Even though one could say that as a philosopher reading forms a large part of my work, my interests pull me in so many different directions that I feel I am perpetually behind (sometimes embarrassingly so), publishers’ lists in any particular field or genre. That is true for philosophy and doubly so for literature (which is better than philosophy, since it nourishes the mind but also pleases in a way that very few philosophical authors and their too-careful-to-the-point of verbosity prose are able to achieve). So it came to pass that I sat in my garden in July 2023 reading Richard Ford’s The Lay of the Land, published in 2006.

The Lay of the Land is the third volume of a trilogy that began with The Sportswriter and continued with Independence Day. In one respect, the trilogy is classic Americana: an epic that traces the domestic dramas of Frank Bascombe, former sportswriter cum New Jersey real estate not-quite mogul, on his journey from early to middle middle age, through his struggles to love his kids, divorce, re-marriage and its sundry complications, and finally to some sort of inner peace.

In almost all respects Bascombe is everything I absolutely rejected when I was younger. I disdained the social conventions that Bascombe lives by, never wanted to have children, valued ideas and art more than money, dressed in tight black jeans and a leather jacket rather than pale pastel golf shirts. But the power of literature (and all art) is to draw us into worlds which are not our own. The greatness of literature is not found in how accurately it “represents” this or that reality but with how skillfully it constructs its own reality for readers– who are not the characters– to explore. And if we have the courage to explore a world which is not our own we might find– sometimes to our horror, but always to our edification– that we see ourselves, or some aspect of ourselves, where we least expected to find them.

I have never been a sports writer (but I do spend too much time watching hockey and baseball), have never been divorced and have no children, but I am a middle aged man. Of course, the universe sends us no mystical signs, but it is amusing sometimes to think that it does. The delay of 17 years between Ford’s publishing the novel and my beginning to read it allowed my age to catch up with the protagonist: we are both 55. Perhaps occult forces were at work guiding my eye to this volume on a springtime book-shopping trip to Ann Arbor. Maybe the universe wanted to warn me about something (but I hope not, because Bascombe has prostate cancer).

Even as I shuddered at the thought of being caught dead in chinos and loafers, (not to mention being terrified of being diagnosed with cancer) the book made me realize the obvious: I was very far from being the cool near-teenager living in a basement apartment in Toronto but a middle middle aged (I hope 55 is middle middle age) man, sitting in the back garden of my two story brick house in Windsor. I was not a real estate agent but a Philosophy professor, decidedly middle class, living a very different life than my working class origins, and also capable of basic existential mathematics: every day on the planet increases the probability of my receiving the sort of bad news that Bascombe receives. The book forced on me the reality of the commonalities that age and class impose which run deeper than our chosen values. These commonalities do not negate differences of life goals and priorities, but they force us to be honest about the whole of what we become. That honest reckoning is difficult, because the funnest thing in life is self-deception.

But in order to provoke nourishing self-reflection and understanding, novels must please the mind. What pleases is Ford’s absolute mastery of economy of expression. His sentences are exquisite: “This Clevinger, entered the quiet, reverent classroom of test takers, walked among the desks and toward the front to where Ms. McCurdy stood, arms folded, musing out the window, possibly smiling. And he said to her, raising a Glock 9-mm to within six inches of the space just above the mid-point between her eyes, he said, “Are you ready to meet your Maker?” To which Ms. McCurdy, who was 46 and a better than average teacher and canasta player, and who had been a flight nurse in Desert Storm, replied, blinking her periwinkle eyes in curiosity only twice, “Yes. Yes, I think I am.” A scene of absolute horror is rendered with such quiet attention to the banal details that it renders the extraordinary ordinary in a way which better drives home the deeper point (which the rest of the novel explores) that each of us should cultivate the quiet dignity of Ms. McCurdy as we come closer to that inevitable meeting.

As I began the novel, storm clouds gathered quickly as they do here this time of year. The wind picked up and I became conscious of sitting under the limbs of a large mulberry tree. Directly overhead, jets headed out on a easterly flight path from Detroit Metro towards Europe. I thought: “If a branch fell or a 777 on its way to London dropped a piece of its wing on me, could I, in the fraction of a second before the tree or flap crushed me, answer the question with the same equanimity as Ms. McCurdy?” Probably not, because I do not believe in the God that gave her strength. Philosophy is not therapy. One can, with Socrates, extol the examined life and believe that philosophy is preparation for death (because it helps us live well and fully) and still spend most of one’s days trying to distract oneself from that relentless existential mathematics that I noted above. Every moment that you live is a subtraction from a finite sum of days.

