Things Hidden at Novitate 2023
Katechon Rises
Yesterday, I had the opportunity to attend Novitate 2023, the first-ever conference on René Girard and his ideas. It was great, I had a lot of fun, big thanks to
for organizing it. I found some things interesting/surprising, writing down my impressions before they fade. This isn’t meant to be a comprehensive retelling of the conference - all the talks were recorded, so I assume they will be available online at some point.Peter Thiel Set The Tone
Peter Thiel is perhaps the best-known student of Girard. The story goes that Girard’s ideas made Thiel realize the value of Facebook early, and prompted him to become the first outside investor in the company.
Peter Thiel did not talk about Facebook. Peter Thiel talked about the Apocalypse, the Antichrist, and how kids these days are low-T and don’t really want anything. The speech was amazing, it displayed an erudition seldom displayed publicly, and made some spicy points. One, for example, was that any amount of yoga or meditation is too much for people today - we are already too introspective and need to focus more on the outside world, not the inside world. Big picture, though, Thiel thinks that there is a narrow path between the Apocalypse (x-risk, AI or what have you) and the Antichrist (a totalitarian world government that kills progress) and that the way for us to thread that path is… To go to church.
Many other speakers struck the same note, but Thiel’s speech was by far the best on the subject - if you listen to one speech to understand the conference, listen to his.
Darryl Cooper on Nietzsche and Dostoevsky
In a welcome break from the Apocalypse,
talked about the uncanny similarities between the lives of Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. This talk was pure joy for me, and I highly recommend it. There is a 5-hour version available online:I understand that 5 hours on the topic might be too much for some, so keep an eye out for a slightly shorter version. While there are tons of tremendously interesting details, the broad shape of the story is as follows:
Dostoevsky and Nietzsche had a remarkably similar first part of their lives. They both were recognized early for their talent, they both didn’t fit in society, they both suffered through the losing part of love triangles, and they both suffered from chronic illnesses.
They responded by digging themselves into holes and eventually finding themselves in the Underground. Dostoevsky responded by stopping digging, climbing out of the hole, reintegrating into society, and gaining prominence during his lifetime.
Nietzsche kept digging. He dug himself into a hole of madness and died in obscurity. But before he suffered that final breakdown, he completed his greatest works, which people still marvel at today.
I am a hole-digging enthusiast myself, and this talk struck a chord. It made me go back and read Notes from Underground (it was the first time in over a decade that my Russian proved seriously useful to me). That novella is a perfect companion for the talk because it is written at the juncture between the two paths Nietzsche and Dostoevsky chose. Thanks, Darryl.
Hamish McKenzie’s Elder Statesman Arc
, one of the co-founders of Substack, is a fantastic person, with whom I’ve had the absolute pleasure to work. At that time, Substack was THE controversial hot topic in media, and Hamish symbolized the scrappy upstart, or the “bad boy” of media, depending on how you look at it.Yesterday, however, Hamish was cast in a new role. As
crossed swords with about whether the Stanford Internet Observatory is an agent of the totalitarian state-industrial complex or a truth-seeking scientific organization, Hamish was the reasonable adult on stage, making practical and unoffending points. I think Hamish will make a great Elder Statesman of Internet Media, and I look forward to more developments in the Elder Hamish arc.And then things went in an… Interesting direction.
That Apocalyptic Diff
I really like The Diff, a finance/tech publication by
. So I went to his talk (cohosted with )with great expectations, and whatever I expected, well, that’s not what I heard.Their basic argument was that technology will cause the Apocalypse. That’s a lukewarm take at best today, but what really struck me was the shape of the argument. The shape of the argument was “The Apocalypse is obviously going to happen because the Bible says so and technology (specifically AI) fits the bill of how it might happen”.
I was… Surprised. I don’t really ever encounter “thinking starting from religious principles” in my daily life, and I was specifically amazed to hear it coming from one of my favorite tech journalists. This caused me to update some priors - more on that later.
