The Bonapartes of the Bits

Tech's quest to blast to the future returns to Napoleon's dynamite.

One’s life can be transformed in a quarter of an hour. In my case? Whichever fifteen minutes of infamy accelerated the financial crisis of 2008 into its apocalyptic phase. My dissertation proposal on Constant, Tocqueville, Emerson, and Nietzsche’s assessments of Napoleon Bonaparte had just been approved — now my committee chairman had sat me down over campus coffee with an unceremonious update. “Something very bad is happening. I don’t know how long it will last. You seem to have a good thing going with your writing. Don’t be afraid to run.”

Even in a good year, the likes of which were already fading from living memory, political theory PhDs hoping for tenure-track employment faced a market of two or three jobs nationwide. Now, a downward revision to the nice round number of 0 was all but certain: Harvard’s endowment had been sliced by the crisis in half; the state schools had suddenly lost staggering sums of budget; small liberal arts schools, the last refuge of a post-doc, could no longer count on mommy and daddy to drop $50K on a bachelor’s degree in Longhouse Studies.

I ran, back to L.A. Ten years later, I got my diploma.

THE GREAT ME SET

Today’s relentless concentration of power by the tentacles of the Current Regime (our “Global American Empire,” “rules-based international order,” “sacred democracy,” “the West” — its name is legion) is of a piece with the vast assemblage of the Eurasian powers into a kind of opposite. Characteristically of such opposites, it often mirrors its rival in certain key respects. This duel duality is a favorite preoccupation of technologues convinced that René Girard is correct about “mimetic contagion” and its heightening to pandemic conditions no vaccine can cure. Under the sway of this theory, no man can avoid confronting the two objects of fear Girard associates with the finality of the ultimate duel — the first a figure, the next an event: Antichrist and Apocalypse.

But other technologists, of equal or greater influence, would sooner take their chances on more rivalry, more risk, floored acceleration directionally toward Apocalypse, if at least it means escaping the gravitational sink of perpetual “peace” (read: stagnation) they see the wokes and the legacy elite consolidating together around them. Such boldness especially excites those who think or hope — at least are willing to bet — that we can still have Great Men without triggering an accelerated cascade into one Great Man, a One with an utter monopoly on greatness, the overawing Sovereign and “mortal-god” of the Leviathan, but for the whole planet.

Close readers will recall that under that ultimate Sovereign no lord can remotely attain to rival greatness. Hobbes dedicated Leviathan to the Royalist aristocrat Sidney Godolphin: as Oakeshott observed, Godolphin was Hobbes’s exemplar of the vanishingly rare man of greatness. Motivated still more by pride than fear, such a leading man saw in the distinction of championing peaceful unity under the Sovereign an ultimate in salutary pride, that of imitating the God of highest glory rather than trying to supplant Him.

But Hobbes, in the end, one of a handful of massively influential early modern theorists who sought to resolve the roiling disorder unleashed by Protestantism through recourse to Hebraic (in his case Mosaic) political theology, could never endorse one Lord of the World, unless, one ventures to surmise, the Christian churches might be united — in a manner focused (as Hobbes does) on man’s glorification of the perfectly just God, rather than on God’s mercy toward undeserving man. A prospect like that was hugely implausible in Hobbes’s time. It is less so now — if we consider the extreme prejudice across both tech and woke against the Ancient Church’s grounding in God’s mercy still more than His justice.

For the woke, it is the old Western Christian obsession with propitiating divine punishment of original sin that has been thrown into an overdrive outstripping Christianity and the Triune God altogether; for tech, what dominates is the obsolescence or transcendence of any need for divine mercy in a schema where our bodies and souls must and will be transformed by human ingenuity to justly partake of (however construed) the divine and ultimate glory. This schema opens the door of the mind and the heart to the tempting image of a World Lord who is yet not Antichrist, who perfects an aristocracy of great and founding men below him but above the human mass, accelerating into an “Apocalyptic” version of the end of history not to be feared but welcomed because it entails the divinization, not the destruction, of humanity.

For these deep reasons, it makes sense that well-placed eyes are turning to great men of ambition for escapes from what’s seen as the twenty-first-century version of the “oriental despotism” that haunted nineteenth-century critics of institutionalized servility as otherwise different as Tocqueville and Nietzsche.

DROPS OF JUPITER

Perhaps it is not very surprising that so few Christian men rank among the movers attracting the most of tech’s attention — probably the most characteristic figure right now is MBS, positioning himself and his Saudi regime as a sort of VC to the VCs and an end run around woke-sick or Hobbit-pilled Western Christianity, Protestant or Catholic. MBS has another thing going for him — he isn’t Vladimir Putin, who just spawns more problems than he solves for Western tech lords angling for a boost in domestically adverse times, or Xi Jinping, whose crackdown on US-based techies has proven far more severe still than Joe Biden’s.

Indeed MBS shows all the signs of a man who understands he and his people have a priceless opportunity to become the gray zone of choice for the so-called gray tribe of Western technologists — a silicon Switzerland where the best of both worlds, East and West, can be swiftly and profitably exploited with minimum exposure to the downsides putting so much drag on each.

Drag is a serious issue. The guy who was meant to be the MBS of the West, Emmanuel Macron, has been cut down to size over and over again by France’s endemic problems: for him and his “Jupiterian” style, the Napoleonic breakthrough of Jupiter Scapin himself has lain too far out of reach — even if not forever, simply for too long, which under today’s conditions of digital acceleration is like forever without the grace period.

Yet nevertheless it is Napoleon who remains the model and touchstone of the great man who can move mass and masses at the requisite speed of modern (or postmodern?) times. Bonaparte was Emerson’s representative “Man of the World” for this reason, and his encomium, despite its many and serious caveats, echoes with the tropes that have come to define our socioeconomic battlespace. “He is so largely receptive,” Emerson wrote, “and is so placed, that he comes to be a bureau for all the intelligence, wit, and power of the age and country;” it was “as if the sea and land had taken flesh and begun to cipher.”