Marc Andreessen for the Tough-Guy Techno-Right

I got interested in Marc Andreessen, big time tech guy and then tech investor, because I was sent a link to a piece he wrote back in July about  the mooted plan for an Elon Musk/Mark Zuckerberg mixed martial arts cage match. He says that his first reaction on hearing about it was, “I think that’s all great.” 

In explaining why he starts with how great MMA is in general, because it recreates the ancient Greek fighting contests of Pankration. This, people say, was both an athletic competition and part of the training for Spartan and Theban warriors. Ok, fine, I used to do karate, I have nothing against training in martial arts. But it would take a long time to unpack the historical blinders behind this sentence:

If it was good enough for Heracles and Theseus, it’s good enough for us.

Andreessen is particularly big on teaching MMA to children "as young as eight", because

The message to kids is not, this is how you beat people up. The message is, this is how you protect yourself – and as important, this is how you protect your family, your friends, your community. You use these combat skills in the service of others – you never start a fight, but when someone is threatening someone you love, or even an innocent bystander, this is how you end a fight.

And already you are getting a feel for why this article is wrong-headed. Because, on the whole, people trained in violence are not less violent than others; that is a fantasy promoted by various tough guys and would-be tough guys that is not born out by reality. To take only the first example that comes to mind, the Japanese military of the 1930s was obsessed with martial arts training as a path toward self-control, clear-headedness, and protection of loved ones, but that didn't stop the Rape of Nanking. Or for a second and more immediate example, Andrew Tate.

Swords have, as they say, two edges.

Andreessen goes on to argue that martial arts training will help protect us against two of our scourges, rising street crime and obesity, and that the ultimate result will be

self-respect – not the self-respect of armchair therapy and wishful thinking, but real self-respect, the earned realization that one is strong and useful and of merit, and of value. Skilled fighters carry themselves differently, and this is why. In our present time, where many young people are suffering from anxiety, depression, and what can only be described as anomie – again, from the Greek, ἀνομία, “lawlessness”, a collapse in the code of expected adult behavior – what could be better than a return to earned self-respect?

So the cure for the mental health woes of our children is more football and karate. Which is not an entirely absurd position, but perhaps a limited one.

Anyway I got curious about Andreessen's thinking, so I did a bit of googling. This took me to an essay about Andreessen by Ezra Klein (NY Times), which might be why I was sent that first link, and from there to a fascinating document called the Techno-Optimist Manifesto. Hey, great, I love manifestos. More people should write manifestos so we can tell what they think instead of having to work it out from random stuff they say. This one is a long series of bullet points and short paragraphs making the argument that (to adopt its style):

• Technology got us from hunting and gathering to space travel;
• So technology is great, and we should throw ourselves into pursuing it to the limit;
• The people who make all the new technology are awesome and deserve to be really rich;
• And the biggest threat to us is the wimpy cowards who fear the future and want to put limits on both technology and the people who make it.

He writes,

We believe technology is liberatory. Liberatory of human potential. Liberatory of the human soul, the human spirit. Expanding what it can mean to be free, to be fulfilled, to be alive.

And the way to get there is toughness: 

We believe in ambition, aggression, persistence, relentlessness — strength. We believe in merit and achievement. We believe in bravery, in courage.

But there are enemies! Not bad people, he write, but bad ideas:

Our enemy is the Precautionary Principle, which would have prevented virtually all progress since man first harnessed fire. The Precautionary Principle was invented to prevent the large-scale deployment of civilian nuclear power, perhaps the most catastrophic mistake in Western society in my lifetime. The Precautionary Principle continues to inflict enormous unnecessary suffering on our world today. It is deeply immoral, and we must jettison it with extreme prejudice.

Our enemy is deceleration, de-growth, depopulation – the nihilistic wish, so trendy among our elites, for fewer people, less energy, and more suffering and death.

Aha! I knew I would find it somewhere, the half-hidden wish to live forever. Sorry, Marc, you were born too early for that one.

This is a remarkable document because it is forceful, clear, and concise, so all credit to Andreessen for producing it. But let me put in a few words for the Precautionary Principle. Does Andreessen object to putting limits on lead in the air, or arsenic in drinking water? To the detente that helped wind down the Cold War? To preserving special places like Yosemite or Yellowstone from development? To testing new drugs before they are marketed to the masses?

The actual answer to those questions is going to be – because Andreeseen is, so far as I can tell, sane – that, yes, we have governments to set some limits but our current regime is too precautionary and we should be bolder and take more risks. And that might be true, in areas like our refusal to license drugs that have been sold in Europe for a generation. But it gets us away from clear principles about courage and progress and back into the messy ordinariness of everyday politics.

People with Andreessen's mindset raised hell about the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act for exactly these reasons, because they set restraint and caring about cute little animals above human progress. But, as I have written here many times, those laws did more than anything else to bring back America's older cities; they benefitted us much more than any other animal. They also helped us live longer, which seems to be one of Andreessen's main goals.

Andreessen is really unhappy that we did not build out nuclear power to the limit, but he has nothing to say about solar and wind power. Are those too wimpy for him? Not enough risk? To much involved with anti-growth pessimist weirdos? I wonder.

I am glad that there are people like Andreessen in the world, pushing technology forward and trying to get rich by making life more interesting. But when I write a manifesto it will be for the Middle Way, because too much bravery and ambition are just as bad for us as too little. In the manifesto Andreessen supplies a famous line from Richard Feynman, 

I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned.

Me, too, which is why I find the Techno-Optimist Manifesto to a starting point for discussion and not a reliable guide for what we ought to do most of the time.