We're back with another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Jashnski,
culture editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the show
at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on exit fdr LST,
make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts, and of course to the
premium version of our website, the Federalist dot Com as well. I always
love being joined as i am today by Innez Stepman. She's a senior policy
analyst of course at the Independent Women's Forum with our friends over there. And
she has a wonderful new essay out that's called Ambitious Nihilism. It's in First
Things. It's in the Fedruary edition of First Things. You can read it
online now. But and as this is the culmination of years of sort of
thinking through your experience growing up in the pale Alto area as the tech industry
was exploding, is that a fair description of how this piece sort of came
into existence? Yeah, No, it's definitely a fair description. Although I
would add and I write about it, and this was sort of well known
at the time. There was an Atlantic article about it, the CDC recognized
it that there was a string of suicides. They kind of became known as
the Pale Alto suicide. There was a what they call a suicide cluster where
you had an extraordinarily high suicide rate copycat I mean, very intense actually method
of committing suicide jumping in front of the train, to the extent that there
were many many years, starting I think when I was either middle school or
early high school, and then going all the way through well after I left,
there were either one or two suicid sides that way almost every single year
of basically high schoolers, So in a relatively small community that was very,
very high And so I have been thinking about that for a long time because
obviously it did touch me and I knew people who ended their lives that way,
but also because it's so strange, and the community how it tried to
respond to that tragedy, and all the ways in which it tried to explain
that, I think revealed a lot about Palo Alto. So that part I've
been thinking about since I've been in high school. But some of the conclusions
I draw are more recent ones of mine, maybe in the last few years.
But you may have even teased that you were working on something like this
on Federalist Radio Hour at some point, because it just hit my inbox one
day and I was like, finally, and Neez has done it. She's
sort of distilled all of these thoughts into an essay and I have to say
it and as it didn't disappoint at all. I mean, it's just wonderfully
written. And maybe a good place to start is how you use this Malcolm
Harris book as a jumping off point and actually also you use not just the
book, but the sort of crossed paths between your own arc and Malcolm Harris's
arc as a jumping off point. Can you tell us a little bit about
Palo Alto a History of California Capitalism in the World, which was the Malcolm
Harris book. Yeah, I mean Malcolm and I were I would say acquaintances
in high school, like we had we had overlapping friends that I wouldn't say
that we were like best friends or anything like that, but we knew each
other in high school. He was one year down for me. He dated
a friend of mine. That's how I how I knew him. So I
wouldn't want to like delve into his head or his thoughts or anything. But
he's written basically Howard Zinn's History of Palo Alto, that that really is what
he's done. It is a very well researched account, in in the sense
that there's obviously a huge amount of work that went into it. Some of
the interpretations I obviously question a question in this essay, but he really does
sort of build it pal Alto's. The problem with pal Alto is that it's
built on this history of conquest, right, the history of racism, of
conquest, of colonialism, of abuse of labor. And that's not a wholly
incorrect way of framing the history not only of pal Alto, but I would
say the world, which is part of his title. But it doesn't answer
the questions I think, at least that I had after growing up, why
Palalto does seem so existentially empty and why the people growing up there, the
kids growing up there, are so full of anks, right to the extent
that almost everybody I knew was on multiple psychiatric drugs, everybody was doing therapy,
everyone was obsessed with their own neuroses. You know, it just doesn't
seem like a model that's really actually working to produce staple happy I can't even
say successful, because they are successful people from the outside. But it's not
It's not a place I would ever want to raise a child. It's not
an environment in which that I think produces people who can really deal with life
in a fundamental way. And none of what Harris wrote about the history of
Palo Alto, true or not to me, addressed that. I mean,
he describes it as haunted because again by this conquest by the Aloney tribe that
used to live there. And although I will say the one part of his
book that I really agreed with is that we should return the land of Stanford
to the Aloney. I'm totally fine with doing that. Like Stanford University.
No, but but the port, the Hoover Institute. Yeah, we can
carve out the Hoover Institute. The one tower that defines the skyline of of
of Stanford University, the Hoover Tower. H No, it just it doesn't
explain a lot about Palo Alto, because the history of pal Alto is not
that different. Although I will say it is a history written almost exclusively by
the right kind of progressives for whatever era it is. I mean, Palalto
was a hotbed of capital p progressivism at the turn of the century, which
meant at that time it was a hotbed of eugenics, among other things.
I mean I went to I went to David Starr Jordan Middle School, which
I think has since been renamed. I mean they said that he was famous
for doing research on dolphins. What David Star Jordan is actually famous for in
the scientific community is his work on eugenics. But so there's there is gens
not dolphin. Yeah, yeah, exactly, eugenics. It's a different ethical
question. You got you got to breathe those dolphins for the you want to
give them big brains and friendly and hopefully friendly. You know, you don't
want unfriendly smart dolph. I mean, the worst thing is the dolphin welfare
just depletes our resources. Yeah, but you know, Palotto has been a
hotbed of progressive politics for each era for a very long time. And that
was the part of I think Harris's book that rang the most false to me
is he almost tries to reconstruct even the pala Alto that we grew up in
as some kind of bastion of conservatism, but in reality, what it was
is a bastion of a series of shifting left wing of American political spectrum,
right from the progressive to the turn of the century to I mean pally High,
where I went, you know, is where the Grateful Dead started.
I think as the Warlocks in the pal Alto Gym. Bob Dylan hung out
there for a while. Joan Biez is a native daughter of the region.
Really hippie counterculture, a lot of that stuff, and then the hard radicalism
of the sixties, the Black Panthers there was, there was a huge presence
in Oakland and elsewhere. So the Bay Area more broadly has been essentially quote
unquote on the right side of history the way the left would describe it in
successive eras, And it has always been this sort of left wing place for
the time. But what that's meant has changed obviously over time. But I
don't know. I think the critique ultimately that people like Harris would launch and
he's he's a Marxist and he sees the world of materialistic terms. He thinks
that they essentially he highlights their hypocrisy in making money hand over fist in a
very sort of hyper capitalistic way while putting on this costume of political radicalism.