I do not know how a younger man or a middle aged woman would experience The Lay of the Land. To be sure, the novel could still resonate for those at a different stage of life or experiencing it from a female perspective, but I am not certain they would feel the novel’s pull the same way a person in my position feels it. I am not saying that Ford had only middle aged men in mind when he wrote the book, but for me, its power lay in how perfectly it captures the way in which, no matter what one does at 55 (or thereabouts) one cannot deny that one is no longer young. Having adult children (like Bascombe) would put a fine point on that fact, but even without them one just feels (and looks) one’s age. And that is disconcerting, initially, whatever one’s walk of life, because it shatters the temporal illusion in which people live. Second to second, one does not look different, feel different, or worry about the next second being one’s last. But ruthlessly iterated over decades, we do change, our hair recedes, our knees ache, we would rather have a martini in our back garden and read Richard Ford than go to a club. Most importantly, we start to recognize emotionally, and not just abstractly, intellectually, that one second will be our last, and we are much closer to our final breath than to the first.

There is thus a deep intelligence at work beneath the surface narrative of the novel. Most people are not philosophers and do not ruminate on the meaning of life or grapple with their mortality by reading existential philosophy. Many seek spiritual comfort in religious communities, but many, like Bascombe, approach these essential problems through their memories. As we age, the number of days remaining to us shrinks, but we accumulate memories, and these become the substance of on-going self-examination: was I a good father or husband or partner, was I there when my friends needed me, did I make the right career choice, study the right subject, vote for the right candidate, speak up when the situation demanded. These are totally banal questions, and yet absolutely central to the only evaluation of one’s life that ultimately matters: one’s own. The difference between the philosophical and literary treatment of these issues is that in the latter case we experience them through the constructed feelings and thoughts of the characters: they are evoked, rather than laid out in the abstract. As soon as literature lectures it dies as art: if you want to lecture, become a professor; if you want to be an artist, trust that your audience will find their own way through your work.

There are no lectures in Lay of The Land. There are, unfortunately, some badly drawn scenes (Bascombe’s thoughts as he fantasizes about his daughter’s lesbian partner) and a melodramatic climax whose motivation I could not understand at all. The novel recovers from the fireworks of the climax and reaches a satisfying conclusion consonant with the tenor and the themes that Ford so wonderfully unfolds in this novel and its two preceding volumes. I do not know if Ford plans a fourth volume that would take us through to the end of Bascombe’s days but, for myself, I hope not. Sometimes literature, like life, is best when it leaves some things hanging in the balance.

In ancient Greece, to be a cynic was morally estimable. Cynics (exemplified by Diogenes the Cynic) were renowned for their honesty: brutal, but honesty nonetheless. They were regarded as truth tellers who were not afraid of power. Today, the term has come to mean almost the opposite of what it would have signified to the ancient Greeks. Cynicism retains its connection to honesty, but honesty in the pursuit of one’s own interests. Contemporary cynics can cut through bullshit, to be sure, but not to subordinate power to truth. The truth for a contemporary cynic is the truth of power.

It is in this light that we must examine the results of the recently conclude NATO summit. There is much that sounds like platitudinous hypocrisy, but beneath the platitudes are important political truths asserted cynically. What sound like universal principles are in fact bald expressions of the interests of NATO members, of which the United States is the most important. Below, I cite the most politically important of such passages from the communique issued on first day of its summit, July 11th 2023, and add brief, critical comments that supply what the communique leaves out.

“We, the Heads of State and Government of the North Atlantic Alliance, bound by shared values of individual liberty, human rights, democracy, and the rule of law, have gathered in Vilnius as war continues on the European continent, to reaffirm our enduring transatlantic bond, unity, cohesion, and solidarity at a critical time for our security and international peace and stability.”

