Born 100 years ago this weekend, on a kitchen table in a Brooklyn tenement, just in time for the Depression and the golden age of American comedy, Melvin Kaminsky, the son of Polish and Ukrainian Jews, inherited a powerful love for life. He was raised by a single mother who worked a 10-hour shift in New York’s garment district. (His father died when he was two.) Short, scrawny, and with a nose that someone once compared to “a small mudslide”, Brooks told Playboy that he could hang around with older boys because “they were afraid of my tongue. I had it sharpened and I’d stick it in their eye. I read a little more than they did, so I could say, ‘Touch me not, leper!’ ‘Hey! Mel called me a leopard!’ ‘Schmuck! Leper!’ Words were my equalizer.”

That’s true of comedians in general. But it was Jewish ones who perfected the fine art of using wit — which Aristotle defined as “cultivated insolence” — as a weapon of defence. Don Rickles, Joan Rivers (born Molinsky), and Jackie Mason (Yacov Moshe Maza), also children of immigrants and contemporaries of Brooks, made their careers out of humor honed to a razor’s edge over centuries in the Diaspora. (A typical Mason joke: “Are there any Poles in the audience? No? There must be. They just don’t understand the question.”) A few years older than Rickles and Mason, Rodney Dangerfield (Jacob Cohen), “Mr I Can’t Get No Respect”, revealed the socially anxious underbelly of their aggressive routines. But Brooks, who at the age of nine told his uncle that he was headed not for the garment district but for show business, is cut from different cloth.

Brooks can be as outrageous as anyone: The Producers’ vaudeville production “Springtime for Hitler” made the film untouchable by major studios. Yet if his humour is distinctly Jewish — in Blazing Saddles, he appears as an Indian chief who speaks Yiddish — it is also as big-hearted and self-assured as the country that gave him his break. Whether it was a natural inclination to gratitude, or serving his country at the Battle of the Bulge, or rising from poverty to the silver screen by way of the Borscht Belt, Brooks came to love America, and to reflect that love in his art.

Consider Blazing Saddles. Nothing captures the American belief in gritty individualism, justice, and a fair deal for the little guy more than the Western, where the white hats give the black hats what’s coming before they ride off into the sunset. Brooks, whose writing team included the legendary comedian Richard Pryor, turns that idea into a piece of biting social commentary — one that condemns present-day racism while offering a hopeful vision of Americans’ capacity to live up to the nation’s ideals. The story’s protagonist is Bart, a black convict played by Cleavon Little. As the opening credits roll, the title song informs us that Bart “conquered fear and he conquered hate, / He turned dark night into day, / He made his blazing saddle / A torch to light the way.”

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Blazing Saddles doesn’t exactly break the fourth wall, because there is none from the get-go. In one early scene, a boss taunts his chain gang of railway track-layers: “When you was slaves, you sang like birds. Come on! How ’bout a good ole n****r work song?” Backed by a chorus of black convicts, Bart sings a fine a capella version of the 1934 Cole Porter tune “I Get a Kick Out of You”, and then watches with amusement as the befuddled cowboy bosses — “Hold, it, hold it! What the hell is that shit?” — dance like imbeciles while singing “Camptown Races,” a minstrel song that parodies slave music, to show what they had in mind. Taggart, who oversees the whole operation, comes riding up fit to be tied: “What in the Wide Wide World of Sports is goin’ on here? I hired you people to get a little track laid, not to jump around like a bunch a’ Kansas City faggots!” It’s a brilliant (if unintended) reversal that foreshadows the plot as a whole — Taggart is as racist as anyone — in which bigots learn to respect, and even cherish, the objects of their former hatred.

Like Huckleberry Finn, an anti-racist book full of racial slurs, Blazing Saddles doesn’t have a mean bone in its body. In fact, it’s a retelling of Twain’s great American novel of friendship between outcasts, with Gene Wilder’s Jim (a washed-up alcoholic gunslinger) in the role of Huck, and Bart in the role of Jim. These two characters — nothing but a lousy pair of deuces, socially speaking — become fast friends when Bart, who’s been appointed sheriff of Rock Ridge by the state’s attorney general in a scheme to seize their land, is greeted with open hostility by the town’s all-white residents.

But the pair ultimately win over the townspeople, setting up a genuinely democratic drama. They lead a popular coalition of Rock Ridge settlers, and black, Irish, and Chinese track-layers, to outwit a motley band of common criminals, Klansmen, Nazis, Hell’s Angels, and (this being the year after the Yom Kippur War) Arabs on camels, paid for by the wealthy and powerful. In Blazing Saddles, a classic tale — the triumph of the wily underdog against organized injustice — turns out to be equally Jewish and American. In the end, the townspeople beg Bart to stay on as sheriff, but he and Jim head for greener pastures. They get into a chauffeured limousine and drive west, toward the setting sun. It’s a story of civic amity worthy of America’s 250th, a reminder of national aspirations that are sorely in need of renewal.

“I’m a serious human being who is a humorist,” Brooks told Playboy. “The greatest comedy plays against the greatest tragedy. Comedy is a red rubber ball… if you throw it against the hard wall of ultimate reality, it will bounce back and be very lively.” Brooks’ signature combination of edgy humor, deep generosity, and a tragicomic sensibility shaped by wide reading — Gogol, Conrad, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy — was already apparent in his first film, The Producers, released in 1967. The protagonists are Max Bialystock (Zero Mostel), a Broadway producer, and Leo Bloom (again Gene Wilder), an accountant, whose name is a nod to the eponymous wandering Jew of Joyce’s Ulysses.

Many people think that it was in very bad taste for Brooks to make a film full of goose-stepping, Sieg-Heiling characters in Nazi uniforms little more than 20 years after the Holocaust. Maybe so: but Brooks subtly indicates that he is by no means insensitive to Jewish suffering. Joyce’s Leopold Bloom is targeted by Irish antisemites, while the Polish city of Bialystock was home to 50,000 Jews at the start of the Second World War; 800 were burned alive inside the Great Synagogue when the Germans torched it in 1941, while the rest died on the streets, in the ghetto, or at Treblinka.

These hints had to suffice, and not just because the film is a comedy: American survivors just wanted to forget the past, and began speaking publicly about their experiences in the Holocaust only in the Seventies. But in 1967, Americans were fully prepared to ridicule the Nazis; the popular television series Hogan’s Heroes had been doing just that for two years. Little wonder “Springtime for Hitler” brilliantly mocks the Third Reich by having a spaced-out acid-head perform the role of Hitler (did Brooks know that der Führer was sustained by a steady diet of opiates, cocaine, and amphetamines?) and a black hipster that of “Little Joe” Goebbels.

Brooks’ big heart is there again on full display in The Producers. Bialystock talks Bloom into participating in his con of massively overselling shares in “Springtime for Hitler” — a play so bad that he is convinced it will fail on its first night — to little old ladies he pretends to love. The scheme backfires, and both men are sent to prison. But neither the little old ladies, who attend their trial, nor Bloom, who seems to bear in himself all the anxieties of Jewish trauma have regrets. He explains that “No one ever called me Leo before… even in kindergarten they used to call me Bloom. I never sang a song before, I mean with someone else… This man, this man — this is a wonderful man.”

It’s a plea for kindness and compassion that is all-too-rare in comedy today. That’s because the world in which Brooks came of age no longer exists. His generation was educated in the school of hard knocks: first the Depression, then the war, with its triumphs and horrors. And if the slump taught self-reliance, that existential fight against the Germans and Japanese taught patriotism and civic responsibility. To many veterans, it revealed what really matters in life: family, friendship, community; gratitude and kindness. Brooks’s distinctly American comedy — democratically capacious, high-spirited, goofy, magnanimous, tinged with Jewish pathos — perfectly expressed this sensibility.

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Shortly after the bicentennial, however, Americans began losing faith in their great experiment in ordered liberty. The schools stopped teaching civics; the idea of the melting-pot ceased to form young souls, and national pride declined. No longer united by common ideals and aspirations, our sense of humor has become smaller and more brittle. And with the reassertion of a wary tribalism, Brooks’s marriage of Jewish and American comedy seems but a distant memory. In Blazing Saddles, Sioux warriors attack a wagon train in which Jim (then a boy) and his family are travelling far in the rear, a wry comment on how black Americans were sent to the back of the bus in the Jim Crow south. Brooks, the Yiddish-speaking Indian chief, lets them go, marvelling “They darker than us! Woo!” The scene, which wittily presents Jews as aboriginal Americans while emphasising their solidarity with black Americans during the civil rights movement, wouldn’t work today. Some black Americans view Jews as oppressors, and few Jewish Americans still understand Yiddish. Like other Americans, Jews have increasingly embraced progressivism, which turns people into humorless scolds — especially when jokes contain offensive language. These developments have pushed Brooksian comedy to the brink of extinction.

What remains in a world without humor is absurdity, the incongruity at the heart of any joke. But absurdity in itself, shorn of the meaning our common human endeavors and shared concerns bring to it, isn’t funny. It can’t lift us up, because it isn’t going anywhere. Brooks is always going somewhere; his comedy is beloved because its honesty about who we are, and its hopeful vision of who we might be, satisfies our craving for authentic human meaning.

But today, logos — and therefore our humanity — is under intellectual, political, technological attack. It’s not that people have stopped talking. Rather, the difference between speech and what Aristotle called “voice” (phōnē) — the verbal expression not of reason, thought, and judgment, but emotion — is rapidly being effaced. Indeed, the most troubling social phenomena of our time are all reflections of misology: the effective, if largely unconscious, hostility to logos that is perhaps the definitive characteristic of 21st-century life.

Academic culture has, for decades, perversely promoted misology. In the early Nineties, I told a new assistant professor at my university that I taught and wrote about the Ancient Greeks. When I asked her what she worked on, she said: “Sure as hell not dead white males!” The incident was a harbinger of contemporary intellectual trends. The assistant professor’s aggressive dismissal of DWMs, as they were then known, was an expression of academic radical chic: the view that the poets, statesmen, philosophers who founded and developed the Western tradition have nothing worthwhile to teach us, because their (unchosen) membership in certain groups stained them with some sort of indelible sin. What had long been regarded as essential was now understood to be accidental, and vice-versa; being white and male counted for more than being human. This was little more than voice — the communication of feelings of pain or pleasure, as in a dog’s bark — masquerading as speech.

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Misology has now taken root far beyond the academy, degrading political discourse and curtailing essential human freedoms. The notion that speech is violence and violence is speech, a confusion of the fundamental categories of liberal democracy that are enshrined in the US Constitution, justifies shutting down speakers and badgering those who wish to remain silent into endorsing positions they do not support. Nor is it permissible for actors to “play the other” — sympathetically to inhabit roles that do not match their identities as members of particular groups — even though doing so has been the lifeblood of dramatic performance since antiquity, when free Athenian males enacted the suffering of female slaves. All these developments constrain and weaken the capabilities of thoughtful speech and moral imagination that make it possible for human beings to live decent and elevated lives together.

At the same time, ideological imperatives have warped and corrupted language. Words like “racist”, “Nazi”, “fascist”, and “genocide” are applied so broadly and inconsistently that they have ceased to signify anything other than the speaker’s disapproval. “Equity” — which originally meant reasonableness and moderation in the exercise of one’s rights — now has virtually the opposite sense: imposing extraordinary measures to ensure equality of outcomes. Neologisms like “undocumented immigrant” or “birthing people” have become necessary in order to avoid acknowledging plain matters of legal and biological fact. Some, notoriously including the Smithsonian Museum, have even condemned objectivity, scientific reasoning, and good grammar as expressions of “whiteness” and “patriarchy”. And, of course, politicians’ constant resort to hyperbole (President Trump being the primary example of this trend) has exacerbated the decay of logos. The looseness of our language and imprecision of our thought have left a void that is increasingly filled by intemperate emotion, making citizens leery of publicly sharing their perceptions of what is just and unjust, or what is best for the body politic — an activity that is vital to the health of any free society.

But it is digital technology that poses perhaps the greatest threat to the development and exercise of logos. Social media connected individuals, but also allowed them to melt into “flash mobs”. The possibility of remaining anonymous encouraged angry outbursts, personal attacks, and other threatening behaviours, so much so that these phenomena required new words: “flaming”, “doxxing”, “swatting”. The online world also promoted simplistic binary thinking: swipe left, swipe right; thumbs up, thumbs down. By limiting users to 140 (later 280) characters, Twitter — now X — got people into the habit of communicating in crude, telegraphic ways: acronyms, truncated phrases, and emojis. All the while, smartphones offered addictive distractions that shortened attention spans and sent reading, already in decline, into a tailspin. These developments have undeniably made us dumber: less able to concentrate, less knowledgeable, less articulate, less nuanced in thinking, and more inclined to respond to political or intellectual challenges with “hot takes”.

