AI and American Nihilism

After the afterglow

Twilight in the Wilderness by Frederic Edwin Church (1860)

For his 2011 book Lost in Transition, Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith conducted a series of in-depth interviews with 18-23 year-olds on culture, religion, and values. When he asked his respondents about a time they had faced a moral dilemma, two-thirds of his respondents weren’t able to engage with the question. Many simply could not name a moral dilemma they had ever faced, while others cited practical or financial decisions, such as whether they should buy a second cat litter tray or rent a larger apartment.

It is tempting to read this as evidence that young Americans are inarticulate and despairing. But Smith found his respondents were optimistic and often ambitious; they weren’t ruminating on why nothing mattered. Moral language survived in their speech, as inherited positions – it is good, after all, to be good – but these positions had ceased to organize their experience. These people could follow rules, but didn’t approach life as if it involved competing claims, such as trade-offs between obligation and desire, or the need for mercy against justice.

This is American nihilism: the decline of the capacity to experience some things as mattering more than others. It is not a despairing nihilism, but one that can coexist with happiness, niceness, ambition, and strong personal preferences.

This condition erodes autonomy – the capacity to perceive competing goods, judge among them, and accept responsibility for the life that judgment produces. We are not born with this capacity. It is formed through tradition, practice, role models, and contending with real responsibility. Self-rule is not simply about choosing between a menu of preferences that is presented to you.

Unfortunately, this formation has been dismantled and replaced by a therapeutic ideal that teaches us to be free, happy, and to avoid injury. Other sources of training in self-rule are also much diminished. The associational life whose demise Robert Putnam described in Bowling Alone was not merely a source of community. It also served as the venue where ordinary people weighed goods against each other, such as in a union, a parish, or a school board.

All of these trends meaningfully predate recent advances in AI capabilities, but they also explain why AI potentially poses such a risk to our autonomy.

Moral judgment is a capacity sustained by exercise, and we have been handed cheap, highly capable tools that can perform the exercise for us at a time when our civilizational antibodies are weak.

A person formed by thick commitments and an ability to navigate real dilemmas is much more likely to use powerful AI tools instrumentally than someone who cannot name a dilemma that they have faced. The danger lies less in the technology and more in the timing. It threatens to convert cultural deficiency into technological default.

Afterglow

The bones of this diagnosis may seem familiar. A version of them can be found in Alexis de Tocqueville’s famous nineteenth century warning about the risk of soft despotism. Tocqueville’s work is usually cited in response to concerns about the decline of associational life and as a means of rebuilding civil society. But his concern was more about what free people would come to want, rather than a narrow institutional prescription.

Tocqueville believed that the advent of democracy was irresistible, but feared that it could dissolve the social bonds that had previously anchored social order and personal obligation. As people become focused on private accumulation and enrichment, they lose interest in self-rule. This would result in a “tutelary power,” as opposed to a classical tyrant, stepping in and managing their lives, keeping them in a state of “perpetual childhood.” He had seen this begin to take hold in his native France, but believed America, with its federalism, free press, and robust civil society was better-placed to counteract this tendency.

Tocqueville feared that enlightened self-interest alone could not be the foundation for self-rule. It does little to prevent the development of a culture of materialism that causes people to turn inwards and abandon the public sphere. Instead, such a society needed to be grounded in the scrupulous practice of religious morality in public life.

Religion was vital as it was a “practical means of teaching men the immortality of the soul,” so “legislators of democracies … must apply themselves relentlessly to raising up souls and keeping them turned toward Heaven.” With this in mind, Tocqueville even offers advice to religious leaders in the democratic age, counselling them to emphasize morality over dogma and to exercise prudence.

While associations could help sustain the capacity for self-rule, religion would supply the reason people still wanted it, as it could offer goods that stand above comfort and consumption. But this is inherently fragile. What happens when that shared belief fades?

Leo Strauss, in his 1954 lecture course on Natural Right, pushed on this instability. He criticized Tocqueville for relying on a political argument for religion that “is of course dangerous to religion, because this argument proves merely the need of spiritualistic myth and not the need of a spiritualistic religion.”

By spiritualistic myth, Strauss means a belief in the spiritual that is held not because it is true, but because it is useful. Faith’s authority relies on people believing in its truth. Preserving it for its political utility undermines this truth claim: a myth known to be a myth loses its power.

In essence, Tocqueville leans on providence as justification for democracy, but that same democratic age brings with it incredulity and skepticism that hacks away at the foundations Tocqueville believes are essential to prevent soft despotism from spreading.

Nietzsche, however, grasped this. Once the highest horizon has become incredible, comfort is no longer subordinate to anything above it, and a life organized around comfort no longer seems a failure to the person living it.

Tocqueville would likely have despised Nietzsche. He was anti-egalitarian, compared advocates of equality to tarantulas, and ridiculed Christianity as “slave morality.” But the two men had convergent fears about how democracy and equality would lower our horizons and capacity for greatness.