Note that these values remain undefined and hence they cannot be used reflexively, to criticise alliance policy on the same grounds that they use to justify it. When we decode their meaning in the context of this document, liberty, democracy, and human rights are equated to the institutions of the member states. But whether people in NATO countries enjoy the means to live according to their choices, whether the expression of the collective considered judgements of the people as a whole governs policy and law, and whether the fundamental interests of human beings as asserted in key human rights documents are satisfied are not examined. Rhetorically, one is supposed to uncritically accept the claim that NATO defends democracy, etc., because NATO protects countries that call themselves liberal democracies. That those societies might need fundamental changes in order to become liberal, democratic upholders of human rights is not raised as a serious possibility. But this is not just hypocritical rhetoric: there is no reason to think that politicians and statespeople do not actually believe their platitudes. Their convictions are key impediments to change through rational argument (supposedly the primary political virtue of liberal-democracy, as understood by thinkers from Mill to Rawls). They simply cannot see their actual policies as their opponents might see them (undemocratic and coercive), and so could never be persuaded to change course. Opponents’ arguments re simply dismissed as propaganda while their own pronouncements assumed to be necessarily true.

“NATO is a defensive Alliance.”

It is true that in its origins NATO was formed to contain the Soviet Union and it did not undertake offensive actions during the Cold War. But it did bomb Serbia to help secure the independence of Kosovo (contrary to international law) and it also participated in the Afghan war, when the United States manipulated Article 5 of the Washington Treaty, falsely claiming that the 9/11 attacks were undertaken by the government of Afghanistan. (People forget that the Taliban offered to turn over bin Laden if the United States provided them evidence that he was behind the attacks). Those are two cases of NATO engaged in offensive military operations with an aim to re-define the map and replace governments. I exclude the dozens of solo US interventions of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

“NATO’s three core tasks [are] deterrence and defence, crisis prevention and management, and cooperative security.

NATO played a deterrent role during the Cold War and it should have been disbanded when the Warsaw pact was disbanded. Instead, it carried on because of the inertial force that the past exercises on the future. The problem with anachronistic institutions is that uses must be found for them. Their existence prevents their supporters from seeing that new possibilities open up under new historical conditions. NATO no longer had an objective or historically specific function once the Soviet Union collapsed, but it carried on. Not only did it carry on, it grew. Not only did it grow, it expanded right to the borders of the Russian Federation, provoking the very sort of nationalist security reaction that underlined the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Hence this “defensive” alliance provoked the very thing it was supposed to prevent: war in Europe.

“We reaffirm our commitment to NATO’s Open Door policy and to Article 10 of the Washington Treaty. Every nation has the right to choose its own security arrangements.”

The policy that created the context for war in Ukraine continues, despite the catastrophe it has brought about. As I noted above, the contemporary cynic equates truth with their own power and cannot rise above to look critically at the objective results of its exercise. Thus, despite the fact that their refusal to negotiate Russian security concerns created the conditions for open warfare, they persist– but ambiguously– with teasing membership for Ukraine. This teasing of offers of admission without actually offering them all the while demanding that Ukraine sacrifice more and more of its men to the killing fields is the height– or perhaps better, the depth, of NATO hypocrisy.

Not only is this position murderous, it is also self-undermining if it is supposed to justify NATO policy and discredit Russia’s. It is of course true that every sovereign nation can choose its own security arrangements, but if this principle is the universal that it is asserted to be, it must hold for Russia too. Where there are competing security interests war, can only be prevented if both sides listen to each other and take one another’s concerns seriously. That did not happen in this case: Russia presented written proposals to the US that would have helped resolve the conflict. The US did not respond seriously. An agreement to end the fighting was negotiated in the early days of the war; the US and the UK urged Ukraine to reject it. They did, and now there are probably 100 000s of thousands of dead and no sign that the fighting will end soon.

“Peace in the Euro-Atlantic area has been shattered. The Russian Federation has violated the norms and principles that contributed to a stable and predictable European security order.”

In fact, NATO and the US de-stablised this order by failing to change their strategic thinking when the strategic situation in Europe changed after the Cold War. Russia was then in no position to invade Europe but sought deeper integration, which it achieved, as a major supplier of energy and resources to Europe. Russia had no reason to upset those trading relationships. That it did was a function of the Maidan coup (shaped by Washington policy) and later the refusal to implement the principles enshrined in the two Minsk Treaties.

“The People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) stated ambitions and coercive policies challenge our interests, security and values. We remain open to constructive engagement with the PRC, including to build reciprocal transparency, with a view to safeguarding the Alliance’s security interests.”

It is unclear how does anything China has done domestically or in its own sphere of interest threatens Europe. European and United States’ capital has benefited tremendously since the 1980’s from off-shoring manufacture to China. In turn, Chinese policy has channeled resources into the biggest poverty elimination scheme in human history. Like every state, China has the sovereign right to organise its internal affairs and “determine its own security arrangements.” No country, including China, is above reproach or criticism, but problems of the Chinese state are for the Chinese people to resolve. Provoking a massive military confrontation will hardly promote the values of individual liberty, democracy, and human rights that NATO asserts that it upholds.

