Technology and Truth: Reflections on Russia, America, and Live Not By Lies

This essay first appeared in the September/October 2021 issue of The National Interest magazine and on August 22, 2021, in the online edition. We are grateful in the extreme to National Interest for taking an interest in this essay — and for having the courage to print it. It is reproduced here with the original footnotes and some additional explanatory materials. The latter include certain controversial matters pertaining to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Important as these additions may be, they should not be allowed to distract from the central concern of this essay, which is the following: What happens when ‘truth’ and ‘lie’ become nothing more than raw materials for a continuous process of making and re-making? How does one take a stand, when technocracy has removed the ground from under our feet? — Paul Grenier

One of the most general characteristics of technological society is that it prioritizes the virtue of control and action over understanding; it values understanding only to the extent this may serve its most fundamental aim, which is to act, and first of all to act so as to increase control.  The modern American foreign policy establishment is quintessentially technocratic.   

During the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Washington told the world that Iraq was in possession of weapons of mass destruction.  Although the Bush administration had no real evidence to back up this claim, this presented no impediment to pursuing the desired course of action. The necessary evidence was invented, and contradictory evidence was firmly suppressed. The following example is instructive.  José Bustani, founding director of the OPCW, was at the time making persistent efforts to get Iraq accepted as a member of the OPCW, as this would have allowed thorough inspections, and Bustani fully expected that such inspections would confirm what his own chemical weapons experts had already told him – that all of Iraq’s chemical weapons had already been destroyed in the 1990s after the Persian Gulf war.  The Bush administration’s response to Bustani was swift.  Then under-secretary of state John Bolton gave him 24 hours to resign or face the consequences.[1]   For the Bush administration, overthrowing Iraq was far too important a matter to let the truth get in the way. 

Let us consider the contrasting course taken by John F. Kennedy during the Cuban Missile crisis. The crisis itself was initiated when U.S. spy planes photographed Soviet nuclear-capable SS-4 missile sites being installed on Cuban soil.  In obvious contrast to Iraqi chemical weapons, these ‘weapons of mass destruction’ were real, not invented.  Despite this factual evidence, and even though this went against the insistent advice of his military, Kennedy refused to go to war.  He refused to invade Cuba, thereby, in all likelihood, saving the world from Armageddon.  

But there is an even more instructive point of comparison between the two cases: Kennedy’s evolving efforts, in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, to understand the Soviet Union.  His June 1963 American University speech demonstrated the president’s effort to understand both the motivations and the complex reality of the Soviet adversary.   Kennedy’s description of both sides as equally trapped in “a vicious and dangerous cycle, with suspicion on one side breeding suspicion on the other,” suggests a mind influenced by Homer’s Iliad.  He praised the Russian people “for their many achievements in science and space, in economic and industrial growth, in culture, in acts of courage.” He acknowledged the Soviet Union’s massive losses during WWII.  Instead of dehumanizing America’s adversary, he did the opposite; he emphasized our shared humanity: “We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's futures. And we are all mortal.”

The contrast between the high level of thought reached by Kennedy during his American University speech and the banalities and lies so regularly uttered by American presidents ever since could hardly be more dramatic.  What has happened?  How did the quality of American thought and leadership decline in such precipitous fashion?   

We will limit ourselves to a few brief points.  Page Smith, in his eight-volume history of the United States, repeatedly returns to the competition, throughout most of American history, between what he terms a Classical Christian and a Democratic Secular consciousness.  Almost from the very beginning, according to Smith, the second had already outweighed the first.  The historian’s multi-volume study concludes with the administration of FDR.  If I were to extend his analysis, however, I think it would be fair to say that Kennedy briefly re-opened the possibility of an America incorporating at least some important elements of the Classical Christian perspective. With Kennedy’s assassination, that possibility closed. By the time George W. Bush and Dick Cheney became occupants of the White House, the Classical Christian consciousness, some unconvincing rhetorical flourishes aside, was already nothing more than a distant memory.  American politics, culture and society had become thoroughly technocratic.  The Democratic Secular consciousness, present from the very beginning, had  undergone a transformation; or, perhaps it is better to say, the final outworking of the idea that had always already been implicit within it.  

Under technocracy, reason, even rationality, are no longer recognized as having an intrinsic value.  They no longer oblige our agreement. To the contrary, they are now themselves subservient to our autonomous will.  Nature is like putty in the hands of technological man:  indeed, it is no longer possible to speak of ‘man.’   The actors who act within technological society reject any such imposition.  They themselves will henceforth technologically decide what and who we ‘are,’ right down to the very core of our biological existence.

This, to be sure, is still only a poetic definition of technological reason. In due course we will supplement this sketch with a somewhat more carefully considered definition and philosophical genealogy.  But first things first.  Let us begin by situating our discussion of technocracy within America’s current cultural milieu, or at any rate the dominant one. 

That milieu has two aspects, two scales of operation.  On the one hand, we have the ‘left’ revolutionaries and crash-course quoters of Marx and Foucault who, in surprising numbers, have recently burst forth from American college campuses.  And then we have, on the other hand, the surprisingly large number of global corporations and, in particular, all the big social media giants who as a group have embraced this ‘revolution.’ The latter in particular help discipline public speech so as to keep it in line with the new ideology.

