Urgently needed: A reborn patriotic belief in Western virtues

From an unlikely place – the upper reaches of the technology industry – comes an unexpected summons to an invigorated patriotism. The summons will discomfit progressives by requiring seriousness about the nation’s inadequate defenses, which endanger peace immediately and national survival ultimately. Conservatives will flinch from the new – actually, a recovered – patriotism that calls them up from an exclusively market-focused individualism, to collaboration between public and private sectors in great collective undertakings.

In the “The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West,” Alexander C. Karp, CEO of the software firm Palantir, with co-author Nicholas W. Zamiska, connect the ascent of Silicon Valley and the decline of the nation’s cultural confidence. The former is a symptom of the latter. Karp thinks “the loss of national ambition,” which produced the atomic bomb and the internet, is today manifest in Silicon Valley’s devoting mountains of cash and legions of engineers to “chasing trivial consumer products.” (Disclosure: The columnist’s son David Will is a lawyer at Palantir.)

The 20th-century union between science and government, the latter leveraging the former, was driven by the exigencies of World War II. Today’s geopolitical dangers require what the nation’s cultural agnosticism impedes: a rebirth of belief in the importance – the virtues – of the West.

The collective endeavors of the previous century are forgotten. Today’s preoccupations are market-rewarded “shallow engagements” with technology: a banal internet serving the quotidian desires of the individual. There is scant interest in constructing the technical infrastructure national security demands in this “software century.”

The manned F-35 fighter, conceived in the 1990s, is scheduled to be in service for another 63 years, until 2088. Karp thinks not. “The arrival of swarms of drones capable of targeting and killing an adversary, all at a fraction of the cost of conventional weapons, is nearly here.” Yet the Defense Department budget devoted just one-fifth of 1% of its 2024 budget to artificial intelligence.

Few of today’s capable coders, Karp said, even know a military veteran. Many are reluctant to assist military-connected endeavors. “Why,” Karp writes, “court controversy with your friends or risk their disapproval by working for the U.S. military?” Instead, retreat from the communal purpose of national defense, into the profitable building of photo-sharing apps and algorithms “that optimize the placement of ads on social media platforms.”

“In 2022, YouTube made $959 million from advertising that was targeted at 31.4 million children under the age of 12.” “We must,” Karp said, “rise up and rage against this misdirection of our culture and capital.”

Righteous rage, however, requires passion born of confidence in the rightness of the American project. This confidence has been a casualty of “the hollowing out of the American mind.”

Not since Allan Bloom’s astonishingly successful 1987 book “The Closing of the American Mind” – more than 1 million copies sold – has there been a cultural critique as sweeping as Karp’s. He connects our national flaccidity to a “cultural hesitation” born of what Bloom presciently diagnosed 38 years ago.

Vacuous celebrations of “openness, “diversity,” etc., produce, Bloom warned, a “meaningless country” in which there is no intense experience of national purpose: “Students now arrive at the university ignorant and cynical about our political heritage, lacking the wherewithal to be either inspired by it or seriously critical of it.”

Much of today’s intelligentsia has what Karp calls a “vacant neutrality” regarding our national project, or the West generally, as distinct from other cultures. Karp: “At present, the principal features of American society that are shared are not civic or political, but rather cohere around entertainment, sports, celebrity and fashion.” How many internet “influencers” influence anyone about anything concerning national survival?

Karp defines a “thin conception of belonging to the American community” – respect for two unquestionably indispensable components of a good society, individual rights and economic freedom. He prefers a “thicker conception.” It involves a grander narrative of “this wild and rich experiment in building a republic.” The current agnosticism, which borders on nihilism, about America’s virtue as a nation, Karp said, dilutes recognition that the nation-state is the indispensable means of “collective organization in pursuit of shared purpose.”

To some, reconnecting engineering and ethics is pointless. If all national identities are merely contingent emanations of transitory, unjudgable and hence ultimately fungible cultures, why make arduous and expensive preparations to be able to fight in defense of ours?

“Is that all there is?” Peggy Lee sang. “If that’s all there is my friends, then let’s keep dancing.” Until the music stops. Dangerous men elsewhere are preparing to stop it.