“Russia bears full responsibility for its illegal, unjustifiable, and unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine, which has gravely undermined Euro-Atlantic and global security and for which it must be held fully accountable.”

Russia bears responsibility for its decision to invade. That decision was egregiously stupid and has ensured the very encirclement by NATO forces that it was designed to prevent. Sweden and Finland have now joined the alliance, and whether Ukraine gains formal admission or not, there is no scenario in which it emerges outside of the Western security umbrella. The invasion was rash and will most likely end up being one of the major strategic political and economic blunders of the past 100 years. At the same time, those decisions were made in reaction to two decades of provocative NATO expansion. As with the Cold War, the people of a smaller nation are the primary victims of great power competition, made even more tragic because there were no objective economic or ideological causes of this conflict but only the inertia that prevents major power from changing course when the historical situation makes it possible to do so.

“We do not and will never recognise Russia’s illegal and illegitimate annexations, including Crimea.”

That is probably true as regards Donbass, but Crimea will likely have to be formally ceded if there is ever to be peace. Whatever happens, this claim is the height of hypocrisy, given NATO’s role in cravinf Kosovo off from Serbia. Kosovo’s independence was forced by a 78 day NATO bombing mission.

“There can be no impunity for Russian war crimes and other atrocities, such as attacks against civilians and the destruction of civilian infrastructure that deprives millions of Ukrainians of basic human services.”

Fair enough, but of course the universalisation of the underlying principle would require the investigation and punishment of war crimes committed across the Middle East, Central Asia, and North and East Africa during the ‘War on Terror.’ Everyone knows that will not happen. Remember the hundreds of thousands of deaths of Iraqi children that Madeleine Albright said were “worth it?” They died mostly because of the destruction of civilian infrastructure.

“We urge all countries not to provide any kind of assistance to Russia’s aggression and condemn all those who are actively facilitating Russia’s war.”

… while we continue to pump more and more offensive military hardware into the theatre of operations.

“We underline that this cannot be realised without Russia’s complete and unconditional withdrawal. While we have called on Russia to engage constructively in credible negotiations with Ukraine, Russia has not shown any genuine openness to a just and lasting peace.”

As I noted above and has been extensively documented, this claim is simply untrue. Russia asked for negotiations and was ignored’ they had an agreement worked out with Ukraine that the US and UK undid.

“We fully support Ukraine’s right to choose its own security arrangements. Ukraine’s future is in NATO.”

This claim sounds like a naked contradiction. According to whom is Ukraine’s future in NATO? The present government of Ukraine, it is true, is demanding NATO membership, but governments change. Is it not possible that Ukrainians, waking up to the way in which they have been sacrificed for US-NATO policy, will come to regard it as a de-stabilizing force and prefer some other security arrangement?

“Ukraine has become increasingly interoperable and politically integrated with the Alliance, and has made substantial progress on its reform path”Ukraine has become increasingly interoperable and politically integrated with the Alliance, and has made substantial progress on its reform path.”

Not according to Transparency International, which gave Ukraine a score of 33/100, ranking it 166th out of 180 countries. It has also engaged in a systematic campaign of Russophobic historical revisionism, including the inexcusable removal of Russian language books from the nation’s libraries.

“As part of a broader effort to better respond collectively to this threat, we will further develop Allies’ capabilities, and continue to engage with the Global Coalition to Defeat Da’esh and with partner countries in order to support their efforts and to help them build their capacity to counter terrorism. … Our approach to terrorism, and its causes, is in accordance with international law and the purposes and principles of the UN Charter, and upholds all relevant United Nations Security Council Resolutions on the fight against terrorism.”

Terrorism will never be defeated save by the elimination of its causes, of which armed invasion of small countries is a primary cause. Terrorism is a malign tactic in support of legitimate causes. Until the US stops interfering in the affairs of other countries there will always be resistance. Unable to match up to the US militarily, guerrilla and terrorist tactics will be adopted. In pursuit of its interests the US has never worried about international law. At this moment the US occupies parts of Syria in open contradiction to international law.

“Russia is fuelling tensions and instability across these regions. Pervasive instability results in violence against civilians, including conflict-related sexual violence, as well as attacks against cultural property and environmental damage.”