And I think that's it. I think that's a fair critique. I think
that is a fair critique of the sort of hyper distilled near liberalism of Palo
Alto. And this also gets into an extremely salient question of definitions, which
is that is the and you can tell me what you think of this,
the almost Nietzschen sense of nihilism and ambition sort of put together, and that's
a huge can of worms, I know, so I'm curious what you think
about that. But is it fundamentally conservative or leftist? And it's really hard
for me as a conservative, especially as a religious conservative, to hear that
sort of talk of Nietsch and ambitious nihilism being attributed to conservatism or being categorized
as conservatism. But it does seem to me that's where Harris is coming from,
that this lust for power is fundamentally a conservative one because it doesn't come
with big government essentially, And that's a very st formulation. I think there's
something to that in terms of how he views it. I view it very
differently. So I would say the extent that he like what you're saying would
be true just from a kind of Marxist perspective, is because Palo Alto really
does embrace hierarchy, and it does embrace extreme value, and it puts extreme
value on intelligence and especially like being able to so that this is where I
would say it's not Nichean at all. It is much more I call it
in a line that got cut from this piece. And by the way,
like first things, incredible editors that they the version that they came up with,
that this essay was so much better. I had all this extraneous stuff.
But this is one line I wish they hadn't cut, which is I
would describe the Palletto system much more as like the Chinese Imperial system of examinations
with American characteristics, and in that sense it's very anti Nichschean. It actually
doesn't. There's this whole ethos in Silicon Valley, which maybe was true at
some point. And my father, who was a programmer, right that's why
we were in pale Alto, he thinks that it was true at some point
when he early on in the eighties, when and nineties when he was working
in that environment, that they're the athos at least how they present themselves is
like, this is where anyone can have like one fantastic idea and three smart
guys can get together in in you know, in the garage right start the
next apple. And it's very disregarding of pathways or of you know, doing
the required number of years or anything like that, where like pure genius is
what matters, and my experience in Palelto was exactly the opposite. It's an
extremely unhospitable climate for anybody. Uh And I'm not I'm not describing myself,
so don't get me wrong. I actually, you know, perform pretty well
in the selective system, but it is very very much like you you have
to advance to each level, and it's very very based on careful attention to
what the teacher says, whether that's political or whether that's just doing the required
four hours of homework. It's it's sort of inhospitable to actual, real eccentrics,
out of the box thinking. And in that sense, I think it
is very anti Michian as well. I in this essay, I say basically
because the second thing I think you rightly pointed to is as a religious conservative,
if you look at this and you say something is missing, I think
that Palelto falls in this unfortunate middle. And the reason I think this is
relevant because who cares about my childhood? But like I think this describes the
American elite written large increasingly over time, is that it's neither based on kind
of a Pagan Nietzschean uh you know, these are the best, the strongest,
the smartest, and in the state of nature and they have the will
to power. It's neither that, nor does it have some of the virtues
of essentially Christian Western civilization. Right. It doesn't have the kind of answers
that religion gives to people about life's meaning. What you have instead is a
series of like essentially winnowing a class down. You start with a bunch of
people that tests into a program based on some kind of raw intelligence, and
then you select them down and down on the basis of this characteristic or that.
But what you actually end up with at the end is not world shaking.
You don't end up with Napoleon at the end, or Caesar or like
even the Roman legions, right. You end up with people who are smarter
than average, for sure, who work hard, but are actually very shaped
by the kind of four corners of a system. And again it does remind
me of the Chinese imperial system in that way. It's very much a like
say yes to teacher, learn how to take the test, learn how to
sit and do your four hours of homework. And that does leave out not
only the the Chian qualities of being able to just make things happen through sheer
charisma, for example, or sheer genius, but also on the flip side,
doesn't give any Christian or religious comfort or sense of self to people who
are selected out. And that's ultimately that has been over the years where I
think a lot of the suicide comes from. Because the explanation is always,
while we push these kids too hard, and it's true they do push the
kids really hard. But on the flip side, I think if they were
offering any sense of meaning that didn't involve getting to the next level of the
selective system, that didn't involve getting into the ap class, and then didn't
involve getting into Stanford, and then didn't involve going directly into Google. Right,
it's not that any of those things are bad. They're achievements that are
worthwhile, but there's nothing to fall back on in Palo Alto. So if
you don't get that job at Google, like I think, people have nothing
left to hang on to because they don't have any other way of defining themselves.
As you know, I think a more like traditional Western ethos or Christian
ethos would give them, but they don't have that. So when you failed
to meet the next level of selectivity, it's like, who am I?
Now? What do I do with my life? Well, if you're a
regular listener to this program, you know I talk a lot about the gaps
I feel like are in my knowledge from my public school education to my secular
college education, things like history, economics, the great works of literature,
even the meaning of the US Constitution? Did you study these things in school?
In many cases you may not have, or if you're like me,
A you might need a refresher and b you just might not think your education
was that good to begin with. Time and technology have changed a lot of
things, but they have not changed basic fundamental truths about the world and our
place in it, no matter how badly today's teachers might want to act like
it's otherwise. That's why I'm so excited that our friends at Hillsdale College are
offering more than forty free online courses in the most important and enduring subjects you
can learn about the works of C. S. Lewis, the stories in
the Book of Genesis, the meaning of the US Constitution, the rise and
the Fall of the Roman Republic, or the history of the ancient Christian Church.
