The Slave and the Smartphone

Inculcating the 'justice of equivalence'

People…continually expose their souls to mortal danger in imagining that they are free of it, when, indeed, the only mortal danger for the spirit is to remain too long without it.

-from A Soldier of the Great War, by Mark Helprin

We are all familiar - are we not? - with the idea that as technology advances it becomes more and more effective as a means of social control. We do not, however, tend to think in a very sophisticated fashion about how technological advancement functions, as it were, on the demand side - how it constructs political needs within the citizenry.

This, I would like to argue in this post, is one of the most significant influences of screen-based technology in particular (in the form, chiefly, of the smartphone). In short, this type of technology has the effect of inculcating in its habitual users the desire for what Alexandre Kojève called ‘equivalence’, and it in turn politicises them in a particular way. This is already having serious consequences for the way in which young people engage with politics - and it is far more important than the usual boo words (such as ‘echo chambers’, ‘extremism’, ‘disinformation’, and so on) that are trotted out when people start tut-tutting about social media.

Along the way I will put Kojève into productive dialogue with Michael Oakeshott so as to elucidate the central argument, and I will close, with some trepidation, in reflecting on that most dangerous and controversial of topics: the human soul.

If you’re sitting comfortably, then, I’ll begin.

Expand your world

I’d like to start this discussion by making reference to an advert I recently saw, on a big screen at my local mega mall, for the latest Virtual Reality (VR) headset, Meta Quest 3. Advertising these days - you will have noticed - is more like an exercise in cosmic horror than an attempt to market products. Back in the early 2000s, Banksy observed that advertisers simply want to ‘take the piss out of you, every day’. Nowadays their ambition is grander - it is to take the piss out of the human experience as such: to depict a world in which people lead lives of awful frivolity, superficiality, and quiet desperation, but seemingly enjoy and indeed embrace their lack of meaning with insouciant joy. The results frequently resemble an attempt by evil and inscrutable space aliens to undermine humanity from within - we are made through advertising not only to reconcile ourselves to bland consumerism, but to do so with grinning, almost senile inanity.

In the advert in question, a young woman walks into a crowded waiting area for what looks like a local authority or passport office, and takes a number from a machine. Realising that she will have an extremely long wait, she breaks into a smile, finds a seat, and puts on her Meta Quest 3 goggles so she can watch an episode of a Netflix series - while onlookers gaze at her in bafflement, and quirky-but-joyful music plays in the background.

The idea, of course, is that thanks to VR, the human race need never experience boredom or inconvenience again - and, indeed, the implication goes, we will soon be able to encounter life as a basically non-stop series of entertainments punctuated by occasional and brief interactions with the real world around us. The moment we are forced to confront any situation that is remotely dissatisfactory we will be able to simply retreat into a virtual world and passively consume pleasing images until the problem goes away. And the advert presents this future to us as though it is a good thing.

The tagline for Meta Quest 3, ‘Expand Your World’, has a profoundly bleak irony that you cannot fail to have picked up on. The much more apt slogan would be: ‘Narrow Your World’ - do nothing, achieve nothing, leave no trace of yourself behind after death, but salve the existential crisis of meaning that would otherwise result with the balm of being entertained at every conceivable opportunity. The underlying message is that, all things considered, fantasy really ought to trump reality. In the world of fantasy, anything is possible; in the almost pathologically humdrum land of the real, there is only the burdensome, the bothersome, and the bland. Do not therefore waste your time engaging with what is real unless you absolutely have to (that is, when your number comes up and you actually have to go through the chore of dealing with a fellow human being); the rest of the time, what is really important is what is going on on the screen that you have more or less attached to your eyeballs.

Brutal and wrenching confrontations

It is no accident, of course, that the woman in the waiting room gets out her Meta Quest 3 to stave off boredom in particular. Boredom, as you know, is an intensely dislikable emotion, but we do not often give much thought as to why. What is it that is so bad about being bored?

Well, to be bored is really to be forced to confront the most galling and upsetting feature of human existence: that our lives are finite, and that our limited time is too precious to be wasted. Boredom is the brother of rage - the sheer frustration and anger that arises in the soul as the result of having to fritter away precious seconds, minutes, hours in the performance of some task or duty that one knows to be of no value. We would do anything not to be bored, and not to have to feel that particular category of rage descend upon us; being released from boredom means in the end to be released from the need to confront the inevitability of our own deaths.

The Meta Quest 3 advert, then, gets us to the very heart of this matter. If being bored means to confront the inevitability of one’s own death, then the only valid response to boredom must be to shake things up and do something useful and productive with the time that one has left upon this Earth instead. Since one will some day die, and since that day might be very soon, then one ought really to make the most of what little remains. Obviously one cannot simply elect to no longer go to work (if one has a boring job) or deal with menial tasks that simply have to be done (mowing the lawn, putting the bins out, changing the baby’s nappy). But if one’s time is free, the feeling of boredom should only really be encountered as a call to arms.

