Tech Superpowers: Israel

Facing a moment of truth

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Under the circumstances, there’s no better place to start than Israel in assessing the situation faced by the world’s top digital powers, which I’ll do over a series of posts here over the weeks to come.

Israel is a country in a very tight spot. A variety of factors weighs upon Israeli statesmen faced with the challenge of responding effectively to October’s Hamas assault — which exhibited particularly demonic tactics and plugs clearly into a broader strategy touching on multiple significant international players — but it is important to keep in mind the realities of the environment created by digital technology itself.

Let me recap these worldwide media effects on the interplay of religion and politics at the civilization level. Then we will be able to see precisely why Israel’s difficulty is so acute.

Tech retrieves, not replaces, Church

I laid out my overarching analysis over the course of several passages in Human Forever, mostly in the late middle chunk of the book. From Samuel Huntington’s famous analysis of the clash of civilizations, I took as the most important element that religion defines civilization above and beyond all other factors, the second of which is that one particular polity leads, represents, or embodies many of the strongest civilizations. These “civilization-states” as some call them, therefore stand in significant relation to the religions which define their civilizations.

For a long time, it was not in vogue to go along with Huntington in his analysis. The “secularization thesis” and the now all too familiar trends of “modernization” and/or “liberalization” indicated that religion, like nationalism and perhaps even parochial civilizations themselves, was on its way out. Poof, that whole theory of globalization was junked since the commodification of the smartphone. Even the most powerful sources of seemingly rock-solid secularization, technologists themselves, are increasingly nakedly devoted to building a new god, adopting Luciferian rhetoric and aims, worshipping their creations, manufacturing cults, etc.

Two years ago, however, this dynamic was weaker or harder to recognize; the general situation was not. So in Human Forever, I cautioned that, as a result of the total impact on our identity, purpose, and status of the new digital environment, “the civilization-statesman confronted with the challenge of digital statecraft must establish a new moral order by recourse to the religious sensibilities of his people.”

Those sensibilities are rooted in human memory—the digital-age key to preserving our human identity, which the digital triumph foregrounds in generativity and influence as the human imagination is disenchanted. The digital statesman must then in turn recognize that every civilization state (with each smaller politeia gravitating into one civilizational and digital sphere or another) will do the same.

Before the triumph of the digital, when the world-ruling communications technology was merely televisual, memory was relegated relatively far into the background, with fantasy at the fore: whoever could dream the biggest and best dreams was thought to possess the spiritual authority to rule the world, and America lived out that expectation to the fullest. Now, however, “the collapse of the human imagination as a substitute for ancient religion reveals that statesmen have no other resource but their ancient religion to preserve their civilization by applying it to their automata as well as reviving it among their people.”

What’s key in this dynamic is that the central importance of memory is not simply a matter of “advance” or “progress.” Marshall McLuhan convincingly showed that among the primary effects of media is retrieval of phenomena and conditions; more is at play than the simple linear schematic so often assumed to define our historical life and the dimensions of our spacetime. Even McLuhan’s primary effects of enhancement and obsolescence are nowhere near as narrow and stereotypical as “progress” and “regress”. True, the introduction of machine memory to join human memory as a definitive aspect of the media environment may reflect a massive innovation of sorts. But the return of human memory to psychological, social, and spiritual prominence shows dramatically how technological development does not imitate or operationalize the old modern understanding of time as linear, cumulative, incremental, and standardized, and does not cause linear, cumulative, incremental, and standardized human development either.

The revealed panorama of the digital age’s re-formative pressure demands an inwardness with regard to one’s people taken to a height not seen in centuries. It is not to be confused with isolation or isolationism—it will be a truism of life in the digital age that seemingly exogenous factors will persistently challenge the discipline, concentration, humility, and efficacy of the statesman turning his resources to the renewal of the interior that is a precondition of his people’s survival in a digital age.

It is important to add here that even a very robust theoretical understanding of media causes and effects does not carry us directly into the realm of the spiritual when it comes to the comprehension of human and divine space and time. The return of human memory and religiosity to the center of geopolitical life spells a return of eschatological thinking and patterns of thought (a subject we’ll touch on later), but the geopolitical dynamics illuminated by the triumph of digital tech do not — contrary to the fears of some tech critics and the wishes of some tech worshippers — have much if anything to say about eschatological time frames or end states.

