Morality and ambition

Bregman is on to something

Rutger Bregman, historian, public intellectual and all-round decent human being, has just finished delivering the annual series of Reith lectures. Until he received his invite, Bregman had never heard of Reith or his eponymous lecture series; being Dutch, he suggested, is why he had never heard of a very British institution. These days I guess most Brits have no idea who Reith was and his connection to Donald Trump’s latest $10 billion lawsuit.

Bregman’s four lectures are well worth a listen - all available on BBC Sounds. He asks for fewer of us to head for bullshit jobs in consulting, tech and finance. ‘Do something that might actually matter’, is his humble suggestion. Why do so many of us end up in careers devoted to devising tricks to get more people to click on ads?

[our] brightest minds are building a single great moloch, an attention-hijacking machine that devours our focus, steals our time, and leaves us emptier by the hour. And AI threatens to supercharge it all.

There are some great one-liners in the lectures. Bregman tells us there is good evidence to suggest the most engaged people on political social media sites have high psychopathy scores and low cognition. I think that means Twitter/X, Facebook and all the rest are populated with more than their fair share of thick wingnuts. I could, of course, be wrong.

One particular strand in Bregman’s narrative is the loss of morality in the U.S. In fact, he suggests that morality has been ‘outlawed’ in America. Lamenting Europe’s lack of tech companies of any note he also suggests ‘ambition’ has been outlawed by the EU. ‘The EU is great at regulating companies it doesn’t have.’

The Americas and Europe need both morality and ambition.

Like the Pope, Bregman has a pop at the MAGA adherents who espouse a faux-moral compass with only three points: faith, family and nation. J D Vance, the Vice President, has led the charge here, wrongly claiming Saint Augustine and Thomas Aquinas - ‘Ordo Amoris’ - as backing his belief that his compassion for his fellow human beings rightly stops at the American border. A little learning is a dangerous thing. Or maybe just an example of low cognition with a touch of psychopathy.

Vance once claimed Trump reminded him of Hitler. Today, Vance has morphed into a kind of Trump-on-stilts, willing to say things that his mixed-race children should hopefully never hear. Vance’s mentor, Peter Thiel, gets name-checked by Bregman. Thiel has expressed doubts about whether he thinks the human race deserves to survive the AI age. He also thinks democracy and freedom are incompatible.

AI is firmly in Bregman’s sights. A technology that even its designers don’t understand might lead to abundance. But it might kill us all: a possibility that should, but doesn’t, bother our new tech overlords.

Bregman thinks we need to deal with the tech lords in the same way previous generations dealt with slavery and female emancipation. That’s what he thinks social media is doing and what AI will do.

Social media, tech and morality. There is a lot about all of these things in his lectures. I’ll leave the last word to the owner of a social media company, a very politically engaged person who might well one day be diagnosed with some kind of opathy. The post is consistent, in my view, with various kinds of opathies. It also speaks to morality’s absence. This is a post in response to the tragic deaths of well known, much admired, much loved, people in Hollywood. In many ways its message is simple: Bregman is right.