Indeed it does, and the US has been the major destabliser of “these regions” (in Africa). In the current conflict no African nation has openly supported the US. They have instead remained neutral and agitated for peace. having suffered from centuries of imperialist domination African nations are well-positioned to cut through NATO’s platitudes. They are certainly mistaken if they think that Putin’s Russia is a consistent opponent of imperialism, but they are correct to identify the US and Europe as the major historical sources of their own oppression.

“The People’s Republic of China’s stated ambitions and coercive policies challenge our interests, security and values … he PRC’s malicious hybrid and cyber operations and its confrontational rhetoric and disinformation target Allies and harm Alliance security.”

As above, there is no evidence that China has any ambitions beyond securing its own borders and spehere of interest. It is does not claim the right, as NATO does, to decide policy for the whole world, but only insists on the consistent application of the principle which NATO purportedly believes, that each nation has the right to “decide its own security arrangements.” If African nations prefer Chinese to Western investment, that is again their sovereign right to choose. All the “confrontational rhetoric” blows into China from Europe and America.

“The PRC seeks to control key technological and industrial sectors, critical infrastructure, and strategic materials and supply chains.”

Has Chinese policy sought to embargo key technologies? Has China strong-armed allies to stop trading with the US. This assertion is an inversion of reality. Biden has continued Trump’s policy of economic war against China. He could in fact learn a lesson from the last forty years of Chinese history. The Chinese have used the wealth generated by economic growth to lift hundreds of millions out of poverty. Yes, inequality has increased in relative terms, but no one can deny that there has been world-historical improvement in living standards, an improvements which the US seeks to de-rail.

“The deepening strategic partnership between the PRC and Russia and their mutually reinforcing attempts to undercut the rules-based international order run counter to our values and interests.”

As a number of realist commentators in the US have pointed out, the alliance between Russia and China is a direct function of US policy.

“We reiterate our clear determination that Iran must never develop a nuclear weapon. We remain deeply concerned about Iran’s escalation of its nuclear programme.”

Even the US admits that Iran is not actively pursuing nuclear weapons. As with the Russian-Chinese alliance, the escalation referred to here is tactical and a direct response to Trump’s walking away from the agreement that the Obama administration reached, Biden, of course, has not rejoined, so whatever happens, America has only itself to blame.

“The threat to critical undersea infrastructure is real.”

Where better to end than on this astounding assertion. The destruction of Nordstream 2 was either brought about by the US directly, indirectly, or with its silent approval and yet the inclusion of this claim implies that forces other than the US-NATO were involved. Only a group that assumes that it makes reality rather than responds to it could make such a claim. As it is finding out– sadly, at the cost of other people’s lives– NATO’s beliefs do not constitute the world, but they do help make it worse than it might otherwise be.

While it is true that market forces are always shaped by laws and political regulations, anyone who doubts that there is such a thing as class-based economic power needs to think about what has transpired in Ontario this summer over government subsidies to attract automaker investment in electronic vehicle production. I live in “Canada’s Automotive capital,” across the Detroit River from the Motor City. Both Windsor and Detroit have faced decades of factory closings. So when Stellantis (the latest permutation of what used to be Chrysler) announced a partnership with LG, a Korean company, to build a new factory to produce lithium batteries for electric vehicles, it seemed to ensure the long term future of Windsor’s one remaining assembly plant (Canada’s largest factory). Construction began almost as soon as the agreement was announced, but it came to a crashing halt two months ago. The Canadian and Ontario governments had pledged an undisclosed sum to secure the investment, but they had also been negotiating with Volkswagen to build a similar factory in St. Thomas, about 150 kilometers away. Unlike the Windsor deal, the subsidy that Volkswagen would receive came out in the press: 16 billion dollars according to a report from the Parliamentary Budget Officer. No sooner had this deal been announced than work halted on the Windsor plant. Whether Stellantis demanded that an existing deal be re-opened or whether the deal had never been finalized was unclear, but what was clear to the city, the provincial and federal governments, and Unifor, the main auto workers union, was that the biggest industrial investment in Ontario in 30 years was in jeopardy.

Negotiations were re-started and a new deal was reached this week: Stellantis will receive 15 billion dollars in tax concessions. All told, then, two companies will receive 31 billion dollars in subsidies to build two factories that will create 1400 jobs in St. Thomas and 2500 in Windsor.