Yet all this is nothing compared to the destruction of logos being wrought by AI, which is merely a mechanical simulacrum of a living human intelligence. Chatbots that can summarise books, do homework, and produce exam papers have made it largely unnecessary for students to study, or to read and write beyond a basic level, in order to get good grades. So far, academic leaders have found no adequate solutions to this problem. They’ve either embraced AI, which will ultimately reduce education to efficient prompt engineering, or they’ve allowed professors to formulate their own policies, which will incentivise laziness and low standards on the part of instructors (some of whom are already using AI to write lectures and grade papers). Few universities and colleges are likely to hold the line against AI, especially because continuing to educate students the old-fashioned way is expensive. Yet that’s the only way to ensure that students will learn how to think (or even really come to understand what they think), let alone develop the individually distinctive way of expressing themselves that qualifies as style.

Nor is AI a threat only to young minds. Its sycophancy (it is deliberately engineered to tell users what they want to hear) is sophisticated and seductive — but also manipulative. A small example: Google’s Gmail is using Gemini to summarise long email chains, and these summaries include nudges that are designed to eliminate wrongthink. Gemini’s recent summary of a chain I was on stated that one person “incorrectly claimed Trump opened Straits” and another “used an offensive term for head coverings”. As AI learns more and more about each and every one of us, it will be able to deploy an unlimited number of individualised nudges to influence our thoughts and actions in ways that it (or its hidden masters) prefer. That is misology on the deepest level, for it may irreparably damage the capacities of independent thought, speech, and action that constitute our innermost individual being.

In Plato’s Phaedo, the philosopher Socrates says that “one could suffer no greater evil” than misology. He associates the affliction with misanthropy, the hatred of human beings, as if to suggest that hating logos just is hating human beings. The Phaedo ends with the execution of Socrates for the civic harm he allegedly caused by publicly asking questions that, as he freely admitted, annoyed and embarrassed many of his fellow citizens. That victory of the many over the individual, emotion over logos, was short lived — Plato renewed Socrates’ living speech in his dialogues — but future ones are likely to be more permanent. And what makes this prospect particularly horrifying is that, if independent thought should ever be completely extinguished, its passing will be as unremarked as snuffing out a candle.

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Reflecting on life in the Soviet Union, where the Western ideas were criminalised and surveillance, indoctrination, censorship, and violence sought to eliminate the individual human centre of logos, Nadezhda Mandelstam wrote that, “Nothing can be predicted with certainty: people could even forget how to read altogether and books moulder away to dust. We might even stop talking with each other and communicate only by emitting calls of bloodcurdling war cries.” That future seems more likely to me than the supposedly utopian, total biological control of humans by machines predicted by transhumanists like Cristian Daniel Bolocan, when “words become useless” and “only feeling remains”. Yet in either case, we will be faced with the hideous prospect of a world populated entirely by beings that may look (and even genetically be) human: but lack the capacity of speech.

How can we combat misology and reclaim our logos? First, understand that the very core of our humanity is at stake. That’s worth fighting for, so we must screw up our courage for grassroots personal effort, without which we cannot count on institutional or other help. We’ll need courage to stand up to totalitarian impulses wherever they assert themselves, from campus bullies to governmental speech controls, and to relearn how to say what we think in public. We must also try to put down our phones, read good books, reclaim the meanings of high-jacked words, and seek out face-to-face conversations with family, friends, and fellow citizens. Above all, we must purge education of petty politics, and once again make the cultivation of logos a central focus of everything from grammar school through university.

Homo sapiens — the wise hominid, the one said to be made in the image of God — is clearly an endangered species. Who will save us if we are not for ourselves? The capacity of logos is, thankfully, a source of freedom. It enables us to make deliberate choices about the direction of our lives, and, to the extent that we have the means and the will, to shape our collective fate. To do nothing in the face of the present crisis is itself a choice. But would it not be shameful to knowingly abandon what is highest and best in us?

Jews have lived on the Iranian plateau for more than 2,600 years, constituting one of the oldest continuously existing religious communities in the world. The Babylonian monarch Nebuchadnezzar II brought them there by force after he destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple of Solomon in 586 BC. This exile, known as the Babylonian Captivity, lasted until 536, when Cyrus, the founder of the Persian empire, conquered Babylon and allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem. (See the Book of Ezra.) Some chose to remain in the regions of modern-day Iraq and Iran. And these Mesopotamian Jewish communities of late antiquity were not idle. Their rabbinic academies produced the nearly two-million-word Babylonian Talmud, the crowning intellectual achievement of Jewish thought to this day.

The Book of Esther is set during the reign of the Persian despot Ahasuerus (better known as Xerxes), who in 480 BC led his massive invading army to epic defeat at the hands of the Athenian-led Greek cities. Read aloud on Purim, and celebrated in a carnivalesque atmosphere of mime and mimicry, the story of Esther expresses diaspora Judaism’s great wish: to triumph over neighbors who would annihilate them, but in such a way as to make them friends. This is the accomplishment of young Esther and her uncle Mordechai, who lived under Ahasuerus’ reign. On Mordechai’s advice, Esther conceals her Jewish identity, becomes Ahasuerus’s queen and cleverly maneuvers him into executing Haman, a Persian Heinrich Himmler. Mordechai then takes Haman’s place as prime minister. Something like this has in fact been the general strategy for Jewish survival in the diaspora: benefit the ruler (as Joseph did Pharaoh), enter the ranks of the elite, and use economic and political power to protect the Jewish community. But as the fate of European and Middle Eastern Jewry showed in the mid-20th century, this strategy, called shtadlanut (“intercession”) in Yiddish, entails considerable risks, and seems to have outlived its usefulness.

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The reality of Jewish life in Persia has been neither as perilous nor as glorious as in the Book of Esther. Until the arrival of Islam in the seventh century made them second-class citizens distinguished from Muslims by special clothes and yellow patches, Jews “participated freely”, as the historian Houman Sarshar notes, “in every sphere of society, from the army to the courts”. Subjected to further economic, social, and physical restrictions after the ascendancy of Shi’ite Islam in the 16th century, they regained their ancient freedoms in 1906, when Iran adopted a new constitution. Iranian Jewry enjoyed a golden age under Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, a Westernizing ruler who became Shah in 1941 and later extended de facto recognition to the new state of Israel. When political turmoil forced Pahlavi into exile in 1953, an Iranian Jewish merchant issued him a blank check drawn on a Swiss bank account. Jews subsequently assumed leadership roles in key Iranian industries.

But history is full of ironies, and one long in the making finally caught up with the people of Iran. The Greek victory over Xerxes in the Second Persian War saved Athenian democracy, and thereby the West, from perishing in its infancy, but the equally despotic Ayatollah Khomeini used Greek philosophy to defeat Western values when he established the Islamic Republic of Iran in the 1979 revolution. The medieval Shi’ite thinker Alfarabi argued for an Islamic version of Callipolis, the city ruled by philosopher-kings in Plato’s Republic, that would be ruled by a Muslim prophet and lawgiver who was also a philosopher. A millennium later, Khomeini looked to the Republic in founding his totalitarian theocracy, in which power is concentrated in a Supreme Leader and a Council of Guardians composed of clerics.

The Shah had grown increasingly authoritarian and repressive in the Seventies, and Iranian Jews supported the revolution in the hope of a more progressive government. Instead, the Ayatollah exacted a heavy price for their policy of shtadlanut. The new regime almost immediately charged Habib Elghanian, a wealthy businessman and president of the Tehran Jewish Society, with corruption, Zionism, and contacts with Israel. He was executed and his family’s property was confiscated by the state. Most Jews subsequently fled Iran, and the community, which numbered 100,000 under the Shah, now has perhaps 9,000 members.

It’s hard to know what the Jews of Iran are thinking right now, because the regime monitors their communications with the outside world, strictly prohibits direct contact with Israel, and treats Zionism as a serious crime that can be punishable by death. Little wonder that they “dodge questions”, “talk in code”, and use fake names on social media; that they participate in Al-Quds Day rallies expressing solidarity with Palestinians; and that, when Israel and the United States bombed Iran last year, the Jewish communities of Tehran and Isfahan issued public statements condemning the “Zionist regime’s” brutal aggression. There’s no doubt that Iranian Jews feel great pressure to make such declarations. But after the Hamas pogrom of October 7, 2023 unleashed a worldwide wave of anti-Israel sentiment and Jew-hatred, diaspora Jews in general, who are increasingly suspected and accused of having more loyalty to Israel than to their home countries, have felt a similar (if less intense) social pressure to denounce Zionism. This is a cruel predicament, for that very pressure underscores why the existence of Israel — the ultimate guarantor of Jewish safety in the post-Holocaust, post-Soviet world — is so necessary.

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Why haven’t the remaining Jews of Iran left for greener pastures? For one thing, Iran has historically restricted Jewish families from emigrating together. It’s also unclear whether her Jewish communities know enough about the situation of Jews in other countries to make a realistic assessment of their alternatives. Then, too, it’s very difficult to give up one’s home, business, and way of life in order to become a stranger in a strange land, compelled to learn another language. Finally, Iranian Jews, including those who left after 1979, feel a strong and genuine attachment to the land where their ancestors have lived for millennia. Some even believe that, if the Americans succeed in toppling the regime, they might be safer in Iran than anywhere else, even Israel.

The Jews of Iran are surely anxious about the current war, and they’re by no means alone. Between 40,000 and 50,000 Persian or Tehrani Jews live in Los Angeles, and they are currently experiencing a “mix of jubilation and dread” as events unfold in the Middle East. One member of the community expressed a fear that many American Jews are feeling: “If this war doesn’t have a positive end result, it will only further increase the resentment that Americans have of Israel. And that is not good for Israel. It is not good for American Jews.” Nor would it be good for any of the world’s other Jewish communities, to say nothing of the beleaguered Iranian people, who have repeatedly shown great courage in opposing a malignant ideological tyranny. This year, it’s not just the Jews whose hopes of safety are reflected in the story of Purim.

Best known for his novels — A Room with a View, A Passage to India, Howard’s End — Forster had a keen eye for concrete particularity and individual character. These are qualities largely absent in the colorless world of The Machine Stops. The story is set in the distant future, when human beings have retreated from the Sun, the source of light and life that shines upon the surface of the Earth. Isolated, alone, and terrifically self-involved, they live in underground hexagonal cells, where all their needs are met by something called the “Machine”. Contact with others is almost exclusively electronically mediated. Vashti, the only named character in the story besides her son, Kuno, “knew” several thousand people she’d never met in the flesh, e-friends who could be seen and spoken with on something like Zoom. Vashti is surrounded by buttons “to call for food, for music, for clothing” — even for Machine-made literature and poetry, the equivalent of today’s AI-generated pap. She has no need or desire ever to leave her room.

Forster grasps that a life so dependent on technology would be one of comprehensive decay. A “swaddled lump of flesh” with “a face as white as fungus”, Vashti lacks teeth and hair, organs that have little use in a predigested, temperature-controlled world. Perpetually sedentary, she walks with great difficulty, is highly irritable (“a growing quality in that accelerated age”), and — like everyone else in the great subterranean hive — can no longer hazard the Earth’s surface without a respirator. Leaving her room for the first time in years, she is initially “seized with the terrors of direct experience” and retreats to her armchair. And when a woman later “barbarically” puts out her hand to keep her from falling, she becomes irate, for “people never touched one another”.

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Culture, too, is marked by decadence. It no longer renews itself through immediate openness to the world, a necessary stimulant of intellectual imagination. Like algorithmic chatbots, or Hollywood producers making endless iterations of a past blockbuster, it instead feeds on the creations of bygone epochs. Vashti spends her time listening to lectures on topics like music during “the Australian Period” or “the pre-Mongolian epoch”. She and her intellectual circle long for new “ideas”, demand for which far exceeds supply. Unfortunately, the riches of the past stimulate few ideas in the abstract age of the Machine, when strong individual personality is considered a “taint”, and when feckless intellectuals, to echo Nietzsche, stand like eunuchs before the “great historical world-harem”. “First-hand ideas” acquired by direct observation are thought to be of little value, for they are disturbed by love, fear, and other passions.

The most trustworthy ideas, in Forster’s world, are “tenth-hand”, arrived at by a sequence of intermediary historians counteracting previous interpretations. Yet the result is a flat and narrow presentism masquerading as science. To study the French Revolution in this way, it goes without saying, is to purge it of the powerful passions of its participants and contemporaries — to see it “as it would have happened, had it taken place in the days of the Machine”. History done thus levels understanding rather than expanding it. It no longer connects people to other times and places, rooting them in a cherished past and offering models of excellence to which they may aspire. Rather, it merely generates counterfactuals that reflect the predominant assumptions of the present.

And if this is a prophecy of the withered historical sense of our time, you might say the same of technology. The Machine is no longer developed in new directions, but merely mended as needed. Travel has ceased to generate ideas, “for, thanks to the advance of science, the earth was exactly alike all over”. Though there are airships on which people are occasionally compelled to travel for official purposes, like the propagation of the race, the sight of the earth below and the heavens above conveys no new ideas. One is reminded, here, of the disappointment of the internet, where great expectations of cultural cross-pollination are drowned in a flood of pornography and echo-chambered rage.