Calls to arms, though, can be brutal and wrenching, and what Meta Quest 3 - and, of course, the smartphone and the video game console and the streaming service and TV before it - offers is a Get Out of Brutal and Wrenching Confrontations Free card. Instead of recognising what boredom forces us to recognise - the fact that we are mortal, and that our time and what we do with it really matters in the only sense in which anything can really be said to matter - we are through our technology released into an interior dreamscape in which the pain of recognition need never take place. We can blissfully, even gleefully, abandon ourselves to the empty infinity of spectating, taking an astral projection into a universe in which time itself has paused, and indeed in which nothing really matters as such at all. Here, there will always be something coming along to spectate upon afresh, and anything that does come along will itself be of substantively no difference phenomenologically to what came before it - one will in the end merely be sitting on one’s sofa eating Doritos with supermarket guacamole regardless of whether one is watching the evening news or Squid Game or Reality Bites or whatever else might happen to be occupying the screen (or one’s headset) at that given point in time.

If I can summarise all of this, then, it seems that digital technology in particular (but we could extend this to the watching of screens in general) encourages within us a flight from negative emotion, and particular boredom. And in doing so it implicitly has the effect of reconciling us to the finitude of our existence. It says to us: never mind that you will one day die and will have to confront the question as to what you did with the time allotted to you on planet Earth. Do not think about such matters. There is another world, and it is one in which time is infinite, and in which you need never die. It is my world - and I encourage you to enter it. When you are there, the fact that you exist, and that you are alive, and that your life has import, will not be permitted to bother you or detract from your pleasure; you will simply be permitted to luxuriate in detached observation for as long as you desire. And since detached observation is essentially the same act whatever is being observed, it literally will not matter what you happen to be observing. The point is not the substance of the object of observation, but the fact that you will be fully engaged in the act of observing at almost all times. And you will thereby forget that you are mortal, and the rage at boredom will diminish.

Master and slave

This has an effect on the psyche that is so patently evident to everybody that it would be embarrassing to spell out. Instead, I would like to consider instead its political import. And here it is necessary to dwell for a moment on a subject that is fraught with risk of misunderstanding, misrepresentation, misinformation and probably also lots of other ‘mis-’ words: Hegel’s so-called ‘master-slave dialectic’ as it was interpreted by the important Stalinist thinker, Alexandre Kojève.

Setting aside Hegel entirely, the ‘master-slave dialectic’ as Kojève presents it is a political-anthropological rumination on both historical development and the character of the individual in modernity. The modern individual, liberated from the rigid social structures of the pre-modern world, is confronted with his very individualism. He is both liberated and cut adrift. And he is therefore thrust into a circumstance in which he must strive for recognition whether he likes it or not. His character will henceforth not in other words be defined by hereditary social status, but by who he (to use modern Disney princess parlance) ‘really is’.

For Kojève this produces ‘masters’ and ‘slaves’, a translation that is not warranted by the text of Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit, but which has the advantage of direct impact. In brief, modernity, in forcing everybody into a struggle for recognition, produces two categories of response. There are the ‘masters’ - those who are willing to risk death to win the struggle for recognition. And there are the ‘slaves’ - those who are not willing to risk death for recognition, and who therefore become subservient by offering to the masters the recognition they crave.

This is an unstable situation which ultimately will result in a synthesis into what Kojève called the ‘universal and homogenous state’ of perfect equity, and thus the end of history. But since we have not yet reached that stage (we of course await it with bated breath), it is important to understand the political import of this anthropology.

Kojève tells us that the master and the slave are chiefly defined by two ideals of justice, which he labels the ‘Justice of equality’ and the ‘Justice of equivalence’, or ‘aristocratic’ and ‘bourgeois’ justice respectively. The former of these - the Justice of equality, or the aristocrat, or the master - is defined by equality of status. What the master considers just is to be formally equal with other masters. He has risked all for recognition, and his prize is that nobody should have a superior status. And since all masters are in the same position, the only way they can perceive justice is through formal equality of status, one with another.

The latter form of justice - the Justice of equivalence, or the bourgeois, or the slave - is defined by equality of substance (or, perhaps, ‘opportunity’). The slave has surrendered recognition because he has not been willing to risk all in the struggle. And what he craves is therefore recognition of his individual dignity. This can only be realised through a system of justice which provides that individual recognition through the creation of a redistributive model of ‘equivalence’. And this produces not formal equality of status but substantively equal conditions - an, as it were, ‘level playing field’ between all individuals absolutely.

