists on leaving behind it; translate us, bright Angel, from this hell of inert and ailing matter, growing steadily senile in a time for ever immature, to that blessed realm, so far above the twelve impertinent winds and the four unreliable seasons, that Heaven of the Really General Case where, tortured no longer by three dimensions and immune from temporal vertigo, Life turns into Light, absorbed for good into the permanently stationary, completely self-sufficient, absolutely reasonable One.

Both of these longings — one of which remembers an innocent past, while the other hopes for a perfected future — are evasions of responsibility. They are ways of looking for rescue, not through self-correction and self-improvement, not through social negotiation and collaboration, and not through submission the one and only God. It is a human or humanoid authoritarian figure that they want to submit to. “Carry me back, Master”; “Deliver us, dear Spirit.” They’re not going to turn to Jesus because Jesus has already told them that His kingdom is not of this world. He’s useless, and they know that. He doesn’t look to them like a strong god. And whether they want to go backward or forward, they want a recognizable mighty King to lead, guide, and protect them.

Writers and scholars in the middle of the 20th century thought deeply about these matters, for reasons that should be obvious; it wouldn’t hurt today’s commentators to discover what their predecessors thought, and what they said. Another key work, especially in light of Harrington’s hope for a King who is our friend, is Arthur C. Clarke’s 1953 novel Childhood’s End, about the arrival on Earth, or at first above Earth, of a powerful alien species who come to be known as the Overlords. The most famous scene in the novel comes when we see the Overlords for the first time, as one of them emerges from his ship:

A vast silence lay over the whole world for the space of twenty seconds — though, afterward, no one could believe that the time had been so short. Then the darkness of the great opening seemed to move forward, and Karellen came forth into the sunlight. The boy was sitting on his left arm, the girl on his right. They were both too busy playing with Karellen’s wings to take any notice of the watching multitude.

It was a tribute to the Overlords’ psychology, and to their careful years of preparation, that only a few people fainted. Yet there could have been fewer still, anywhere in the world, who did not feel the ancient terror brush for one awful instant against their minds before reason banished it forever.

There was no mistake. The leathery wings, the little horns, the barbed tail — all were there. The most terrible of all legends had come to life, out of the unknown past. Yet now it stood smiling, in ebon majesty, with the sunlight gleaming upon its tremendous body, and with a human child resting trustfully on either arm.

The really key thing here, the thing that connects Clarke’s vision with Harrington’s vision, is that Karellen gently holds children. He’s going to be our friend. He’s going to make friendship possible. See? Nothing to be afraid of. Yes, he has horns and a tail, and he’s enormous and frightening, but he’s our friend. Just look at the little children sitting comfortably on his shoulders and playing with his wings.

But, of course, the Overlords end up destroying the Earth and almost everybody in it. They have no love for us. They are interested in accelerating the evolution of humanity — in a few humans who are able to go to the next level of consciousness and power, children whom they take with them; the rest of us are to be eradicated. This is inevitable.

It was the end of civilization, the end of all that men had striven for since the beginning of time. In the space of a few days, humanity had lost its future, for the heart of any race is destroyed, and its will to survive is utterly broken, when its children are taken from it.

The powerful love and recognize only power. They’re never going to be our friends. They’re going to use us and discard us. Power alienates, and absolute power alienates absolutely. That is why the Bible says, “Put not your trust in princes.” But Harrington does put her trust in princes — or hopes to.

Did the twentieth century teach us nothing?

Which leads me to the third work of mid-century literature that I have in mind. Big Brother isn’t even here yet, and already Harrington has won the victory over herself. She loves Big Brother. But should her dream come true, one day he’ll say to her, and to all of us unfortunate enough to be present, “I’m not your brother, and I’m not your friend.”