Thiel And Strange Gods

The great and lovely James K. A. Smith has what I must call a frankly bizarre review of Peter Thiel’s book Zero to One. A philosophically well-grounded Christian, and an innovative thinker, Thiel provides much grist to the mill of Christian thinkers.

Smith’s accusation against Thiel is that he is a proponent of an ideology or heresy called “startupism.” According to Smith, this has four planks, and Thiel exhibits them. Frankly, I don’t see how else to get that other than from an uncharitable reading.

Let’s go:

A cult of creative innovation, startupism has four notable features, beginning with the outsized role it accords to human creativity. As early as page two of the book, Thiel tells us “humans are distinguished from other species by our abilities to work miracles. We call these miracles technology.” His emphasis on the creative power of human making is laudable and timely, though not particularly new. (Thiel should add Giambattista Vico to his reading list.) What’s unique to startupism is the “miraculous,” god-like powers Thiel attributes to us mortals: “Humans don’t decide what to build by making choices from some cosmic catalogue of options given in advance; instead, by creating new technologies, we rewrite the plan of the world.” We command fate. “A startup is the largest endeavor over which you can have definite mastery. You can have agency not just over your own life, but over a small and important part of the world. It begins by rejecting the unjust tyranny of Chance. You are not a lottery ticket.”

The god-like character of the human vocation is, of course, a profoundly scriptural and traditional theme. We are called, as St Peter says, to be partakers of the divine nature. We are all baptized as priest, prophet and king. Adam was called by God to be Viceroy of the Universe. In the best of Christian Tradition, as well as for Thiel, this lofty vocation is particularly well expressed in man’s creative powers, which are one of the most salient features of the imago Dei implanted within us. Humans are called to be full co-participants, fellow workers, in the cosmic and transcendental New Creation inaugurated in the flesh of the risen Christ. Or, as Thiel puts it, “Humans don’t decide what to build by making choices from some cosmic catalogue of options given in advance; instead, by creating new technologies, we rewrite the plan of the world.”

Is Thiel saying that humans “command fate”? I don’t know. But Christianity certainly says that men are liberated from it. Fate, fatum, is the suffocating pagan idea, best expressed in the dark world of the Greek tragedy, that the meaning of the Universe must be found in the meaninglessness of human lives. To deviate too much from the established social order, blessed by the gods, is to have hubris, or to rebel against fate, and the one who shows hubris is always, but always, put to death by the gods. Fatum says that men like Yeshua of Nazareth must be put to death. But on the cold light of Easter morning, the decree of fate was utterly reversed by the power of God’s love, setting men free from the bondage of sin and death–and fatum, which always leads towards death. In Christ, men are liberated. Free, in the first instance, to be free, a freedom towards which God’s freedom can never be rivalrous, since authentic freedom is man’s orientation towards the greatest Good, True and Beautiful, which finds its culmination in the Alpha and Omega, and since God, having all transcendence and perfection within himself, is oriented towards men not by need but by generosity. This authentic, ontological Christian freedom must expresses itself in the full realization of man’s faculties as an image-bearer of God; priest, prophet and king; for many, if not all, in the creative faculties, in one way or another. As a Calvinist, maybe Smith is uncomfortable with this language of Christ liberating us from the bondage of fate and guiding us towards a divine calling, but Christian Tradition is quite comfortable with it, and so I see no objection to Thiel’s use of it.

Indeed, you are not a lottery ticket.

(By the way, only a total curmudgeon would begrudge the adjective “miraculous,” in its colloquial sense, to many of the wonders of modern technology.)

Second, the creativity celebrated by startupism blurs the old distinction between Creator and creature. What Thiel calls “vertical” or “intensive” progress isn’t 1+1 development; truly creative, intensive progress is a qualitative advance from 0 to 1. I believe the Latin for that is creation ex nihilo. (And “[t]he single word for vertical, 0 to 1 progress” is…you guessed it…“technology.”)

Oh, so “zero to one” means “creation ex nihilo”? That’s the only way to interpret that phrase? Come on.

Third, as you might expect, startupism has its own ecclesia: the new organization founded by a noble remnant who have distanced themselves from the behemoths of existing institutions. “New technology,” Thiel observes, “tends to come from new ventures” that we call startups. These are launched by tiny tribes that Thiel compares to the Founding Fathers and the British Royal Society. “[S]mall groups of people bound together by a sense of mission have changed the world for the better,” he explains, because “it’s hard to develop new things in big organizations, and it’s even harder to do it by yourself.” We shouldn’t be surprised, then, that “the best startups might be considered slightly less extreme kinds of cults.” The successful startup will have to be a total, all-encompassing institution: our family, our home, our cultus.

It’s hard to see how this is charitable. In this passage, Smith gives us a medley of Thiel quotes followed by his own interpretation, and the difference between the two seems to come wholly from Smith. So, for example, does Thiel say that many startups have “cult-like” elements (which is certainly true in some sense of all highly-focused, idiosyncratic enterprises)? Why, surely, he must mean that the startup is like the cultus of the pagan idolaters! What supports this interpretation? As best as I can tell, Smith’s decision to read Thiel that way.

Finally, in startupism, the founder is savior. Granted, Thiel—following Girard—is going to talk about this in terms of scapegoating in a long, meandering chapter that aims to associate successful Silicon Valley geeks with pop stars and other people we like to look at. But it’s not just that founders are heroes in their companies. The scope of their impact is much wider: “Creative monopolists give customers more choices by adding entirely new categories of abundance to the world. Creative monopolies aren’t just good for the rest of society; they’re powerful engines for making it better.” But to get there, Thiel says, “we need founders.” No founders; no progress. Steve Jobs, hear our prayer.

See, again. “If we want more startups, we need more founders” seems to be among the most innocent, indeed tautological, statements imaginable. But to Smith, it means an idolatrous divinization of the founder: “Steve Jobs, hear our prayer.”

Since, as Smith correctly notes, Thiel’s read of the founder’s vocation is girardian, one has to wonder why he doesn’t pick up on the flip side of this “heroic” vocation of the founder: in Girard, the king is elevated and venerated…and then scapegoated and killed.

Again, I proclaim myself mystified to where Smith lands, given where he gets his premises. He starts out his post by (justly) distancing himself from the all-too-common academic’s disdain towards the world of business and entrepreneurship; to laud many entrepreneurs he’s met as creative, practical philosophers; to intone that a world with more entrepreneurs would be a more flourishing world. But when Thiel says pretty much the same thing, he thinks “the founder is savior.”

Of course, I find myself in such confusion because I find myself agreeing with quite a lot of what Thiel says. I agree with Thiel (and, I think, Smith) that technological innovation and entrepreneurship has been a great occasion for human flourishing and can continue to be so. I agree with Thiel that we live in a quite conformist society where too many people lead very tracked lives without deep reflection and discernment on their vocation. And I must say that I am often unsettled by what too often seems like a reflexive apprehension towards technological visions on the part of orthodox Christians; while there is certainly a great merit to many specific prudential concerns, there is sometimes a dissonance with the fundamental optimism of Christian Revelation and its emphasis on man’s lofty vocation to participation in the work of New Creation (and its great liberation of us to ambitious risk-taking); a small-c conservative disposition might be a virtue, but it is certainly not a doctrine.

Previously: Peter Thiel And The Cathedral