For Nietzsche, this was embodied in the figure of the last man:

“‘What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?’ thus asks the last man, and he blinks. ‘The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. [...] Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.”

He saw Tocqueville’s democratic man as the problem, because “every enhancement so far in the type ‘man’ has been the work of an aristocratic society [...] since this sort of society believes in a long ladder of rank order and value distinctions between men.”

As nothing had intrinsic value, Nietzsche looked to a new nobility capable of creating values, rather than merely receiving them. Unlike the traditional European aristocracies, the qualification of membership was not birth, but a capacity to will. But as Nietzsche himself accepts, the person who wills is themselves already formed by inherited drives, language, examples, and distinctions of rank.

Even if a few exceptional individuals could legislate values for themselves, an aristocracy of self-creation is no foundation for stable society-wide autonomy. Nietzsche may diagnose the collapse powerfully, but doesn’t guide us through the rescue.

The end of history?

It’s possible to argue that nineteenth-century rumination on decaying shared values tell us little. Democracy spread, the aristocracy vanished, and the death of God came and went, but the twentieth century was still a profound time of scientific, technological, and moral achievement.

Nietzsche saw this coming to some degree. He believed that Western civilization could live off the afterglow of its moral inheritance for a while.

Religion and philosophy orient people toward what is worth wanting, but scarcity, rivalry, and institutions can discipline them in the pursuit of those goals. Modernity may have lost confidence in the ends, but it retained the professions, wars, ambition, and material necessities that continued to demand courage, restraint, work, and sacrifice.

In essence, we’ve been living in an interval where inherited institutions continue producing a human type whose ultimate justification they could no longer explain. What happens when those residual disciplines disappear too?

In the closing chapters of Brave New World, Mustapha Mond, the Resident World Controller for Western Europe, patiently explains to the Savage how the state has abolished God, art, tragedy, and danger. The World State’s goal was to remove any standard beyond immediate preference by which goods can be ranked. This is why the Savage desperately asks for “the right to be unhappy.” He doesn’t desire misery, but something against which his desires can be measured. But as the Controller says, “we like to do things comfortably.”

Alexandre Kojève envisaged such a world. Kojève, who preached an idiosyncratic mix of Hegel, Heidegger, and Marx, influenced a generation of intellectuals through his 1930s lectures, before becoming a senior official in the French government and one of the chief planners of the future European Union.

Kojève believed that history had a direction and an endpoint. By history, he didn’t mean events, but the sequence of struggles driven by fundamental human dissatisfaction, such as wars, revolutions, and political transformations. He believed that this process was driven by two forces: the human desire to be recognized by others and the need for labor to transform the natural world. When both of these processes had run their course, history would end.

At the end of history, with no defining work left to do, Kojève wrote that “Man properly so-called” – a restless, striving creature – would cease to exist, but the human animal would live on amid “abundance and complete security.” Initially, he envisaged this as a sort of contented animality pursued as “birds build their nests.” After visiting Japan, he saw a potential alternative: a life of pure “snobbery” and formalism, in which people upheld elaborate rituals, emptied of “all ‘human’ content.”

Kojève thought that this end state was both inevitable and quite possibly desirable. To most other readers, it seems repellant. In an extended back and forth with Kojève, Strauss dubbed it “destructive of humanity”. Parodying the Communist Manifesto, he concluded: “Warriors and workers of all countries, unite, while there is still time, to prevent the coming of ‘the realm of freedom.’”

As labor is progressively automated and if we see even a fraction of the speculated GDP gains, economic necessity will cease to be a driver. The remaining competition will persist increasingly between firms deploying marginally more powerful automated systems.

This is what every previous abundance-creating technology was supposed to do. Keynes cheerfully told his readers that their grandchildren would only have to work fifteen hours a week and would face the harder problem of deciding what to do with the rest of their time. Marx envisaged men hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, and criticizing literature after dinner.

But Keynes and Marx assumed that technology would substitute for human labor while leaving human judgment in-tact. AI unsettles that assumption. It can eliminate not only the need to perform labor, but the need to decide what labor is worth doing, how it should be done, and what its products mean. As Alasdair MacIntyre would put it, the achieved good would be separated from the human exercise that produced it.

The dying of the light

Assuming we don’t wish to spend our lives building nests and engaging in elaborate tea rituals, there are a number of paths that are open to us.

A popular one is to reject this comfort and complacency by embracing a form of accelerationism. Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto explicitly states that “our enemy is Friedrich Nietzsche’s Last Man.” At the end, he includes Nietzsche in his list of “patron saints of techno-optimism” and there’s even a section on “becoming technological supermen.”

Per this view of the world, if we reject the deceleration and get out of the way of the techno-capitalist machine, then we could see a world of abundance, growth, and a human population of over 50 billion, as mankind takes to the stars.

This has some obvious appeal. For most of human history, the vast majority of people were unable to exercise their full capacities due to economic constraints. Poverty has probably wasted human potential more than any other force in history. The societies that have produced great art or scientific discovery were rich and tended to produce it while they were getting richer. The fully formed life in the past that some look back on nostalgically was only available to a small minority of people.