Rod Dreher’s latest book, Live Not By Lies, provides a useful introduction to this woke new world.  Dreher’s methodology – and for us this is an added benefit – depends on a wide-ranging comparison of the United States and the USSR/Russia.  In the course of these comparisons Dreher, to be sure, himself occasionally falls into the trap of technological reasoning, however inadvertently. Nonetheless, his analysis is revealing. It points to how these woke corporations and woke foot soldiers express one and the same thoroughly technocratic ‘civilization.’  

Freedom vs. Totalitarianism?

Dreher takes the Soviet Union and its East European satellites as the paradigmatic case of a political order based on lies. What kind of ‘lies’ does he have in mind?  

First of all, atheism. For Dreher, the Soviet system’s denial of the truth of Christian faith, a denial necessitated by its founding Marxist-Leninist creed of dialectical materialism, is key.  The central point, for Dreher, is that a system based on atheism is itself for just that reason already based on a lie.

He pays considerable attention, however, to the moral challenges faced by believers living within a society which considers faith itself to be dangerous, or at any rate something wholly belonging to the past. In such a society it is difficult, and at times altogether hazardous, to openly live out one’s faith.  In the 1920s and 1930s, when many thousands of Orthodox priests and believers were swept up and perished in Stalin’s Gulag, it was deadly.  Although after WWII and after Stalin’s death in 1953 the situation in Russia gradually underwent important changes that made life considerably easier for believers, it is true that for most of the Soviet period open expressions of religious faith were at minimum a career killer.  

Dreher’s second example of ‘living by lies’ relates to the Soviet system’s demand for ideological conformity. Dialectical materialism was the reigning ideology and the Communist Party apparatus made known which interpretation of that ideology at any given point was to be considered authoritative.  Under such a system, writes Dreher, the Party itself became “the sole source of truth.”  School children had to mouth what the ideology demanded of them instead of reflecting in their papers what they honestly thought.

Building on these two themes, Dreher draws a series of parallels between what he terms the totalitarian Soviet empire and the ‘soft totalitarianism’ currently being installed by ‘woke’ revolutionaries. These latter share with the early Bolsheviks what might be termed a sociological fallacy. Both divide people into categories of oppressor and oppressed.  For the Bolsheviks, the oppressors were the property-owning bourgeoisie,  the oppressed were the propertyless poor, the peasants and the factory workers. For America’s woke revolutionaries, the oppressors are now white, male, heterosexual Christians, while the oppressed are sexual minorities and people of color.

Such thinking by sociological categories entails a failure of reason.  Although Dreher doesn’t make use of the term, it also entails the embrace of moralism.  Dreher notes how, for a generation nurtured on Marx as filtered through Foucault, there is no such thing as objective reason.  Rationality is no longer viewed as something equally available to all. Reason is no longer viewed as authoritative.   What matters is one’s power position, and power is viewed as a function of the category (oppressors or oppressed) to which someone belongs.  The similarity here with the early Bolsheviks is indeed very striking.  For today’s practitioners of social justice and other woke ideologies, the enemy cannot be reasoned with.  The enemy can only be defeated.  Those who resist the imposition of new doctrines proposed by the new revolutionaries, Dreher notes, “are practicing ‘hate.’”

On the other hand, whereas Soviet ideological conformity was for the most part top-down, in the American case, it is more distributed.  Evoking themes reminiscent of Russian theater director Konstantin Bogomolov’s controversial essay “The Rape of Europe 2.0,” [2] Dreher writes:

Today’s [Western] totalitarianism demands allegiance to a set of progressive beliefs, many of which are incompatible with logic – and certainly with Christianity. Compliance is forced less by the state than by elites who form public opinion, and by private corporations that, thanks to technology, control our lives far more than we would like to admit. (8)

Silicon Valley social media giants further intensify the totalitarian threat.  Citing Edward Snowden, Dreher notes that the state now has access, in perpetuity, to everyone’s communications, and if the government wants to target someone, there is no longer any reason to expect that the law will be a refuge.  The result is the spread of a “ … surveillance capitalism into areas that the Orwellian tyrants of the communist bloc could only have aspired to,” and the emergence of what he terms a soft totalitarianism.

It is significant that Dreher repeatedly cites Hannah Arendt as the authority on  totalitarianism.   He cites her well-known thesis that totalitarianism tends to take root in a society of uprooted, lonely and isolated individuals.  Such atomized selves make easy marks for an ideology that offers meaning, the opportunity to be part of a cause.  Another key Arendtian theme is the reduction of reason to mere self-consistency.  An ideology, for Arendt, is by definition a closed system lacking in the openness to mystery that is the hallmark of classical reason.  According to Dreher, to the extent America’s mainstream and social media giants foster constant repetition of memes and phraseology borrowed from critical race theory and other sources of progressive jargon, they encourage precisely ideological thinking.  Citing Arendt, Dreher notes that what convinces the masses, at the point where they become susceptible to totalitarianism, “ … are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.”

Contradictions of Anti-communism

In the U.S, Dreher writes at one point, it is difficult for the ordinary person to even imagine a world where one must lie constantly simply to exist.  At regular intervals, he contrast the “totalitarian” USSR and a “free and prosperous” United States.  By this he means, of course, the U.S. as it was until it came under attack from what he terms the Social Justice Warriors (the above-noted ‘woke’ revolutionaries).

It is here, however, that Dreher himself slips into a certain technological style of thinking.  Instead of prioritizing first of all understanding of the whole of the phenomenon before him, he makes use of it to score points, and to better sell his narrative.  His missionary stance overwhelms his concern for truth.