Instincts of veneration and familial attachment do persist even in this deracinated era. The only printed volume in Vashti’s room is the richly bound Book of the Machine, published by the Central Committee (the functions of government are evidently performed by worldwide bureaucratic and technocratic organs that are supposed to keep the Machine in working order). This Book is but a shadow of the one it has replaced: while the ancient Bible taught how to live free and responsible lives, this one contains “instructions against every possible contingency” — a comprehensive list of buttons to press should one be “hot or cold or dyspeptic or at a loss for a word”. Human agency is thus made to assume the binary form — on/off, 1/0, thumbs up/thumbs down — that is alone comprehensible to the Machine. Yet when she is troubled, Vashti caresses the volume, which she ritualistically kisses while uttering “O Machine!” Even so, the Book’s comforts are limited; late in life, she asks several times to be euthanized, an expedient at least as popular in her time as it is in ours. In the end, Vashti’s requests are denied: too many people want the same thing, and the number of deaths cannot exceed the number of births.

Into this tragic, broken world steps Kuno, who lives in another hemisphere but wants to see his mother in person and “not through the wearisome Machine”. In his longing for direct experience — for connection with the natural world, historical lands and peoples, and the whole of things; in brief, for a human home lost centuries ago — Kuno defies the spirit of the age. He speaks to Vashti about some stars he saw from an airship, in which he discerned the figure of a man with a sword. He wants to see the stars from the surface of the Earth, “as our ancestors did thousands of years ago”. Vashti at first refuses to visit him, but maternal attachment — and, perhaps, curiosity about his statement that “any moment, something tremendous may happen” — ultimately convinces her that she must.

When Vashti arrives after a miserable flight, Kuno tells her that he’s been threatened with “Homelessness”: death by expulsion through a “vomitory” onto the surface of the Earth. For the tremendous thing had happened: he’d found “a way of my own” to the sunlit uplands of the world, and his crime, going outside without a permit, had been discovered. His preparation for that upward journey had been an education in its own right. He’d never thought of space as anything but an empty container of things, but in walking to build up his stamina, he began to recover a sense of human place. “Man is the measure,” he tells Vashti. “Man’s feet are the measure for distance, his hands are the measure for ownership, his body is the measure for all that is lovable and desirable and strong.”

When he finally climbs to the surface through a hole in a railway tunnel, his ears are pierced by silence. Only now does he realize that the Machine hums with a hum that “penetrates our blood, and may even guide our thoughts”. In the silence, Kuno hears the call of “all the generations who had lived in the open air”; the spirits of the dead comfort him, just as he “was comforting the unborn”. Forced to breathe the painful new air because he has lost his respirator, he climbs a slope and sees sleeping hills that “commune with humanity in dreams” — “the hills of Wessex as Ælfred saw them when he overthrew the Danes”.

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Kuno passionately explains to a weary Vashti what else he now sees. The Machine has “robbed us of the sense of space and the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal relation, it has paralyzed our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it”. This talk shocks her. But when he tells her that the flexible mechanical arms of the “Mending Apparatus” came from the shaft to drag him back down, and that a woman of the surface ran to his aid and was killed, she thinks him mad as well as blasphemous — no higher forms of life were thought to exist above ground. Then she leaves. Mother and son don’t speak for years, even after he is transferred to a cell near her own.

The rest of the story describes the suffering by which Vashti learns Kuno’s truth. Having stripped us of humanity and made us its slaves, the Machine finally breaks down, at first slowly, then suddenly. For at some point, no one alive understands “the monster as a whole” well enough to repair it — a distinctly modern fatality of which the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset warned in The Revolt of the Masses (1929), and one that may already have befallen us with respect to AI. Murky bathwater, distorted music, and unrhyming poetry are excused, but when beds fail to appear from the cell floors, the air grows foul, and euthanasia is no longer available, the situation becomes grave.

Finally, communications systems fail, a terrifying silence nearly kills Vashti (“it did kill many thousands of people outright”), the walls crack, the floor heaves, and all is plunged into primeval darkness. The desperate moment of reversal and recognition is at hand. Vashti encounters Kuno in the passage outside their rooms, and they weep for humanity, and for mankind’s sins against body and soul. Yet before they die in each other’s arms, touching, talking, and kissing, their minds and hearts are opened to what was important on Earth. And the existence of people on the surface  — men and women Kuno has seen, spoken to, and loved, who are “hiding in the mist and ferns until our civilization stops” — gives them some hope that human culture may once again take root beneath the stars.

Huxley and Orwell give their readers no such hope: the rebellious individuals of Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four are crushed beneath the ineluctable weight of totalitarianism. But like Forster, Zamyatin and Bradbury leave us with the consolation that humanity can never be completely extinguished — that even, in the most terrible tyrannies, it survives in a few independent souls, and that all regimes must inevitably collapse. We ends in a civil war started by rebels who’ve made contact, as Kuno has, with people living in the wild lands beyond the walls of the One State; in Fahrenheit 451, seeds of a post-apocalyptic civilization are contained in the minds of survivors who’ve memorized great books. Our own fate is still undecided, but there is some reason for optimism. For as Forster reminds us, it is still possible to hear our ancestors’ human voices, there beneath the drone of the Machine.

More than two millennia later, Judaism’s spiritual reserves endure. They caught flame in recent decades among the Bnei Menashe (Children of Menasseh) of northeast India, a group of roughly 9,000 Tibeto-Burmese people of the Chin-Mizo Hmar tribe. The tribe’s rituals and legends echo very ancient Jewish priestly practices as well as the story of the Exodus, down to the pillars of cloud and fire and the parting of the Red Sea. 19th-century missionaries convinced these former animists, whose ancestral patriarch was named Manmási, to adopt Christianity. They now believe they are descended from Menasseh, one of the Ten Lost Tribes that conquering Assyrians sent into exile in 720 BC. After 1951, when a tribal leader had a dream that Israel was their ancestral homeland, they began to learn prayers and observe Jewish rituals. In the Eighties, they started moving to Israel, where the government has just announced plans to help the remaining 5,800 immigrate by 2030.

The story of the Bnei Menashe raises fundamental questions about Jewish identity, questions which have been debated since the time of the Talmudic sages. Who is a Jew? What does it mean to be a Jew? And, not least, why would anyone want to remain, let alone become, a Jew? These are matters of existential import,  in which both Jews and their enemies have always had a say. The unusually harsh proclamation that excommunicated Spinoza from the Jewish community of Amsterdam in 1656 — assailing him for his “abominable heresies” — declared that “the Lord shall separate him unto evil out of all the tribes of Israel”, nullifying even his ethnic identity. Conversely, unimpeachable ideological orthodoxy was not enough to save ethnically Jewish citizens of the USSR from persecution under Stalin.

Jewish identity, then, is clearly complex, framed as it is by ethnic, national, religious, and political components. The Book of Exodus relates that the 12 sons of Jacob — the Israelites who settled in Egypt — grew from a family and tribe into the Hebrew nation, a people that Pharaoh enslaved and ultimately sought to destroy. These slaves became Jews when Moses led them out of Egypt and they accepted the Torah given by God at Mount Sinai. In the Land of Israel, God ruled through intermediaries: first judges, then kings, and, in the Second Temple period, through high priests subject to various imperial governments. The Maccabean Revolt was thus politically as well as religiously significant.

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Politics played little role in Jewish identity over long centuries in the Diaspora, when the affairs of local communities were administered by rabbis whose authority derived from their knowledge of scripture and the religious tradition. Writing in the 17th century, Spinoza believed that other nations’ hatred of the Jews prevented them from assimilating, and so preserved them as a people apart.

But identifying as a Jew, and being recognized as one, became two separate things after the wave of political emancipation that began with the French Revolution. Emancipation destabilized Jewish identity by making it, by turns and in shifting combinations, both voluntary and compulsory. Jews could choose to be religiously unaffiliated, yet identify, for example, as “culturally” Jewish. Nor did conversion guarantee that one was no longer considered Jewish: Benjamin Disraeli, who was baptized as a child and bought up in the Anglican church, was “hounded and reviled throughout his life — and beyond — as an oily, devious, dishonest Jew.” Then there are those horrors of the 20th century, with both the Nazis and Soviets persecuting and murdering many ethnic Jews who had zero connection with the religion.

Since its foundation in 1948, meanwhile, the State of Israel has had a say in determining who is a Jew, and therefore eligible for the protections and benefits of Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return. Interestingly, Jews who have converted to another religion are not eligible for immigration, presumably because they don’t feel the connection with the ancient Jewish homeland on which the Law, and its assumption of patriotism, is based. For the same reason, Palestinians do not enjoy a right of return. As part of its effort to filter out opportunistic migrants who have no commitment to Judaism, meanwhile, the government has obliged the Bnei Menashe to undergo conversion under the authority of the Orthodox rabbinate, a process that involves demonstrating their knowledge of Jewish religious law and practice. In 2008, indeed, some Messianic Jews were denied on the ground that they sought to enjoy the legal benefits of Jewish status while practicing Christianity.

Tests aside, though, and unlike the persecutors of Jews in the 20th century, it’s surely telling that the Bnei Menashe chose to be part of the covenantal community, coming to Judaism in an act, if not of rediscovering their past, at least of giving themselves one from which they wished to be descended. And after the October 7 pogrom it somehow seemed permissible — yet again — to gang up on Jews in public, that free choice seems particularly meaningful.

Jews have long been criticized for claiming to be God’s chosen people, which implies their superiority to other groups. But devout Christians and Muslims, too, believe they are God’s elect, and it would be strange if they did not. More to the point, election is not so much a privilege as an obligation — often an onerous one. “I know, I know. We are your chosen people,” Tevye famously laments in Fiddler on the Roof. “But once in a while can’t you choose someone else?” Judaism survives today not because God chose the Jews, but because the Jews persist, through thick and thin, in choosing God. As the German theologian and Holocaust survivor Leo Baeck wrote, “Israel is elect if it elects itself” — if, as he understood it, it embraces its vocation of being a “light unto the nations” by trying to mend the world through exemplary righteousness and charity.

Baeck’s “ethical monotheism”, which embraces the moral core of the rabbinic tradition in a way that is attractive even to unobservant Jews, understands Jewish particularism as a necessary condition of its universal mission. Of course, this contemporary understanding of what it means to be a Jew is only one of many. But common to all is a sense of obligation internal to what the Israeli national anthem, Hatikvah (The Hope), calls the “Jewish soul”. This sense of obligation is a constant, even if its perceived source — God, family, polity, one’s ancestors — varies widely. The theologian Emil Fackenheim famously derived the obligation to remain Jewish from the moral imperative not to give Hitler any posthumous victories. In our day, antisemitism is no longer sufficient, as Spinoza supposed, to preserve the Jewish people. Still, one wonders: do Jews remain Jews in spite of the persecution they’ve suffered, or because of it? In the Bible, both Moses and God call the Jews “a stiff-necked people”, and many have felt more solidarity with their brethren after October 7. The greatest massacre of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust renewed old questions about the meaning of Jewish suffering. Who among us is willing to say that it was all for naught?

Here is where the perspectives of two very different groups of people — educated Westerners like me, who come from a long line of Jews, and third-world Easterners like the Bnei Menashe,who want to become Jews — find common ground. While it would be strange to suppose that antisemitism would make one want to convert to Judaism, one suspects that the survival of the people of Israel over more than three millennia is, for the Bnei Menashe, an argument in favor of conversion. For it testifies to the Jews’ vitality, adaptability, toughness, and so bodes well for the future of anyone who wishes to join (or return to) them. Similarly, admiration for the noble accomplishment of countless generations of forbears, who kept the faith under the most difficul conditions, is, for many Jews today, a source of increased resolve in the face of widespread hostility.

As the philosopher Leo Strauss has suggested, the Jewish soul is, at bottom, characterized by fidelity or loyalty to one’s ancestors, “piety in the old Latin sense of the word pietas.” That virtue, which opposes every instinct of modernity, is by no means unique to Judaism. It is exemplified by Virgil’s Aeneas, a Trojan who carried his father Anchises on his shoulders out of the burning city of Troy when it was razed by the conquering Greeks. The homeless Aeneas would later become a progenitor of the Romans — whose belief that the future belongs to those who cherish the past was reflected in their worship of Janus, the god of gateways (jani) whose two faces look back and forward simultaneously.

Through long experience as a people in exile, the Jews, too, have learned what it means to inhabit liminal spaces, and to stand on the threshold between a known past and a deeply uncertain future. The festival of Hanukkah commemorates their remarkable capacity to begin anew by drawing on old resources, and so to recover what would otherwise have been lost. That capacity is reflected in the rebirth of their ancient language, the restoration of their ancient homeland, and now, either the return of a long-lost tribe or the ardent self-election of unlikely Jewish wannabes. And the fact that neither the orthodox rabbinate nor the Israeli government care which of these is the case tells us that, unlike ethnic or national identity, a deep and serious attachment to Judaism is universally sufficient to make one a Jew. As an Israeli rabbi who has helped to prepare the Bnei Menashe for conversion and immigration vividly put it: “They want to be Jewish, and so they will be.”

