I have just finished An Army of Davids and beyond the fact that it is an excellent read, brimming with provocative ideas, there is a deep current which flows through the book and connects it to larger historical and cultural trends. An Army of Davids is all about freedom, in the purest and best meanings of the word. Glenn's overt premise is that the accelerating pace of change in technology has given individuals power and freedom to act that has never been seen before. Where it once required a newsroom with all their resources to gather information and package it for the reading and viewing public, now it only requires a readily affordable computer, an on-line connection, and a digital camera. An individual can now do what it took a large enterprise to do in the recent past.
Man's long slog toward freedom is now accelerating in unimaginable ways.
From the moment the first inhabitants of the planet discovered agriculture and the first towns and villages sprang up, human beings were faced with a brand new experience; for the first time there was enough "wealth" to support a class of people who were not primarily involved in subsistence. This is what allowed some early geniuses to invent the first tools and begin the development of technology.
We are now living through a time of such profound change that anyone can become free from the constraints of necessity. While there are positives and negatives to so many people acquiring such power, on balance I think we will find a way for the "good guys" to outpace the "bad guys" though there are likely to be some harrowing times before we can all relax a bit.
How does Psychoanalysis fit into this picture?
When Sigmund Freud created his first model of the mind, he offered a new way to understand how the mind works and what kinds of things can go wrong and interfere with the optimal working of the mental apparatus. The intensive treatment of Psychoanalysis is designed to enable our patients to increase their area of autonomy. The treatment involves removing, by way of interpretation (essentially, making unconscious processes conscious) impediments to the patient's capability to use the full range of his or her psychological and mental assets. By replacing unconscious constraints with conscious choices, the patient is freer to determine how he will live his life.
[It will not be until we can actually "reverse engineer" the brain that we will be able to finally achieve Freud's dream of replacing Psychoanalysis with a more purely neurological treatment. It should make for fascinating discussions between those who believe the mind is the brain and those who believe something more is required to differentiate the two. ]
Glenn's vision is of a future that rewards flexibility of thought and behavior; those who are trapped in rigid mind-sets are likely to experience the dizzying changes as dangerous. The ranks of Luddites is likely to expand exponentially in the face of such fears. We see it already on the streets of Paris where the young, raised to believe the Maternal State will always cater to their every wish, are rising up to protest against the idea that they might have to show competence in work in order to keep their jobs.
This is the source of the great tension between reactionary and progressive forces in the world. It explains how the left can ally themselves with the Islamists, two groups that look back to a "better" time and ahead to a Utopian regressive future.
This struggle is most acute in Europe. The Norwegian blogger Fjordman stopped blogging in December but has stepped back into the fray with an article in the Brussels Journal that is a must read. In When Danes Pay Danegeld – Dealing with Islam in Scandinavia [HT-Marc Schulman] Fjordman describes how troglodyte Islam is threatening a whole range of European freedoms; he wonders if and when a backlash will occur.
The war in Iraq is, among other things, an attempt to allow the Muslim world, with one quarter of the planet's population, to join in our frightening modernity; if they fail, we will certainly wall them off and allow them to descend into whatever variety of totalitarianism and chaos that they prefer, only reacting when their excesses affect our vital interests.
The sine qua non of Sharia is inflexibility. Individual freedoms and rights are near absolute for the Muslim man (except the freedom of apostasy) and almost nonexistent for anyone else. In a section of the book devoted to the necessity of colonizing space, Glenn Reynold's describes how the desire for security and safety will vie with the struggle for freedom. He worries that Space colonies will choose the illusion of security over the risk and exhilaration of freedom and concludes (p. 225):
In fact, I think that although early Mars societies will not offer certain kinds of freedoms that we enjoy on Earth- such as the freedom to be nonproductive sponges living off the labors of others- they will offer more freedom for individuals to make something of themselves.
Toward the end of the book, Glenn presents an interview with Ray Kurzweil, author of The Singularity is Near, which should be read as soon as you finish AN Army of Davids. They discuss the concept of non-biological intelligence surpassing biological intelligence by the end of the 2020's. Kurzweil and Reynolds discuss the probability of post-Singularity humans doing better than the current variety and Kurzweil says (p. 250):
Human egocentrism, greed, jealousy, and other emotions that emerged form our evolution in much smaller clans have nonetheless not prevented the smooth, exponential growth of knowledge and technology through the centuries. So I don't see these emotional limitations halting the ongoing progression of technology.
And:
But there is reason for believing we will be in a position to do better than in times past. One important upcoming development will be the reverse-engineering of the human brain. In addition to giving us the principles of operation of human intelligence that will expand our AI tool kit, it will also give us unprecedented insight into ourselves. As we merge with our technology, and as the nonbiological portion of our intelligence begins to predominate in the 2030s, we will have the opportunity to apply our intelligence to improving on- redesigning-these primitive aspects of it....
I think Kurzweil is a bit too sanguine about our prospects of re-engineering the mind (Forbidden Planet remains one of the great cautionary tales of Science Fiction) and I look forward to seeing if we can answer the mind/body question in any meaningful way; however I am certain that the resistance to the future envisioned by Glenn Reynolds and Ray Kurzweil will make everything that has come before pale in comparison. People fear change and the kind of change Glenn writes about is likely to terrify a lot of people.
It seems to me that the greatest impediment to the optimistic future envisioned by Glenn remains the unconscious conflicts and primitive fears that exist within our own minds.
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