With Hillsdale College's online courses all available for free. You heard me right,
They are free, and I have recommended so many of these to my
own family, my own friends. They are truly excellent. Hillsdale College is
an authority I look to for wisdom all of the time, especially on these
subjects that again I feel like our gaps in my knowledge. I personally recommend
you sign up for C. S. Lewis on Christianity. That is a
seven lecture course where you'll examine some of Lewis's classic works. Those include Mere
Christianity, my personal favorite, The Screwtape Letters, and another excellent one,
The Abolition of Man. To see what Lewis had to say about scripture,
prayer, suffering, joy, Heaven and Hell well. The course is also
self paced, so that you can start whenever and wherever and role now in
C. S. Lewis on Christianity to discover Lewis's core lessons regarding the truth
and the goodness of the Christian faith. And how you can apply those lessons
to your own life. Go right now to Hillsdale dot edu slash Federalist to
enroll. There is no cost and it's easy to get started. That's Hillsdale
dot edu slash Federalist. To register Hillsdale dot edu slash Federalist. And say
you do get that job at Google, and you grow into adulthood and sort
of become a cog in this vast global machine. You also start butting up
against those questions of a lack of purpose. And I guess, and as
I think, at the heart of this is the incoherence. And that's what
ambitious nihilism, the sort of oxymoron or paradox of the title itself, really
gets that. It's fundamentally in incoherence. And when you say it does a
produce the person of nietzsch and Fever dreams, it's so interesting because what it
does produce is Sam Bankman Freed. Quite literally, what the Bay Area produces
is Sam Bankman Freed. And in that you have this constant nagging question of
why if if all of these sort of foundational principles of Western civilization, uh,
they're they're ultimately relative, they're only true as and as much as they
can serve an individual. We all have our different versions of what happens in
the world, then then why be charitable? Why maximize? And when you
get into those questions, you end up not maximizing your your altruism. Where
would you and Harris depart on Bankman Freed? Oh, I can't speak too
much for Malcolm, but just you know what I mean, sort of like
I critique. So to me, the distilled ethos of Silicon Valley is less
Sam Bankman Freed, although it's not an accident than Brian Johnson, who make
it I think hit exactly. I think you do get a lot of people
who do make it to the top of all of the selectivity tiers. Either
they end up working you know, in devs for Microsoft, or they start
their own company and they become the billionaires and they hit it rich and there
is that sense of well what now. And that's that's why I think you
do get these these sort of productivity hackers, like these life hackers coming out.
So as you're trying to advance to these tears, you're taking drugs not
for fun, not for like release or pleasure even, but to see whether
you can tweak your brain to get slightly more productivity out of it, and
then you end up at the end of that selectivity tier, like Brian Johnson
thinking well, okay, well, what's the goal here. I've done all
all the things and the tiers, and now he, you know, is
essentially trying to preserve his body for upload to the cloud like at some point,
right, that's why he's obsessed with slowing and reversing aging. Because the
ultimate goal that they've come up with, that the like when they hit that,
what they've come up with is essentially transhumanism, and that just isn't that
appealing to a lot of people. And I've noticed that with these sort of
tech dreams of overcoming completely humanity and the limits of nature, you do get
people who that really excites them and it gives them meaning. And I've come
to realize it's maybe a personality difference or some kind of you know, so
alesque conflict of visions or something like that. But it does not give me
a sense of excitement and meaning to imagine merging with Circus Tree. And I
can see why for a lot of people if they hit that wall, and
that doesn't appeal to them for whatever reasons, as a purpose in life.
They check out, They check out a life, and so what if the
many many people who have checked out of life but not so literally? You
know, the I'm just anticipating a counter argument would be, so you're zeroing
in on these, this this smattering of very tragic suicides, and yet the
beating heart of Silicon Valley goes on and is here till today, and these
are still you know, massive growing corporations, and people still desperately want to
work at them. You know. My answer that question, just very simply
would be they're working, they're not happy. They don't realize that they're not
happy, they don't realize why they're not happy. But what would you say
to that argument? It does, I mean, it isn't. And this
is really where I do depart from the book is I don't see any of
these things as bad in themselves. I don't think I mean, I am
a capitalist. I think it's fine to to just push yourself and to strive
in this way, and there is something admirable about it. But I have
a kind of twofold objection. One on the national level, we will suffer
if we have an elite of strivers. Only, right, where are our
great generals? They're not coming from They're not going to come from Silicon Valley.
Right, Where are our real sort of titans of industry? I mean,
the US used to have a bunch of different bases and industrial bases in
different geographic parts, and those were spinning out elites and wealthy people and success
stories in very different ways. And so you had a mix of people within
the elite. And increasingly the American elite is the elite that is selected the
Silicon Valley way, even if they have nothing to do with tech. Right,
you are the person who pays attention to teacher in class, You do
your homework, you get strade a's, you hire an SAT tutor, you
do all the things, and you're if you're you know, white straight guy
and life is rough. Getting accepted to Harvard, then hopefully your parents are
rich enough to donate to put their name on a building, right, and
then you advance n through. Yeah. But but it is that that type
of I would say, almost like there are elements of sort of bourgeois middle
class sensibility to it, and we're using those to a select an elite that's
increasingly taking the powers of an aristocracy, and I I really don't think that's
going to do well for the country. I think that this is one type
of person. It's a type of person who's done really well and increasingly a
managerial, bureaucratic economy, and I mean a real bureaucratic culture that we are,
but that itself is a product of enormous wealth in America that I don't
think is going to last if we rely exclusively on these kinds of people to
make up our elite. So that's sort of a consideration. And by the
way, this elite is exactly the people who don't view themselves as attached to
nation They think that, you know, they think that patriotism is xenophobic and
chauvinistic and worse than that, they seem like, like a bygone age,
the nation state is irrelevant. Right as they look at the world, they
realize they have a lot more in common with elites in other countries, and
they then they have ties to the country that first of all birth the cat
you know, that the system that allowed them to gain this much wealth.
So that I have those those critiques as I guess as an American, as
somebody worried about who is making the decisions that will ge eyed this country.