While incidents of this kind — ramming followed by stabbing — are common in Israel, the Manchester attack targeted Jews and Judaism, not Israelis. In the coming days, critics of Israel will no doubt insist, yet again, that anti-Zionism in no way implies antisemitism. But it is no longer possible to ignore the link between the two. For there has been an unprecedented spike in antisemitism since October 7, 2023, and it has been fueled by the concerted efforts of what has been described as “the Israel delegitimization machine”. The machine is a device with many moving parts: international organizations, NGOs, news media, even teachers’ unions. It gathers data and produces reports, but its purpose is not to establish facts or determine truth. (That’s clear enough from the BBC’s decision to air the claim that IDF soldiers are deliberately shooting Gazan children in different body parts depending on the day of the week, or the U.N.’s dubious assertion that 14,000 Gazan babies would die within 48 hours without humanitarian aid.) It is to manufacture global consensus on a single, pressing point: that Israel’s conduct in Gaza is so morally abhorrent as to be intolerable to all civilized nations.

It won’t do just to blame all this on ancient and perennial hostility to Jews and the Jewish state, though that is part of the problem. At least as important is what the machine’s constituent parts learned in college, where progressive doctrines flow like milk to newborns. They took courses in critical race theory, intersectionality, postcolonialism, and other neo-Marxist ideas, all of which presuppose that the West’s signature combination of liberal democracy and capitalism is systemically unjust. Marx taught that the point of such ideas is not to interpret the world, but to change it. Having taken that lesson to heart, they now use their jobs as platforms to advance revolutionary action in the service of the latest cause — being sure, in this age of virtue-signaling, to be seen doing so.

Some, no doubt, serve the machine without fully understanding the violence that real revolution entails. But radical activists, to whom opinion-making elites have outsourced their political conscience, regard half measures as useless. Establishing universal freedom and equality requires using politics to help demolish existing social and political orders. This means, in the first instance, destroying foundations of national life that have been hallowed by time and tradition.

That was the goal of Nikole Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project, which argued that the US was founded not in 1776, but in the year when enslaved Africans were first brought to Virginia. The 14 August 2019 issue of The New York Times, which launched the 1619 Project on the 400th anniversary of the slaves’ arrival, included essays attacking capitalism and advocating universal health care. Hannah-Jones dismissed weighty criticisms of the Project’s erroneous claims and scattergun scholarship because her critics — leading American historians like James McPherson, Allen Guelzo, and Sean Wilentz — were mostly white men. Officially blessed with a Pulitzer Prize, the Project was turned into a curriculum for primary and secondary school students; by 2020, it was being taught in 4,500 schools nationwide. But perhaps the biggest lesson to be learned from the 1619 Project was that we’d entered a post-truth era, where strong emotions trump evidence and rational argument.

Six years later — after Covid, BLM and Antifa, the birth of the censorship-industrial complex, and 10/7 — the machine is applying that lesson beyond national borders, not just to the reinterpretation of the past, but to the construction of the present. And at the center of that construction, the one place, as a popular meme proclaims, where all the West’s ills intersect, is Palestine. This totalizing approach has something for everyone, from old boomer protesters in socks and sandals to young nihilists in keffiyehs, while simultaneously following Saul Alinsky’s advice in his 1971 book Rules for Radicals: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” In other words, attack something concrete that is emblematic of the whole you wish to destroy: in this case, Israel.

Yet neither the machine nor the Western activists who seek to “globalize the Intifada” seem to have noticed that attempts to liberate ostensibly oppressed populations by attacking the foundations of their civilization have an unbroken record of horrific failure, from the Soviet Union and the Third Reich to North Korea. History repeats itself. And, so far, the tragedy and farce of current events has, yet again, followed the pattern established at the primal scene of all future revolutions: the French Revolution, in which the pursuit of lofty democratic ideals rapidly degenerated into civil war and terror, and ended with Napoleon’s coup.

Reading A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution — edited by the distinguished historians François Furet and Mona Ozouf, and published in 1989, the 200th anniversary of the storming of the Bastille — one discovers that the Revolution’s radical ambition was unlimited. It held out, not just to France, but to everyone, the “boundless promise” of an escape from social corruptions and injustices. It was meant to be the final solution to the riddle of history: a “total event” in which “men sought to resolve all their problems at once — political, social, and moral — and to change themselves thoroughly and completely”. The first step in constructing this utopia of liberty, equality, and fraternity was to raze the old social and political order and jackhammer its foundations.

Revolutionary destruction proceeded in ways all too familiar today. Cultural and religious artifacts, including monuments, statues, paintings, books, icons, and altars, were smashed and burned with a fervor that justified the coining, in 1794, of a new word: “vandalism”. Drained of spiritual substance, religion was repurposed as a political force: a campaign of de-Christianization swept the land, even as Christ’s example was invoked in support of revolutionary ideas like the “universal fraternity” of men. Catholic priests were persecuted; churches were looted and closed; quasi-religious cults, including that of Reason and of the Supreme Being, were established. Much like George Floyd and Luigi Mangione, revolutionary leaders achieved secular sanctification in iconic paintings like Jacques-Louis David’s depiction of the murdered fanatic Jean-Paul Marat.

The Revolution moved quickly to gain control of historical time as well as political space. Because it was to replace Christ’s ministry as “the beginning of eternity”, the Christian calendar had to be scrapped, with Year I beginning on the day the Republic was proclaimed in 1792. The first version of the calendar comically presumed that nature itself would submit to the imperatives of the rational will. There were to be “ten months of equal length, divided into ‘weeks’ of ten ten-hour days”. These months would bear names — Bastille, People, Republic, Unity, Liberty — suited to molding the “new man”. But the plan required too many calendrical interpolations and adjustments to be workable. Nature ultimately triumphed over history: the final calendar included 12 months with seasonal names like Nivôse, Pluviôse, and Ventôse, which Thomas Carlyle characteristically translated as Snowous, Rainous, and Windous.

Ideological hubris has always been eminently mockable. But the Revolution’s guiding assumptions — that politics can do anything; that everything is political; and that revolution must be total — are no laughing matter, not least because the communist and fascist horrors of the 20th century have done little to diminish their popularity.

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Max Weber captured the intransigence of social and political reality when he described politics as “the slow boring of hard boards”. The Revolution supposed, on the contrary, that reality posed no serious obstacle to its aims. When the revolutionary spirit failed to achieve its objectives (a daily occurrence), “the perversity of adverse wills” was to blame. The fantasy that politics could do anything fueled paranoia — counterrevolutionaries were presumed to be around every corner — and furnished innumerable justifications for scapegoating violence. It also encouraged a psychotic rejection of the significance of observable phenomena, for in this atmosphere of universal suspicion, “what could be seen was not what really existed: reality was a lie”. Nor were there safe ways to steer clear of the total presence of politics: silence, hesitation, indifference, and fence-sitting on political questions suggested that one harbored counterrevolutionary tendencies and deserved, so to speak, to be canceled. And the assumption that revolution must comprehensively reject the established rules of society meant that its main motions were illegal. People grew used to committing what, until yesterday, were crimes — including, in the end, killing their fellow citizens.

In brief, the Revolution was unthinkable without a near-universal unmooring of thought from logic, reason, and the actual conditions of human life. It’s easy to imagine something like this happening today (many would say that it already is), especially because this unmooring was accelerated by the discovery that even “democratic” revolutions cannot tolerate the free flow of information and opinion. The Revolution initially embraced freedom of the press; but unfiltered public opinion, which reflected the actual life of the people, turned out to be inconveniently diverse. What was needed was the top-down formation of a unified “public spirit”. But stage-managing consensus proved impossible, and the September Law of Suspects, passed in 1793, allowed the Revolutionary Tribunal to arrest and execute journalists and publicly burn their writings.

Thankfully, no new Robespierre has as yet emerged to guide the revolutionary energies of groups united by little more than their antipathy to the West. But the machine’s cartoonish shadow-plays of good and evil are produced by people just as sanctimonious and anti-democratic as the Jacobins. In the US, they are currently at the astroturfing-and-censoring stage of manufacturing public spirit, including issuing strong warnings about the threat populism poses to its increasingly detested political brand: “Our Democracy.” (Of course, the Trump administration’s heavy-handed approach to free speech hasn’t helped.) The Europeans have gone further still, canceling elections in Romania, banning a leading candidate in France, and preparing to outlaw the most popular political party in Germany.

The machine nevertheless promotes insane allegiances and feeds fantasies like those of “Queers for Palestine”, or of prime ministers whose pledges to recognize a Palestinian state assume that Israel can continue to live alongside an enemy dedicated to its annihilation. Most important, it targets the people of Israel for the same reason the Revolution attacked the Catholic Church in France: because they founded, along with the ancient Greeks, the ancien régime it seeks to overthrow — the Western civilizational order that emerged in the creative tension between Athens and Jerusalem. The Jews’ survival for more than three millennia, to say nothing of their present flourishing in the Land of Israel, constitutes an intolerable rebuke to the revolutionary consciousness.

Taking its cue from the 1619 Project, the delegitimization of Israel imputes to it the sin of systemic racism. By invoking the memory of white-ruled South Africa, the widespread accusation that Israel is an apartheid state adds the stench of fascism to its target. (Wikipedia, a reliable arm of the machine, provides 25,000 words on “Israeli apartheid”; 16,000 on “Racism in Israel”; and 10,000 on “Comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany”.) Convincing people that the world’s only Jewish state is as genocidally racist as the Third Reich doesn’t just give comfort to antisemites. It helps make the case that the West, built on foundations rotten with chauvinism and hypocrisy, is well and truly irredeemable.

Ignored and suppressed for too long, however, reality always has the last laugh. Run mostly by intellectually lazy people, for whom radicalism is a fashion, not a cause worth dying for, the Israel delegitimization machine may nevertheless hasten the collapse of the brittle civilizational order on which it rests, and which it so thoughtlessly despises. The French diplomat Talleyrand is said to have remarked to Napoleon, “One can do everything with bayonets except sit on them.” Have the mandarins who run the machine considered that they, too, need a place to sit, and maybe even think?

One common denominator in all of these events was the impulse to explain or “contextualize” them in ways that minimize their horror. After 9/11, for instance, I heard a Muslim student say that the hijackers just wanted to “start a conversation” with the West. After 10/7, an expert on sexual violence excused her public silence about the rape and torture of Israeli women because, she told me, such atrocities are “happening every day” around the globe. The Charlotte mayor responded to the murder of Zarutska, an utterly innocent victim, by calling for “compassion” for homeless criminals like the man who stabbed her. Some people even started crowdfunds for Zarutska’s murderer, which GoFundMe quickly shut down. As for Charlie Kirk, plenty of people, makeshift scales of justice in hand, would have us weigh his death against his supposedly hateful opinions.

Whatever else all this might mean, these responses serve to distract us from addressing the real issue: the problem of Evil. To be fair, people will go to great lengths to avoid peering into the dark abysses of the human soul. That includes contemporary philosophers and theologians, few of whom, even after the mass murders committed by Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, have had much to say about Evil. Perhaps this is because these atrocities directly challenged the presupposition that human social existence is characterized by intelligible and relatively stable moral structures.

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Precisely this assumption is called into question by the behavior not only of the Holocaust’s perpetrators, but of its bystanders, among whom one finds few exceptions to the twin principles articulated in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah by Polish farmers who lived near Treblinka: “One can get used to anything”, and “If you cut your finger, it doesn’t hurt me”. Morally speaking, in other words, human beings are highly flexible, so much so that dwelling alongside a death camp need not register as anything more troubling than an inconvenience. Those who would dismiss such callousness as evidence of the stupidity and ignorance of peasants would do well to watch the numerous videos of educated progressives tearing down posters of Israeli hostages abducted on October 7.

I insist on capitalizing Evil for several reasons. First, because it is a metaphysically fundamental reality. It won’t do to describe it, as many thinkers have, as the mere absence of Good. Evil, the demonic willfulness and primal instinct of death and destruction that Freud called Thanatos, is a substantial force in its own right. As such, it resists all ordinary explanation. Can the Holocaust really be explained, as scholars have tried to do, as the result of social discontent in Germany caused by hyperinflation and other contingent factors? The very idea is obscene, not least because it implicitly relieves people of ultimate responsibility for their choices. Second, because Evil is as inexplicable as Good. In Vasily Grossman’s novel Life and Fate, a German officer captured at Stalingrad, surrounded by irate Russians, is approached by a bereaved mother who carries a brick to bash his head in. Seeing his frightened face, she instead gives him the gift of a breadcrust, a spontaneous choice for which she immediately berates herself. The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, who was himself a prisoner of the Nazis, was greatly impressed by this passage. For him, the fact that nothing in the totality of the woman’s strong emotions and urgent needs can explain her deed is one indication that it is Good. It is a pure act of kindness, from which she derives no benefit, and that she later regards as senseless.