Bait-And-Switch
After that, I went to a talk by Jon Askonas. This talk was a complete bait-and-switch, and I regret that I went. It started off with the premise of “We can look at Christianity through a purely anthropological perspective, it’s a very successful meme and maybe we can learn something about mimetic conflict by studying it” - which, sure, yeah, I buy. But it very quickly turned into a sermon, about how the SINNERS MUST REPENT and whatnot. I dislike that kind of bait-and-switch, I like sermons even less, so that part I did not enjoy at all. The one funny thing that happened at that talk was that I met
. I’d never met him before and I thought it was rather amusing to meet a central figure in the rationality community at a sermon. Robin wrote his own piece after the conference, which mostly deals with Girard’s ideas - if you’re interested, you should read it:
Now, at this point, I had heard three talks about how AI is going to cause the Apocalypse, and it really made me think. Some personal background is necessary - I am an atheist, I have always been an atheist, I grew up with no religious tradition whatsoever, and I haven’t even read a single major religious text fully1. So I tend to underestimate how much behavior is caused by religion. But now it makes perfect sense to me - there are a lot of Christians out there who believe that the Apocalypse is going to happen. They start at that point, and any reasoning that does happen, happens way downstream of the fundamental belief in the Apocalypse. Moreover, they’ve now seen 100000 movies about AI causing the Apocalypse. I don’t think it’s possible to have a reasonable argument with them about AI - the belief is too ingrained.
If we look at the problem more broadly - people project their biggest fears on AI, whatever they may be. For Christians, it’s the Apocalypse. For socialists, it’s capitalism, as Ted Chiang recently described:
I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism. And I think that this is actually true of most fears of technology, too. Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against us. And technology and capitalism have been so closely intertwined that it's hard to distinguish the two.
For Peter Thiel, a libertarian, AI is most closely linked to the fear of a totalitarian world government.
Overall, this recent turn of events makes me more pessimistic about trying to talk to people about AI. Given how it touches people’s foundational beliefs that defy logic, logical reasoning is unlikely to change many people’s minds. Moreover, I now think the odds of mind-bogglingly stupid AI research prohibitions are pretty high, so the work might need to completely go underground. More on that in later posts.
P.S. WTF is the Katechon
One problem with religious people is that they love to take a term from a religious text that doesn’t define the term and then argue for 2000 years about what it means. “Katechon” is one such term that was in vogue at the conference. Supposedly, it’s something that “meant the historical power to restrain the appearance of the Antichrist and the end of the present eon” and people argue about whether it was the rebirth of the Roman Empire, or the Totalitarian State, or what. Luckily, we have ChatGPT now, and I managed to cajole it into just running “Katechon” as a DALLE-3 prompt without anything added to it. Here’s what it came up with:
Consider the debate settled. The Katechon is a giant cat with its own Death Star. It’s great, we should build it. Antichrists everywhere beware.
Thanks for attending the talk!
I do want to make a quick point of clarification: I could have given a nearly identical talk that cited Bostrom and the Sequences instead of Schmitt and the New Testament. It really depends on the audience, but people who think seriously about big issues, whether from a mostly-religious or mostly-secular standpoint, will often end up worrying about the same things. One reason the presentation was so religiously inflected was that we were at a conference in honor of a Christian thinker, named after a Bible verse, held at The Catholic University of America, featuring a memorial mass. When in Rome...
One of those big issues is: it's persistently easy to extrapolate current trends and imagine the end of the world, and yet the world stubbornly refuses to end. This feels like a modern concern, a very post-1945 worry, but a 19th-century person could worry about revolutions in Europe and European imperialism everywhere else; in the 17th century, you could reasonable wonder if there would be something even more viral than the Reformation that might have an even higher body count than the Thirty Years War. The further back you go, the more "end of the world" has to make sense in light of whose world you're talking about—but the ancient Romans could worry that the Roman World would collapse because of barbarian invasions, and a few centuries earlier countries throughout the Mediterranean could worry about the Romans doing to them what Rome worried that the barbarians would do to *them*.
The secular/anthropological view of religions is that they're memetically competitive; there is some reason that Christianity outcompeted Hellenic paganism, that Islam beat the various polytheisms of the Arabian peninsula, that Judaism has survived for thousands of years despite repeated existential threats. So we can view religious concerns about the apocalypse/katechon as something that's likely to be important. (It could be what Gould calls a "spandrel," i.e. a kind of pointless evolutionary feature that wasn't costly enough to be bred out, but the Bayesian bet is that it matters).
So what we wanted to do was to talk about what causes apocalypse (Christian speak for x-risk) and what leads to Safety (katechon!). Technology is, increasingly, the primary contender for both. I do view AI as more katechonic than not; it's magnifying human potential in important, helpful ways and we ought to build on that quickly.