It is easy to criticize these deals, but they prove that corporations have the power to extract (extort) these concessions from governments. Governments will pay these subsidies regardless of their ideological stripe. The Ontario government is a right-wing conservative party and the federal government a classic example of Liberal centrism, but both scrambled to save the Windsor deal when it became apparent that it was in jeopardy. So important are large-scale manufacturing investments to the appearance that the economy is growing, and so central is the appearance that the economy is growing to the longevity of governments, that it is relatively easy for major corporations to start subsidy bidding wars between cities, regions, and countries. (A complicating factor in the Windsor deal was that the Biden administration passed its own massive subsidy program for green energy and manufacturing as part of its Inflation Reduction Act). In negotiations, one exploits one’s advantage to the fullest. Corporations hold the key to the decision as to where manufacturing plants are sited and they used this power to play countries and regions off against each other until they get the best deal for themselves. Even the most powerful government in the world tailors its policies to attract corporate investment. if governments will not pay, their countries or regions will not get investment.

(Whether these investments really do contribute to overall economic growth is more questionable: The Parliamentary Budget Officer estimates that the total aggregate economic benefit of the St. Thomas plant will amount to a .01 % boost to GDP. Mathematically, the economy is no further ahead than if the government had just kept the money it will pay out in subsidies).

Of course, economies are not mathematical equations but systems of production and distribution upon which workers’ lives depend. Workers live in one place rather than another and must concern themselves with the state of economic forces where they live and not in the abstract realm of aggregates and averages. Voters vote for local MPs and they expect that they will deliver the goods, especially if their local MP is a member of the ruling party. The Volkswagen plant might only generate .01% GDP growth in the country as a whole, but in St. Thomas its effects on the local GDP will many orders of magnitude more than .01. One cannot dismiss from on high the efforts of local governments to attract investment (especially in historically industrial towns like Windsor and St. Thomas) unless one has a ready-made better alternative for workers.

The ability of corporate capital to determine political policy proves that class-based economic power is real. While this ability confirms one core criticism of capitalism (that it subverts democratic power by determining government policy) it also undermines a key plank of capitalist ideology. Capitalism’s main supporters argue that free competition drives innovation and innovation drives economic growth, better standards of living, and technological progress. Visionaries and bold, risk-taking entrepreneurs constantly sail into the unknown, returning with new ideas, new products, new methods of production: all that governments have to do is stay out of the way. Sure, sometimes a homemade sub will implode while it takes adventure seeking billionaires to the bottom of the Atlantic, but cumulatively, over time, the risks return rewards that pay for the occasional failure.

But what risks are Volkswagen and Stellantis assuming here? None: at least in the case of large-scale investments, public money and not entrepreneurial vision drives “innovation.” The ability of corporations to determine public policy by playing jurisdictions off against one another thus proves the reality of class-based economic power at the same time as it undermines the myth of entrepreneurial vision as the driving force of capitalism. The actual marketplace is not a complex order of small competing firms pushing each other to innovate but a network of coercive power controlled by massive corporations able to bend governments across the political spectrum to their will. Syrizia in Greece was effectively destroyed by the power of German banks who threatened to destroy the Greek economy if Syriza heeded the will of the people as expressed in the referendum of July, 2015. In the Windsor case, Stellantis either reneged on an existing agreement or radically changed its demands. Governments scurried back to the table and added untold billions to the subsidy package.

Examples could be multiplied thousands of times, but the point to take away is that capital is not the source of innovation. It is not even the primary source of investment for large scale enterprises: national and regional governments provide the funds (directly and indirectly), engineering and scientific intelligence is the source of the know how involved in the manufacturing, and workers provide the labour power. The corporations risk relatively nothing but extract all the profits. Governments pay the bills because for the majority of working people “the economy” means “jobs” and jobs at large manufacturing plants tend to pay better, provide more stable employment conditions, can be effectively unionized, and provide better benefits. However, if governments provide the capital, engineers and scientists the ideas, and workers the labour power, the corporation is really an unnecessary middle man appropriating the value created by government and workers.

There is no reason other than ideological attachment to a mythical free market and its magic powers of innovation and wealth creation to prevent governments from actively cutting out the corporate middle man and simply investing in industries that will produce life-valuable products and services. Well, a critic will respond, that is all well and good but we know that “state industries” are not efficient and that governments lack the expertise to run complex systems. That might be true, but it is is equally true about private corporations (which often underperform because of managerial incompetence or greed). Corporate boards do not know anything about the physics of lithium batters. They hire scientists and engineers that do. Nationally owned industries do not need to be run by the cabinet of the government of the day. Competent managers can be hired along with the requisite scientific experts. Few people are so dogmatically attached to an idea of capitalism that they will turn down challenging careers just because their employer is publicly rather than privately owned. Plenty of right-wing economists happily toil for publicly funded universities (and some even participate in their faculty unions).

