Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

In an already classic episode of Black Mirror, called “Arkangel” and directed by Jodie Foster, a single mother has her daugh- ter grafted with a cerebral implant connected to a screen. The system, known as Arkangel, allows Marie to monitor Sarah’s every action, and also to suppress stimuli that might cause her daughter distress. The system is equipped with a filter that can blur any troubling vision or sound in order to make her perfectly “safe.” In this way Sarah grows up absolutely unaware of all the dangers that lurk along her way — starting with the barking of the neighborhood dog, which Arkangel prevents her from hearing. When Sarah turns ten, a classmate entices her to watch graphic violence and porn. With the system still operating in her mind, she is unable to experience the attendant mental pain, and decides to draw blood from her finger in order to figure out what the fascinating fluid really is. At this point, realizing the harm that her own extreme worry about her daughter’s vulnerability has caused her daughter, Marie disposes of Arkangel. (A psychologist tells her that it is anyway soon to be banned.) But it is too late. The implant cannot be removed from Sarah’s brain. There is no way back. Years later — Sarah is now fifteen — Marie suspects that she has been lied to about a party that her daughter was supposed to attend. Crushed with anxiety, she turns on Arkangel, on the pretext of checking that her daughter is safe — only to witness Sarah’s first sexual experience, peppered with the clichéd vocabulary gathered from the porn movies that she has been free to watch since she was left to her own devices. This horrific tale — a parable, really — addresses helicopter parenting as the symptom of a broader and more formidable malaise. The real subject of “Arkangel” is the ideology of safety. To live a longer but narrower life; to see risk and its inherent poetry as a secularized version of sin; to renounce death and danger, hence renouncing life as well — those are its objectives, its prescriptions for happiness. “Everything in the modern world functions as if death did not exist,” Octavio Paz wrote in The Labyrinth of Solitude, but the problem is that “a civilization that denies death ends by denying life.” As a result of our rejection of death, Paz observed, it has slipped in through the interstices of the walls that we have built against its power. “Death enters everything we undertake… The century of health, hygiene, and contraceptives, miracle drugs and synthetic foods, is also the century of the concentration camp and the police state, Hiroshima and the murder story.” Our dream of perfect immunity does not strengthen us, it leaves us weaker. On the assumption that, by scientific and technological and political means, we can make endurance moot, there is more and more that we find it harder and harder to endure. Safety, remember, is the opposite of resilience. We believe we can lock up life, but death resurfaces in the most brutal manner — in campus shootings or on Capitol Hill. A certain sense of hygiene, a kind of demiurgic pretension to complete control, has made us forget that we are animals, not robots. It is the animal within men that snarls and finally kills. We have chosen plastic over blood; but blood will strike back, and in such a ferocious way that we will wish we had found the balance between perfect safety and utter barbarity for which we were too lazy to search, too enamored of our fantasy of total protection. To Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, we have added a fifth: the freedom from risk. In practice, it is the negation of freedom. Thus we have rid ourselves of privacy, as well as of humor and free-thinking, “wokeness” being in part a political avatar of the same phenomenon. In my view, there is nothing specifically liberal or progressive about it, and, to paraphrase the French title of Michel Houellebecq’s first novel, it is merely a society-wide and culture-wide extension of the domain of safety. While many African-American or gay students may embrace it in order to foreclose freedom of speech on campus, it is certainly white in its provenance — if we are to understand this word as referring to a certain ethos rather than an actual incidence of melanin. That white ethos is, in a word, Puritanism, or more generally the long ferocious tradition of forbidding knowledge and protecting people from sin and contamination, from any idea or experience that is dogmatically defined as an evil or a peril. In this regard, frantic suburban parents are no different than outraged BIPOC undergraduates. African-American or Native American activists show just how well they are now able to speak the language of any Long Island Sunday-lawn-mowing family man. (Cultural appropriation!) As in Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, the vital — swinging and dissonant — force of the minority has surreptitiously given way to the majority’s (or the noisier minority’s) stiffened morality and exemplary nature. Puritan and white is the obsession with hygiene and toxicity (as in “toxic masculinity”), with stainlessness and spotlessness replacing salvation from sin. Puritan and white is the obsession with safety, with unbreachable havens, with “safe spaces” on campuses that are the spiritual successors of the believers’ equally ardent craving for “being safe and secure in Christ.” But being safe is not enough. Even more urgently, we need to feel safe. America, after all, is the world capital of emotionalism. This desire is so widespread and well accepted that “feeling safe” has become a magical expression in everyday America. Your upstairs neighbor awakes you at four every morning? The landlord will not lift a finger to remedy the inconvenience unless you notify him that you feel unsafe, which will prompt him to act swiftly on your behalf. An Amazon package that you were expecting has not yet arrived? Write them that you “don’t feel