Artificial Intelligence and the Rise of the Meritocracy

This chapter discusses how IQ reappeared in the era as a proper measure of personhood. Numerous figures looked to psychometrics as confirming the objective existence of separate subjectivities. Examining the promise and defeat of artificial intelligence in philosophy of mind and New Wave science fiction, the chapter shows that a suspicion of Great Society welfarism took hold among writers with little in common except their commitment to the idea that human minds could neither be replicated by machines nor reconfigured by state institutions without injury to personhood. If there is something weird about reviving not just classical IQ science but also classical liberalism, at least one can trace the motivation for such retrievals to the widespread seventies attitude that the present itself had little to offer by way of solutions to social problems. Many forward-thinking or progressive figures in the decade preferred to look to the past, a habit of mind that hastened the collapse of the present.

Afterword

This afterword reflects on the afterlife of neo-idealism and clarifies the author's stance on questions of social justice, utilitarian ethics, and the nearly universal repudiation of statism. The author's argument has been focused on the degree to which the collective consciousness that formed a staple of the New Social Movements — perhaps its key catalyst — gives way in seventies culture to a profound displacement onto subjectivity. But it would be a mistake to see this as a perversion of sixties thinking. The appeal to subjectivity was always the latent grounding of social change among important movements of that earlier decade; hence the coming to dominance of identity politics in the generation after the sixties. It is no surprise that the effort to reclaim consciousness's underappreciated power in sixties discourses should give rise to celebrations of unfettered power in seventies thinking. The afterword examines how the market became the megastructure for a wide array of antistatist impulses.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides an overview of “neo-idealism,” which can be defined as the effort to retool features of the Kantian tradition as weapons in the struggle against a behaviorism discredited by post-sixties thinkers because it appeared to underwrite the failed policies of the Great Society. The book's basic premise is that a dramatic inflation in the value of consciousness and autonomy in the seventies accompanied a recognition of the state's refusal to safeguard such values. And this premise's central implication is that figures from different schools and literary traditions found alternatives to statism in conditions that, while not reducible to neoliberalism's free market ideal, would lend support to that ideal's consolidation. To put the point this way is to keep in view the distance between neo-idealism (the embrace of subjectivity) and neoliberalism (the embrace of the market). The space between these terms contracts and dilates depending on the positions staked out by neo-idealists. The chapter explains that neo-idealism affords more than an ideology for neoliberalism and less than a stark alternative to it.

Radical Ecology’s Mindfulness

This chapter argues that radical ecology offers less a rebuke to neo-idealism than a hyperbolic extension of its crucial conceits. One can begin by noting the large number of its practitioners who believe that ecology's task is to raise not merely human awareness of ecosystems but consciousness as such. In the view of these ecologists, the environment, if not quite sentient, confers a heightened sentience on persons. The chapter also details a dramatic example of the period's tendency to look to the past in the enthusiasm of many ecologists for what can be called the “paleo-republic.” For such thinkers, the future of civilization was not merely the preindustrial but the preagricultural past, an era before malignant overpopulation and bureaucratic inertia steered our species off its evolutionary path.

That Seventies Cult

This chapter assesses the unlikely mutuality of two very different seventies formations: the mind-control cult and the libertarian movement that arose out of a longer and more conflicted tradition of anarchism. It demonstrates that the cult's principles converge with those of libertarianism, particularly with respect to the prestige both cultists and libertarians assigned to expanded consciousness. L. Ron Hubbard bases Scientology on a premise not unlike libertarian paternalism: “What is true is what is true for you. No one has any right to force data on you and command you to believe.” Hubbard embraces the computational theory of mind with a fundamentalist zeal. Just as Hubbard shows us that cult libertarianism pairs well with the decade's resurgent antifoundationalism, so Scientology's techno-fetishism and celebrity centers remind us that seventies cults, breaking with an earlier generation's despair about mass media's atomizing effects, go all in on the euphoria of togetherness.

Millennial America and the World to Come

This chapter addresses another pair of seeming opposites — New Age spirituality and Christian evangelicalism — in order to reveal their shared embrace of the spiritual possibilities on offer in the free market. The chapter considers the rising belief in the end times alongside the emergence of “channeling,” the period's other popular mystical movement, in which earthbound mediums become conduits for otherworldly spirits. Adherents of rapture and channeling profess a stronger reverence for self-authorization and reason than the precepts of their faith might lead us to imagine. Then, too, they predicate that respect on the kinds of social sorting we are used to seeing in various seventies enterprises. As with other movements, rapture and channeling reveal the friction between freedom and equality in millennial America.