Though it is not usually read in this way, the depiction that Kojève offers can in one sense therefore be understood as that of a division of character. There are those who approach the conditions of modernity as a struggle for recognition that is to be won through one’s own efforts - and who therefore demand only to be made free to pursue those efforts. They desire recognition by their own lights and will willingly risk failure as the price paid for the chance to try. And there are those who approach the conditions of modernity without wishing to struggle and who therefore desire recognition of their inherent dignity to be granted and guaranteed by the State - to be freed, as it were, from risk and insulated from failure.

The directly political implications of this are clear, and seem to have something to offer us as a means of reflecting on our schizophrenic understanding of equality. Are we supposed to be formally equal, for instance, in the sense of not being discriminated against, having equal rights to free expression, freedom of contract, and so on? (This is often referred to as equality ‘before the law’.) Or are we supposed to be substantively equal, for instance, in the sense of being equitably treated (with members of some groups being entitled to positive discrimination accordingly), and with our needs for dignity met by the redistributive power of the State?

We do not appear to be able to agree about this. And it is suggestive of a genuine tension or indeed schism with respect to our understanding of the meaning of both equality and freedom, and one that by no means maps perfectly to the division between, say, men and women, or white and non-white, or rich and poor, and so forth - rather cutting across those distinctions. On the one hand, there are those who value the equality of form, and associate it with liberty, pride, and self-reliance. And there are those who value equality of content or substance, and associate it with the meeting of needs and the avoidance of harm.

But the abstract way in which this picture is sketched out by Kojève leads us to other, more subtle interpretations. And here it is worth putting Kojève in contact with his almost exact contemporary, Michael Oakeshott.

Loving and fearing freedom

In the third part of On Human Conduct (1975), Oakeshott describes the modern European state as existing in a tension between two human archetypes which were essential to political modernity as such. Like Kojève, although much more directly, Oakeshott describes modernity as bringing with it freedom from fixed and inherited social roles, and he tells us that this has benefits and drawbacks, which different people respond to differently. On the one hand there are the ‘individuals’ proper, who thoroughly embrace the possibilities of self-directed adventure and accept the risks and consequences of personal failure, and ‘individual manqués’, who prefer the warm coziness of security, and who fear the risks that freedom brings.

This tension, for Oakeshott, found its reflection in the curiously bifurcated character of the modern State, which was simultaneously interested in liberty and control, autonomy and dependence, free markets and welfarism, laissez-faire and central planning, the rule of law and managerial technocracy, and so on. The divided character of the modern soul - both loving and fearing the freedom that had been thrust upon it - replicated itself in the currents of mass democracy, and ultimately in the unhappy and awkward marriage of individual autonomy and co-dependent pastoralism that produced the State itself. (Michel Foucault, seeing the same phenomenon at work, called the two sides of the modern State’s coin the ‘Greek’ and ‘Hebraic’ modes of governance respectively - itself a curious mirror of Leo Strauss’s preoccupation with the tension between ‘Athens and Jerusalem’.)

Often misinterpreted as an elitist diatribe, the passage in which Oakeshott describes the ‘individual’ and ‘individual manqué’ is really better to be understood as a rumination on a division which runs through the heart of every human being in modernity. We all to some degree both love and fear the fact that we are unleashed into the world to choose our own adventures, and that our choices and actions have consequences; we all look at freedom as simultaneously a blessing and a burden. It is just that the propensity for one or the other is more pronounced in some people than others, and more strongly cultivated in certain circumstances. Crucially, the tendency towards true individuality and the failed or reluctant individuality of the individual manqué was something that was made in a person, not born into him or her.

And the distinction was not - Oakeshott was clear about this - something that was rooted in class or poverty; it was rooted rather in the way in which people were educated and in the ideas which have been inculcated in them. True individuals were produced by an aristocratic education that valued the taking of physical and intellectual risks, and which placed the locus of moral decision-making in the individual heart. Individual manqués, on the other hand, were produced by a prevailing social ‘anti-individual’ morality that treated moral decision-making as resident in the domain of expertise, and treated individual people as risk-averse, sheep-like ‘conscripts’ without the capacity for genuine autonomy. Individual manqué-isme, as it were, was more along the lines of a learned helplessness that was imbued in society by experience rather than simply springing unadulterated from differences of personality.

The result of this was a vision of the modern State as being founded on and deriving its character from the bifurcation between individual and individual manqué, and hence from a division which lay at the heart of the human personality in political modernity. And this is suggestive of course in turn of an understanding of the State as emerging organically from society in an evolutionary dynamic - responding to, and shaping, the human substrate on which it rested.

Technology and the justice of the slave

The political anthropology of Oakeshott’s individual-individual manqué clearly mirrors Kojève’s master-slave dialectic in important ways, but frames the matter more helpfully around the question of what produces in a person the love, or fear, of freedom, risk and struggle, and what therefore produces the drive towards understanding justice as inhering in formal equality of status, versus substantive equivalence. In short, the distinction no doubt derives in part from personality, but it is chiefly shaped by social conditioning. And this should lead us to the question of how indeed social conditions form attitudes to moral decision-making, risk, struggle, and freedom.

