What Does Peter Thiel Want? – by Damon Linker – Persuasion
The evidence that scientific and technological progress has ground to a halt is mixed. When it comes to communications technology, and especially its application to the sharing and processing of information via personal computers, it s hard to deny that advances have been impressive over the past several decades. Yet Thiel and others point out that when we lift our gaze from our phones and related consumer products to the wider vistas of human endeavor breakthroughs in medicine, the development of new energy sources, advances in the speed and ease of transportation, and the exploration of space progress has indeed slowed to a crawl. As Thiel put it two years ago in a favorable review of New York Times columnist Ross Douthat s book about the phenomenon, the present looks and feels pretty much the same as 1969, only with faster computers and uglier cars.
If such views are commonplace in Silicon Valley, Thiel s approach to the problem is distinctive in that he sees the shortfall as evidence of a deeper and more profound moral, aesthetic, and even theological failure. Human beings are capable of great creativity and invention, and we once aspired to achieve it in every realm. But now that aspiration has been smothered by layer upon layer of regulation and risk-aversion. Legal sclerosis, Thiel claimed in that same book review, is likely a bigger obstacle to the adoption of flying cars than any engineering problem.
Thiel s diagnosis differs from standard-issue libertarianism in denying that it s enough merely to roll back constraints on individual initiative, as if ambition and creativity would be instantly unleashed as soon as Big Government stopped riding our backs (to paraphrase Ronald Reagan s first inaugural address). Progress in science and technology isn t innate to human beings, Thiel believes. It s an expression of a specific cultural or civilizational impulse that has its roots in Christianity and reached a high point during the Victorian era of Western imperialism. As Thiel put it last summer in a wide-ranging interview with the British website UnHerd, the Christian world felt very expansive, both in terms of the literal empire and also in terms of the progress of knowledge, of science, of technology, and somehow that was naturally consonant with a certain Christian eschatology a Christian vision of history.
In Thiel s view, recapturing civilizational greatness through scientific and technological achievement requires fostering a revival of a kind of Christian Prometheanism (a monotheistic variation on the rebellious creativity and innovation pursued by the demigod Prometheus in ancient Greek mythology). This is the subject of a remarkable short essay Thiel published in First Things magazine in 2015. Against those who portray modern scientific and technological progress as a rebellion against medieval Christianity, Thiel insists it is Christianity that encourages a metaphysical optimism about transforming and perfecting the world, with the ultimate goal of turning it into a place where no accidents can happen and the achievement of personal immortality becomes possible. All that s required to reach this transhuman end is that we remain open to an eschatological frame in which God works through us in building the kingdom of heaven today, here on Earth in which the kingdom of heaven is both a future reality and something partially achievable in the present.
This seems pretty nutty to me, but I agree that outside of information tech, we seem to have slowed down a lot.