Harold Bloom in Silicon Valley
What is the future of the canon?
This piece originally appeared on newsletter. I am posting it today because of the ongoing discussion about the “vague tech canon”. Patrick Collison has a long list. Marc Andreessen has a short one. As you will see, my view is that even though many in the valley don’t read literature, it might be the best way to explain them. And yes, they do need more Shakespeare over there… has a good post on this too.
Harold Bloom in Silicon Valley
I sometimes have a strange vision, almost dithyrambic, of the late literary critic Harold Bloom descending through the lonely air of Silicon Valley. He would have hated it there, having called the internet the great grey ocean into which we were all falling like lemmings. For Bloom, the discovery and sustenance of the inner self came through solitary reading of the literary canon; he was aghast at all the passive screen-gaping and internet rambling he saw creeping over our lives like a numbing frost. His life was dedicated to advocating for the great works of the past: Shakespeare, Proust, Dante, Montaigne. The works of Silicon Valley, he thought, were inimical to his project.
Why then do I imagine Bloom shambling down through the descending day of the Bay Area? When Bloom was most polemic, he argued against literary critics: Marxists, post-structuralists, French theorists—what he called a rabblement of scholars who no longer believed in the canon. In hindsight, Bloom and others may have over-reacted (adding Black and women writers has more often extended rather than diminished the canon); but they were right about the general trend: undergraduates are reading less literature, reading it more politically, and at Harvard there is a course being taught on Taylor Swift, comparing her, outrageously, to William Wordsworth.
So Bloom reached out to the common reader. He concentrated on readers uncorrupted by theoretical prejudices. Ironically, today, it is those readers who are enabling the humanities to thrive online, in places like Interintellect and Substack (including this one and my own, The Common Reader). Whatever the arguments on campus, readers carry on reading. And they are finding, discussing, and writing about the great works using the technologies Bloom thought would be most detrimental to the continuance of literary culture.
With the acceleration of AI, I predict they that will continue and become more significant. AI will never be able to read Anna Karenina for you. ChatGPT-4 is a wonderful reading companion. I recently used it to help me untangle parts of Ulysses. But the benefit of reading Ulysses will always be just that,—the irreplaceable, ineluctable, solitary act of reading.
So the first way in which I see Bloom’s spirit buzzing beside the ears of those creating these technologies is that his work will become more and more relevant in the coming years. Bloom’s book The Western Canon is a blueprint for what to read in an age when other tasks require less of your attention and when AI cannot do the reading for you, but can help you do the reading. As we distinguish between what we value because it is created by AI, and what we value because it is created by people, The Western Canon will gain in importance. Tyler Cowen told me when I interviewed him about this last year, it is slowly gathering a reputation with a new generation.
But we cannot quite claim that Bloom’s influence extends to many people in tech circles reading Dante or Tolstoy. I have spoken to multiple people about this and they all said the same thing: the canon has little if any influence on tech culture, there’s a general lack of humanities education, and when people do read it tends to be books that are less than fifty years old.
The intellectual landscape of the Bay Area is instead inherently political, with some groupings of philosophical thinking. There are large cohorts of Rationalists, Effective Altruists, and Wokeists, far more concerned with narrow areas of political debate and specific strands philosophical thought than they are in the general idea of Great Books. The majority of people in the industry have a modern, STEM-based, philosophical view of the world; they are much less influenced, if at all, by any notion of the canon.
There is, though, a group of people in Silicon Valley and tech who are more interested in the great achievements of the past. Marc Andreessen is obsessed with Hollywood and listed philosophers like Nietzsche and Adam Smith in the Techno-Optimist Manifesto. Mark Zuckerberg is obsessed with Marcus Aurelius. Paul Graham is a formally trained painter who loves the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Patrick Collison has quoted J.S. Mill’s essays Bentham and Coleridge in interviews. He is currently reading Bleak House (in my view, perhaps the great English novel) and recently enjoyed Middlemarch. Sam Altman’s bookshelf includes Plato, Huxley, and Tolstoy. Beyond this, there is a widespread interest in the work of Rene Girard, thanks to Thiel’s endorsement, which I’m told has lead a few people into reading Shakespeare. And the AI crowd are obviously interested in writers like Isaac Asimov, (whose Foundation trilogy was recently adapted (butchered?) by Apple TV).
The reason for this interest, I think, is simple. Silicon Valley is a civilisational project. The most significant people in Silicon Valley and tech see it as part of the great ongoing attempt to preserve and progress human society. There’s something very Whiggish about the whole place. Patrick Collison told me, “I care about civilization and culture, and have a kind of awe for what we've accomplished to date.”
What I want to suggest is that this interest in the great works of the past, broadly defined, is a significant factor in these entrepreneur’s own ambitions. Bloom’s most important significance may not be his reading list but the one great phrase he embedded into modern culture: the anxiety of influence.
