The political and cultural reality we used to call the West has been for a long time assailed by the facts and no less by the reflection these facts entail. Before we start to celebrate or to deplore the situation it is convenient to choose some thermometer by which to sense it. A suggestive one is a piece by the sociologist Kyle Chan published some months ago in The New York Times with an eye-catching title: “In the Future, China Will Be Dominant. The U.S. Will Be Irrelevant”.
The fractured West
By comparing the fundamental transformations China is imposing on the global supply chains with the incapacity of the United States and its allies to deter the Chinese expansion (for example, most steel production today is in Chinese soil), Chan is provoked to coin the term “Chinese century”: just another name for the century we are already in, a century that emerged as the inevitable outcome of the Western nations’ energy mishandling in their almost exclusive attention to irrelevant or ridiculous matters. While the West remains internally fractured (“polarization”) and eagerly arguing if a man can or cannot be a woman, China fabricates steel and chips and expands its gigantic informational infrastructure.
At the bottom of the situation lies the problem of West’s unity. This unity maybe was achieved one day in the past, but it is no more. And this is why Xi Jiping, or Vladimir Putin (two authentic political futurists, not nostalgic ones), force from the top down and through state intervention an unity without which their nations would risk being in the same situation as the United Kingdom, whose half of the subsidized housing is inhabited by foreigners who have great difficulty in identifying with the English society. Hence the divide.
These are some facts, all related to the fracture of the entire system of international relations built in the post-war period. And what about the interpretations prompted by these facts? Let’s look at one.
At the end of 2024, the European Research Council (ERC) invested nine million euros – to be spent by 2031 – in the MOSAIC project, an acronym for “Mapping the Occult Sciences in Islamic Cultures”. The four researchers involved, all of great academic repute in the field of religious sciences, intend to redraw – literally, to trace new borders – the cultural map of what is considered to be the West. This, in fact, would not have been fractured recently. In truth (and here comes the thousandth cultural critique in the style of Edward Said), it would have always been a colonialist and segregating concept, which does not recognize as its fundamental part, for example, the cultures of North Africa and the Middle East, despite the importance of Egypt and Syria for the formation of various currents of thought that would orient disparate Western movements, from the structuring of the Church in the West to the fostering of a myriad of long-lasting esotericism, reaching the beginnings of modern science.
To encompass this rejected cultural slice of the West, as well as the Arab presence in Spain, Portugal, and Italy, the researchers start from an expanded concept of the West, to the point of even speaking of “Western Islam”. Not that the idea doesn’t make sense: in some respects, it is accurate, just as it is dangerous in view of the uses it can produce in a Europe that day by day is demographically forced to understand itself, in fact, as part of “Western Islam”.
The Software Century
The facts addressed by Kyle Chan and the interpretations forwarded by the MOSAIC project researchers sketch the background for a recent attempt to take a serious look at the fractured West challenges: I’m thinking of the book The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, by Alex Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska.
The authors don’t shy away from the risk of this century being the Chinese century because they know, no matter what, this one is and will continue to be “The Software Century”. Therefore they have written a book for diagnosing our times and for championing one idea that has become heretical in libertarian and right-wing circles:
> A skepticism of government work and national ambition took hold in the Valley. The grand, collectivist experiments of the earlier part of the twentieth century were discarded in favor of a narrow attentiveness to the desires and needs of the individual. The market rewarded shallow engagement with the potential of technology, as startup after startup catered to the whims of late capitalist culture without any interest in constructing the technical infrastructure that would address our most significant challenges as a nation. The age of social media platforms and food delivery apps had arrived. Medical breakthroughs, education reform, and military advances would have to wait. (...) [This happened because] The most capable generation of coders has never experienced a war or genuine social upheaval. (...) It will, however, be a union of the state and the software industry — not their separation and disentanglement — that will be required for the United States and its allies in Europe and around the world to remain as dominant in this century as they were in the last. (...) It is essential that we redirect our attention toward building the next generation of AI weaponry that will determine the balance of power in this century, as the atomic age ends, and the next.
This idea sounds even more heterodox, maybe cynical, because Karp is no less than one of the Palantir founders, this complex and discrete company that since 2003 has developed solutions in data management for US intelligence agencies and military departments. The extremely expensive jobs performed by this corporation that since its inception has the declared purpose of helping the Big Brother to surveil the world include: the intelligence actions that led to Osama Bin Laden killing; the watching of illegals in American soil and the devising of better ways of capturing and deporting them; the monitoring of Russian troops in Ukraine, country that would have been completely occupied without the Palantir assistance (the company established an office there); global bank fraud detection and the chasing of dirty money to be employed in terrorism acts; and the most Orwellian case currently taking place in a Gaza Strip under complete surveillance, with the killing of combatants that would later be recognized as not so combatant as expected…
PhD in Social Theory by Goethe University (Frankfurt), Karp deserves a compliment for the openness displayed in The Technological Republic, whose theoretical foundations dictate the aims and methods of his private Leviathan. This openness is rarely seen in globalist billionaires.