Evil is similarly unsupportable by ordinary reckoning. Like Good, of which it is a kind of photographic negative, it is no longer on the moral continuum of everyday existence. It is a quantum leap to another system of human interaction, where violence reigns supreme and life is nasty, brutish, and short. The murder of Charlie Kirk — a young husband and father, slain on a university campus where he came to model the give and take of respectful argument for which universities were designed, and on which they used to pride themselves — was Evil. So was the celebration with which this despicable deed was greeted by an alarming number of people.

But there is something peculiar about the latest iterations of Evil. Here again, the Holocaust is instructive. The Nazis had an ambivalent relationship with their crimes. They recorded everything in ledgers, photographs, and films, making their war against the Jews one of the most extensively documented events in human history. Yet survivors of the camps report that their SS guards took solace in the idea that no inmates would live to see the day of liberation, and that even if they did, no one would believe their testimony. Osama bin Laden took a very different approach. 9/11 was mass murder as political theater, a tour-de-force performance for Islamists and radicalized Westerners. This tactic found its audience. At the university where I was teaching at the time, Saudi students cheered when the Twin Towers fell. A professor was happy to tell me that Americans would now understand the suffering they inflicted on other peoples. And my public endorsement of what would later become the policy of the Obama administration — hunting down bin Laden and killing him — made me an outcast among the faculty.

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The Hamas terrorists intuitively understood the effectiveness of al-Qaeda’s political theater, and doubled down on it. On October 7, they equipped themselves with GoPros, so that their spree of murder and torture could be broadcast far and wide. They publicized their acts, correctly betting that some would relish their death porn, and that the world in general would respond by blaming their victims. For those who’ve watched the 22 minutes of footage released by the Israelis, that response is unfathomable. We see images of a dozen older women at a bus stop, waiting to catch a ride to the stores. After the attack, they lie in heaps, blood pooling around their corpses. We see couples burnt to a crisp like the petrified victims at Pompeii, their cries at the moment of death frozen for all time. We hear a rescue worker describing what he saw in one kibbutz: the corpses of a father with his eye gouged out, a mother with her breast cut off, a daughter with her foot cut off, a son with his fingers cut off. What was the message sent by their torturers? To the father: what you see us do to your loved ones will pain you more than having your eye ripped out. To the mother: you gave these children life, fed them and gathered them to your bosom. Here, in the warm, severed breast we hold in our scarlet hands, is what we think of that.

That’s not all. The rescue worker explains that the murderers sat down for a meal in the presence of the slaughtered family. This is straight out of the Nazi playbook. Hitler’s Einsatzgruppen — the mobile killing units that executed millions of Jews across Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union — would sometimes set up a table alongside the pit into which their victims had fallen, and enjoy a hearty meal. (Not for nothing did Life and Fate include a scene in which Adolf Eichmann dines on ham in a gas chamber whose construction he is inspecting.) The message could hardly be clearer: your unfathomable suffering and grisly death is our sustenance and pleasure. This is ghoulish vampirism, and it is Evil.

Evil is not banal, but many people are doing their best to make it so. To characterize the Hamas pogrom or Kirk’s murder as understandable reactions to Palestinian suffering or Right-wing provocation is to normalize Evil — to pretend that it is something we can control, a problem that reasonable people can solve over coffee and talk. More honest, though hardly less blameworthy, is to avert one’s eyes, like the passengers who walked away from Zarutska as she bled to death on the train. Neither of these responses dare to confront Evil directly, and to call it out, nor to look into the faces of its victims and to say their names. Yet this is what all decent people must do if we hope to arrest our descent into limitless violence.

This last is no over-statement. In 2025, companies and private investors will spend more than $600 billion developing ever-more-powerful AI. This enormous boom (or bubble) has made people like Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Ellison even more fabulously rich. But advanced artificial intelligence is, notoriously, a black box. No computer scientist understands how it really works, and while everyone agrees it will profoundly change our lives, no one can say exactly how. One prominent economist predicts that AI will somehow introduce an era of unprecedented “human flourishing”. Others, including the computer scientists who developed the AI 2027 scenario, warn that it may “kill all the people”. Setting aside that extreme outcome, there are obvious reasons for concern. The internet, social media, and chatbots have already allowed us to peek under the hood of advanced, highly monetized digital technology, and what’s flown out so far is not encouraging: depression, psychosis, cognitive impairment, societal atomization, political polarization, enhanced surveillance and censorship — the list goes on. And because more than half the people in the world already own smartphones and spend, on average, more than three hours a day on them, these effects are global.

Yet while superintelligent AI is already looking like Pandora’s box, governments, corporations, and consumers are hell-bent on opening it. The march of technology is unstoppable, and tech oligarchs now have as much say over our collective human fate as any world leader. What’s more, they know it. Some, such as Bill Gates and Elon Musk, have even come to regard themselves as potential saviors of humanity.

We’ve grown used to enormously wealthy tech entrepreneurs acting like they are in the business of solving global problems. Peter Thiel recently recalled a conversation in which Musk and Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, disagreed about whether making us an interplanetary species or building superhuman AI was “the most important project in the world”. You might have thought that the most important project in the world would address some substantial threat to people’s safety and well-being, like the precipitous collapse of education at all levels, or the serious risk of civil war in Western nations. But superhuman AI and the quest to colonize space are expressions of a techno-politics that aims not to mend the world, but simply to leave it behind.

The desire to build machines that will allow us to flee our terrestrial home, and that will make humanity functionally obsolete, reflects the fatality of technology — a seductive, yet ultimately monstrous synthesis of desire and ingenuity. René Descartes spelled out the project in his 1637 Discourse on Method. This masterpiece of political rhetoric was written not in scholarly Latin but demotic French, to reach the broadest readership. He claimed that basically everything he learned in the finest school in France, where he was at the top of the class, was worthless. Knowledge needed an entirely new foundation, to be provided by modern tools of mathematical analysis, including the algebraic geometry he pioneered. His as yet unnamed project, he wrote, promised to make human beings the “masters and possessors of nature”. Descartes predicted a future in which technology would produce “an infinity of devices that would enable us to enjoy without pain the fruits of the earth and all the goods one finds in it”, rid us of “an infinity of maladies”, and perhaps make us immortal. He compared himself to a prophet of God, who would not sin against mankind by withholding earthly salvation — a magnanimous example, perhaps, for today’s tech oligarchs. Scientists, he suggested, would be the new rulers; science, the new state religion.

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Human beings have always made tools to accomplish their goals, altering their relationship with nature and one another in the process. But for most of human history, that activity was subordinate to larger conceptions of the good, embodied in cultural practices and political structures. Our pre-modern forebears regarded the natural or created world as intrinsically well ordered, a suitable basis for human fulfillment. They found goodness and beauty in everyday life, and celebrated them in religious ritual, architecture, art, music, and literature. Technology, however, is indifferent to such soulful gratitude. It considers the world to be, at best, neutral matter, capable of any number of transformations and uses, waiting only to serve our desires for security, convenience, and pleasure.

In the long run, technology — which promised to give people what they want, when they want it — was the easiest of sales. It didn’t just supercharge technical advancement. It made the potentially boundless or infinite development of what the Greeks called technē, technical skill, an end in itself, eclipsing all prior conceptions of the human good. Actuality — the real character of human existence, felt and understood — paled in comparison with possibility; the imagined future, a virtual playground of unconstrained individual freedom, came to seem more desirable than the quotidian present. Digital technology in particular has insinuated itself throughout our daily lives, dissolving human connections at alarming speed and exacerbating a crisis of meaning. Yet it has also proved to be a powerful economic engine and an invaluable military resource, so much so that it would be unthinkable to step off the accelerating AI train.

Today, technology is entering its final, post-human phase, in which it no longer regards nature, our bodies, and our psyches as neutral material to be molded according to our wishes, but rather confronts them as enemies. This development, while shocking, was not entirely unforeseen. Its main lines were spelled out almost a century ago, in 1929, in a hideous little book by the gifted Irish scientist J. D. Bernal, The World, the Flesh and the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul. Bernal’s “rational soul” is the spirit of technology, which is moving with “ever increasing acceleration”. Its enemies are the primary forces opposing “the progress of the future”: the world (nature), the flesh (the human body), and the devil (human psychology).

For Bernal, the world is a poor prison from which outer space is the only escape. In the future, synthetic foods and clothing will make for “a world incomparably more efficient and richer than the present”. Later, manmade “globes” — space shells 10 miles in diameter — will replace the pathetic one we’ve been stuck on for so long. Like the Russian Revolution (Bernal was a Stalinist), itself a violent leap into an inscrutable future, this radical break with the past promises somehow to make ordinary politics unnecessary: in these artificial globes, “there would probably be no more need for government than in a modern hotel”. But our descendants will aspire to govern the universe, putting an end to its spectacular wastefulness: “the stars cannot be allowed to continue in their old way but will be turned into efficient heat engines.”

In Bernal’s estimation, the flesh — the human body — is by no means our friend. Much of it already serves little purpose: “modern mechanical and modern chemical discoveries have rendered both the skeletal and metabolic functions of the body to a large extent useless.” What the flesh needs now is “radical alteration” through physiological chemistry and the extension of foreign bodies into the structure of its living matter. “Normal man”, Bernal insists, “is an evolutionary dead end”, and there is much work to be done: “We badly need a small sense organ for detecting wireless frequencies, eyes for infra-red, ultra-violet and X-rays, ears for supersonics, detectors of high and low temperatures, of electrical potential and current, and chemical organs of many kinds.”

Bernal envisions “the direction of mechanism by pure volition” (something Elon Musk’s Neuralink, now rivaled by other groups, has already achieved through brain implants for people with spinal cord injuries). And while his transhuman cyborg — which, he predicts, will ultimately evolve into a brain in a vat — is apt to strike us as “a strange, monstrous and inhuman creature… he is the only logical outcome of the type of humanity that exists at present”.

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The greatest impediment to the birth of the technological and ideological “new man”, Bernal writes, is our species’ persistent irrationality, especially including its “unintelligent respect for the past”. This is where his book becomes truly demonic, inverting the spiritual order on which civilization was founded. For “we can abandon the world and subdue the flesh only if we first expel the devil” — the retrograde sensibility that rejects “the progress of dehumanization”. That can happen only if “the scientific expert” — linked, Borg-like, to other advanced consciousnesses — rules the world. Bernal imagines political and psychological manipulators on the model of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, a scientific aristocracy with “the means of directing the masses in harmless occupations and of maintaining a perfect docility under the appearance of perfect freedom”. These masses, reduced in numbers until the elite “are no longer seriously inconvenienced by them”, might be allowed to live on Earth as “a human zoo, a zoo so intelligently managed that its inhabitants are not aware that they are there merely for the purposes of observation and experiment”.

Bernal’s chilling priorities to one side, he understood earlier than anyone else that technology, like Soviet communism, would ultimately demand a radical disconnection from the past and a leap away from the only world we’ve ever known. Such desperate leaps are, at bottom, a symptom of, and response to, nihilism: the sense that life as we know it is basically meaningless. And in a kind of doom loop, technology now offers itself as the solution to the problem of nihilism it has helped to create. This helps to explain the willingness of tech leaders to take extraordinary risks with our collective future.

Musk’s idea of space colonization was a political project, which he gave up on when he realized that “woke AI” would follow us to Mars. His desire to make a clean break with the ideological overload of contemporary life was so strong that he was prepared to abandon the Earth. How many people would have been willing to join him? The answer would give us some idea about the insufficiency of meaning that Bernal so completely expresses in his dystopian vision.

The first, Covid, showed that money mattered more than mission when universities continued to charge full tuition for an inferior online product: asynchronous lectures and “real-time seminars” where many students were just black squares on Zoom. Then, the revelation, after October 7, that universities had suffered extensive ideological capture — that much of what passes for higher education is actually indoctrination in cultural Marxism. Mobs of Ivy League students — radicalized by “critical theories” of oppression and victimization, yet wearing Covid masks and keffiyeh face-coverings to protect their future earnings — harassed and intimidated Jewish classmates while the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and Columbia merely watched on.

The third, the most seismic of them all, is ongoing. And it is not ideology, but technology that is precipitating the greatest crisis higher education has ever faced.

A recent article by James D. Walsh in New York Magazine, widely circulated among academics, reported that “just two months after OpenAI launched ChatGPT [in 2022], a survey of 1,000 college students found that nearly 90 percent of them had used the chatbot to help with homework assignments”. The use of Generative-AI chatbots for required coursework is, if anything, even more widespread today. At elite universities, community colleges, and everything in between, students are using AI to take notes in class, produce practice tests, write essays, analyze data, and compose computer code, among other things. A freshman seems to speak for entire cohorts of undergraduates when she admits that “we rely on it, [and] we can’t really imagine being without it”. An article in The Chronicle of Higher Education quotes multiple students who are effectively addicted to the technology, and are distressed at being unable to kick the habit — because, as an NYU senior confesses, “I know I am learning NOTHING.”