The strongest minds in modern technology might best be understood, surprisingly, by reading literary criticism.
The burden of the past and the vision of the future
Bloom’s famous theory of the anxiety of influence owed a lot to the less heralded critic Walter Jackson Bate, who theorised that the great poets created their new aesthetics (Romanticism, Victorianism, Modernism and so on) because they felt “the burden of the past.” Seeing what Milton had done, Wordsworth had to swerve into his own new style of writing; seeing what Wordsworth had done, Keats had to swerve again, and so on. In former times, poets imitated each other; in modern time, the “burden of the past” meant they had to distinguish themselves.
Bloom made this theory more Freudian, posited an intellectual contest in the mind of the new poet that involved “misreading” the former work. Each new poem was a form of denial, a rebellion against the past: anxiety that you were too strongly influenced by previous writers, and thus not original, drove writers into strange new forms of imagination.
People of great accomplishment in other areas feel the burden of the past and the anxiety of influence. As an undergraduate, Neil Armstrong felt bitter that he had missed the great age of flight. There were no more grand adventures to be had. To repeated the adventures of old would simply be inadequate. Then, a new frontier opened up and Armstrong re-imagined flight. Elon Musk, who might be the most ambitious person alive, also feels the burden of the past. He has talked about the risk that going to the moon is the last thing we did in space: “Do we want to tell our grandchildren that we gave up?” The knowledge of the pyramids was lost, and the aqueducts, he said in an interview TED talk. He also echoes the ambitious space rhetoric of the 1960s. Musk’s sense of his involvement in a civilisational project is the result of his feeling “the burden of the past.” And the anxiety of influence crackles like static electricity in all of these remarks. Musk will go to seemingly insane lengths to do his greatest, most individual, work.
Just as Milton wrote for God, then, Elon is aiming for the heavens. You might balk at the secular pride of his ambition, or you might, like me, stand in mute astonishment at his commitment to civilisation and his large artistic spirit. But it seems clear that the psychological burden of “coming too late” is the same for him as it was once for the great poets. Others in the Valley have felt this too. Imagine arriving in the nineties and feeling that microchips and computers had all been invented. That’s the sort of feeling that produced the next wave of innovation. Think of Steve Jobs wanting to make a dent in the universe.
Even when Silicon Valley isn’t literary, it is historical. There is a cult of Napoleon and an obsession with the Manhattan project among many working in AI. In this way, Bate’s and Bloom’s notion of influence seems inescapable. The bigger the accomplishments of the past, the bigger the ambitions for the future.
Not by slumbering
Bloom’s vision of the world might be about to be partly vindicated in another way. Peter Thiel recently told economist Tyler Cowen that it is the “numbers people” who are most replaceable by AI. Once AI can answers all of the questions in the Math Olympiad (which may only be three years away), Thiel thinks the balance between maths and verbal ability will shift significantly. And it is Silicon Valley that is “way too biased towards the math people.”
Of course, in some significant way, that isn’t true. Thiel himself is the best counter-example, as is someone like Paul Graham. The most significant people aren’t all maths-biased. Even Jeff Bezos includes the novel Remains of the Day as one of his “must read” books. As we saw earlier, many others are increasingly absorbed in the more “wordy” subjects of history, philosophy, and literature. It’s a marginal group, but growing and significant.
The unifying factor, I want to suggest, is the idea of civilisation. What distinguishes these people is less their specific skills and interests, less their reading list, and more their animating idea. Many of the most important people in tech now exhibit a combination of words and numbers. They are driven less by that and more by the ideas of progress or optimism. They are futurists.
Now, using Peter Thiel’s famous grid of definite and indefinite optimism and pessimism we might still find that these tech people are indefinitely optimistic. Few have the specificity of Elon’s vision of life on Mars. And so we might wonder if this theory of this emerging culture of the future will fall apart for lack of enough specific goals.
I doubt it. Just as I don’t think wordcels are about to take over the tech movement, away from the shape-rotators, I doubt that a predominantly indefinite sense of optimism will be a brake on progress. We do not know what the future will be, but we do know how to get there.
John Stuart Mill drew the same distinction as Thiel in his 1836 essay ‘Civilisation’. Civilisation, he said, “sometimes stands for human improvement in general, and sometimes for certain kinds of improvement in particular.” The closest Silicon Valley comes to the particular and definite are movements like Effective Altruism and rationalism, which have limited reach and arguably quite mixed consequences. (Perhaps if Sam Bankman-Fried had been more genuinely committed to an indefinite view of progress things would have worked out differently…)
Instead, I think the intellectual tension in tech is less between the definite and the indefinite than between the idea that progress is urgent and important and the idea that there are many risks to the community that need to be avoided. One side side we have Progress Studies, Techno Optimism, and Defensive AI; on the other side we have doomers, decelerationists, and those whose concerns are more political than civilisational.