Undoubtedly the political economy has an important impact here, and it is certainly the case - this is hardly a novel observation - that modern welfarism gets its strength from a positive feedback mechanism wherein dependence on welfare itself cultivates greater and greater dependence in turn. But technological advances across the course of the 20th and 21st centuries have brought to the fore technology itself as a driver in the cultivation of a desire for slave-like (or individual manqué-like) ‘equivalence’.

Consider once more the role that screens in general and smartphones in particular play in nurturing within us the desire to take flight from boredom, and therefore releasing us from the need to confront the inevitability of our own deaths. Consider how they lull us into a state of largely passive observation in which what is being observed is phenomenologically irrelevant. And consider how they thereby allow us to postpone indefinitely the brutal and wrenching confrontation with reality which we need in order to usefully embrace our time on Earth.

This, in short, is a powerful force for luring us away from both risk, and death - and therefore of the conditions that favour the growth of true individuality. Locked into a pattern of passive observation or spectating, we are never placed in a position in which we are driven to embrace risk in the interests of gaining glory, status, or other rewards (such as love, family, charity and so forth). And, freed from boredom, we are freed likewise from the need to consider our own mortality and the question of how best to spend the time we have allotted to us. We are therefore drawn away from the struggle for recognition and towards something more akin to a slave-like relinquishment: we do not so much as consciously abandon the desire for mastery as we are lulled away from it - drawn into a world of timeless dreaming where nothing much matters and little is worth vesting with commitment.

This has obvious consequences psychologically, as we have noted, but the political consequences which follow are rarely remarked upon. When we think about the political effects of technology, we tend to start muttering about social media and how it fosters things like ‘echo chambers’ and ‘extremism’. But, based on what I have written here, the more important and insidious effect of technological advancement may be that it positions most users (perhaps not the ‘influencers’ and wannabe influencers) as slaves or individual manqués, and thereby conditions them to embrace a justice of equivalence rather than equality - a justice which provides them with recognition of their dignity not through their own actions, their own conduct, their own risk-taking, their own struggles, all of which the eschew, but rather through substantive redistribution.

This explains a great deal about why it is that young people in particular are so keen to embrace cod-communism of the most squalid kind, identity-based hand-outs, and the basic conceptual framework underlying ‘DEI’. Having been raised on screens more than any group of human being in history, they have been, likewise, more insulated from the concept of the inevitability of death than it has hitherto been possible to be. Perpetually relieved from boredom, they are collectively characterised by an abandonment of risk and struggle - a feat made infinitely easier by the ubiquity of passive entertainment in the current age. And their concept of justice is therefore, by and large, that of equivalence, not equality. They do not see justice ‘aristocratically’ as a matter of just desert for opportunities seized, discipline exerted and battles won, nor as the preserving of conditions in which individual merit generates success. Rather, they see it as the creation of conditions of equivalence of substance, in which resources are redistributed and reallocated so as to ensure that everybody gets roughly the same portions of pie.

This explains much about our current political moment. And it explains much about the way in which politics and what I will, advisedly, call the ‘soul’, interact. Current discussion of politics is obsessed with ideology and the matter of ideas. This means that other factors - history, demography, geography, culture, theology, spirituality - are frequently overlooked as formative in the structuring of the sphere of the political. What we believe politically may derive superficially from ideas, but this tells us little about why it is that some ideas prove more popular or persuasive than others at particular times, whether at the level of the individual or society. No doubt economic incentives matter. But far more important, I would suggest, are the conditions which shape our thinking in the physical world in which we find ourselves. And since those conditions increasingly derive from the technology which we addict ourselves to, it should be no surprise that our politics is driven ever more directly by the influence of technology on the way in which we encounter the world and negotiate our place in it.

This is, in turn, has rather bleak implications. The future, it seems clear, will at least in the short-medium term be characterised by a deepening interest in the justice of equivalence of the slave, as immersion in screens and passive observation accelerates, and as young people raised on screens enter adulthood in greater and greater number. We will come to experience the political consequences of the turn away from struggle and risk and commitment, and towards escape, security, and what tends to be called ‘equity’, quite viscerally. And the likely upshot will be that we will be forced into the realisation that attending to matters of the soul - rather than the battle of ideas - provides a more helpful path out of our predicament than ideological confrontation.

In other words, we will re-embrace the virtues of boredom and death by hook or by crook. But it will be a process defined more by kicking and screaming than reasoned decision-making. It will be thrust on us as conditions deteriorate and the political, economic and psychological implications of the embracing of the justice of equivalence play out.

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