I don't think we're producing an elite enough elite in many ways, or at
least not I diversified enough elite. And then on the personal level, growing
up in all of this, I mean, I really object fundamentally to the
idea that this is the group of people who's gonna wield power, because I
find them so weak, both physically in the sense that you know, these
are these are essentially this is revenge of the nerds. These are all lactose
intolerant. Yeah, they're they're all like, they're all neurotic. They have
a thousand you know, things that they want to call up their therapists and
talk about. They're, like I said, they're taking drug even drugs neurotically
in a way to try to sort of calm down their various anxieties. They're
not superistically strong, and I'm sorry they're they're not nichean uberminsch. But but
they behave as though they are, and they wield enormous power, especially as
you are always taughtalking about Emily with you know, the hyper novelty and the
rate of technological change. They're wielding enormous power, and they're making decisions that
are going to take not just the country but the human race in a trajectory
chosen by this group of people. And I just don't think, I don't
see that they're up to that task. Maybe I would feel more confident if
I looked around me, you know, growing up, and saw strong,
confident, brilliant people who maybe they're wrong sometimes as we all are, but
like who are I would feel comfortable sort of turning over the trajectory of the
country to fundamentally in some way, even if I was not concerned about small
de democracy, right, But that's not what I saw. I saw really
fundamentally weak people, like psychologically weak people, fragile, unable to deal with
some basic tragedies in life, unable to deal with relating with other time types
of people. Just undeserved power, just fundamentally undeserved powered. I think part
of the problem of Silicon Valley is a lot of these kids feel that they
that their power is undeserved. Somewhere, there's that like nub of insecurity that
they're wielding a level of wealth and power that is that they don't deserve,
that they haven't proven themselves worthy of you know, there are a million places
that we could go from here, but that was a I think helpful on
the question of ambition. As we were talking, I was picturing like a
house of cards, and you know, each achievement, you're you're adding a
layer to the house of cards, and one day you realize that it's not
a house. It is indeed a house of cards. That it's it's built
on absolutely nothing. And that's the nihilism portion of this. Can you speak
to where the nihilism comes from and how people, if they do sort of
end up realizing it. You know, what brings people to that realization or
what keeps them from confronting it, from confronting that realization? Is it?
You know, brave New World? They're all sedated? What is it?
I So, I think it's not an original observation obviously to say that Nietzsche
and Ostievsky were probably the two thinkers in the nineteenth century who best understood the
I guess the existential problems of modernity. And people quote the death of godline
oftentimes wrongly, you know, sort of as a gloating like placing the flag
down and saying, you know, great God is dead. We can do
whatever we want, and that's obviously not the way it was meant. I
would say that it's difficult enough that problem of modernity and of of not just
the lack of organized religion or religious faith, but the lack of understanding deeply
as it becomes a mass phenomenon that people realize, you know, the altar
in the Catholic Church was made by man. It doesn't reflect heaven, right,
that the king is just a guy and not the emperor. Wears no
clothes. So no, but that realization has caused enormous problems for so called
modern man. Right. But I would say that in Paloelto, that realization
is so baked into the cake that nobody even thinks about it anymore as a
problem or something to be overcome or replaced. It's just the background hum of
that like sort of class of people, right, It's not even something to
be considered, it's just the background assume that they're all they're all materialists in
their assumptions, which, by the way, I think, to the extent
that pal Alto has people on the right, I would classify them as libertarian.
So you end up with this neoliberal versus libertarian dynamic where they're both materialistic.
They agree on the stakes, and they agree that the stakes are materialistic.
But what you don't get is a kind of conservatism or you know anyway,
You just you don't get a real left and a real right in a
certain sense. You only get to have a materialistic whole politically. And I
don't think that's an accident. It's the fact that this question is no longer
a question. I'll give you actually a really good I'm sort of scattering around
here, but I'll give you a really good example of how the role of
religion. It's not just that religion is reviled or something because being aggressive New
Atheists or or something to that effect would actually, in my view, demonstrate
that the religion still holds some kind of transgressive power, right, that transgressing
against Christianity or Judaism or Slam still held some kind of value or power.
Instead, it's so passe that I didn't realize that. Do you remember in
the new atheist stickers and this is deep cut, but I mean you might
be too young for it, actually, but it was very popular right around
the late nineties, early two thousands into the mid two thousands to have these
stickers on the back of your car that had the fish with legs and it
said Darwin. Right, you'll still see him on a Subaru everyone. Yeah,
exactly. It's very much of that era. I didn't know that that
was a response to the Christian fish on people's cars. I had never seen
anybody with the Christian fish, so I just thought it was a weird,
quirky thing that people really liked Glockpa Ghost Islands, you know, and they
were just really into Darwin. I didn't realize that it was in It was
a response to something. That's how absent religion is. And I'm sure there
are religious people in Palo Alto, but it's not something that you talk about
in public. It's not something that anybody discusses with their friends. It's quiet.
I think what I wrote was quiet and apologetic and no pretenses to answer
any great questions. It's not just that it's anti religious, it's that it's
post religious. Yeah, and I think that that is that's where that nihilism
comes from, I think, and people would, again, thinking of the
counter argument, would say this is a sort of the ambition is really a
Western chauvinism, and the Western chauvinism produces the nihilism, and I think you
have a dramatically different take on that, which is the materialism that is produced
by that that kind of and we are getting we are going straight into like
Catholic integralist territory right here. And I'm really not trying to I don't need
to debate the printing press right now, as but the chicken or the egg
here seems really strong. Does the ambition in the Western chauvin is capitalism engender
the nihilism or does the nihilism engender the ambition in a nietzsche sense where except
in this weird sense where it's like I'm not going to be strong and a
mass conqueror slash murderer. I'm going to be the effective altruist who just happens
to not be so effective or altruistic because it ultimately just becomes about my own
interests. Where do you see that dynamic. It's a good question which direction
it goes. I tend to think as someone who isn't a Catholic and take
a list. I tend to think capitalism is a good, but it has
its limits. It can't answer some of these questions. And to some extent,
I do think the nihilism springs up because Palo Alto, and I do
write this in this essay, has maxed out what capitalism can offer. This
is so capitalism has been so incredibly good to these people, right in terms
of making them more money than God, all right, And so I do
think it engender is a kind of nihilism when you get all of those blessings
and yet they don't answer what you need it to answer. I do think
that opens up the abyss in front of people in a very direct way.