One problem is that it’s difficult to prove that students have cheated with chatbots. They’ve learned how to detect “Trojan horse” traps in assignments, engineer prompts that won’t make them look too smart, and launder their essays through multiple bot-generated iterations. Nor is AI-powered software a reliable means of detecting such schemes. (This is unsurprising: why would providers like OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT Plus free during final exams, want to imperil huge student demand for its product?) And in the long run, market forces will always keep students one step ahead of their professors. Walsh’s article highlights a young man whose attempts to monetize dishonesty got him expelled from Columbia. This former student has raised more than $5 million to design a wearable device that “will enable you to cheat on pretty much anything” in real time.

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Faced with these difficulties, universities have punted. They’ve done little more than leave faculty to establish their own AI-use policies, which vary widely and are, in any case, largely unenforceable. (What is more, some professors are using chatbots to formulate assignments and grade papers. In their classrooms, machines are talking to machines.) This response is completely inadequate. Universities will not survive if they are little more than expensive diploma mills. Nor will the United States, for what will take their place in preparing future citizens, leaders, and builders to repair our broken institutions and maintain a healthy and prospering polity?

AI optimists would argue that such concerns are overblown. That’s because superintelligent machines capable of “usher[ing] in an age of flourishing the likes of which we have never seen” will soon be doing “the real thinking”, as the economist Tyler Cowen and Avital Balwit, an AI researcher, write in The Free Press. If the authors are right, students and professors need to concentrate on learning how to use AI, which will take over the management of human affairs. Yet they don’t explain what they mean by flourishing — a question begged by their admission that, by undermining our sense of purpose, radically degrading our agency, and making meaningful forms of work obsolete, AI will introduce “perhaps the most profound identity crisis humanity has ever faced”. Can human beings flourish when they’ve given up much of what makes them human?

That’s not the only problem with their predictions. In everything from diplomacy to medicine, real thinking — thinking at the highest levels, where strategies are devised and executed — requires practical wisdom: an adequate understanding, not just of the range of tools available to us and how to operate them, but of the ends these tools ought to serve. Cowen writes that, in his field of economics, he’s still better at posing questions than AI. That’s a significant admission, because the questions we ask are determined by our ends. The student who told Walsh that using ChatGPT allows her to spend so many hours on TikTok that “my eyes start hurting” asked the wrong question — How can I make more time for social media? — because she was pursuing the wrong end. She has some ability to engineer chatbot prompts — her grades are “amazing” — but doesn’t know how to employ that skill for her own benefit. And her prioritization of vapid entertainment offers a clue about how most people whose jobs are eliminated by AI will use their leisure, a question that inspired dread in the economist John Maynard Keynes when he realized, a century ago, that “technological unemployment” would eventually deprive mankind of its “traditional purpose”.

Simply to use AI well, it seems, requires a liberal education: one that teaches what makes for a good and meaningful life, and cultivates the well-formed loves and dispositions that motivate one to act on that knowledge. Where will AI acquire the knowledge and motivation it needs reliably to use its own capacities for the benefit of human beings? From AI researchers and developers, whose knowledge and intellectual powers may not extend much beyond coding? Its current training is not significantly weighted toward a study of great books, art, music, and “the best which has been thought and said”, in Matthew Arnold’s phrase. That’s clear enough from the case of the advanced Pathways Language Model (PaLM), as described in a 2023 article. Social media conversations accounted for 50% of the dataset on which PaLM trained; webpages, Wikipedia, news, and computer code comprised 37%. Only 13% consisted of books, doubtless of greatly varying quality.

Nor are the results of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT generated by the kind of deeply internalized judgment that liberal education aims to cultivate. LLMs respond to prompts based on complex calculations of probability across a vast, digitally-encoded reservoir of opinions: good, bad, and ugly, true and false. And as helpful as they can be in conversation with the most thoughtful users, they can’t be fully trusted to identify and communicate matters of fact, let alone to regulate themselves by an adequate understanding of the nature and conditions of human flourishing and the sources of meaning in human life. That’s clear enough from their notorious hallucinations, and from their disturbing inclination to lie — an inclination that’s presumably been strengthened by what these LLMs are learning from users who lie, to themselves as well as others.

AI can’t overcome these problems just by being, as Cowen claims, “smarter than all of us”. It would instead need to achieve real human intelligence: to comprehend qualitatively, not just quantitatively; to intuit, not merely to calculate. AI developers would object that human intuition is the product of a neural network that is not functionally different from that of AI models. This claim ignores the fact that digital computation, which “reads” information encoded in analogue signals by means of varying voltage levels, is merely a mechanical simulacrum of our native abilities. That is what makes it “artificial”. AI’s training is in any case as removed from the concrete and particular circumstances of human development, experience, and education as its software-based mind is from ours. For while our minds inhabit mortal bodies embedded in actually existing circumstances and communities, AI observes and imitates us from the ether of abstract operations whose relationship to particular pieces of hardware is purely contingent.

Cowen and Balwit reject transhumanism, which aims to make the natural or God-given condition of being human obsolete by connecting us to superintelligent AI through neural implants and other devices. They envision a middle ground where we retain our humanity under the governance of AI. That’s beginning to look like the best possible outcome of the arc of technological development over the next five to ten years. Yet it recalls the characteristically modern and impatient utopian dream of Karl Marx — a dream that relied on vague prophecies of what life would be like after the revolution, but swiftly evaporated on contact with reality. Because Communism would change the conditions of existence so radically that well-founded predictions were impossible, Marx wrote little about life in the post-revolutionary utopia. He was confident only that the violence required to bring this utopia into being would be worth it. Similarly, Cowen and Balwit admit that the advent of artificial superintelligence will do violence to human agency, meaning, and purpose. But they, too, are excessively confident that all will be well in the end.

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The ultimate aim of a liberal education is fully to actualize the human capacity “to form an instinctive just estimate of things as they pass before us,” in the words of John Henry Newman. If we are to maintain our humanity in the age of AI, an education that teaches young people to read, write, and think through the investigation of traditional sources of human meaning — goodness, truth, justice, beauty — and the cultural and political conditions in which they acquire a prominent place in human life, will be more necessary than ever. A recent conversation between Ross Douthat and AI researcher Daniel Kokotajlo, a principal author of the highly pessimistic AI 2027 forecast, makes this clear. Asked about “the purpose of humanity” in a world run by superintelligent AI, Kokotajlo channeled the core of the biblical and philosophical traditions in which Western civilization is rooted:

I guess what still matters is that my kids are good people, and that they have wisdom and virtue and things like that. So I will do my best to try to teach them those things because those things are good in themselves, rather than good for getting jobs.

Education is possible because the world at its core is good: it possesses a natural or created order that can never be fully comprehended, but to which our minds and hearts, souls and bodies, may be well or poorly attuned. AI or no AI, education at its best develops the virtues or excellences of thought and action, taste, feeling, and judgment, that fit one for all seasons, occasions, tasks and responsibilities of life. And that moral, intellectual, and spiritual attunement, not just to physical reality, nor to the largely unforeseeable contingencies of time and history, but to eternal or transcendent truths, is good in itself as well as for its consequences. This is the most fundamental teaching that the great thinkers and doers in all languages and fields of understanding — Kepler, Galileo, Newton; Al-Farabi, Maimonides, Aquinas; Hamilton, Madison, Jefferson, and Lincoln — have internalized through reading even a few great books.

If colleges and universities have any hope of surviving, they must articulate a compelling vision of what higher education is, and what it is for — of its signal importance for individuals and society alike. If they are to equip students to find their way in an increasingly complex world, they must provide not just a technical education, but a genuinely liberal one. That’s the only way they can convince students not to cheat themselves out of the chance to live rich and meaningful lives by unreflectively turning over their distinctively human energies and capacities to AI. Let’s hope they succeed. For if higher education ceases to preserve, extend, and transmit the wisdom and knowledge our ancestors struggled and suffered to achieve, who or what will?

Some will find Thiel’s project very odd. How could an enormously successful, mathematically-gifted, philosophically-educated tech entrepreneur seriously entertain Bible-thumping myths from the Apocalypse of John? Here’s a better question: how could he — and we — not take them seriously? As Dorian Lynskey writes in his book, Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World, “apocalyptic angst has become a constant: all flow and no ebb.” Contemporary culture has long been saturated with post-apocalyptic novels, comic books, films, TV series, and video games. Zombie end-times fantasies do particularly well in all formats. The mindless, mechanical mob of the undead, who hunger insatiably for the brains of the living, has become a primary and pervasive cultural symbol — one that resonates with a widespread sense of impending catastrophe that’s been building steadily since the 2020 Covid lockdowns. And if bioweapons, climate change, nuclear bombs, or AI don’t drive the human species to extinction, drastic measures deemed necessary to forestall such dangers, such as the establishment of a single world government, might themselves bring an end to politics, morality, spiritual life, and culture. Thiel is driven to find a way between the binary alternative of No World or One World, the whirlpool of planetary destruction or the many-headed monster of global totalitarianism.

Thiel’s insight is that, unlike most contemporary imaginings of global catastrophe, the Bible’s prophecies do more than pluck our inner strings of existential dread. They help us to understand our chaotic times. Matthew 24:24 predicts that “[T]here shall arise false Christs and false prophets … [and] they shall deceive the very elect.” In other words, the Antichrist will attempt to appear more Christian than Christ himself, even as it works to accomplish the wholesale destruction of the Christian underpinnings of Western civilization. The Nazis pursued this strategy, but were hampered by the limited appeal of their antisemitic ideology. German theologians fashioned a new myth of Jesus as a spirited warrior who strove to destroy Judaism, and they elevated Hitler to the status of the second coming of Christ, who would finish the work Jesus failed to complete: the total extermination of Jews and Judaism. A more successful Antichrist would, like the French revolutionaries and the Marxists, promote values that seem more consistent with the Judeo-Christian foundations of civilization, such as universal liberty, equality, and justice.

While the past displays a seemingly endless cycle of civilizational rises and falls, Thiel believes that modern science and technology have turned history into a linear progression, as the Bible teaches, with a beginning and a final, irreversible end. From its inception, technology — a political project as much as one of engineering — has dangled before us the shimmering promise of godhood, with which the serpent tempted Eve to eat the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Francis Bacon and René Descartes, the project’s 16th- and 17th-century founders, rightly understood it to be an anti-Christian endeavor that needed to be cloaked with a veil of religious orthodoxy.

Bacon’s New Atlantis, which describes a secretive, ostensibly Christian community of scientists devoted to the experimental investigation of the properties and uses of all material things, features a prototype of the modern research university called the College of Six Days’ Works. Descartes’ Discourse on Method, which advances (with a similar veneer of piety) the bold promise of making human beings “the masters and possessors of nature”, has six parts in imitation of the first six days of God’s creation. In both books, the Sabbath — the seventh day devoted to God — falls by the wayside. The frontispiece of Bacon’s Great Instauration further hints at the transgressive nature of technology. It features a ship passing beyond the Pillars of Hercules (the Strait of Gibraltar), a landmark the divine hero established to warn ancient sailors not to exit the Mediterranean into the unnavigable Atlantic. And the book’s epigraph, “Many shall go to and fro and knowledge shall be increased,” is from the prophecy of the End of Days in Daniel 12, as if to suggest that the expansion of technological power would bring history to its apocalyptic conclusion.

An early modern conceit that has in many respects become a late modern curse, technology underlies virtually every apocalyptic anxiety of our time. But Thiel is unsure of the role of advanced technology, and in particular AI, in the big picture of history he’s trying to work out. Is it the Antichrist? Does it prepare the way for the Antichrist? Or is it a katechon, the mysterious force mentioned at 2 Thessalonians 2:6 that forestalls the Antichrist (the Greek word katechein means “to hold down”)? The katechon plays a major part in Thiel’s analysis, because things capable of opposing the Antichrist can also advance its aims, and vice-versa. In the absence of the existential threat of Communism, for example, Western countries like the US and UK, aided by advanced digital technology, have turned psychological operations and disinformation tactics developed to fight foreign adversaries against their own citizens. This suggests deep cultural sickness, a crisis of confidence in the values that defeated totalitarianism in the 20th century.

Thiel nevertheless thinks that worries about AI taking over the world are more dangerous than AI itself, because the fear of existential threats plays directly into the cold hands of deracinated elites who are working to establish a global managerial state. Even so, there is something satanic about AI, a ghostly entity that is increasingly capable of hacking human minds on a very large scale. What Thiel said of Bacon seems to apply to the developers of Large Language Models (LLMs): they’ve “summoned a demon they don’t believe exists”.

