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AR 21:36 - American exceptionalism, a "fanatical secular religion"?
In this issue:
CULTURE - new film has "a wary reverence for the Internet that is in part due to the ways it threatens to transform humanity"
SECULARISM - the hazards behind American exceptionalism's misguided thinking?
Apologia Report 21:36 (1,309)
October 14, 2016
CULTURE
"Herzog's Web: What happens when the iconic German director makes a promotional film about the Internet" by Jason Tanz -- "We usually think of geniuses as people who are inimitable, but part of [Werner] Herzog's genius is that he is so readily and unmistakably mimicked. And the Internet loves imitating Werner Herzog."
Tanz describes the present as "this moment in history - a moment when our machines are growing inseparable from our selves, when networked intelligence is challenging our notions of what it means to be human, and when the digital underpinnings of society are evolving faster than we can comprehend.
"'Werner is one of the few directors who can step back and look at the really big story,' says technologist Danny Hillis, one of the film's many subjects, 'the story of what humans are becoming.'"
A sidebar adds: "Herzog once called social media a 'massive onslaught of stupidity.' But his new film has a wary reverence for the Internet." Tanz says that this is due in part to "the ways it threatens to transform humanity. ...
"At one point, Herzog visits the family of a girl decapitated in a car accident who were inundated by lulz-seeking trolls mocking their loss. ('I have always believed that the Internet is a manifestation of the Antichrist,' the girl's mother says convincingly.) He interviews the residents of Green Bank, West Virginia, a town with no cell phone towers that has drawn a community of people whose 'electrosensitivity' led them to pursue an Internet-free existence. He visits an Internet-addiction treatment facility, where he hears, thirdhand, about a couple whose baby died while they played videogames. (Herzog, who insists he is not a journalist, does not judge or question the veracity of any of these accounts.) ...
"At [another] point, as a young roboticist breezily enthuses about his favorite soccer-bot, Herzog stops him in his tracks with the question 'Do you love it?' He repeatedly asks his subjects whether the Internet dreams of itself, a question inspired by a remark Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz once made about war. And at one point Herzog gets Elon Musk to admit, after a long, uncomfortable pause, that the tycoon remembers only his nightmares.
"In the finished film, astronomer Lucianne Walkowicz speaks with Herzog.... 'We spoke about the Internet as its own entity,' she says, 'a manifestation of human consciousness that is almost a separate being - that's comprised of human activity but has a life of its own.' ...
"That part of Walkowicz's discussion didn't make it into the film, and it's in good company. Herzog and [Jim McNiel, newly installed as chief marketing officer of an Internet security and assurance firm called NetScout that hired Herzog for this film] say there are many hours of unused footage, covering everything from bitcoin to cognitive computing. In fact, the two hope to use some of that material as the foundation of a new documentary television series....
"'Do you know what I like about high school girls?' [Herzog] recently asked host Scott Aukerman, in a nod to the classic line from Dazed and Confused. 'I keep getting older but they do not realize the futility of existence yet.' Herzog may be an art-house film director, but he is a blockbuster meme.
"Despite Herzog's repeated claims that he lacks a 'sensory organ for irony,' he clearly has a sense of humor about himself."
While discussing Herzog's films, Tanz mentions that "Grizzly Man's Timothy Treadwell fancies himself a friend and protector of the bears he lives among, until one of them devours him. 'Unfortunately, this misconceived idea cost him and his girlfriend their lives,' Herzog says. 'We'd better do some coherent thinking before we face a bear - and step so close that we can touch his nose.'
"That's more or less what Herzog hopes to accomplish with this film - to challenge us to think hard about this force of nature we have unleashed, to not be facile or glib about our relationship to it but to respect and fear it as we would any other jungle. As Herzog and I chat in the UCLA engineering department...." Here in a classroom "undergraduates in Dropbox and GitHub T-shirts attend a workshop. If they're at all typical, there's more than a little hubris and obsession in their plans and more than a little romance in their thinking about the world they are helping to create. ...
"I have something to ask him before he goes. It's my own stab at a spiritual successor to his question about whether the Internet dreams of itself: Does the Internet need us?
"Herzog pauses. The silence goes on for a while, like the awkward moments in one of his own documentaries when you can watch his subjects mentally feeling around for a response. 'It's a beautiful question,' he finally says. 'I don't think it does.' In the magnificent cyborg future we are building, the relics tossed into the storage unit - that could be us. If Herzog's films teach us anything, it's that while we may fall in love with our sublime, ecstatic visions, our affection is always unrequited." Wired, Aug '16, pp96-103. <www.goo.gl/utn7eq>
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SECULARISM
The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy: How America's Civil Religion Betrayed the National Interest, by Walter A. McDougall [1] -- "A Pulitzer Prize–winning historian examines the fanatical secular religion of American exceptionalism and why it is leading government officials and the electorate astray in an increasingly violent world. McDougall (History and International Relations/Univ. of Pennsylvania) opens with the errors of the George W. Bush presidency based on American civil religion and closes with the errors of the Barack Obama presidency based on nearly identical misguided thinking. In between, he produces a mostly chronological tour de force.... During the 1950s and '60s, [John F.] Kennedy's Catholic faith certainly generated controversy, but McDougall is more interested in the young president's invocation of civil religion to justify his democracy's manifest destiny. At his inauguration, Kennedy stated that human rights derived not from compassionate governments but rather from the power of God. As a result, on God's Earth, the United States of America was required to further God's plan of individual freedom across national borders." Kirkus, Sep '16 #2.
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SOURCES: Monographs
1 - The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy: How America's Civil Religion Betrayed the National Interest, by Walter A. McDougall (Yale Univ Prs, November 2016, hardcover, 424 pages) <www.goo.gl/xDg4kL>
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