On a last note, I think it's good to be able to code-shift between a secular and religious framework for understanding issues that both sides care about. (Be careful, though! I was a secular person who could talk in religious terms before I was religious.) It will be increasingly important to think this way because of demographics. Look at the behavior of secular people—moving to high cost-of-living cities, spending years in higher education, deferring or avoiding having kids because of a general sense of doom. If somebody were forcing nonbelievers to do this, rather than them doing it to themselves, you wouldn't be wrong in calling it a form of ethnic cleansing. So, over time, more middle-class educated people will be religious because the secular populations are mostly not having enough kids to keep up. I don't emphasize my personal religious views that much in public, mostly because I don't think I'm an especially exemplary Christian; it's a whole lot easier to be a morally-consistent and righteous atheist (at least outside of deathbeds and foxholes). But it is an important part of my worldview.
Hello Sergey, The conference was on René Girard, but you don't say much about him. I looked around to see what people say.
The "scapegoat mechanism," seems to be at the core of Girard's model of social dynamics. Girard observed that scapegoating is the ultimate craft of statesmanship. Many statements attributed to Girard are hard to make out exactly what he wanted to say. Maybe these examples are outside of context, but within the context they could be even more befuddling. I read paragraphs of abstract material that really say little or nothing to me. Here are a few examples.
✓Religion humanizes violence; it protects man from his own violence by taking it out of his hands.
✓Ignorance is constructive because it purges man of the suspicions that would poison his existence if he were to remain conscious of the crisis.
✓Men would not be able to shake loose the violence between them, to make of it a separate entity both sovereign and redemptory, without a surrogate victim.
✓Violence will come to an end only after it has had the last word, and that word has been accepted as divine.
✓Religion protects man as long as its ultimate foundations are not revealed.
✓The only barrier against human violence is raised on misconception.
✓The well-adjusted person is thus one who conceals his violent impulses and condones the collective’s concealment of them. The "maladjusted" individual cannot tolerate this concealment.
✓Psychic catastrophes misunderstood by the psychoanalyst result from an inchoate, obstinate reaction against the violence and falsehood found in human society.
___________
Of course, we can see "scapegoating" everywhere we look, on all levels of society, and throughout time. That practice is the basis of racism, which is the needed explanation to cast the "other" down. Girard suggests these incidents might be the product of blood-feuds; which are then resolved by the scapegoating? America has been in some contentious periods, (I could probably say when and why). Then they scapegoated Iraq. Did that calm the waters on the home front? Where does this theory take hold and produce results?
He forwards the idea that RITUAL SACRIFICE is a cultural universal like marriage or gender. We still have marriage and gender, but is there any ritual sacrifice in your life? Are you searching for a scapegoat so that you can get along better with your neighbor? (Maybe it's the neighbor's dog that is the scapegoat, because he barks too much.) Girard also speaks of, "the uniquely human propensity for vengeance that must have destroyed many early societies". Is that an Assertion or an Axiom?
There is vengeance in the world, and it is sold as a necessary part of justice in our scriptures. Girard says, "A pattern, points to an INSTINCT, that leads a society in crisis to pick a scapegoat and direct their accumulated hostility towards that chosen individual or subgroup". Where does the INSTINCT part come in? Is there a definition about that, or a process revealed of how it formed? Or is it another Axiom
What is the definition of a "blood-feud", and where does it come from. Or is it that it just exists?
To look at an ancient ethos and notice there was a lot of killing, isn't any breakthrough. (I could probably explain it in another way. And I have studied ancient history). And then to claim that these taboos and sacrifices solved problems and kept the society together, is a giant leap. All the other societies that did the same killing and collapsed, aren't in the formula. It is a cognitive blind-spot called survivor-ship bias.
Some like David Deutsch says that good explanations have "reach." Reach is not depth. Just because something was widely practiced, doesn't tell you where it came from, why it persists, and what changes could put-it-away.
Gerard finds many scapegoats all throughout Europe, for 1,000's of years. These are all well-known. So he postulates that the mechanism might be a sort of VESTIGIAL ORGAN that gets reactivated in situations of societal chaos? That one is a whopper.
Then we hear of Deutsch's alternative: that theories come from human creativity, which only LATER are tested through the crucible of real-world data. Better to ask if CREATIVITY isn't actually a leaning toward the PERSONAL ADVANTAGE of my sponsor, (he who pays my salary for spinning these thoughts). That is clearly the way of the present-day-narratives.
Maybe you can tell that I didn't find what I learned about Girard's theory too convincing. I also reject the three kinds of thought modeling as the only ones, "conceptual reasoning," "ethical reasoning," and “affiliational thinking."
IMO, If you would define all the language that Girard used, a bit deeper and in non-western terms, you would surely arrive at a different conclusion.
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