It's Time to Build (Unsiloed Edition)

Building a place where Athens, Jerusalem, and Silicon Valley meet

Hubert Robert, ‘Projet d'aménagement de la Grande Galerie du Louvre’ (1796)

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Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen (of A16Z) published an essay in April 2020 titled “It’s Time to Build” while we were in the throes of the pandemic lockdown. I remember reading it while I was holed up in an AirBNB in Norton Shores, MI, binge-watching The Sopranos every night with my wife. (Yes, it was our first time ever—I’m glad I kept that one in my back pocket when I needed it the most.)

That essay begins:

Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings. This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the decade, but it’s not too early to ask why, and what we need to do about it.

It was both a failure of imagination, but also our “widespread inability to build,” Andreessen writes. I don’t disagree.

However, the deeper problem is that many of the people building VC-funded things are doing so within a siloed and highly specialized echo chamber that is existentially fragile and fails to provide meaning to people’s lives.

Silicon Valley is massively limited in its imagination because many of the people there have chosen, as a starting assumption, to build things for a Yuval Hararian Man, for men without chests, for siloed souls like themselves.

But while they build more tech to amuse themselves to death, some of us are wondering: do we need a new paradigm for building? Don’t we need to revisit the assumptions on which, and for which, we’re building in the first place? I think we do.

Nobody is building anything like the great medieval cathedrals anymore, and perhaps nobody ever will. (Will a colony on Mars have one? Doubtful.) And that’s okay. But we’re not even having the conversations that would lead us away from the small-souled building—we’re not forming the relationships nor having the shared experiences that would bind us together for a higher purpose, that would activate the capital network to fund spiritually ambitious things, that would help us to want more, and to want better.

Tens of billions of dollars have been invested in NFT’s in the past few years, which was the first sign that capital was priced incorrectly and that there was a failure of imagination. But the failure of imagination, the small-souled initiatives that were garnering millions of dollars in investment overnight, were not just due to the closing of the American mind, nor its coddling, but the shrinking of the soul.

Innovation without the spirit is dead. You will always be building on top of dry bones.

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Where Athens, Jerusalem, and Silicon Valley Meet

It’s no longer acceptable to talk about the religious sense in polite society—but I believe it should be, and that we desperately need it to be so. Otherwise, we are forced to bracket ourselves and live disintegrated lives. We all want to be able to show up, as we are, and not try to fit our opinions, our hopes and dreams, our spirits into Procustean beds.

Everything we build, from our Substack publications to our technologies, is either awakening the religious sense in us or dulling it. There is no between. And yet most of the Content Class just shrugs their shoulders and seems embarrassed to even have the kind of conversations we need to have to even know where we stand. When the Stanford “Huberman Labs” founder and podcaster Andrew Huberman admitted on a podcast that he believed in God, he looked like he wanted to crawl under the podcast table. He hedged his statement in apologetic tones even before the words left his mouth.

We can do better than that. This kind of stifling environment serves nobody. We should all be able to lay our metaphysical commitments on the table—if we even know what they are—and talk openly about them. Otherwise, we’re building things for a human nature that is an Unknowable X, with people whose own selves are Unknowable X’s, which turns the people who consume these things into Unknowable X’s to themselves, too.

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There are already signs that there is a vibe shift going on. Politics can’t save us; neither can technology. And it’s becoming more and more apparent just how exhausting and how banal life in the metaverse (remember that?) actually is.

We crave encounters; we crave fire. Or rather: we crave those experiences that will set us on fire. But the time has come in which we need to re-create fire.

The three city problem has led to a strange blurring of the lines. Religion has entered into academia; politics has entered into religion; innovation has entered into everything. Athens, Jerusalem, and Silicon Valley are communing in ways not fully understood. But we should strive to understand. The consequences of not understanding the metaphysical assumptions and commitments being formed in this new environment are grave on both a societal and personal level.

And yet we have to build—we have to build things that truly matter, not things which merely amuse us or make for a good VC exit.