The Antichrist is, by definition, negative and dependent. It rejects Christ and Christian values while offering a spurious imitation of them. AI is a similarly dependent being. It is a simulacrum of human intelligence and language, capacities of thought and speech the Greeks called logos. But AI lacks essential elements of human logos: its embeddedness in the world through birth in a body bound for death, and the moral and intellectual interiority that makes the human being an image of God. Speech is a living voice that springs from the soul — to give interiority its biblical name — embedded in the body of an existing individual. But AI is not a living being, and it replaces inner plenitude with mechanical, algorithmic emptiness. Embeddedness in space and time expresses itself as concern for, and responsiveness to, the actual conditions of existence, the biblical paradigm of which is Adam’s naming of the animals who live alongside him in Eden. But while AI requires material substrates — servers and other hardware — it inhabits them in purely occasional and contingent ways, like the demons that beg Christ to pass from the mad Galilean to the herd of pigs. Its relationship with actuality is equally contingent. It exists in a digital cloud of pure possibility, where it arranges information according to no criterion of truth besides probability and the rules of logic. That’s why ChatGPT and other LLMs are so prone to hallucinations, like citing books that exist only in Borges’s fictional, virtually infinite Library of Babel.

Yet, like the sham philosopher and bad citizen Plato calls “the sophist”, who is equally indifferent to truth, AI has a seemingly divine ability to imitate virtually anything with lifelike plausibility and vividness, and in multiple media. The market, whose whims have for decades guided the world’s best software engineers, has made this soulless capacity of representation, tailored to the tastes of the individual consumer, available to almost everyone on the planet. It has taught us to spend hours every day in its virtual reality, entertaining or distracting ourselves with the shadows it casts on the walls of our own private caves. Yet, using AI for more serious purposes is no less a Faustian bargain. Every advance AI makes in serving our desires degrades fundamental human capacities and gives it more mastery over human beings. Using AI to navigate makes us less capable navigators. Using AI to write makes us less capable writers. Using it to make decisions weakens our executive capacities of judgment and action. Peak AI, ministering to the inner emptiness and boredom of atomized, directionless selves, will mean peak human debility and enslavement. Aren’t these the goals of the Antichrist — which, whatever form it may take, always seeks to remake human beings in its own image?

Not so fast: perhaps AI is really a katechon. That is the argument of Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska in The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West. Karp (a classmate of Thiel’s at Stanford who also studied philosophy and, with Thiel, founded Palantir Technologies) and Zamiska, his longtime deputy, insist that the enemies of the West will prevail unless software developers work in close collaboration with the American government to produce AI-powered military capabilities superior to that of our adversaries, as Palantir has done using LLMs. They acknowledge that this will require a massive cultural shift among our technological and cosmopolitan elites, who’ve embraced an “ethereal”, “post-national”, and “disembodied” morality that scorns patriotism, and who’ve learned “that belief itself, in anything other than oneself perhaps, is dangerous and to be avoided”. Yet it is the market’s deployment of advanced technology, including AI, that has above all promoted this “Hollowing Out of the American Mind” (the title of the book’s second part), not least by rapidly dissolving social bonds, encouraging pathological self-absorption, and making possible — even incentivizing — digital swarms of doxxing and online cancellation.

Considered in the context of Karp’s and Zamiska’s urgent call to arms, the revelation of this contradiction is genuinely apocalyptic. Whether it will accelerate or slow the advent of the Antichrist and the bang or whimper of the world’s end depends on our individual and collective capacities to make informed decisions that call for moral courage — capacities that have been eroded by technologically-induced oblivion, historical, moral, and metaphysical forgetfulness, and our ingrained habit of “ced[ing] direction over our interior lives, the development of our moral selves, to the market”. Contemplating our predicament, it is hard not to feel discouraged. Hope alone remains in the Pandora’s box our clever man-gods have constructed — hope, without which the understanding (at least, for those whose prayers delivers no consolation) would be plagued by the perplexity and fear that have flown therefrom. It’s time to take it out of the box and hold it close to our hearts and minds, where it might inspire new growths of wisdom.

Time has given the SS some posthumous victories. Surveys conducted in the US and UK show that memory of the Holocaust has faded like an old family photograph. The median age of Holocaust survivors is now 86, which means that half of them were six or younger in 1945 — too young to bear witness to much of anything. Soon, everyone who saw the inside of a Nazi camp or ghetto will be dead, and what happened in these God-forsaken places will disappear completely from living memory. Worse, political opportunism and widespread antisemitism have distorted the way the Holocaust is remembered. Eighty years on, Western shame about the Holocaust has turned into blame of the Jews.

The Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC) recently called for a boycott of Holocaust Memorial Day in the UK, insisting that the Gaza “genocide” be recognised as well. This is an old story: the Muslim Council of Britain was boycotting the event 20 years ago. What is new is the sudden acceptability of public expressions of Jew-hatred in the Anglosphere after October 7. The sight of large, keffiyeh-adorned mobs in London, New York, Montreal, and Sydney, marching in support of Hamas and calling through bullhorns for the death of Jews, would have been unimaginable just 16 months ago. These demonstrations have emboldened hard-core antisemites, in a radical-chic cosplay of Kristallnacht, to deface and burn Jewish businesses, schools, and synagogues.

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The gatekeepers of high culture and intellectual life have played their part in this tawdry farce, embracing a binary ideology of oppressors and oppressed that has emanated from our universities. Academic societies and journals have overtly or covertly boycotted Israeli professors, while publishers, literary agents, art galleries, and cinemas have blacklisted Jewish writers, artists, performers, and film producers. These intellectuals claim to be anti-fascists, concerned above all with the fundamental human values of equality and justice. But political space curves like the Earth: go far enough Left and you’ll be far-Right.

Pro-Hamas demonstrations, encampments, and building takeovers proliferated on college campuses after October 7. Faculty and administrators have encouraged groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine, much as an earlier generation of academics, equally eager to demonstrate the political relevance of their radical ideas, stirred up the militant students of their day. In his infamous 1933 Rectoral Address to the University of Freiburg, the philosopher Martin Heidegger described Hitler as a new revelation of Being for the German people and praised student organisations that were “on the march” for Nazism. German theologians similarly worked to fashion a myth of Jesus as a forerunner of Nazism. They portrayed Hitler as the second coming of Christ, an Aryan saviour who promised to finish the work that Jesus failed to complete: the total extermination of Jews and Judaism.

The Nazis weren’t the first to appropriate the divine history of human salvation for demonic purposes, making the State — with its political sermons, sacred dogmas, rituals, indulgences, excommunications, and sacrificial victims — a new Church. These innovations were introduced by the Communists, whose utopian fantasies of universal happiness claimed something like 100 million lives in the 20th century. Today, the delusion that a permanent solution to humanity’s problems can be achieved by eliminating a nation, a people, or a class has been revitalised by neo-Marxist academic theories that see society as a zero-sum competition between rival groups, in which success is achieved only on the backs of other groups.

No one should be surprised that Jews have yet again been singled out for scapegoating, this time in the name of social justice. A major survey recently found that nearly half of adults worldwide hold “significant antisemitic views”, which means they agreed with at least six of 11 antisemitic tropes, including “Jews don’t care what happens to anyone but their own kind”, “People hate Jews because of the way Jews behave”, “Jews’ loyalty is only to Israel”, and “Jews are responsible for most of the world’s wars”.

When the Nuremberg trials exposed the crimes of the Nazis for all the world to see, the West understood that what they did to the Jews was pure evil. To say that’s no longer the case would be an understatement. Seen through the twin lenses of antisemitism and critical theory, the Holocaust looks both too little and too big. Too big, because the Jews are viewed as having claimed an unfair share of victimhood, which  is now understood to be yet another zero-sum good that must be redistributed to other groups. Too little, because there is supposedly nothing special about the Holocaust — or for that matter, about the worst attack on Jews in 80 years. A feminist I know refused to speak out about the rape, torture, murder, and abduction of hundreds of Israeli women on October 7 because that sort of thing “is happening every day” to women around the world.

That’s not true—yet. But those who want to “globalise the Intifada” are effectively calling for a worldwide pogrom: October 7 on an endless loop. That’s the logical conclusion of antisemitism in its current form, a crowdsourced Auschwitz for the 21st century. While the future is unknowable, it would be a serious mistake to regard the Holocaust as dead, or even past: American adults may know little about it, but 76% of them believe it could happen again. If that doesn’t freeze your blood, you haven’t been paying attention.

Universities urgently need reform. Henry Adams, who graduated from tiny Harvard College in 1858, wrote that his alma mater left the mind “open”, “supple”, and “ready to receive knowledge”. Few would say that today about any elite American university or liberal arts college. The top schools, and many lower-ranked ones as well, have become grim centres of cancellation, progressivist indoctrination, and self-censorship.

To understand how higher education reached this deplorable state, we must return to the 19th century.

Back in 1874, Nietzsche wrote that universities must be quiet enclosures where the young, protected from the noise of the day, can become “finished, ripe and harmonious personalities”. But he perceived that the primary objective of the modern research university — which was born in Germany, and came into its own in the US at the turn of the 20th century — was social utility, not individual growth and ripeness. The young, Nietzsche lamented in his On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, were “to be trained for the purpose of the age and to lend a hand as soon as possible”.

The world wars of the 20th century only exacerbated this narrow intellectual presentism. In 1946, George Orwell wrote that “there is no such thing as keeping out of politics”, and the university was no exception. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Europe was focused on repairing its ruined infrastructure and economy, and these tasks — to say nothing of the rapidly expanding US military-industrial complex — called for technical expertise. The result was what German philosopher Josef Pieper decried as an industrial model of education, in which teaching and learning were judged exclusively by the criterion of “social service”.

Pressed by an increasingly complex age’s demand for specialists, universities eventually lost whatever integral vision of education still animated their faculties. As Wendell Berry observed in his 1984 essay “The Loss of the University”, the faculty no longer understood that “the thing being made in a university is humanity”. Academics had ceased to speak or teach the “common tongue” that for millennia had formed “responsible heirs and members of culture”. For Berry, while liberal education resembled the trunk of a tree from which it is possible to branch out — a tree of life — the contemporary academy was “a loose collection of lopped branches waving about randomly in the air”.

By the mid-Eighties, something new — or rather, something as old and stale as a secret policeman’s office — was in the air. Universities had come to understand service to society not just in economic terms, but in ideological ones too. The activist seeds of the Sixties — in particular Herbert Marcuse’s call for “intolerance against movements from the Right” — had been blowing in the wind for decades, and were taking root well beyond campus walls.

Marcuse, who combined (and in the process deformed) the thought of Marx and Freud, fathered the so-called New Left. He inspired generations of radical activists and professors, including Angela Davis and Abbie Hoffman, and laid the foundations of what is today known as critical theory. Marcuse rejected the basic traditions of American political life, including free speech. Tolerance, he wrote in 1965, “cannot protect false words and wrong deeds which demonstrate that they contradict and counteract the possibilities of liberation”. Channeling the Sixties’ “Make Love, Not War” vibe, he aimed to liberate our erotic nature from social constraints, but ignored Freud’s warnings that the monsters in the basement of the psyche must be kept behind locked doors.

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With the release of aggressive and nihilistic resentment, ever more ground had to be cleared in the university curriculum for new growths of political activism. In 1987, Jesse Jackson led 500 students at Stanford in chanting “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go”. In 1989, Stanford’s “Western Culture” humanities programme, mandatory for all undergraduates, was replaced by one that featured “more inclusive works on race, class, and gender”.

Some tried to fight back, but their attempts were futile. In 1991, Yale alumnus Lee Bass gave $20 million to his alma mater to fund a Western Civilisation curriculum. The curriculum was never implemented, and in 1995 Yale returned the money.

These developments were not limited to esteemed institutions such as Stanford and Yale: elite universities have a huge impact on the composition of the professoriate at every level, from community college to research university. One decade-long study published in 2022 showed that the most prestigious PhD-granting departments (those in the top 20%) train 80% of American professors in any given field. That includes schools and departments of education, which generally attract faculty and graduate teachers and future administrators who are steeped in identity politics.

Unsurprisingly, while liberals have significantly outnumbered conservatives and moderates in the professoriate since at least 1960, the percentage of those who identify as liberal and far-Left has skyrocketed in recent decades. A 2018 survey of 8,688 tenure track, PhD–holding professors from top liberal arts colleges in the United States found that the ratio of registered Democrats to registered Republicans in the field of history was 17.4 to 1, in philosophy 17.5 to 1, in English 48.3 to 1, and in religion 70 to 1. This imbalance — present in every one of the 24 academic subjects surveyed — is likely higher today, as professors have moved further Left along with the Democratic Party.

In 2024, little remains of the great hard oak of the West in university curricula — and what does is often pulped and strained through a steel mesh of criticism so as to extract object lessons in inequality and injustice. Universities still pay lip service to the goal of graduating well-formed human beings, but far too many punish independent thought and reward ideological conformity. Applicants to elite institutions, many coached by expensive consultants, have for decades been evaluated according to largely non-academic measures. This explains the decreasing percentage of Asian and Jewish students in the Ivy Leagues and other top-tier schools. If you want to be admitted to these universities, or for that matter to win a Rhodes Scholarship or any other highly prestigious award, it helps enormously to be a member of a favoured minority who can speak the language of DEI, critical race theory, intersectionality, and settler colonialism.

