The Six: March 13, 2024
Hello, and welcome to this inaugural issue of The Six, which is the name I’m assigning to what I hope will become an approximately weekly missive wherein I highlight some of the most interesting conversations and writings from the world of ideas (a world that is in many ways more real than our own). You may be wondering why I’ve chosen the title “The Six.”
First, there’s a practical reason: it sounds great. It’s short, punchy, and just a touch evocative, perhaps calling to mind a gunslinger of the Old West or a fictional 1960s megaband. But it’s also descriptive, because I hope to be including in each installment a list of six recommendations for your reading, watching, listening, or pondering. There’s also the numerological facts surrounding the number six. Consider, for example, this list (assembled mostly from Wikipedia):
In mathematics, six is the first perfect number (a number equal to the sum of its divisors) and the only one that consists of a single digit; it is the only perfect number that is also the product of its divisors
(1 x 2 x 3 = 6)
; it is the number of faces on a geometric cube; it is the number of trigonometric functions (can you name them?1);In chemistry and biology,
6
is the atomic number of carbon, the building block of life, and there are six common biomolecules (carbon, phosphorus, sulfur, carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen). The six-sided hexagon is a common appearance in nature (e.g. a bee’s honeycomb), and there are six colors in the RGB color wheel.There are six days in the creation mythology of the Abrahamic faiths (a mythology that is true, by the way), and it was on the sixth day that God created both man and beast.
And last but not least, St. Louis Cardinals great (and devout Catholic) Stan Musial wore #6 for his entire Hall of Fame career.
In sum: it’s one of the better numbers out there. You might even say that in a sea of infinity, it’s top ten! (Sorry.)
Let’s get to it.
Secularization Comes for the Religion of Technology by L.M. Sacasas
I’ve been telling everyone about this piece this week. Sacasas is one of the most technologically and theologically astute writers alive today, but I’m pained to say that I only recently discovered his work. His latest article is an illustrative example of his characteristic incision:
What if we’ve got the underlying religion [of the secularization narrative] wrong? Or, better, what if there’s another religion in play? In other words, what if the secularization of consequence for understanding our present moment is not a process in relation to Christianity, but to another, related but distinct, form of religious belief and practice?
Enter the religion of technology.
So what is this “religion of technology”? In Sacasas’ telling, it is the religion-enabled fervor that characterizes the pursuit of technology, usually in an understandable effort to cast off our mortal human limitations and achieve our salvation through technology. One might think here of a parallel to the religious zeal with which American pioneers set off across the Great Plains in pursuit of their professed Manifest Destiny.
Sacasas describes the “religion of technology” as reaching its zenith in the age of the World’s Fairs through the first half of the twentieth century, when all of a sudden it, like Christianity before it, faced a reckoning of secularization. The result is that just as Christianity’s secularization led from “Providence to Progress,” the Religion of Technology’s secularization leads from “Progress to Innovation.” “Whatever you want to say about Innovation,” writes Sacasas, “it does not compel and inspire the way Progress once did.”
He’s right. One can think of any number of examples of this sort of uncompelling innovation: the latest flagship phone has smaller bezels! a faster processor! a truer black screen! Or the newest generation of WiFi has twice the range! double the bandwidth! Or more accurately, you might think of any one of our more recent deleterious innovations that—like that ghastly invention, the videoconference—have enabled an entire generation of white collar professionals to talk to their computer screens for eight hours a day.
I’ve wanted to write a reflection on this piece for some time (Andreesen’s techno-optimist manifesto is a clarion call to return to the halcyon days of American industry that is for progress, not simply innovation), and Sacasas apparently had plans to do so when he instead wrote this essay. But he issues a helpful interpretive key for understanding Andreesen’s thesis: If secularization has indeed come for the religion of technology, then Andreesen’s words are not a call to improve but a homily in the tradition of the Great Revival: “Turn back, you venture capitalists, and purify your hearts, you innovation-minded.”
I encourage you to read it.
If the description of Sacasas’ essay above has whet your appetite, then I have good news: my friend Andrew Petiprin and I teamed up for another What a Week to talk about it more.
In what is certainly the most visually arresting development of the AI revolution, industry leader OpenAI announced its pathbreaking text-to-video generation model a couple of weeks ago. In OpenAI’s words,
“Sora is able to generate complex scenes with multiple characters, specific types of motion, and accurate details of the subject and background. The model understands not only what the user has asked for in the prompt, but also how those things exist in the physical world.”
To give you an idea of how quickly things are moving: less than a year ago, the leading edge of video generation gave us an alien-like Will Smith eating something that looked vaguely similar to pasta. Now we’re here. The results are impressive in a technical sense, but it’s difficult for me to think of a technological “advancement” that I’ve hated more. I’m on record already on the sheer banality of generative AI, and think that Sora is simply more evidence that my thesis is correct.
There’s also this kind of ontological nonsense coming from the technical team that developed Sora. So yea, I hate it.
Reflections on Melancholy by Larry Chapp
Larry, whom I consider a friend and mentor, has a great way of fitting a flurry of punches into a single paragraph. This meditation on melancholy as a sign of the eternal is worth your time.
The melancholic person does not settle for such short-circuited preoccupations and has instead an unquenchable thirst for the fulfillment that the inner dynamic our desires implies. He or she therefore refuses to stop short in the vestibule of our simian past where the postmodern deconstructors live, ever-ready to pronounce that all love is “merely” veiled lust, all justice veiled revenge, all beauty merely the epiphenomenal dance of procreative peacockery, and all truth a veiled grasping for power.
The Rest is History: JFK
I’ve really been enjoying The Rest is History podcast, and Tom and Dominic are a delight. This is part one of the fantastic six-part series that I have digested recently. The 1960s are such a fascinating time in American history, and hearing these Brits explain much of it to me was highly educational.
Full points if you listed: sine, cosine, tangent, cotangent, secant, cosecant!