Revaluation of Values
Last week I asked if we are in a meaning crisis. We are, but it is a symptom of a larger movement of history that is forcing a confrontation with a new episode in humanity’s capacity to assert purpose against fate. I ended by invoking Nietzsche’s concept of a revaluation of values. In this installment of the Wednesdays series, I want to follow up on that idea.
To see a meaning crisis is to risk moralizing our present, and to moralize is to worry that something essentially human is under threat of attenuation or destruction. Time as Practice has never sought moralizing, and I certainly don’t seek to defend an essential humanity against our technology. The question before is not ‘What is human nature?’ but ‘What can humanity become?’ To be sure, the former question has always really been the latter—today, however, we can be clear about this.
We are entering a new, accelerating phase of our hominescence—our capacity to assert purpose and thus to make ourselves and our environment more amenable to our needs and desires.
To be sure, this is a moral and ethical moment as I’ve argued extensively in this project and in my Substack Time Out of Joint. But I see less a loss of meaning than a revaluation of values in the face of our new capacities to assert purpose at increasing speed and scale. Values formed under earlier conditions strain when agency expands, when consequences propagate farther and faster than we can predict.
When responsibility can no longer be localized and contained by ‘good intentions’, meaning indeed becomes a crisis, but it is symptomatic not fundamental.
In previous essays, I’ve argued that our computational power turned a corner during the Enlightenment. We went from predicting eclipses, the return of comets, and planetary orbits to seeking control over natural processes here on Earth. From breeding faster and more efficient horses to improving steel for faster moving carriages, the Enlightenment swapped out local tradition for expansive expertise.
On the speed and spread of our computational power, see my Enlightenment Essays on Substack.
The building of roads, train tracks, and colonial ports expanded to become the laying of cable across the globe—all in an effort to bring more and more of nature’s processes under human control. This required a lot of new, professionalized knowledge.
If our current age is different, it is so in degree not in kind. We may be passing through a threshold to something different, but this difference is brought about by acceleration and speed, not wholly new powers that we are imposing on ourselves.
The passage feels like more of a somersault than a leap over a barrier.
If there is a loss of meaning, it is because our technology moves faster than our ability to make sense of it. So, yes, we are in a meaning crisis, but I would rather frame it as a crisis of purpose and fate related to acceleration.
Read more from the Wednesdays series.
Read more about our Computational World.
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