The time of building for acquisition and the time of building apps for engagement are over. The time is coming to build things that elevate the human experience, not trivialize it so much that it becomes en vogue to say that you don’t know whether they are living in a simulation or not anytime something unexpected or weird happens.

The materialist view is going to die. It is already in the process of dying. The clicks and the engagement are like a chicken with its head cut off running around for a few minutes before it finally collapses.

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An Integral Human Ecology

Human ecology is “the systematic study of human beings in their relationships with one another, with various human communities, and with the natural world shared among all the living organisms on the planet.”¹ It addresses the fundamental problem of our being disconnected from reality—and our inability to adhere to reality for more than a few seconds at a time, or perhaps for a few days at a time (when our first child is born, perhaps)—before we are flung back into disconnection, and before we must fight the disassociative and disassembling darkness.

We all need help fighting it. We all need help staying connected to reality. I know that I do. But what interests me even more than the study of human ecology is building around it.

Lest we become still further delayed, still further paralyzed, by market research and panels of talking heads, it’s time to build.

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In 910 A.D., the Duke of Aquitaine—one of the most powerful men in Europe—took a monk from a nearby abbey through the countryside of Burgundy, France, and asked him to decide the spot on which he should found a new abbey.

In those days, many noblemen would retire to monasteries and donate their wealth to them in a last ditch attempt to care for, and try to save, their immortal souls. That was this Duke’s plan, too.

To the Duke’s great dismay, the monk selected the very spot of the Duke’s hunting grounds as the place where he should build his new institution. He told him to kick out his dogs and replace them with monks. The Duke had sworn an oath to build on the spot this monk chose, though, and he intended to honor it.

What happened next was a legal agreement unlike anything the world had ever seen: the Duke signed over the land and donated his assets to aid in the construction of this new institution, but he did so by completely renouncing his rights over it, and wrote the charter to ensure its complete independence and primacy of the spiritual.

Unlike every other monastery in Europe, in which feudal lords had dominion over these institutions and could exercise power over them, this new institution would remain completely independent politically, free from feudal lords, and it would sit at the nexus of all of the rivalrous factions and lands and at the nexus of what we might today call “Athens, Jerusalem, and Silicon Valley”.

Of course, there was no Silicon Valley then. But there were also no such thing as universities as we now know them. This new institution, which would come to be called Cluny, would become the center of learning, the center of architectural science and construction (the abbey which would eventually be built would be the most majestic structure in the entire world at the time), the center of liturgical renewal, and the center of innovation, both artistic and technological. (Many agricultural innovations were born there, as well as publishing: the scriptorium in Cluny led to the development of thousands of beautifully illuminated books.) The infirmary took in the sick. The abbey ministered to the poor. More than anything else, though, Cluny revived the spirit and fired the imagination; it led to magnanimity. People were once again given permission to dream, and to seek what is highest.

The spirit of Cluny became the center of renewal in all of Europe for over 200 years. The building itself stood all the way until the French Revolution, when it was torn down and looted. By that point, unfortunately, Cluny had become corrupt. Corruptio optimi pessima—the corruption of the best is the worst. In no case was this truer than Cluny. But the spirit of Cluny, that original impetus of cultural renewal, lives on.

The founding of Cluny was the most important thing to be built in Europe in the three-hundred year period between 900-1200. The Cluniac Reforms influenced over 1,200+ abbeys and priories and deeply affected political life, the formation of education and the university system, civic life, care for the poor and the sick (what we now know as the modern hospital), and much more. It’s hard for us in 2024 to wrap out heads around just how important this single institution was.

I have often wondered: is the building of a new Cluny even possible? And what would it look like?

Today, it probably would not look like a monastery. But it would be an institution that took the religious sense seriously, that remained politically independent (yet not indifferent to the most fundamental human needs and desires, nor policy), and which was a nexus for unexpected encounters of talented and spirited people who want to work together to build things that elevate and ennoble the human spirit. It would not be founded on a materialist ideology. It would be a place for people for people who wanted to start fires.

1. https://ihe.catholic.edu/about/#mission