Technology is Existentialist

The Origins of the Modern Worldview are Technological

I’m hosting an “Ask Me Anything” series with Interintellect on Philosophy, Theology, Spirituality, and Poetry. The first salon is this Thursday, January 27th at 8:30 PM EST. Reserve your ticket here.

Why is existentialist philosophy a modern phenomenon? Why is it that moderns obsess about questions of identity and personal purpose in a way that is scarcely found amongst ancient writers? Why is it that Kierkegaard and Nietzsche could write only in the 19th century, but not in the 10th century B.C.E.?

One possibility is that moderns suffer identity crises and confusions more than their ancient ancestors. But why?

Here are some potential causes for the malaise that Marx lamented as “alienation” but that other modern thinkers re-branded as the cost of heroic striving:

1. More social mobility means you don’t accept your given lot in life.

2. More geographic mobility means you don’t accept your given culture as innately true.

3. More ideational mobility (the spread of ideas through technology) means you encounter more ideological diversity.

4. Urbanization means you feel small relative to your surroundings.

5. Globalization means you feel small in the world.

The key point is that mobility of all kinds, which we associate with opportunity, also tracks with a sense of meaninglessness—because the more that is up for invention, the less guidance one has on what to do.

Individualism doesn’t lead to technological innovation so much as technological innovation makes individualism inevitable. Moderns are obsessed with the individual because they saw the industrial revolution gut the stability of the tribe and the village.

Although we think of individualism as a political philosophy or worldview, it’s more likely that it’s a response to a lived crisis than it is the result of first principles thinking. We don’t derive the individual. We find ourselves individuated, in part, by the reality of increasing complexity and specialization.

Responses to existentialism that repudiate it as “selfish” or else as “relativistic” fail to account for the ways that modernization has made identity confusion a stubborn problem. Going back to Aristotle might work for a few academics, but Aristotle’s thought was written at a time before the printing press, let alone the internet.

The biggest challenge facing ancient systems of thought is not disproof by “science,” but lack of resonance wrought by new technology. Worldview is downstream of technology.