The Confidence Man
Peter Edman
Books & Culture for August 2005 features a review essay from Dr. Eugene McCarraher (hat tip: ALD).
McCarraher, in “The Confidence Man,” a pleasantly acerbic article, discusses Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World without Redemption, a new book by Mark C. Taylor, who is essentially an evangelical Nietzschean.
One often wonders why some atheists feel the need to evangelize their lack of faith. At any rate, Dr. McCarraher raises some good questions about an assortment of subjects, most notably the danger that academics and others face who are too isolated (in this case by tenure) from the joys and sorrows of the material world.
What does it take to write with such insouciance about failure, suffering, and death? I don’t think it’s flippant to respond: tenure, medical insurance, and a pension, the oblivious possession of which provides the Bobo set with security to neglect some intractable material and social realities.
McCarraher also makes trenchant comments (while appreciating Taylor’s spirited defense of capitalism) on the now common techno-gnostic utopianism that Taylor falls into, which is certainly born out by my recent readings on technology.
This is brain candy for middlebrows, and it makes Confidence Games a learned but utterly conventional artifact of New Economy literature. Other samples include Ray Kurzweil’s wonder at “spiritual machines”; George Gilder’s libertarian celebration of info-technology as “the overthrow of matter”; Michael Lewis’ paeans to youthful and avaricious techno-geeks; Bill Gates’ heralding of “friction-free capitalism.” Heir to Italian Futurism and ‘60s “social forecasting,” it’s a heady and intoxicating genre, swelling the imagination with a frisson of movement, a synaptic romance of micro-circuitry, and a utopian promise of global communion. Bogus but beguiling, it demonstrates that an unrequited eschatological hope has always fueled the engines of accumulation.
On that last, it’s worth comparing with my current favorite book, John Polkinghorne’s The God of Hope and the End of the World. Polkinghorne, one of the discoverers of the quark, sets out to discuss the Christian understanding of the end of the world in light of what science and theology tells us; it is the layman’s summary of a longer and denser work that Polkinghorne edited, The End of the World and the Ends of God. He certainly predicted Taylor’s perspective:
A world obsessed by the present will have only cold memories of the past and apocalyptic fears for the future. It will be a world of multiple options and no shared stories, the setting for a skimpy and etiolated human existence, which is a kind of life on half pay. A world of this kind is reminiscent of the lunar landscape portrayed by science, as a consequence of its self-chosen decision to concentrate on the impersonal aspects of our encounter with reality—a world populated by quarks and gluons but without persons in it, quantifiable but without value, condemned to ultimate cosmic futility.
Polkinghorne’s meditation on the theological virtue of hope—grounded firmly in the profoundly anti-Gnostic doctrine of the resurrection of the body—is one of the best I’ve read. He makes a compelling argument for the meaningfulness of creation—a requited eschatological hope—and helps us see how to live purposefully and realistically in the present and not fall prey to the false promises of technical utopias, whether consumerism, cryonics, or “spiritual” machines.
Hope is the negation both of Promethean presumption, which supposes that fulfillment is always potentially there, ready for human grasping, and also of despair, which supposes that there will never be fulfillment, but only a succession of broken dreams. Hope is quite distinct also from a utopian myth of progress, which privileges the future over the past, seeing the ills and frustrations of earlier generations as being no more than necessary stepping stones to better things in prospect.
Gleanings, Faiths and Worldviews, Meaning and Calling, Science and Technology, Wed 27 Jul 2005
