A Week with the New Intellectuals

Here are three big takeaways I got from my week at the New Intellectuals Conference.

Does the future look bright?

Last week, I attended and spoke at the New Intellectuals Conference (NICON) in Budapest, Hungary. The conference, themed around the idea that “the future looks bright,” brought together advocates of reason and freedom for five days of presentations and discussions about what the future holds and how to improve it. 

Even when I’m attending these kinds of events as a speaker rather than a student, they are still a learning experience for me. Here are three big takeaways from the conference that helped me clarify my thinking about these issues.

It Is the Best of Times, It Is the Worst of Times

When it comes to human progress, I’m a pretty unrepentant optimist. Growing up as a Star Trek fan, I’ve always believed that we are capable of building a flourishing future in which we spread out among the stars and live long, healthy lives enhanced by technology in myriad ways.

But I’ve also long thought that I was in a tiny minority in this respect. Most people, it long seemed to me, believe that human society has peaked, that we’re living in something called “late capitalism,” and that the future is filled with such scary threats as a third world war, globe-dominating AI, and widespread tyranny. Only a few people seemed to share my confidence in human potential.

The conference made me realize something unexpected: Many intelligent people can’t decide whether the future looks bright or not. I went in expecting a minority to share my optimism and a majority to have a more pessimistic outlook, but instead I found that most people had elements of both. It’s not that people think the future looks mixed (which it probably will be)—it’s that they’re torn between the extremes of thinking it looks fantastic and terrible. Many were excited about the ways that technological advances such as compact nuclear reactors and space travel might enhance our lives and scared about such things as the rise of authoritarianism and the return of war in Europe. People expect radical change for the better and the worse.

One other thing that surprised me on this score is that people’s predictions of the future were broadly consistent across different nationalities and backgrounds. Although some people pointed out that the future probably looks brighter in a developed country than one facing war and/or poverty, I heard a similar mix of optimistic and pessimistic predictions from Brits, Swedes, Serbians, Ukrainians, Americans, and more.

I did my bit to promote more optimism about the future by delivering a talk about how science-fiction books and TV shows can promote positive, life-serving values—including curiosity, reason, and technology—and thereby inspire the belief in and creation of a better world. Although I chose this topic to contribute to a theme of futurism, I ended up unexpectedly integrating with another talk at the conference, which leads me to my second takeaway from the event:

We Need to Think Seriously About the Ideas Expressed in All Forms of Art 

I’m used to discussing the ideas in books, TV shows, and films. I often review them as a writer at The Objective Standard. I included a chapter in the Reason for Living book on the importance of thinking carefully about the ideas we absorb from the media we consume. And my wife writes about the ideas in fiction books on her Substack. It frustrates me that many people do not think deeply about the ideas presented in these art forms, instead focusing on concrete details such as visual effects and performances while the story’s meaning (and any unclarity it may contain) seeps into their minds almost undetected. 

But I realized at the conference that this issue is even more important than I’d thought, and applies to more forms of art than I’d appreciated. My colleague Jon Hersey spoke on the current state of popular music and why many people’s ideas about why it’s going off the rails are focused on the wrong problems. Without giving too much away, his talk made me realize that the biggest problem with modern music isn’t a loss of musical ability, a loss of complexity, or a shift in the most popular genres, but a change in the ideas expressed through the music that dominates the charts today.

That doesn’t only mean the lyrical content of music, which has been problematic at least as far back as the Sex Pistols. It also means the sense of life that music conveys. Sense of life is, in Ayn Rand’s words, “an emotional, subconsciously integrated appraisal of man and of existence.” It is the general view of the world that someone holds, and that a work of art conveys. A song’s lyrics are part of how it expresses its sense of life, as are its construction, tone, and any visuals that may accompany it. Much popular music today not only explicitly celebrates a cavalier attitude to violence, relationships, and life in general, but also conveys a lazy and nihilistic worldview through unimaginative writing and a lack of musical and ideological creativity.

The problems that Jon highlighted with the modern music scene integrated in my mind with a comment one attendee made about my talk—that many of the science fiction TV shows I discussed were from the 1990s and only one was from recent years. This drove home for me the fact that we are seeing a cultural move away from optimism, creativity, and a positive sense of life in modern media across the board, from TV to music and beyond. This trend is a symptom of a deeper problem—one I’ve identified before but which came out clearly in several conversations I had during the conference:

In the Battle to Save Our Culture, Education Is the Front Line

If you ask people what they’re most concerned about today, they might list such concerns as a rise of authoritarianism or “populism,” the rising cost of living, a lack of opportunities for young people, the threat of war and terrorism, and a rising sense (whether justified or not) of being unsafe in one’s home city or country. These problems may seem more serious than the problems in art I just discussed, but they’re symptoms of the same issue.

The questioner who asked me why I focused on older sci-fi shows also asked why so much modern TV fails to express life-serving values and exhibits poor writing and character development. I answered that the reason is the same as why modern food is often so unhealthy. Many people blame both of these problems on capitalism, but capitalism is simply a very effective engine for giving people what they want. If people want junk then that is what they’ll get, and get it they do.

Why do people want this stuff? For the same reason that they elect corrupt politicians, advocate destructive social policies, and fail to identify the ideas that lead to dictatorships and empower the enemies of human progress: People are not taught to think independently—to use their own rational minds to form values and critically assess important questions. We have built a culture that, from the classroom to popular media to the workplace, teaches the passive acceptance of widely held ideas and the most superficial treatment of moral and philosophical questions. School (in most cases) teaches the memorization and regurgitation of facts (or trending theories presented as facts). Entertainment and news media reinforce those perspectives. Social media encases us in a bubble of self-confirming messages and ideas. We are never encouraged to doubt our ideas, question our sources, go against what our peers believe. We are never taught to think for ourselves about our values and choices.

To truly create a brighter future, we need a dramatic cultural change in favor of independent thought. There are two main things that need to change in order to achieve that: education and popular media. But the second is downstream from the first. Until the ideas that people are taught change, the media will merely provide people what they want. That is why the most valuable thing that we can do to achieve real social change in any field is to teach rational ideas. I’ve made that my mission. I hope you will too.