Apocapolitics: Lovelessness, Hopelessness, Guiltlessness

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Session Description

If the end is not in fact nigh, there is certainly a belief among some that it is at least nigh-ish. Our roundtable takes on the matter of an ‘Apocapolitics’—a term borrowed from Romanticist Morton D. Paley—from tacks both hopeful and pessimistic. Eileen Hunt Botting (Notre Dame) looks to political science fiction, with her broad focus being “loveless literature,” which she holds can be read as the most profound of political science fiction due to its engagement of questions concerning the basis of community and its compatibility with biotechnology and AI. Botting contests thinking that posits that parent-child love would fade if enhancement of children made parental care unnecessary for their surviving and thriving. Loveless literature plays on the fear the loss of real connectivity—from the family to outer space—to press readers to wonder: What it would take to re-conceive love and the family in an age of technology? Looking to works of Mary Shelley, as well as Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go and Spike Jonze’s film Her, Botting aims to show how political science fiction can be used to explode some of the technophobic myths at the fore of twenty-first century political science.

Botting’s efforts at puncturing apocalyptic fears mirror those of Michael Lamb (Wake Forest). Today’s challenges, Lamb observes, range from increasing social fragmentation to rising inequality and the threat of ecological destruction. Alone, each of these is daunting. Combined, they tempt despair. Lamb seeks to dispel such despair by gleaning from Wendell Berry, one of America’s most influential living writers and social critics. Berry has had a true impact on environmental ethics, literature, and religious studies, yet few moral and political philosophers have looked to him for insight. Lamb aims to correct this neglect by recovering Berry’s nuanced democratic hope and highlighting its relevance for contemporary citizens. Lamb reconstructs Berry’s account of hope as a virtue and highlights the practices needed to cultivate it. He shows how Berry encourages us to infer “difficult hope” from action, even action that may, at first glance, seem despairing.

Botting and Lamb find hope, but Steven B. Smith (Yale) is warier of such optimism. Smith’s reading of Frankenstein, through Rousseau, is as something closer to a warning about the dangers inherent to modern science and its “Baconian” drive to conquer nature. Both were concerned with the aspirations of science to create a world cleansed of ignorance, misery, and want. This idea of a radical transformation of the human condition, Smith argues, has been most fully developed in Michael Houellebecq’s novel The Elementary Particles. For Smith, the tragedy of Frankenstein is a premonition of sciences like eugenics and biomedical engineering, used not for the relief of man’s estate but to create a master race. Since the time of Shelley, the idea of a post-human future has come to appear as an immanent reality. The story that began with Rousseau and Shelley finds its denouement in Houellebecq’s book, in which a race of technologically advanced post-humans has supplanted humans as we currently know them. On Houellebecq’s view, knowledge advances by sudden and cataclysmic epistemic changes that nothing in the past can either prepare for or explain.

If Smith’s paper envisions a certain hopelessness for our future, Samuel Piccolo (Notre Dame) wonders whether technology might not excise a different emotion: guilt. Piccolo begins in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche is often understood to be contemptuous of guilt, seeing it as a product of slave morality. But Piccolo argues that Nietzsche’s objection to guilt is limited to its persistent feeling, and that his philosophy actually encourages guilt about specific actions. Piccolo finds this by linking Nietzsche’s praise of the capacity for humans to be responsible and this capacity as an inherent part to guilt, and in his praise of Ancient Greek culture, in which individuals felt guilty over particular acts but not over their broad condition. Piccolo’s point is that even in a post-metaphysical world, a capacity to feel guilt is necessary to developing a system of morality. Since this morality is not rooted in first principles or a deity, it is incumbent upon individuals to anchor themselves. Technology, Piccolo fears, provides people with the ability to be unmoored from their guilt—with technology capable of erasing uncomfortable memories, as in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, thereby allowing them to escape from the personal struggle that Nietzsche argues is so essential to living in the modern world.

The roundtable will be chaired by Alison McQueen of Stanford, author of the leading study of apocalyptic themes in Western political thought from Augustine to Morgenthau: Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times. She will give brief comments on the broad themes of the presentations before adjudicating a discussion with the audience.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Chair

• Alison McQueen Stanford University

Presenters

• Samuel Piccolo

• Michael Lamb Wake Forest University

• Eileen Hunt Botting University of Notre Dame

• Steven B. Smith Yale University