I conclude on this note because even as capitalism lurches from crisis to crisis people will argue that there is no alternative. Here we see a first systematic step towards an alternative right before our eyes: public control of the industries that public investment and collective labour build.

ChatGPT has set off a panic, not only amongst some educators, worried that it will encourage plagiarism (or perhaps even call into question the nature of authorship) but amongst media prognosticators and a few maverick tech mandarins (whom I always suspect of raising alarms only in order to raise share prices) that AI is coming not only for academic integrity, but our very humanity. They are not wrong to worry. A long history of science fiction dystopias have painted a picture of uncaring machines turning on their creators. Moreover, people who know a lot more about the science (forget about the fiction) plausibly speculate that an artificial intelligence would likely have very different motives than a natural intelligence, motives that we might find malignant but it would find normal. Hans Moravec, a robotics engineer and prophet of the post-human age argues that just as technologically advanced human societies conquered and exploited less technologically advanced societies, so too will an artificial superintelligence likely eliminate the fleshy form of life as inferior and irrelevant. Nick Bostrom, a leading transhumanist philosopher likewise warns his more cheery transhumanists that there is no guarantee that a superintelligent machine would care one whit for the joys and moral principles of human beings. I take these warnings seriously, but I also think that the nightmare scenarios that they paint of coming robot wars tends to distract from a less spectacular but probably more dire (because more probable) threat that the further development of AI poses.

Part of that threat concerns job markets: now that middle class intellectual and professional careers are threatened by AI they are desperately ringing the tocsin. The stoicism that they preached to generations of manual workers faced with technological unemployment is noticeably absent in their pleas to governments to start to regulate and restrain further AI research. Their hypocrisy aside, this side of the danger is real, and twofold.

On the one hand, we still live in a capitalist society where most of life’s necessities are commodities. In order to access the goods and services that we need we require an income, and for most of us that income means selling our labour power. That side of the problem could be addressed if the surplus value produced by our labour were collectively controlled rather than privately appropriated as profit. If collectively produced wealth were democratically controlled, we could rationally reduce socially necessary labour time. Surplus wealth would then create the conditions for everyone to enjoy more free time. Needed goods and services would be publicly funded and available on the basis of need. The realm of freedom, as Marx put it, would expand in proportion to the reduction of the realm of necessity (of having to labour for the sake of survival and development).

However, the second side of the problem would not be solved, and might even be exacerbated, if the liberatory promise of technological development were realized. The problem here is existential rather than social or economic. The technotopian dream behind the development of AI is to collapse the difference between freedom and necessity. Ray Kurzweil, the author of The Singularity is Near, argues explicitly that the emergence of machine intelligence is a new plateau of evolution. He interprets evolution in teleological terms as tending towards higher levels of integrated complexity and intelligence. The logical end point of this development is omniscience– God is not a transcendent spiritual reality but the future outcome of the development of life.

In Kurzweil’s view, human beings are but a stepping stone on the way to the emergence of omniscience. Artificial Intelligence is the necessary next step. Out of humanistic concern for well-being, he argues, we must have the courage to let our creations unfold along their own evolutionary path. Our transhuman present will become a posthuman future. There will no longer be flesh and blood human beings, but instead, our consciousness will be preserved within the neural networks of the superintelligence– God– that succeeds us.

One might be tempted to dismiss this speculation as utopian theogony and not science, but I think we have to examine carefully the way in which it understands human values and the good for human beings. As I argued in both Embodiment and the Meaning of Life and Embodied Humanism: Towards Solidarity and Sensuous Enjoyment, the real danger of technotopian arguments is not that they might be true at some distant point in the future, but that they change how we understand human intelligence, human relationships, and the good for human beings in the present. Although Kurzweil and other technotopians claim to be the inheritors of the humanist values of the Enlightenment, they in fact understand human intelligence and the good for human beings in machine terms. Consequently, they fail to understand the essential importance of limitations– another word for necessity- in human life.