Dreher’s treatment of the phenomenon of Russia and the USSR throughout the 20th century lacks nuance, at times is altogether reductionistic.  For Dreher, the entirety of the Soviet experience was uniformly ‘totalitarian’ -- as if there were no important differences between 1937 and 1967.  For Dreher, throughout its existence, one found in the Soviet empire nothing but lies, suffering and material want. 

It is indeed true that the actually existing USSR, even after Stalin’s death in 1953, was, in many ways gray, it had chronic consumer shortages, service in stores and restaurants  was rude.  There was, especially in the earlier period, religious persecution.  The great works of Russian religious philosophy (by the likes of V. Solovyov, S. Frank, Berdyaev, Florensky …) were disappeared into secret archives. Soviet Russia had a great deal that deserves condemnation in just such terms as can be found in abundance in Dreher’s volume.

And yet, the reader is given little reason to suspect that a number of monasteries and churches were allowed to reopen in post-WWII Soviet Union, or that ordinary Russians were baptized, and those who were not communists and concerned about career could attend church services.  The majority, to be sure, no longer wished to do so.  The state’s materialist ideology and anti-religious propaganda had its impact.

If it is undoubtedly true that the Soviet Union lacked several of the real virtues of Cold War America, it is equally true that it lacked some of America’s real flaws.  The USSR was not a money-centered world.  It was easier to build enduring friendships, and not only because one had more time for them. People could choose to devote their lives to such useless – and quintessentially human -- activities as the study of poetry or piano playing.  Russia’s 19th century literary classics were still taught, read and revered.  And then there is Soviet cinema. A few examples will have to suffice. Eldar Ryazanov’s Carnival Night (1956) and The Irony of Fate (1976) are masterpieces of humanness and even joy.  Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, released in 1971, was imbued with a tragic sense and spiritually profound.  Throughout much of the Soviet period, radio, television, and theater programming for children was remarkable for its warmth and good taste.  Dreher’s binary contrast embodies precisely a technocratic logic of over-simplification.  

Indeed, it was from within this same binary that the West, in the waning decades of the Soviet era, offered to the Eastern bloc the following bargain: ‘Overthrow your Marxist overlords, then you will have everything.  You will enjoy the freedom to live out your faith fully and you will have a high standard of living – and not at some vague point in the future, but now, today!’[3]   Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce noted that, from the perspective of Western-led technological civilization, the Marxist revolution in Russia was viewed overall as a positive thing, infinitely preferable to the earlier Czarist order, with its embarrassing Christian faith and lack of democracy.  Marxist materialism would allow Russia to gradually “evolve” in the necessary direction.  Ultimately, the West, through its superior attractions, would overcome Marxism by appropriating Marxism’s negations while at the same time abandoning Marxism’s residual humanism.  Already in 1969, Del Noce wrote of Western technological society imitating the Marxian method in the sense that it rejected what Marx had rejected – in the first instance Christianity and Plato.  On the other hand, technological society turned Marxism on its head by instituting an absolute individualism. Such an inversion would give “the technological civilization the false appearance of being ‘a democracy’ and the continuation of the spirit of liberalism.”[4]

As we have seen, the reader can find in Dreher’s Live Not By Lies the familiar Cold War theme of an essentially good and free West over against an essentially bad and unfree East.  This makes it all the more jarring when the reader learns from one of Dreher’s Hungarian interlocutors that thirty years of freedom had destroyed more cultural memory in Hungary than any previous era.   “What neither Nazism nor Communism could do, victorious liberal capitalism has done,” a Hungarian teacher tells him.  The Western liberal idea resulted in a more complete uprooting of the person from “the past and its traditions, including religion” than even the communist era had managed. [5]

Similarly, Timo Krizka, a Slovak filmmaker and chronicler of communist-era persecution of the faithful, declared that Western prosperity and freedom – freedom as the West defined it -- had little to do with the aspirations of those Christians whom he had come to so admire.   They  had found meaning even in their sufferings, and lived joyfully despite having little.  What Krizka discovered, Dreher writes, is that “the secular liberal idea of freedom so popular in the West … is a lie.”  Freeing the self from all binding commitments (to God, marriage, family), it turned out, ” … is a road to hell.”[6]

This turns upside down Dreher’s earlier narrative theme.  The movement away from ‘the lie,’ which, we had been led to expect, was spatial in character – a movement away from the East (away from ‘the long hand of Moscow,’ communism, Russia, etc.) and toward the West, ideally toward the United States -- turns out to depend, instead, on civilizational ideas.  To be sure, Dreher has earlier told us that the West itself is moving in directions analogous to the old communist order.  That is all well and good. But now we see a very different point emerging. The very heart of the liberal civilizational ideal itself, an ideal, furthermore, of very long standing in the West, turns out, in Dreher’s estimation, to be a lie.  

Dreher cites the work of Catholic philosopher Michael Hanby, one of our most perceptive critics of liberal modernity. Hanby describes what might turn out to be the unifying thread connecting the revolutionary West’s present turn away from biological nature, and away from every other traditional form, and its apparent embrace of a new technological ‘utopia’ with obvious dystopian qualities.  Both movements find their ultimate source in that habit of thought that has defined liberal modernity for centuries: the myth of progress -- and science conceived as the engine of that progress.  The ever-evolving sexual revolution “is at bottom, the technological revolution and its perpetual war against natural limits applied externally to the body and internally to our self-understanding.”[7]

Technology and Truth

The challenge technological thought presents to the notion of truth and lying is fundamental.  The technological perspective grows out of the positivism implicitly or explicitly embraced if not by all Western ‘science’ as such (certainly not all Western physics or cognitive science), then at least by the scientism that has been fashionable in the educated Western world since at least the early 19th century.