Whereas when you are striving, when you're on that striver path and you're always
looking to the next thing, you can forget about that. And so I
think that abyss opens up in sort of two directions. For so I do
think, I guess I think the ambition precedes nihilism because I think it opens
up in two directions. In this post religious not really nichean environment, I
feel like both pagan sources of meaning and Western traditional sources of meaning are non
existent. So when you're you're on the rat race, the abyss opens up
in both directions. If you fail and you don't get selected for the next
race, right the next tier of racing. Then the abyss opens up because
you're like, well, what do I do? I've failed. The people
who will go on without me, they'll they'll understand what life is about.
But I've just kind of shunted off. And I think that's a lot of
the story of the Palatto suicides. But on there's kind of the flip side
on the other side, where the people who do then make it to the
end and do get selected into a smaller and smaller and smaller tier, and
finally they are the billionaires of Silicon Valley, and that's when they get that's
when things get really weird. Then that's when they start experimenting with you know,
extending their life for two hundred years and you know, merging with the
singularity and merging their consciousness with the cloud. Right, because there isn't ultimately
that calculust treadmill, which I don't have any problem with, unlike Malcolm Harris.
I think it's fine. It's good. It's produced a lot of wealth
for not only for America but for the world. It's you know, given
humanity great things. But this question, it won't answer for you. It's
not enough to answer this question or or I hear there's a guy who once
said, man does not live by bread alone, and the bread and Silicon
Valley is about as good bread as you can get. You have mountains of
bread, but at the end of the day, you don't live by bread
alone. You just gave me goosebumps. So how's that for non Christian Is
exactly where I was going to go next. In fact, is I saw
today an Institute for Family Studies report putting, you know, more data,
adding more flesh to the bones that we really knew about for a long time.
It's a very obvious point, which is that as religiosity declined in the
Soviet Union, so too did marriage and fertility. And I'm asking that question
to you because your experience is as a child of immigrants. As you mentioned,
your dad was a programmer in Silicon Valley, and I think you would
be the first to say you're sort of very heavily shaped by your parents' cultures
that you know they brought with them, like so many wonderful immigrants to the
States. From that vantage point, what was it like watching this play out
as the child of people who left the Soviet Union? You got out of
the Soviet Union So, first of all, technically Poland wasn't in the Soviet
Union. It was behind the Iron Curtain, but I wasn't in the of
the warsaw let's let's let's get into this. Uh No. So I'm laughing
only because my husband once said, oh, my wife's family is from the
Soviet Union, and my parents have never let him forget it. By the
way, yeah, yeah, and he it was a slip of the tongue.
He totally knew that. But my parents have never let him forget it.
Everything. It's like remember when when our son in law said, we
were from the Soviet Union anyway, Actually, I don't know what I actually
forget your parents were specifically Polish. But that's my fault as a Russian,
Yeah, always from a Yeah, my people always think my dad's xcent as
Russian. So it's it's it's fine. It's part of the great American melting
Pot. I definitely think it's Soviet melting pot. Sorry, I'll let you
go. That also had uh that one, That one was bought with a
little more blood than the American melting pot. But no, I mean I
do think it influenced me a lot. In part, I think it it
kept me sane in a certain way. I didn't not that my teenage years
were without honest I was a complete, like lunatic for at least five years.
Sorry Mom, sorry Dad. But I think ultimately like their attitude towards
some of the stuff, some of the like the therapeutic culture, the you
know, the complaints of these essentially very privileged kids, I do think that
kept me more sane and grounded, knowing that, you know, there is
a life outside of these things. And in fact, many people would from
other countries would be very very pleased to be on the bottom tier of Palo
Alto and be very happy and satisfied with that life. But also, I
mean, I really like my parents are still married, and that was that
was very much not the case for almost all of my friends. I had
one friend whose parents were still married by the time I got to high school
in my little circle. And it's funny, I mean, that is fascinating.
It's funny because when I was reading Coming Apart about Belmont and fish Town,
it's interesting to me because in these super zips, marriage is still very
much a thing, and it's correct to say that family breakdown in the US
is disproportionately a lower class phenomenon, and that it's really hit the working classes
of America much harder than it's hit the elites. But there's still an enormous
level of conscious uncoupling among especially and I don't know, just observed, like
observing in Palo Alto. There most of my friends had divorced parents, some
of them in very ugly ways, some of them in ugly ways, and
there was this It was something I remember being contemptuous of very young, because
that's another way in which I thought these especially for some reason, the men,
I thought they were very weak. I thought they were sort of controlled
by their wives in many ways and then controlled by their girlfriends. They seem
to jump, and that did again sort of knock down that if I was
ever inclined to consider the Titans of Silicon Valley to be e Chian giants.
Right, I'm not going to name names because that would be unfair, but
I had a friend whose father was, I mean, he's a household name
in Silicon Valley, one of the first, like enormous billionaires invented exactly the
way that Silicon Valley is supposed to go. Had a great idea you know,
turned it into a company, sold the company for a billion dollars whatever,
right, the inventor of toaster strudle yes behind the American embassy anyway.