By calling on Silicon Valley’s post-hipsters to look more kindly on the State and American ideals, from which they benefit but for which they do not want to sacrifice themselves, Karp and Zamiska make a sermon difficult to assimilate in usual political keys. The defense of “democracy”, they think, will depend on a kind of state entrepreneurship, which will emulate, in its own way, the organizational principle of a start-up: like a beehive (in chapter 10 they cite famous studies on bee behavior), it will be an organization that will advance diffusely, without the need for imposing central control, but with perfect synchronicity. More or less as occurred in the Manhattan Project, when scientists worked freely in the Los Alamos desert, with unlimited budget and permanent incentive for the most counterintuitive ideas, and delivered the atomic bomb to the Pentagon.
The authors are part of a long lineage of cultural critics of the “closing of the American mind” (lineage for which Allan Bloom’s book is paramount), and it is in this fashion that they target the ideological softness of those in charge of big tech companies. These men and women are called in Chapter 6 “technological agnostics”; they are unwilling to adhere to any opinion on “what constitutes a good or virtuous life” and attach themselves only to “a sort of disembodied morality, one unshackled from the inconvenient particularities of actual life”. It won’t raise anybody’s eyebrows to know the authors have in mind especially the woke movement. It's not fair to say its adherents have no faith; it's more accurate to say they have only one faith: the faith in themselves. For this reason they have developed technologies for the ego (Instagram’s stories, for that matter), and not technologies that would improve people's real lives. Today, the higher liberal creed consists in the affirmation of an extreme capitalist individualism. And not without reason, as “their own distaste for defending culture or concepts of nationhood leaves a void that the market itself fills”. The deterioration of the nation concept and the concurrent despise for patriotism (or anything that resembles a care for a precisely identifiable community) are the obvious results of that state of mind.
A Mere Technological Republic is not enough
“A society unguided by moral values can hardly be expected to remain cohesive under stress”, we can read in an excerpt the authors reproduce from the Goh Report (1979), a blueprint for public policies in Singapore, a country that faced real danger of desaggregation after its independence from Malaysia. Lee Kuan Yew, prime minister of that country from 1959 to 1990 with powers of a benevolent dictator, said that with an unifying spirit Singapore would stand on its feet for the next thousand years. Karp e Zamiska want to convince the Western elites that they too need to be standing in a millenia from now, and standing in a superior and mandatory position. Nevertheless this new Reich, if raised according to the author’s instructions, maybe won’t last even a century.
It’s true they want to recover the individual’s “belonging” to the Western societies. It’s true, they know, that “It is this disinterest in mythology, in shared narratives, that we have as a culture taken too far”. They even cite Alasdair MacIntyre and his standing that time has come to build “new forms of community within which the moral life” can “be sustained”. They write:
> Without such belonging, there is nothing for which to fight, nothing to defend, and nothing to work toward. A commitment to capitalism and the rights of the individual, however ardent, will never be sufficient; it is too thin and meager, too narrow, to sustain the human soul and psyche. James K. A. Smith, a philosophy professor at Calvin University, has correctly noted that “Western liberal democracies have lived off the borrowed capital of the church for centuries”. If contemporary elite culture continues its assault on organized religion, what will remain to sustain the state? What have we built, or aspired to build, in its place?
Indeed, what remains? Karp and Palantir offer nothing more than an ugly portrait of the enemies of the West. As for what would be the foundations of this entity to be defended, the “West”, with its “civil rights” and its “democracy”, the authors go silent. The reason is perhaps simple, and is found in these words by sociologist Manuel Castells, cited in the book: “Elites are cosmopolitan, people are local”. Karp and Palantir are cosmopolitan, or, if you will, even globalists; they are not local, they are unaware of communities. For them, “nation” is a healthy “mythology”; “religion” is only an inspiring ideology. The Technological Republic presents readers with a plan without guidelines, a doctrine without soul, a religion without spirit, while it condemns precisely the moral and intellectual “agnosticism” of those tasked with creating and managing the software that will define the survival or disappearance of the West as we know it.
Isn’t it a tragedy that the critics of this critical scenario are perfect embodiments of the crisis’s reasons, a fact of which they don’t seem to have the faintest inkling? This definitely does not foretell good days for the “West”, “civil rights”, and “democracy”.
* A Portuguese first version of the text, which appears here with editions, was published by the Seminário de Filosofia’s newsletter.