How lack of belief in American virtues has infected Silicon Valley, to the detriment of our national security

George Will’s latest column discusses a new book called “The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West” by Alexander Karp and Nicholas Zamiska. Will calls it the most sweeping cultural critique of America since Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind.”

Will summarizes the book’s message in the title of his column: “Urgently needed: A reborn patriotic belief in Western virtues.” Will’s subtitle — “A tech executive’s new book decries Silicon Valley’s effects on society and calls for a patriotic revival” — tells us where the rebirth of patriotism is most urgently needed.

Will explains:

In “The Technological Republic. . .[the authors] connect the ascent of Silicon Valley and the decline of the nation’s cultural confidence. The former is a symptom of the latter. Karp thinks “the loss of national ambition,” which produced the atomic bomb and the internet, is today manifest in Silicon Valley’s devoting mountains of cash and legions of engineers to “chasing trivial consumer products.”

(Emphasis added)

He continues:

The 20th-century union between science and government, the latter leveraging the former, was driven by the exigencies of World War II. Today’s geopolitical dangers require what the nation’s cultural agnosticism impedes: a rebirth of belief in the importance — the virtues — of the West.

The collective endeavors of the previous century are forgotten. Today’s preoccupations are market-rewarded “shallow engagements” with technology: a banal internet serving the quotidian desires of the individual. There is scant interest in constructing the technical infrastructure national security demands in this “software century.”

(Emphasis added)

Why isn’t there such interest? Because of our culture:

Few of today’s capable coders, Karp says, even know a military veteran. Many are reluctant to assist military-connected endeavors. “Why,” Karp writes, “court controversy with your friends or risk their disapproval by working for the U.S. military?” Instead, retreat from the communal purpose of national defense, into the profitable building of photo-sharing apps and algorithms “that optimize the placement of ads on social media platforms.”

(Emphasis added)

This analysis should serve as a wake-up call to those reasonable enough to understand that wokeism is silly, but not smart enough to realize how dangerous it is. How can there be a patriotic rebirth — indeed, how can there be much patriotism at all — when America’s students, especially its brightest ones, are taught that America is an unjust racist society built on exploitation of “the other?” How can the folks who work in key Silicon Valley jobs be patriotic when being awake to reality (woke) is defined as embracing a set of beliefs centered around the notion that America is not a virtuous nation?

They can’t. As Will puts it in describing the book’s argument:

The current agnosticism, which borders on nihilism, about America’s virtue as a nation dilutes recognition that the nation-state is the indispensable means of “collective organization in pursuit of shared purpose.”

If all national identities are merely contingent emanations of transitory, unjudgeable and hence ultimately fungible cultures, why make arduous and expensive preparations to be able to fight in defense of ours?

It would be wrong, in my view, to place all the blame for Silicon Valley’s catering to the trivial wants of consumers on our woke culture. A good deal of that catering is bound to occur in a consumerist society at an advanced stage of capitalism. That’s an advantage a communist dictatorship like China has over the U.S.

But one important advantage we should have over China is pride that we’re a free and virtuous society, not a communist dictatorship. Wokeism is eroding that pride and the patriotism that flows from it, and these erosions are making us less secure.

I’m delighted that wokeism is under attack and in retreat, and that the Trump administration is now leading the charge. It won’t be easy to reverse the way wokeism pervades our schools, for example, but conservatives are trying. (Note this recent success described by Stanley Kurtz, for example.)

I must add, however, that some of what Trump is doing to restore pride in America might well be counterproductive, at least insofar as producing a rebirth of patriotism among folks like the ones who work in Silicon Valley. Silly stunts like calling the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America and performative patriotism like wearing a MAGA hat invite ridicule from many of these people. In this day-and-age of America, crude chauvinism tends to give patriotism a bad name.

I agree with Will that we have experienced a “hollowing out of the American mind.” The remedy must be a program that injects real, serious substance into the shell, not a hollow patriotism almost as empty as the void it wants to fill.