Uh no, no, no, So this guy was like extremely successful,
even Silicon Valley terms. And just the the weakness that he displayed and defending
his children, the weakness that he displayed his child actually in towards his like
ex wife, and then the like the new girlfriend, and how like it
was just it was. It was all this very sort of warmed over sixties
free love stuff that by the time you get to the nineties and two thousands
doesn't even have the prison of actual sort of pleasure or rebellion. In other
words, these uncouplings happened not because somebody fell madly in love with their secretary,
but because they're splunking into their own psychological problems and sort of it just
happened in not even the kind of like dynamic way where you would expect in
the sixties, or at least in the you know, movies and stuff in
the sixties, or or the art that came out of the sixties, this
kind of follow your path. It was because they couldn't determine their own passions,
and I just I found it all very lame, frankly, like warmed
Over, not really transgressive in any way. You're not really shocking anyone at
this point. But it had an enormous psychic tole on their kids, and
that was all papered over by this, well, you know, your kids
will be happy if you're happy. You need to follow your your you to
find yourself right, And what I saw was something that made be contemptious,
which is that adults not behaving like adults, not being capable psychologically of pulling
themselves together enough to give the next generation a kind of solidity and a kind
of stability and a kind of authority that would make them feel safe and grounded
and not crazy. And that was a sacrifice that just almost universally they seemed
incapable of making. Whereas this was the baseline for my parents, like not
saying they're perfect people and not saying their marriage was perfect. You know,
they're human beings. But like that was all very much not given to me,
right, Like they gave me a sense of stability at home, a
sense of like safety, a sense of order because they did, you know,
maybe maybe not as much as they should, but they did discipline me.
They did have limits on what I was supposed to do or what I
was allowed to do. And that when you asked that question about the immigrant
background, to the extent that I think that factors in that, that's I
think different. My parents are boomers, but they're not American sixties boomers,
so they didn't pick up a lot of that self esteem movement. You know,
you're gonna hurt your child's feelings if you act like a parent. You
know, they didn't have that mentality, and that was big in Palo Alto.
Again, a lot of warmed over like sixties stuff that had become which
is bad enough in the sixties, but by the time you get to the
two thousands and you're talking about nerds and grind and selective system people pretending that
they're free spirited, that they're you know that they're they're going to the Summer
of sixty seven, Summer of Love in nineteen sixty seven right in in uh
Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, and and you know, doing a bunch
of drugs and having a bunch of sex like it wasn't even that, It's
just a bunch of like neurotic nerds who don't have the strength to just make
carve a path for themselves and stick to it. And the only thing that
they're actually good at is that that like advancement phase within a very structured system,
and the rest of it they're very weak on. And again, like
I, this doesn't apply to everyone. There's tons of great people. I'm
sure anywhere. I'm sure even in Wisconsin. I'm laughing, I'm just livings,
just giving a little no. But there's there's there's great people already.
So I don't these our generalizations necessarily their generalizations, but they are generalizations that
have some truth to them that I observed over and over again as a teenager.
That really again make me very worried that this is the elite of the
United States now, because these people are not strong enough to, you know,
make the kind of calls. Forget about some of our actually great presidents,
forget about George Washington. These people are not making capable of being JFK.
I was gonna say you would, so you would take Carnegie over Zuckerberg.
Yes, there you go. Yes, so this is actually right where
I was I was going to go. Next, is you actually and you
know you said earlier, you know, not that my childhood matters, blah
blah blah. But I actually think your personal arcs as you wrote it into
the story and wove it into the story, is very interesting because our listeners
man and not know that you did not enjoy the district of Columbia here in
sunny Washington, d C. And you fled for the freedom and open space
Manhattan of New York City. And you know to the extent that these generalizations
are useful it because you're describing culture, and culture is always generic. And
I'm just so curious, actually, how you how you sort of think of
all of these three areas, Bay Area, Washington, D C, and
New York City, having spent so much time in all of them, and
how their cultures each can be looked at through this lens that you applied to
Silicon Valley. So, first of all, this is the reason I wrote
this essay. I mean, I've been thinking about it for more than a
decade decade and a half now, but it didn't seem relevant until the last
few years to me because Silicon Valley was Silicon Valley, and do you see
in New York were different than Silicon Valley, and I thought, okay,
you know, maybe this is this is exactly one of the sub elites of
America. And that's okay, right. I can I cannot enjoy being around
this culture. I can have escaped it for other places and left it behind.
But the reason that I did write this essay is because I think it's
spreading and I see it everywhere, not sometimes literally right where they just opened
up in outside of Washington, d C. And in northern Virginia. There's
now like what it is Amazon that's out there. I can't remember which big
tech company. Yeah, well, I mean there are a lot. They
are in your Google, Tesla, Microsoft, They all have a lot of
people out here. There was an influx of tech people into d C.
There is an influx of tech people into New York. So I do really
feel like this culture is chasing me, which sucks personally for me because I
didn't like it. But you're going to end up like in a peenthouse apartment
in Bismarck, just more like like you know, abbit hole in Edinburgh or
something like escape. But that's the point with America. There's no there's no
Reagan was right, I think when he said this is the last best hope.
I don't see uh I don't see a counter to this rising anywhere else.
I do think that European some European countries have certain commitments to the good
life that are missing in America. But they're not going to replicate themselves.
They're mausoleums to their past in many ways. Anyway. That that's a longer
discussion. But in terms of of uh DC and New York, I mean,
obviously the cultures are are very different. D C I think is kind
of similar to what people don't like to think about in Silicon Valley, and
that it is a sort of midwitch driber culture. It has its its upside.
I mean, I had a good time in DC for many years.
But they're just this is this is personal. I don't know that anything that
this is anything like worthwhile for our listeners. I just I don't like talking
about politics all the time, and I like New York because the cultural stuff
is better. It's more walkable, you know. I think the med is
awesome, and I'm one of the people who actually goes to the Harmonic,
So those those kinds of things you can only get in New York. There's
also something very American in New York. That It's funny because people from outside
of the US they think immediately of New York, and then Americans are like,
don't think of New York as emblematic of the United States, And it
isn't. It isn't representative or even emblematic of America. But what it is
is probably the only real, like huge city, global city, if you
will, that is heavily American that doesn't have Actually New York has less of
that generic feel now than many European capitals that like sort of generic globalists.
Everything is the same, it's the same shops, it's the same. There
is some of that, of course in New York. But when you're in
New York, you feel you're in America. Even the architecture is you know,
art Deco is an American art form. And the ostentatiousness and the brashness
and directness of New York, I think are very American. Anyway, I
love New York, so that's that's something that I enjoy. But I do
worry. I don't want our elite even in places like DC and New York.