Even putting aside general skepticism about accelerationism, it fails on its own terms as a response to the challenge of the last man.

Every good the Techno-Optimist Manifesto offers is counted as a product, whether it’s discoveries made, structures raised, or planets reached. Hannah Arendt feared that automation was that it would make us able to do more (or agentic), but able to say less and less about what we were doing. AI could very plausibly allow a civilization to become more capable, while its members increasingly lose authorship over what it does.

Far from confronting these difficulties, the manifesto is written in the teleological language of progress. Its promised land is the systematic removal of every hardship, risk and limit against which a self could be forged. Its proposed engine, “technocapital,” is a want-satisfaction machine with no standard by which to rank some wants over others.

The manifesto treats conquering nature as if it were overcoming the self, when for Nietzsche they were oppositional. In essence, the manifesto’s supermen are creating the engine to produce the last man.

In 1987, despairing at the state of the American university, Allan Bloom observed that America takes the most radical European thought but sanitizes it and strips out any of the terror. While Nietzsche viewed the death of God as a civilizational catastrophe, the version that crossed the Atlantic was a cheerful relativism, framed as defining one’s own truth and identity. For Bloom, this is because there was little intellectual soil in America for the original forms of these ideas. The United States is a country founded on the modern natural right teaching, with comfortable self-preservation, rights, and the rational pursuit of private interest all built in.

The Americans, thanks to their distinct origin story, didn’t have to contend with the gradual exhaustion of the aristocratic and Christian order. To understand and fear the death of God, Bloom believed that you had to have gone through a religious and classical formation that rendered it meaningful. Looking at his students, he sensed that this was no longer the case.

The acceptable Silicon Valley face of accelerationism is exactly this: a nihilism so sanitized that it has a fairytale ending. The much more hardcore accelerationists, such as Nick Land, who await the extinction of biological life with eager anticipation, pull in much smaller crowds.

Living traditions

If accelerationism is an intellectual cul-de-sac and the end of life on earth lacks market appeal, we must recover the conditions under which questions of the good can again be encountered as real.

Rebuilding the associations and practicing self-government is necessary, but not sufficient. Tocqueville’s remedy helped free people exercise their capacity, but assumed that they had a higher goal. People can be dragged back into the township or the jury and still want nothing but comfort and contentment. Participation helps us to organize our lives, but cannot by itself orient them.

We cannot simply sit around in the hope of some form of spiritual revival, nor can we simply impose a horizon upon people via a top-down ‘postliberalism’. You cannot reverse the dissolution of thick metaphysical bonds by handing a section of the elite more political power.

The problem is universal, but builders possess important leverage. Their tacit hierarchy of good becomes the interfaces, defaults, incentives, and infrastructure through which millions of other people exercise (or cease to exercise) judgment. Forming builders cannot substitute for forming citizens, but it can prevent the technologies of the next age from making citizenship harder.

But if the philosopher-builder is to build, they must be able to know what they are building for. Otherwise, we may continue to see technically brilliant builders in abundance, but increasingly few with a horizon. Nor can we simply hand them one – a shared higher goal cannot be manufactured for instrumental reasons.

Luckily, nothing needs to be invented. Institutions cannot supply the answers, but they can equip us to find them. For example, they can treat a classical education as a live argument, where future builders are confronted with these texts at their full strength. The Socratic notion that good has a nature recoverable by reason, or the belief that it comes through revelation, make rival claims about the highest life. They demand explanation, expose contradictions, and cannot be flattened into lifestyle objects. Crucially, they reveal that neutrality or indifference are themselves positions. These debates haven’t been rendered obsolete just because many of our institutions have ceased to take them seriously.

In a live argument, these accounts are taught as rivals. They contradict one another and, at most, one can be true. This tension between ideals creates a richer moral life and allows for more grounded commitments.

Of course, a student could become fluent in classical philosophy and still outsource every consequential life decision to an AI model. If judgment is a capacity sustained by exercise, then there need to be opportunities to use it. These need to be tasks whose performance is constitutive of the capacity they hope to form, as opposed to merely burdensome for their own sake.

The literary societies of nineteenth-century American universities ran on this principle. Students elected their officers, managed their libraries, and disciplined their own members. In 1850, the two main societies at the University of North Carolina had libraries three times the size of the university’s own.

Examples abound in other traditions. For example, in a Benedictine community, the abbot has to summon the entire community to discuss any important matter. The most junior member of the community has to be in the room “because it is often to a junior that the Lord reveals what is best.”

Builders formed inside substantive arguments, and practiced in judgments of their own, are less likely to mistake convenience for civilization. Asked to explain a dilemma they have faced, they will have an answer.

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Cosmos Institute is the Academy for Philosopher-Builders, technologists building AI for human flourishing. We run fellowships, fund AI prototypes, and host seminars with institutions like Oxford, Aspen Institute, and Liberty Fund.