Think of the importance for our psychological well-being of feeling needed. One of the signs of serious depression leading to suicidal thoughts is the belief that the world will be better off if one kills oneself because no one needs you. An effective therapeutic intervention involves convincing the person that in fact others do need them. But why does anyone need anyone else? Because we are limited beings; we cannot procure everything that we need to live through our own efforts; we cannot endlessly amuse ourselves but need to talk to others; the objects of our knowledge lie outside of ourselves and we must work to understand them. So too the objects of our creative projects: they must be built from materials with their own integrity which might not be receptive to our designs. We must therefore work to realise our ideas and have to have the strength to bear failure and the humility to change plans. The good for human beings emerges within this matrix of material necessity. The difference between having a real and an imaginary friend is that we have to work on ourselves to convince other people to like us.

Kurzweil wants, in effect, to abolish this difference. Once material reality has been absorbed by virtual reality there will no longer be a meaningful difference between real and imaginary friends. In a real and not metaphorical sense all friends– in fact, all of reality– will be a function of the imagination of the superintelligence. Since for Kurzweil everything, including inanimate matter, is information, nothing essential would be lost once the material is replaced by the digital simulation. We only hang on to this metaphysical distinction because our minds– our information processing capacity– remains attached to a needy body that depends upon connection to nature and other people. But that archaic metaphysics is maintained by fear: as the Singluarity approaches we must have the courage to die in our fleshy body to be reborn– as St. Paul said– in our (digitized) spirit body.

Just as love of one’s neighbor can easily be converted into a divine command to destroy the enemy, so too transhumanist philanthropy can become a war against what is most deeply and fully human. That is the real danger: that artificial intelligence will re-code the way that we understand our evolved and social intelligence and cause us to prefer the former to the (much more subtle, rich, and complex) later.

Science has long generated metaphorical ways of understanding life. Aristotelian science understood living things as active souls shaping passive matter; in the Enlightenment this conception gave way to a mechanistic understanding of life (as, for example, notoriously expressed in La Mettrie’s epochal Man a Machine (1748). Today that metaphor is giving way to the metaphor of life as information and intelligence as information processing. Since information processing is just what computers do, it is no exaggeration to say that we are coming to understand ourselves as a reflection of the machines that we have built. Whether or not they turn on us, Terminator like or not, they will kill something essential in us if that metaphor takes hold to the extent that we start to think that our intelligence is solely in our brain and our brain is an information processor.

I am not denying that the advances made by AI researchers are not real or much of our intelligence can be captured by computational models of neural activity. But that which makes human intelligence distinct from machine functioning is that it is inseparable from caring, meaningful relationships to the environment. We are not brains in vats, (as Hilary Putnam entertained in a famous thought experiment) but living intelligences standing in meaningful relationships to the natural world, each other, and the universe as a whole. As Teed Rockwell shows in his brilliant book Neither Brain nor Ghost, we cannot understand what brains do if we abstract their activity from the embodied whole of which they are a part. What we see, feel, etc. are not unique functions of the discrete activity of brains but are shaped by the whole nervous system in complex relationships to the world. And– as Marx argued, presciently in the 1840s– the senses themselves are affected by historical and social development. Would Aristotle hear music or unbearable noise if he were brought back to life and taken to a rock concert?

Thus the real danger of further AI development is that it will cause us to dehumanize ourselves and off- load more and more forms of meaningful activity and relationships to a virtual world. And I have no doubt that barring some global catastrophe that collapses social institutions, this result will come to pass (despite my best efforts in Embodiment and the Meaning of Life and Embodied Humanism). Talk of regulating AI development is nothing more than hot air. If researchers are forbidden from pursuing their projects in one jurisdiction another will make itself available. The perceived economic and military “benefits” are simple too alluring for governments to seriously pass up. (I say “perceived’ because, as economic historian Robert Gordon has shown, the last decade of the computing revolution has not produced the expected rise in labour productivity).

Whatever the real or imagined benefits, as the technologies become more ubiquitous they will reshape our social relationships. Hartmut Rosa shows (in Social Acceleration) how a technology that is disruptive to one generation becomes the new normal for a later generation. Opposition to technologically driven social change quite literally dies out.

Old school humanists like me might fret at the loss of spontaneity and risk in social life, but a person born today will not understand the value of spontaneity and risk if they grow up in world where they expect all uncertainty to have been programmed out of existence. And that leaves me with a question that I cannot answer (well, perhaps I can, but do not like what I think that the answer might be): are the values of embodied social existence really universal and ultimate (as I have argued) or are they relative to an undeveloped technological era, perhaps to be admired by future cyborgs in the way we can appreciate the beauty of Aristotle’s hylomorphism without believe that it is true?