And I'm sure actually, you know, in Cincinnati and in in you
know a bunch of other cities. The elite increasingly is tied into this tech
culture, and even if it's not related to tech, because I think of
the same forces, right, the ambitious nihilism forces. As religion falls away,
and you see this in polls, recent polls of Americans over time,
where you would think, so you see organized religion as a priority going down.
You see family formation as a ideal or life goal falling pretty precipitously,
as in, people are not even saying in nearly as high numbers as they
were even ten or twenty years ago that getting married and starting a family is
a priority for them. What they are saying is a priority is make a
lot of money, get a good job. And I think those things go
together. So you just mentioned two actually really interesting and salient things, which
is the met and the Philharmonic, which if you juxtapose with the best art
that Silicon Valley has to offer, I imagine, or the popular art in
Silicon Valley, I mean, New York still is this bastion of Western culture
in a way that places that are more bastions of Western postmodern culture just don't.
And I think it's very clear that Silicon Valley is much more a bastion
of postmodern Western culture. And that's a wonderful thing about New York City.
I mean, one of the saddest moments like that I ever had in terms
of like my patriotism was like many people in DC used to go back and
forth to New York a lot before the pandemic, and when I went in
the middle of the pandemic, the empty streets of Midtown were, I mean
truly repulsive. It was incredibly depressing because as much as New York is awful
in so many ways, it is also just the pinnacle of everything America did
right, and so many people living in a confined space with so much opportunity
and so much success. I mean, it's just incredibly depressing to see New
York down. But I think your point is a really salient one that in
New York there's still life in a way that there isn't other places. I
mean, I agree with that. I know a lot of people on our
team do not agree with me on this one, but I will actually crystallize
what you said in one perfect example. The Anti Chamber of the Met right
now is advertising the first AI exhibit AI Art exhibit so that is the direction
we're headed. That is the And there is an aspect to tech which is
probably unavoidable to a certain extent, but destroys particularity because it's because it's digital,
because it's over the Internet, because it's global. In many ways,
it destroys the particularity of places. It makes the place you're in less important,
and it assimilates everything sort of culturally into the tech bork. Now that
tech itself and that tech culture and that Internet culture is then splintered into thousands
and millions of subcultures. But those subcultures are no longer tied to a place.
That's why I get really sad at quite a part room. I mean,
I think, obviously, I think that it's an act of political revolution
and regime change to take down the Confederate statues in the South has happened since
twenty twenty. But there's also like a different aspect of it that makes me
sad. There's an esthetic sameness to it. You used to really feel that
you were in the South, and the statues were part of that, but
a part of it. Right, did you read the story recently? It
started interrupt but there was a fascinating story recently, I think it was in
the Los Angeles Times somewhere like that about the Washington Posts about how young Georgians
do not have accents anymore for a lot of different reasons. But it's fascinating
how quickly that has happened. They do not have Southern accents at the same
level of proportionality at all. That's happening in New York too, Right,
It's pretty rare that you actually interact with somebody who has the old School in
New York accent, right, that came from Italian waves of immigration, Jewish
waves of the immigration at the turn of the century. I mean, there
we are losing a sense of place, and I think that's probably to some
extent inevitable. But again, my point in this essay and even my sort
of personal antipathy towards this culture, is not to say that there's nothing good
about it or nothing worthwhile about it, or that we should stamp it out,
but to the extent that this becomes the culture of our elite, I
don't see that, first of all, that the America that we love survives,
the particularities about America survive, But also I just I don't think it
offers a very compelling vision for life, for humanity, and it does start
to feel very dystopian when you think about these tiers of selection basically determining your
fate in the way that they do in China, which by the way,
also had a very high suicide rate around these tiers of selection, and as
my like, also really wild stories about some of the people who get de
selected and what they do end up doing and in terms of the society,
but more fundamentally, people who are smart and do well on tests and do
well in a regulated environment are only one type of person. Charisma matters.
We see that with you know, Donald Trump, I wanted Rondasantis to win
because I'm like an uncharismatic nerd, not even close to elite. Like I'm
just you know, I'm one wonky. I'm like, what do you want
from me? I guess that's the part of my soulf But no, But
you see how much Trump's personality matters in all of this, how much charisma
matters in all of this. And there used to be a route for people
like Trump to the elite right. Forget it for a moment about the fact
that he was elected president and the democratic angle. He was able to make
a ton of money right on the New York real estate market. I worry
how much less now the way to make Pep Buddha Judge's yeah, now,
it's yes. Pete Bota Judge is the quintessential American elite now, and I
think that is not a good thing. I think it is better to have
your carnegiese and you know, your Trumps and the old fashioned American sort of
wildcat businessman and to have different And then also we haven't even touched at all.
We touched on the South, the American cavalier culture. That's fading too.
So you're no longer going to have a military elite in the way that
we used to. Their sons and grandsons for a whole variety of very good
reasons, are not going to go into the military. And by the way,
they weren't getting promoted in the military when they weren't, So you have
no military elite to speak of anymore. And I feel very comfortable saying that,
because you know, look at who didn't. Nobody with medals on their
chests resigned for the disaster of withdrawing from Afghanistan. In terms of operational forget
about the political decision to withdraw or not. But like operationally, no one
fell on their sword. There's no like culture of doing that. There's no
martial honor anymore. Those people in the Pentagon probably went through a selective system.
But that's not the only type of leadership that matters. In fact,
in many ways, that's not a type of leadership at all. That's that
is your bureaucratic class, your scribe class, if you want right, but
you need monks and you need warriors, and this class gives us neither.
Palo Alto is never going to spin out monks and warriors. It's only going
to spin out the guy who fixes his glasses with tape and like hunches over
the computer and works eighteen hours a day. That's who's being spat out by
our elite system. And that's not all that a country needs. Remind me
if I'm wrong, Correct me if I'm wrong. Is your husband Jared's family?