The persistence and centrality of religion to the survival of a civilization-state in the digital age indicates that neither Christianity nor any of the great religions should be expected to die out. To the contrary, they should be expected to intensify. Westerners hoping “monkish ignorance” will at last be vaporized by the pure light of ethical engineering will continue to be disappointed. And Christians hoping their denomination or sect will at last reign over the West will be disappointed too: while some lineages of the faith have come to all but repudiate it, this is no proof they will die because of the digitization of the world. Nor will it be possible to stop the return of ancient polytheism, should it come.

Here, as everywhere else, one cannot expect the tech to supplant the Church in its potencies and effects — even where tech worshippers begin to erect their own churches.

The case of Israel

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With that, onward. Almost immediately prior to the outbreak of hostilities, I spent over a week in Europe discussing publicly and privately the geopolitical circumstances faced by Jews and Gentiles at the intersection of technology and theology. The upshot of my conversations concerning Jews and Israel was that the observant Jews in Israel were very disorganized, to the point of inactivity, when it came to mustering a theological response to the issues and challenges posed by increasing technologization and tech worship in Israel and the wider West.

At the same time, I gathered, secular Jews in Israel had, by varying degrees, passively and actively, doubled down on technology as the foundation of their civilizational identity — “Startup Nation”, as Dan Senor and his brother-in-law Saul Singer memorably put it. A few minutes browsing the Web is sufficient to get a taste of Israel’s remarkable track record innovating military technology and spinning up commercial tech concerns from out of its security establishment.

My overall impression was of the Jewish civilization-state swiftly losing touch with its religious foundations — however many secular Israelis decry what they see as a problematic increase in religious extremism — and swiftly moving to reestablish a new spiritual foundation on the ground of technology itself, on the basis of their ability to create unsurpassed tools with a unique force to protect their people and elevate them to the first rank of world powers in the unfolding age.

This provisional assessment squared with my feelings about related remarks made over the summer by Michael Lind. “Beyond partisan politics lies civilizational politics,” he wrote near the conclusion of his broadside against what he called the “Eugenicons,” that is, would be tech superhumanists on the Right. Of course, I certainly agreed that the politics of civilizations existed and today took a certain sort of preeminence. But Lind went further: “In this century, the ultimate struggle will be between the religious and secular heirs of the Abrahamic tradition of ethical monotheism, on one side, and the believers in eugenics, transhumanism, and other pseudoscientific new faiths, on the other.”

By all means, three cheers for humanity. But over the summer, during my time in Europe, and to this very day, I just don’t see which “secular heirs of the Abrahamic tradition of ethical monotheism” — a mouthful uncannily if unfairly evocative of trending lifestyles like “ethical nonmonogamy” — are jumping to the fore in defense of the human identity, purpose, and status defined and defended by the Christian faith.

I’m sure there must be at least a few out there running around, but it strikes me as a fatal conceit that religious and secular humanists stand shoulder to shoulder, as equal partners rooted in a common creed and shared history, in defending our humanity from superhumanists and transhumanists alike. Certainly in Israel, so far as I can see, the situation is exactly not this: the religious are divided, disorganized, and disconnected from the challenges to their people and faith posed by technologization and tech worship, which the secular are onboarding themselves into with increasing speed and enthusiasm. (Neither are secular Jews nor Gentiles, here in America, noticeably fitting Lind’s mold.)

So, it bore special notice to me that both theology and technology have played a conspicuous role in the unfolding of Israel’s present struggle. Critics of the Netanyahu government have focused on the apparently woeful insufficiency of technology to substitute along dangerous borders for courageous, alert, and resourceful human guardians. Netanyahu, for his own part, has begun invoking Isaiah and Amalek.

These developments suggest to me that Israel’s great peril is found in its difficulty reconciling its turn to a new technological identity with the demand for a turn back to its religious identity placed on Israel and all high-tech civilization-states by the digital environment itself. It does appear to be a time of choosing, between the spiritual authority of the God of Israel and that of the silicon idol. But, still more, it remains to be seen whether Judaism, particularly in the hands of its current disunited faithful, can do what must be done in this age to reestablish viable political sovereignty: assert its spiritual authority over the use and development of digital technology.

This momentous matter is undoubtedly out of my hands and all human hands outside of the Jewish faith itself. But as we will consider when we look at the geopolitical and theological situation of the US itself, even more is at stake than the fate of Israel in the digital age. So too does the fate of all that is called Judeo-Christian hang in the balance.