Those who favour progress tend to be more individualist; those who favour a risk-averse approach, more collective. The rise of left-wing politics in Silicon Valley in inextricable with the culture of safetyism and pessimism. They both arise from a culture that is less concerned with the potential of the future—with the idea that the world we have today was the unimaginable future, once—that with the concept that we must preserve and distribute what we have.
We see the effects of these cautious, safetyist ideas in wider society too. Social media has led many to complain about the Girardian nature of modern life, the constant way we mimic each other. Mill anticipated this: “by the natural growth of civilization, power passes from individuals to masses, and the weight and importance of an individual, as compared with the mass, sink into greater and greater insignificance.”
As we become rich and comfortable, Mill said, we are not required to bear pain. And so we become weaker. Turning polemic, Mill said,
They cannot undergo labour, they cannot brook ridicule, they cannot brave evil tongues: they have not hardihood to say an unpleasant thing to any one whom they are in the habit of seeing, Or to face, even with a nation at their back, the coldness of some little coterie which surrounds them. This torpidity and cowardice, as a general characteristic, is new in the world: but (modified by the different temperaments of different nations) it is a natural consequence of the progress of civilization, and will continue until met by a system of cultivation adapted to counteract it.
This all sounds very familiar in the age of cancel culture, ubiquitous therapy, the mental health crisis, and a growing distrust of free speech. Mill called this “decadence”, an idea that has become prominent again in recent years. The more this softening collective culture spreads, Mill said, the more we see that,
The individual becomes so lost in the crowd, that though he depends more and more upon opinion, he is apt to depend less and less upon well-grounded opinion; upon the opinion of those who know him. An established character be, comes at once more difficult to gain, and more easily to be dispensed with.
It’s as if he’s on Twitter and TikTok right now… Mill identified four challenges for civilisation: “the decay of individual energy, the weakening of the influence of superior minds over the multitude, the growth of charlatanerie, and the diminished efficacy of public opinion as a restraining power.” All of these can be seen in Silicon Valley and in the culture at large today.
Mill’s was quite despairing about the state of civilisation in his own time. He saw a diminishment of literature, a greater interest in money getting than intellectual cultivation, and an education system more concerned with exams than the development of the mind. It is all too easy to feel a similar antipathy at the philistine supremacy which reigns over us today. Mill said many similar things we might find too close for comfort:
Success, in so crowded a field, depends not upon what a person is, but upon what he seems: mere marketable qualities become the object instead of substantial ones
The world reads too much and too quickly to read well.
The evils are, that the individual is lost and becomes impotent in the crowd, and that individual character itself becomes relaxed and enervated.
Mill wanted to bring good books and ideas to the public attention, to invigorate a sense of individualism, to improve education. These are the solutions we need too: more attention paid to the best that has been thought and said, more cultivation of independent though, better lifelong education. (This is why I think we also need to re-evaluate the dominance of Girardian thinking in some sectors.) As you will immediately realise, these are the virtues of those Silicon Valley entrepreneurs I mentioned earlier. It is no surprise that Stripe, Collison’s company, has launched one of the more intellectual new publishers to have emerged in recent years, Stripe Press.
Yet once more, then, to these crises of civilisation a solution offers itself in the guise of Harold Bloom. Take yourself away to some quiet place and read great literature. Nurture your inner self. Feed your imagination. Not for any special purpose or particular gain, but because it is the only way to develop your own self without the crushing collective influence of modern society.
As Mill said, “All that we are in danger of losing we may preserve, all that we have lost we may regain, and bring to a perfection hitherto unknown; but not by slumbering.” That’s the attitude that motivates the best parts of Silicon Valley and the tech entrepreneurs. Let us hope it forms the future of their enterprise, that they, and we, will find ourselves more truly and more strange. The future depends, in part, on how much we have the great works of the past blowing in our minds.
You stated that AI will never be able to read "Anna Karenina" for you. Nor will it be as good a crimefighting tool as a good book. In 1886, while tracking and capturing thieves in Dakota Territory, Theodore Roosevelt hauled along a copy of Tolstoy's tome, which he read to his captives as he marched them back to justice.
Interesting that the viral list-makers are not academics. We academics make lists all the time for specific material reasons -- lists for a course syllabus, lists for students to read to pass comprehensive exams, list for students to consider for a thesis or dissertation. Then there are the lists inside of lists, like nesting dolls -- read this book but if you're really going to understand this book you need to read these books, etc.
So I am always glad to see non-academic lists because they aren't purposeful but delightfully whimsical or thoughtful (@patrickc) or performative, or tart commentaries (like @pmarca).