Were they Okie's They're from Oakland, from the sort of Oklahomans. Yeah,
yeah, I know what you're talking about. No, no, I
don't think okay, I was thinking of so that was interesting to me because
he's also from the Bay Area. But another person from the roughly from the
Bay Area from Sacramento would be Joan Didion, who was a descendant of OKI's
and who was incredibly prescient and critical of the boomerism of Joan Baez as you
mentioned earlier and others. And that's what's so sad about California. I just
got back from California. I was at the Reagan Ranch, which is crystallizes
it ranch adl CLO's about seven hundred eight there's the top of a mountain,
super humble, little Adobe ranch house. But that's why California depresses me more
than any place, more than New York. Because if you watch like the
beginning of La Confidential, you have this voice over by Danny DeVito talking about
how California is like the golden land of opportunity for the for America's middle class.
And that's what California was, the frontier, and then California became about
both free love and safety ism, and that is I think one of the
interesting things about the point you're making is like it's the Canary and the coal
mine, because it's a very concentrated in that area. It's just this very
concentrated existence of all of these problems that in our you know, Davos dominated
world are eventually not just going to be relegated to Silicon Valley. They're going
to be in Brussels. They're going to be in all the places outside of
Brussels where people are farming and getting screwed over by the same people that are
thrusting AI Art into the met Yeah, there is this really bizarre sameness to
all of us. And I guess I shouldn't say bizarre, as we just
went through why it might be so. But yeah, the destruction of California
is a tragedy. I know people like to spike the football on, but
California was the middle class dream. It was the American dream within the dream.
And yeah, Didion was very precedent in right about the press, prescient
in writing about this. She would have been president. Yeah, because she
saw early on, even in the first iteration of some of these ideas,
how hollow they are and how you know how they will end up. But
there's something even more pathetic about being that the pale echo of that, like
the nerdy pale echo of that, and that really is the culture now of
the Bay Area. It's the idolization of the sixties. I used to call
my classmates. I used to say they had selma envy, right, because
they wanted to be the generation of the sixties that broke these barriers for good
and for ill. But there were no more barriers to break by the time
they came around, and so it became this pale, weird exercise of narcissism,
of like nerotic self examination of and then of course on the political end,
spitting out this very obvious creation of the man that doesn't exist. Right,
they really want to believe they still live in an America of Bull Connors,
and they really crave Bullcannor, but he doesn't exist because it was a
foil in the same way that for conservatives the Soviet Union was a foil in
ways that are making them under us undergo this identity crisis about what we believe.
Yeah, but there's just something like, it's the same thing that's happened.
This is really bouncing around, but it's the same thing that's happened with
modern art, the early part of the modern art and the total abstraction.
It still meant something to transgress away from form or for example, Right,
but they're kind of now stuck for the last fifty years doing a lot of
the same things, like the found object thing that Duchamp did. I'm probably
mispronouncing that, but like he already did that, right, whatever you think
about it, he already did it. And it's just this grinding of the
wheels over and over and over again because there's nothing more to transgress, and
it's more pathetic, just like it's you know, I judge people who are
communists after you know, understanding what happened in the Soviet Union, after what
happened there happened, more than I judge somebody for being excited about communism in
nineteen seventeen, right, even though I hope I would have been able to
judge correctly that that was a bad idea on paper. There is something worse
about somebody who doesn't update how it actually you know, look at how this
idea actually worked, and then update it. And I feel the same way
about the sexual Revolution and about a lot of these sixties ideas. In Paloelto,
it's it's not novel anymore. There's no there's no barrier to break,
and so it is very anti creative in a certain sense. It's very backwards
looking, and it becomes dogmatic, and it becomes completely devoid of to the
extent that the sexual revolution had any virtues to begin with, right, they're
gone now. And it's the inability then to like actually strike away from the
set path to do something new. And I'm not even saying like, oh,
conservatives or the new rebels or whatever, that's not my point, but
like even to do something new, even if it was wrong, like you
know, to actually have the courage and the genuine creativity to do something new.
Instead they're just rehashing. It is like, you know, it is.
What you're saying, is that Charles Manson made great music. Yeah,
no, it's so like now I have a really good example of what I'm
talking about. You know, we all knew people in high school or in
college who you know, were big partiers and did a lot of drugs,
and like a lot of them were fun and dynamic people. And most people
sort of move on from that stage of life at some point. But the
ones who don't have a time they hit their forties, they no longer seem
fun and dynamic. They seem pathetic and weak in thee I think there is
some element of this in the culture as well, where this pale rehashing of
sixties ideas in Silicon Valley as though they still had transgressive power, as though
they hadn't you know, demonstrated major failure points over the years, and then
especially coupling it with this very very attentive to teacher and neurotic mentality where if
you take one step off the aff the pathway to success, like your life
is valueless. Like in a sense, it's very weird for somebody like that
to idolize Jimmy Hendrix, who legitimately lived his life in a crazy way and
died at twenty seven. Right, But none of these people are actually living
that way, but they espouse these ideas as though in doing so themselves,
in espousing sixties ideas, they're doing something radical and they are, you know,
transgressive and whatever. And they're not. They're nerds who are following what
their teachers tell them. Right. It's it's posting about polyamory instead of joining
the Manson family. Both bad. One. You have to admire the healthier
society, how to admire the commitment. This is a wonderful essay. I
am so glad. I was just when it hit my inbox. I couldn't
believe it because I was. I actually wrote it, because you're acting about
writing. You're a busy person and as we should mentioned, is also the
host of a wonderful podcast called Hi Noon, which you can get wherever you
download your podcasts. Again, this essay is called Ambitious Nihilism. It's out
in the February edition of First Things. You can also access it online and
as thank you. As always, it was a wonderful to chat. Thanks
so much, Emily, It's always great to chat with you. You've been
listening to another edition of The Federalist for radio hour. I'm Emily Kashinski,
culture editor here at The Federalist. We'll be back soon with more. Until
then, be lovers of freedom and anxious for the fry.