For science so understood, knowledge can have value only to the extent that it serves practical ends. But if only what is given by material reality is acknowledged as real, then what is privileged over everything else is the transformation of matter, a transformation oriented to ever-increasing control.

A further consequence is the negation of metaphysics and the undermining of tradition.  Del Noce helps clarify why this must be the case.  If the Platonic notion of truth (being merely ‘metaphysical’) is no longer authoritative, and if, as a result, truth can no longer be viewed as above us, then why should we revere it, why consider it something sacred?  Technological society dismisses any such reverence.  Note, though, what happens next.  Such a trivialized truth becomes quickly boring.  Hence the worship of the new, hence that gleeful undermining of every tradition which is the only remaining ‘tradition’ still dutifully honored by technocratic man.[8]

To be sure, long before the early 19th century, Western thought (Bacon, Machiavelli, Locke, and their heirs) had already rejected nature as it had been understood by the traditions of Aristotelian and Platonic thought and those forms of Christianity of both East and West influenced by them. In that earlier, non-technocratic understanding of nature, all created things have a meaningful orientation to their ideal form or telos.  This is their nature. In the absence of a right form to anything, in the absence of nature, as Heidegger also acknowledged, all that is left is bare matter in the sense of a ‘resource’ waiting to be molded by an external will.   Technological order is thoroughly voluntarist.

Here is the crucial point. If what we know about the world is not conditioned or limited by what things are, in their very nature, then what is to prevent us from replacing what used to be called nature with what we ourselves make?  What is to discourage us from assuming that ‘what most fundamentally actually exists’ is what we ourselves make?  From the perspective of the technological way of knowing, as the Canadian philosopher George Grant emphasized, the processes of ‘knowing’ and ‘making’ begin to merge. [9]  Under technocracy, the technological mind-set reaches an apogee: now the very meaning of ‘truth’ changes and so does the notion of ‘lie.’  Truth is what we make.  What used to be known as a lie may be seen simply a step within the process of that making.

Technological knowing leaves us with only two ways of being in the world: conflict or control.   It is no longer possible to simply ‘let be’ what is not fully under our control.  Just as truth elicits no reverence, neither do ‘things,’ whatever they may be – trees, nations, rocks, human faces.   As George Grant put it, anything we might owe, in the sense of a duty or a necessary obligation to another being, “is always provisional upon what we desire to create.” In other words, what is ‘owed’ to anything is always first of all subject to our own will.   Technocratic will is autonomous and ‘free’ specifically in the sense of being unimpeded by any antecedent order, telos or obligation.  

Kantian-style rationalism would, of course, counter that the boundary lines, the limiting principles, are, after all, set here by the a priori autonomy and dignity of every subject, or person.  What is the source of that dignity, however?  It is that we are creatures capable of designing our own law.  But for law so understood, is anything required other than consistency?  In its vulgarized, modern form, Kant’s grandeur of thought produces the so-called ‘rules-based order’ on which the United States lays its claim to the legitimacy of its vision of international order.  Such an ‘order’ dispenses with law, and in several senses.  As I have argued elsewhere,[10] an order grounded in law requires precisely the permanence and availability of truth – at minimum a capacity for reliably determining what is non-true.

It is precisely this capacity that no longer obtains under technocratic order.  If reality and truth can be created, manufactured, then waterboarding can serve as a sufficiently reliable means of legal discovery.  Waterboarding, as a means of interrogating America’s prisoners, became popular well before any appearance of the ‘woke’ left in American life.[11]  

This leads us to a noteworthy omission in Dreher’s account of what it means to ‘not live by lies.’ The instrumentalization of reason is indeed a widespread practice among those whom Dreher refers to as Social Justice Warriors (SJWs).  The use, or rather, abuse of reason was not an original invention of the SJWs, however.  It has long been a characteristic feature of liberal modernity as such.  At the same time, in the actual historical development of voluntarist technologism, it was the U.S. national security state that honed this approach by making of just such an instrumentalization of reason the most vital tool in its arsenal. The result has been those ‘information wars’ that have replaced what used to be called ‘news.’  Indeed, no longer the province of a single agency, such information wars are now waged on a ‘whole of government’ and even ‘whole of political bloc’ basis. 

So why blame Black Lives Matter? If the ‘majesty of the law’ – represented by the state itself, even if the state, without acknowledging it, has corrupted the very meaning of law -- models to the rest of society a voluntarist imposition of its will, why be surprised when citizens of such a governing order enterprisingly imitate what the state itself has already blessed? If law models voluntarism as the (now technologically understood) ideal form of modern ‘reason,’ why be surprised when ‘reason’ among the citizenry is equally corrupted?  

This is by no means to take the side of the ‘woke.’ Their moralistic defense of ever-new categories of the oppressed is in any case self-undermining.  On the one hand, Dreher accurately describes their ‘revolutionary’ cynicism about ‘truth,’ their rejection of ‘reason.’  On the other hand, the revolutionaries may sometimes even  be correct in seeing through the deceptions of a power cloaked in an ersatz reason -- Foucault, after all, was not entirely wrong.[12]  The problem is this.  Even those real goods that the SJWs may occasionally defend become ultimately defenseless as soon as their own logic is embraced. As D.C. Schindler put it: “Human dignity rests on the fact that, when the social order breaks down, in the face of oppression and the blind force of power, one can always take a stand on truth. But if the ultimate ground of truth is itself suspended … then there is no place to stand.”[13]

From Technocracy to the C.I.A.

Arendt, famous for her writings on Stalin’s USSR and Nazi Germany as totalitarian systems, is less often seen as someone concerned about the transformation of the United States into an analogous ideological system.  Although she may not use the term technocracy, Arendt was very concerned about a trend within American high politics that was abandoning a concern for reality, and therefore abandoning a commitment to the factual order that exists independently of our will.  In, for example, Arendt’s commentary on the Pentagon Papers, she notes that high officials in the executive branch were routinely substituting for the factual world a world that they simply manufactured, a world based on appearances.  

Arendt alluded to similar concerns when she wrote, in her earlier essay ‘Truth and Politics,’ that:

… finally, and perhaps most disturbingly, if the modern political lies are so big that they require a complete rearrangement of the whole factual texture – the making of another reality, as it were, into which they will fit without seam, crack or fissure, exactly as the facts fitted into their own original context – what prevents these new stories, images, and non-facts from becoming an adequate substitute for reality and factuality? (Between Past and Future, 249)

Are there sufficient grounds for a supposition that already here, Arendt was thinking not only of the infamous regimes of the 1930s in Germany and the USSR, but also of the U.S. as it was already in her time evolving?  I think that there are.  At the time of her writing this essay, i.e., in 1967,[14] two major lies had already become institutionalized in the United States, albeit the one would prove more successful than the other.  One relates to the Vietnam War.  The many lies that made that war possible were finally made public when Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971.  Arendt devoted considerable attention to that report, and to the Executive Branch’s unhealthy obsession with ‘image making.’  On the other hand, the lies surrounding the assassinations of the 1960s had not, at that time, yet been made fully public, and indeed they still have not.  

Regarding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Arendt, in her final interview, had to say the following:

I think the true turning point in this whole business was indeed the assassination of the president.  No matter how you explain it and no matter what you know or don’t know about it, it was quite clear that now, really for the first time in a very long time in American history, a direct crime had interfered with the political process. And this somehow has changed the political process [emphasis mine -PRG].[15]

Her statement ‘this has somehow changed the political process’ is noteworthy. It refers, I would argue, to the birth of the systematic use of the reality-changing ‘lie’ in American politics, the use of a technology capable of assuring the successful creation of a new reality that can substitute for ‘reality and factuality.’  In this same interview, when asked what motivates the Executive Branch’s “arrogance of power,” she responds:

It is really the will to dominate, for heaven’s sake. And up to now it has not succeeded, because I still sit with you at this table and talk pretty freely … somehow, I am not afraid. 

After the assassination, the intelligence ‘community’ had a further motivation to dominate the American political process, including by means of the insertion of intelligence operatives directly into the commanding heights of journalism. It was after the Kennedy assassination that, precisely in order to sustain and make permanent the newly manufactured reality, the term ‘conspiracy theory’ was first brought into wide use.  There can be little doubt that the popularization of this phraseology by the standard bearers of mass media was encouraged by the intelligence circles themselves. The phrase ‘conspiracy theory’ has been manipulated to appeal to both vanity and cowardice. By convincing the public to equate ‘conspiracy theory’ with ‘stupid, unsophisticated,’ the fearful can quiet concerns about their own pusillanimity by focusing, instead, on how intelligent they are. [16]  The point to emphasize here is that this too is a technology, a process of making and knowing, because the public is being trained to become accomplices in the manufacture of the same ‘known’ ‘reality.’  From the technocratic perspective, there is little reason to worry about lies.  Is there even such a thing as ‘lies’?   A project is being pushed forward; perhaps, as in the case with JFK, an anti-communist project.  In the process of doing so, various methods are needed. If the project succeeds, then the use of such methods was justified.  Such, at any rate, is the logic of technocracy.

There is no time or space, here, to outline the sophisticated technologies made use of by U.S. intelligence and military circles to rid itself of a president who, among other sins, was threatening to make peace with the USSR.  The account of what happened has, in a form that is no longer subject to serious doubt, been conclusively set forth in James Douglass’s JFK and the Unspeakable.  What makes this book unique, amidst the mountains of literature on the topic, is the author’s methodical account of the whole context – the policy debates, the conversations between Kennedy and the leaders of Cuba and the USSR, and the many surprisingly intricate actions undertaken by the president’s enemies within the bureaucracy to create a parallel interpretation of events – a parallel reality -- that could later be fed to the public.  Of particularly vital interest here is Douglass’s well-documented account of the secret, three-way negotiations conducted, with the help of the U.S. journalist Norman Cousins, between Kennedy, Khrushchev and Pope John XXIII.   Citing notes from Cousins’ one-on-one conversations with Khrushchev, Douglass makes clear that the latter had been terrified by the Cuban missile crisis and was eager to find a means toward avoiding any such situations in the future. In the course of these negotiations, Kennedy did his level best, despite constant undermining of his overtures toward peace by the CIA, to convey to his Soviet counterpart his own eagerness not just to institute a nuclear test ban, but also to end the Cold War as such, to make peace with both the USSR and Cuba.  It was in the context of these negotiations, and urged on by Cousins, that Kennedy formulated and delivered his daring ‘peace’ speech at American University. What is more, detailed documentation cited by Douglass makes clear Kennedy’s intent, after he was re-elected, to end U.S. involvement in Vietnam.  In the parallel reality of smoke and mirrors created by the American intelligence community, very likely with the collaboration of its former director, Allan Dulles, whom Kennedy had fired, the impression was created that Khrushchev’s USSR and Castro’s Cuba were precisely the hidden hand behind the whole assassination operation.

Reluctance to give immediate credence to Douglass’s account is understandable.  This is, after all, the original ‘conspiracy theory.’   In the front materials to the original edition of Douglass’s book, which came out in 2008, Daniel Ellsberg wrote the following:

Douglass presents, brilliantly, an unfamiliar yet thoroughly convincing account of creditable decisions of John F. Kennedy – at odds with his initial Cold War stance – that earned him the secret distrust and hatred of hard-liners among the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA.  Did this suspicion and rage lead directly to his murder by agents of these institutions, as Douglass concludes? Many readers who are not yet convinced of this ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ by Douglass’s prosecutorial indictment will find themselves, perhaps – like myself – for the first time, compelled to call for an authoritative criminal investigation. Recent events give all the more urgency to learning what such an inquiry can teach us about how, by whom, and in whose interests this country is run.  

 The assassination of President Kennedy instituted the full-fledged technocratic political order in the United States that has reigned without respite ever since.  What that event demonstrated is that technocracy can make use of political lies so big that they ‘completely rearrange the whole factual texture of reality. ‘

 Where, one may well ask, was the cause, where the effect?  Did the JFK assassination cause the changes in America that came afterward, or was the assassination itself the effect of a prior shift toward technocratic rule? 

The one is with difficulty disentangled from the other, especially if I am correct in maintaining that the assassination was an ‘inside job,’ – a claim that Douglass’s book, supported by other recent research such as that by David Talbot (The Devil’s Chessboard) and Gerald McKnight (Breach of Trust) compellingly shows can no longer be dismissed as baseless ‘conspiracy theory.’[17]

And if it is not ‘baseless,’ then, as Arendt noted, what transpired was in fact a crime; and what is more, a crime of the highest political order.  Such a crime could not but lead to fundamental changes. The inevitable result was an institutional shift in favor of those bodies associated with raison d’état, in other words with national security, the realm of secrecy and security clearances. These are the elements within any government best suited to hiding the truth.[18]  That the intelligence agencies have steadily grown in dominance over American politics requires no proof, it is obvious. Not that long ago, NY Senator (D) Schumer admitted as much.[19] 

More generally, in the wake of the assassination – I should say the assassinations, because the deaths of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were of course all part of the same series -- the spiritual and intellectual atmosphere of the U.S. underwent a sea-change.  The classically educated humanist, long a rarity, simply disappeared from American politics.  ‘Sex, drugs and rock-and-roll’; mysticism; J.R.R. Tolkien – though of widely varying value in themselves, served equally to distract many others from contact with the truly political.   Those still drawn to politics could only be one of two types. One was the Ronald Reagan-style ‘idealist’ who embraced a fantasy version of America and of the world more generally.  The other was the self-styled realist, the technocrat. Arendt, in her reflections on the Pentagon Papers, described these technocrats and ‘problem solvers’ as intelligent men who “to a rather frightening degree” were above sentimentality. They systematically lied not because they lacked all integrity, but simply “because this gave them a framework within which they could work.”[20]  The complete alienation of action from genuine understanding indeed creates the ideal framework for endless work.  

This same psychological type gradually came to occupy every desk of every well-appointed think tank office-tower in Washington and Crystal City.  They are the ones who, after the fall of the Soviet Union, drew up the plans to decimate half a dozen countries across the Middle East and Central Asia, after already having done so in East Asia and Central America from the 1960s to the 1980s.  It was they who peppered their dinner speeches with such bon mots as “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.”[21]   Nothing provides a more vigorous basis for action and control than fear, and so the technocrats gladly set about creating those threats that elicit the ever-so-useful fear.    

One could go on.  Speaking in general terms, the impact of the assassination has been this: it helped foster an American culture which, if not literally terrified of thinking, at the very least avoids thought as much as humanly possible.  It is safer to stick to the pre-approved script.  

Conclusion

Now that the world as a whole, or at any rate all of the great powers, are embracing technocracy, the problem of lying in politics, along with the meaning of ‘truth’ and ‘reality,’ must be reevaluated.  It is no longer sufficient to critique lying in moral terms alone.  Only a philosophical and theological critique can have any hope of adequacy to the challenge presented by technocracy, our new global (anti) civilization. 

Once technological knowing becomes pervasive, ‘reality’ can no longer act as a limit or discipline on the telling of lies.  Between the assassination of Kennedy and today, early 2021, there have been many instances of the technocratic creation of all-encompassing new ‘realities’ accomplished through the use of what were formerly termed ‘lies’.  Certainly Russia-gate comes to mind.  As does the Timber Sycamore operation in Syria. As does that famous suicide in a New York prison, in August 2019, of someone also apparently tied to intelligence circles.  There is neither time nor space to elaborate on all such examples here, and in any event it would be pointless to do so, except, perhaps, in a new iteration of Samizdat …

The Roman empire persisted for centuries without any noteworthy devotion to truth.  Such, at any rate, was Simone Weil’s assessment.  Ancient Rome demonstrated the efficacy of the combination of absolute power, on the one hand, and the maintenance of a reputation for greatness, on the other.  This method of human domination depended on ample self-praise supplemented by a pervasive system of propaganda. That same propaganda was made all the more convincing because of the awe invoked by the overwhelming use of force deployed against anyone who resisted it.  In her “Reflections sur les origins de l’Hitlerisme,” Simone Weil found in ancient Rome the original inspiration for that power which, at the very time of her writing, was terrorizing France and most of the rest of the European continent.  

Ancient Rome was first of all a voluntarist order, even if not, at least in the sense of that term we have explored above, a technological one. To be sure, its views of nature and of science differed greatly from those of ancient Greece.  What concerned Rome first of all, according to Weil, was its prestige.  “All these cruelties [Weil has just given an account of its treatment of Carthage, among other massacres – PRG] constituted the means of elevating its prestige. The central principle of Roman politics … was to maintain its own prestige to the greatest extent possible, and at no matter what price.”  Later in the essay, she adds “nothing is more essential to a politics based on prestige than propaganda.”[22]

I often wonder whether, were Simone Weil writing today, she would have seen in the United States the worthy successor of ancient Rome.  There are intimations sprinkled about her writings that she may well have been inclined in this direction.  In “A Propos de la question coloniale,” she writes:

We are well aware that there is a grave danger of Europe’s being Americanized after the War, and we know what we should lose if that were to happen. What we should lose would be that part of ourselves which is akin to the East. … it seems that Europe periodically requires genuine contacts with the East in order to remain spiritually alive … the Americanization of Europe would lead to the Americanization of the whole world.

Weil worries that America’s domination after the war will mean that “humanity as a whole will lose its past.” [23]   

Mikhail Nesterov, The Bride of Christ

What Weil feared has very nearly already happened.  To be sure, whether it is America or somewhere else that acts as the engine of technocratic order is, in the end, of small importance.  So long as any great power – the U.S., China, Russia, Germany … -- embraces technocracy, this sets in motion a feedback mechanism that makes it almost impossible for any other nation to make a civilized choice.[24]  Russia today clearly fears that rejecting the technological approach will make it fair game for outside predators, and its growing alliance with China is hardly conducive to a movement away from technocracy.  And yet, of all the great powers, only Russia has the historical wherewithal to move decisively in another direction. 

There was a time, which appears to have drawn to a close mid-way through the Trump administration, during which advisors to the Kremlin counseled the embrace of Russia’s Byzantine Christianity-influenced tradition of rationality grounded in metaphysics. It was urged that such a traditionalism would set an attractive example, both within Russia and without, and would have the further advantage of connecting Russian politics with something that many ordinary Russians could respect and feel affection for.  (The problem of reconciling politics – particularly a politics that embraces truth -- and the necessity that a public feel genuine affection for its own country and  past, has come to the fore in many countries; in the United States, it is at the very heart of a national crisis.)  Meanwhile, the upshot of those efforts by the Kremlin advisors remains, at best, quite ambiguous. Politicians are pragmatists. What does not bring results is generally rejected, and overtures to the outside world based on ‘tradition’ have brought Russia nothing at all.

Is it possible to end on a note of hope?  I cannot speak for China.  For that matter, neither can I speak for England, Germany, or France.  Be that as it may, what I have seen of modern-day Russia suffices to sustain a hope that, were the United States or any other great power to unexpectedly initiate a break with the technocratic project, to instead embrace the tradition of rationality which considers the truth sacred -- that even now there is a good chance it would be met by reciprocity from Russia, and, where necessary, by forgiveness.

We need, of course, to set aside romantic notions about Russians.  Some are materialists. Some are technologists. Some are cheaters. Like every other people, Russians have a great many faults. Still, there remains in Russia a sizable contingent of people who have not yet forgotten their thousand-year-old tradition, and who occasionally whisper, with feeling, the phrase:  forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.  Such people, known as Christians, still have at least some solid ground to stand on in Russia.  Can we say the same in the West? 

Notes

[1] Marlise Simons, “To Ousted Boss, Arms Watchdog Was Seen as Obstacle in Iraq,” The New York Times, Oct. 13, 2013.  https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/14/world/to-ousted-boss-arms-watchdog-was-seen-as-an-obstacle-in-iraq.html  .  John Bolton, the article notes, dismissed Bustani’s account as conspiracy-theory nuttiness, saying, “The kind of person who believes that argument is the kind who puts tin foil on his ears to ward off cosmic waves.”

[2] Pokhishchenie evropy 2.0 appeared in Novaya Gazeta, Feb. 10, 2021 (see: https://novayagazeta.ru/articles/2021/02/10/89120-pohischenie-evropy-2-0).  An English translation of Bogomolov’s  controversial manifesto, along with a detailed introductory essay, was subsequently published by the Simone Weil Center: see https://simoneweilcenter.org/publications/2021/3/14/an-introduction-to-bogomolovs-manifesto-the-rape-of-europe-20 .

[3] I once played a part in effectuating this ‘bargain.’  Throughout the 1980s, during my regular visits to Moscow, I distributed to Soviet dissidents books by Russian religious philosophers, books in the tradition of Vladimir Solovyov and Nicholas Berdiaev. The publication in the West of the miniature pocket editions that I smuggled were rumored to have been financed by the C.I.A.  At the time, little did I suspect that only forty years hence these same authors would be denounced by right-thinking Western journalists for encouraging in Russia a religiosity no longer approved, or even at all tolerated, by Western technocratic liberalism.   An instructive example indeed of technocratic reason’s prioritization of conflict and control over truth.

[4] The Age of Secularization (McGill Queens Univ. Press: 2017), 78 – 79

[5] Live Not By Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents (Sentinel: 2020), 116.

[6] Ibid, 210-211.

[7] Michael Hanby as quoted in Dreher, Live Not By Lies, 64.

[8]This passage draws from points made by Augusto Del Noce, The Age of Secularism (McGill-Queen's University Press: 2017), p. 75 and passim.

[9] ‘Thinking about Technology’ in George Grant, Technology and Justice (University of Notre Dame Press: 1986).  

[10] See my “A Conversation on War, Torture and The Limits of Evil,” Patheos/Solidarity Hall, Feb. 25, 2016, Parts 1 – 4 [https://www.patheos.com/blogs/thedorothyoption/a-conversation-on-war-torture-and-the-limits-of-evil-part-1/]

[11] This account, obviously, does not exhaust the topic of the technological style of knowing.  I wish to draw attention, in particular, to D.C. Schindler’s essay on misology (the failure of reason) that forms the introductory chapter of his book Plato’s Critique of Impure Reason: On Goodness and Truth in the Republic (Catholic University of America Press: 2008), esp. 15 – 22.  Schindler there describes technology as encapsulating in itself all the other forms of modern misology. He points, further, to its inevitable blindness: “It is the very nature of technology to ignore long-term or subtle effects  … for the same reason that it is the nature of technology to be ignorant of itself as merely technological: to recognize its partiality would be to see reality as a meaningful whole of which the manipulable is merely a relative part.”  Schindler’s corpus of writings on reason and technology have importantly shaped my views, including those expressed in this essay.

[12] For a very intelligent account of Foucault’s strengths and weaknesses as a philosopher (and theologian), see Angela Franks, ‘Foucault’s Principalities and Powers,’ First Things, March 2021 [https://www.firstthings.com/article/2021/03/foucaults-principalities-powers]

[13] Freedom from Reality: The Diabolical Character of Modern Liberty (Univ. of Notre Dame Press: 2017), 272.  Schindler’s account of how modernity transformed liberty into little more than ‘a power to do X’ – in other words, modernity’s privileging of potency over act – laid the ground for the technological society.  I have given considerable attention to this dynamic, as revealed by Schindler, in my earlier essay for American Affairs, ‘The Liberal International Disorder,” April 10, 2019.

[14] The essay “Truth and Politics” first appeared Feb. 25, 1967, in The New Yorker and subsequently in the expanded edition of Between Past and Future, in 1968.

[15]Hannah Arendt: The Last Interview and Other Conversations (Melville House Publications: 2013), 113.  The interview in which this passage is found was conducted by and for French television by Roger Errera. It appeared in broadcast in France on July 6, 1974.  Arendt passed away in 1975.

[16] By the logic of ‘conspiracy theory,’ someone on the level of a Hannah Arendt must be dismissed as insufficiently intelligent.

[17] This label is particularly ironic, given the invention of the concept to discredit challenges to the official narrative enshrined in documents like the Warren Commission report – a report that, in hindsight, we can now see was just as thorough and complete as the 9/11 Commission report. It’s naïve to overlook the fact that official truth-finding bodies of this sort have a powerful temptation to start with the conclusion as a given and then fill in all the facts that fit between the coloring-book lines.

[18] “National security is really, if I may already interpret a bit, a translation of ‘raison d’état.’  And ‘raison d’état,’ this whole notion of reason of state, never played any role in this country [emphasis mine – PRG]. This is a new import. National security now covers everything [emphasis mine – PRG], and it covers, as you may know from the interrogation of Mr. Ehrlichman, all kinds of crimes,” Hannah Arendt: The Last Interview, 115.

[19] ‘Schumer warns Trump: Intel officials have six ways from Sunday of getting back at you,’ Washington Examiner, Jan. 3, 2017. This statement was in the context of Trump resisting the efforts of the intelligence organs to frame the president as a Russian asset – charges that a four-year investigation failed to find evidence for.  Schumer, during the same interview, said of the president: "So, even for a practical supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he's being really dumb to do this.”  Sen. Schumer clearly takes it as a given that the position of top dog in the political hierarchy, as a matter of plain, unsentimental fact, belongs to the CIA.  His perception is undoubtedly accurate.

[20]The first of these two Arendt quotes is from her essay “Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers,” in Crisis of the Republic, 11; the second is from Hannah Arendt: The Last Interview, 117.

[21]Ledeen’s words as recalled by Jonah Goldberg. For a reference, see Jonah Goldberg, April 23, 2002, “Baghdad Delenda Est,” National Review.  Goldberg writes that he recalls these words from a speech Ledeen gave at the American Enterprise Institute ten years before his writing in 2002.  Goldberg is in the present context praising Ledeen for his wit and foresight.

[22] Simone Weil, ‘Quelques réflexions sur les origines de l'hitlérisme,’ Ecrits historiques et politiques (Gallimard: 1960), 33, 37.

[23] The first passage cited from Weil’s essay can be found in Augusto Del Noce, The Crisis of Modernity (McGill Queens Univ. Press: 2014), 132-133.  The second short quote from the same essay can be found in Ecrits historiques et politiques (Gallimard: 1960), 375. 

[24] By ‘civilization’ I mean an order within which exists a shared tradition of reason, a tradition more or less accepted by all, to which appeal can be made. Because this tradition forms an integral part of an order which ‘can be loved,’ it does not have to rely on force. Civilization in this sense overlaps with MacIntyre’s notion of a practice, and Weil’s description of a rooted place.