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All of which raises Lenin’s favourite question: “What is to be done?” In Hope Against Hope, a memoir of life under Stalin, Nadezhda Mandelstam wrote of Soviet leaders who, “ensconced in their ivory towers”, thought that they could “build the present out of the bricks of the future”. Today we find ourselves in a similar predicament. We do not need social engineers. We need leaders and citizens who can think for themselves: who understand the conditions of human flourishing, see things whole, and exercise sound judgment.

The good news is that most Americans seem to agree. There were many reasons for Donald Trump’s landslide victory in the presidential election, including inflation, open borders, and a feckless foreign policy. But voters were also fed up with elites who use their power as platforms for ideological scolding and radical activism.

Trump has vowed to eliminate “Marxist diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucrats”. That includes dismissing the current national higher education accrediting agencies, only six of which are authorised to accredit four-year colleges and universities. One agency requires that “the institution defines and acts with intention to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion in all its activities”. Another explains that “an equity framework should permeate… all levels of institutions.” A third obliges institutions to “focus on equity”. New, non-ideological entrants into the accreditation space are sorely needed.

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Even with control of both house of Congress, how much Trump and McMahon can accomplish in the face of Democratic opposition and widespread hostility among federal employees remains to be seen. But if they want to Make Education Great Again, they need to make it easier to start new universities. Regulatory capture is the rule in higher education, even in red states. When the University of Austin (where I am provost) received state authorisation in 2023 to open its doors to students, it was the first new secular institution to do so in Texas in over 60 years. And although our first class of freshmen matriculated this September, these students can receive no federal financial aid until we are accredited, which cannot occur before they graduate. Nor can their parents use popular 529 education savings plans to pay their tuition.

Yet ours is a model whose time has come —as a CBS News feature makes clear. Like rowers, future builders, leaders, and founders need to look back to the past in order to move into the future. Our curriculum turns on the civilisationally productive tensions between tradition and innovation, reason and revelation, authority and freedom, the individual and society. We introduce students to the knowledge and wisdom of our ancestors, compel them to apply those lessons to today’s pressing challenges, and equip them with the 21st-century skills they need in order to do so — all in an atmosphere of open inquiry and civil discourse. For the next four years, at least, institutions that want to try similar pedagogical experiments will have fresh wind in their sails.

It’s a risky business for a people to remember the grievous wounds they have suffered, especially when they are still raw and the evil that would destroy them rages on. But tomorrow, Israelis and diaspora Jews will be compelled to think about the mass murders, tortures, rapes, and kidnappings that 6,000 Gazan invaders perpetrated a year ago. On the liturgical anniversary of the deaths of 1,200 victims, relatives will say Yahrzeit prayers to commemorate them. And even secular Jews will pause to grieve an event that plunged Israel into a war on multiple fronts and ignited worldwide displays of antisemitism.

The Jews have more to forget about than any people in history: captivities and resettlements, expulsions, confiscations, pogroms, and genocide. Yet for three millennia, they’ve displayed a miraculous capacity to overcome hardships and begin anew. Their irrepressible life-force has repeatedly helped them forget the immediate past and rebuild shattered lives.

But the rising waters of forgetfulness can be as perilous as those of memory. Israeli leaders and security officials forgot the measureless hatred and viciousness of those running Gaza and Lebanon. Diaspora Jews, at least in Anglophone nations, foolishly convinced themselves that antisemitism was a thing of the past. Both groups, exemplified in this respect by the young doves who celebrated “friends, love and infinite freedom” at the Supernova music festival where 364 people were murdered, let their wish to live in peace and security be father to the thought that their goal was virtually at hand.

In the United States, many Jews on the Left implicitly forgot their faith when they embraced identitarian progressivism. Since the days of the prophet Isaiah, Judaism has emphasised care for the poor, the oppressed, the widow and the orphan. To many Jews, explanatory frameworks such as critical race theory and intersectionality seemed to advance these noble aims. During Obama’s presidency, social justice activism began to invade American synagogue services. But when the people these Jews had mistaken for allies vigorously supported Hamas after October 7, it became impossible to ignore the fact that progressive ideology is fundamentally antisemitic.

How does it feel for Jews to realise that their supposed friends effectively wish them ill? More or less, I’d say, like the survivor Simon Srebnik felt when he returned to Chelmno decades after the Nazis exterminated 400,000 Jews in that Polish village. In a scene in the epic Holocaust documentary Shoah, Srebnik is surrounded by old men and women who remember him walking in chains as a teenager and are “very pleased” to see him again. They are standing outside a church where Jews were imprisoned before being gassed. A woman states that the doomed Jews “called on Jesus and Mary and God” for salvation; a man says that, when “the Jews condemned the innocent Christ to death”, they cried out “Let his blood fall on our heads and on our sons’ heads”. Srebnik smiles stiffly as they justify the persecution he suffered as a Jew even as they express affection for him.

The explosion of antisemitism after October 7 bodes ill for everyone, not just the Jews. That’s because the fundamental Jewish values — biblical faith; a reverence for tradition; the preservation of the family; national solidarity; the protection of state borders; attachment to the land of one’s ancestors — are the basic values of Western civilisation. I’m reminded of the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s chilling prophecy, in his 1846 book Two Ages, that the late-modern phenomenon of levelling — the ongoing destruction of the organic communities which have sustained human beings for millennia — is “a demon that no individual can control”. He predicted that levelling will be a global phenomenon, driven by an ideological abstraction so extreme as to be utterly devoid of ethical and political content. “Not even national individuality will be able to halt it,” he wrote, “for the abstraction of levelling is related to a higher negativity: pure humanity.” It is this utterly vacuous concept — pure humanity, without respect for actually existing individuals and the thick bonds of family, congregation, locality, and peoplehood of which their lives are woven — that animates the angry mobs of atomised Westerners whose call to “globalise the intifada” expresses their implicit desire to destroy civilisation as such.

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That nihilistic desire springs, in large part, from a failure to transmit the precious wisdom of our ancestors “from generation to generation” (l’dor vador in Hebrew). The result has been widespread cultural forgetfulness concerning the conditions of a decent human life. But Western antisemitism seems to be rooted in another kind of forgetfulness as well, one bordering on the psychological category of repression. We human beings perversely find it difficult to forgive others for the wrongs we’ve done them. Instead of paying our moral debts, we prefer to let them slip from memory while fabricating justifications for doing so. For some Europeans, the guilt of the Holocaust is assuaged by associating Israelis with Nazis and accusing them of genocide.

The Islamist enemies of Israel are consumed with bitterness and envy. Their goal, a demonic inversion of good and evil, is purely negative. They remember — and in a perverse manner observe — the Jewish holy days. The unspeakable atrocities of October 7 occurred on Simchat Torah, the celebration of the completion of the annual liturgical cycle of public Torah readings. Hamas’s barbaric attack was explicitly directed against Judaism as well as Jews.

What Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iran, and the other Islamist enemies of Israel have forgotten is that God chose the Jews to be a light unto the nations. Dispersed throughout the world, their light seems small and weak when times are good, but shines most brightly in the deepest darkness. The attacks of October 7 have stirred in the Jews — Hasidic and atheistic; Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, and Sephardic; Indian, Chinese, Australian, and American — what Lincoln called “the mystic chords of memory”. Today, in an existential crisis that may turn out to be the denouement of the central drama of Western civilisation, these unwilling protagonists — the whole people of Israel — are determined to defend themselves and the light they carry.

Americans have suffered bruising blows for four years now: the Covid shutdown, urban riots and crime, ballooning inflation and debt, open borders, civil strife, the gloating of our enemies and the collapse of the international order. The electorate is weary and dispirited, and seems ready, like a boxer on his last legs, to take a sweet nap on the canvas. 

Kamala Harris’s handlers understand this perfectly well. Having accurately discerned the national mood, they have made her the woman of the hour. She seems to float above all weighty issues. In her campaign poster “Forward”, a knockoff of the iconic Obama “Hope” image, her uplifted gaze radiates joy and “upliftment”. Her invocation of “What can be, unburdened by what has been” is happy and hopeful.

If all that sounds attractive, consider that Harris’s candidacy involves a deep memory-wipe. Politically speaking, she has sprung into being as a fully formed adult with no discernible past or historical recall. Her plan to control food prices repeats a common, famine-inducing error of communist regimes. Her tough-on-crime and border-securing persona rests not just on amnesia, but on media-driven amnesty. And yet, propelled forward by the cheerful drone of the “KHive ” and the good vibrations of “Brat summer”, Harris may surf all the way to the Oval Office.

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However, she won’t get there without the votes of one crucial constituency: the Lotus-Eaters, a mythical tribe now found right here in America.

In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus and his crew encounter the Lotus-Eaters at a moment of great vulnerability. After 10 years of grinding war, the Greeks had finally defeated the Trojans and sacked their city. Pushing off for home with Trojan women and loot, Odysseus’s 12 ships were driven off course by strong winds to the land of the Cicones, an actual historical tribe, where they sustained heavy losses in a pitched battle. Then they narrowly avoided total destruction amid “a howling, demonic gale”. Making for the western isle of Ithaca after the weather cleared, they sailed south to Cape Malea, where the fingers of the Peloponnesus extend into the Mediterranean.

But they were far from home. After a tantalising glimpse of native soil, they were torn out to sea by high winds and a ripping tide. Nine days later they arrived, “bent with pain and bone-tired”, in the Never-Never Land of the Lotus-Eaters. By then, they must have wanted only to lay their heads on the sand and sleep. Mental and physical exhaustion had prepared them to ingest the Lotus, a “honey-sweet fruit” that left the body intact but wiped away the mind.

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The Lotus-Eaters didn’t attempt to kill the men Odysseus sent to scout the land. They don’t seem even to have spoken with them: they “simply gave them the Lotus to taste”. The fruit induced profound forgetfulness. Those who ate it “no longer wished to report back or return” to their shipmates. They ceased to care about anything or anyone. They desired only “to remain with the Lotus-Eaters, feeding on lotus, and to forget about their homeward journey [nostos]”.

Nostos is the root of “nostalgia”, the pain associated with the thought of home. Odysseus’s men must have felt that pain intensely. The Lotus was for them a powerful analgesic, precisely because it induced a kind of total amnesia. For home is not just one thing among others. To forget about home, to cease to feel its deep tug, is to forget about everything: spouse and children, farmhouse and fields; the city of one’s birth and the graves of one’s ancestors; “the ashes of one’s fathers and the temples of one’s gods” — all that, held in memory, inwardly nourishes involuntary exiles by giving hope and meaning to their struggle and suffering.

This amnesia is not just personal. It wipes away all patriotic feeling, all care for the polity that gave one life and liberty. It annihilates cultural and historical memory, the rich topsoil of the past from which all future growths spring. All that remains for those who ingest the Lotus is a sterile present. More than that, its effect is metaphysical: it obliterates the pith and ground of our individual and collective being. Nostos and nous, “intellect”, both derive from an Indo-European root meaning “return to light and life”. The Lotus kills all spiritual and intellectual effort to uncover transcendent, humanly essential truth and to rescue it from oblivion.  

This is not to say that some degree of filtering — forgetting or ignoring things better left in the dark — isn’t essential to life. Every living thing, Nietzsche observes, “can become healthy, fruitful, and strong only within a horizon”. But when our horizons contract to the infinitesimal dimensions of the vanishing present, we are condemned to idiocy. This is the work of the Lotus, a potent symbol of the forces that today militate against memory: censorship, identity politics, ideological litmus-tests, the erosion of free speech, the replacement of education with indoctrination, and the noise of our digitally-distracted age, which drowns out whatever authentic and prophetic voices might otherwise still be heard. 

Today, the Harris campaign has cleverly repackaged oblivion as a panacea. Forget about the spirit of Tennyson’s Ulysses, who urged his men “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”.  The way forward, we are told, is to lay down our citizenly oars — to forget where we’ve been or where we thought we were going, and submit to being carried along in a joyful stupor by the ship of state. Never mind that it’s unclear who is steering that ship, or the destination they have in mind. 

In Homer’s epic, Odysseus dragged his scouts away from the Lotus, lashed them under the rowing benches, and once again took to the heaving seas. Ours, though, is an age not of heroes, but of know-nothings and buffoons who wish only to take us for a ride. This is more the stuff of comedy than of epic. Many would agree, of course, that it would be tragic to succumb to the political equivalent of a lobotomy. Yet in the blank and leaden eyes of those who have traded their human past and future for a zombie-like narcosis, such an exchange would not rise even to the dignity of error.

These bizarre events are shrouded in mystery. Conspiracy theories abound. Did Trump arrange for the shooter to nick his ear with a bullet so that he could rise from the ground bloodied but unbowed? Did the Democrats blackmail Biden into ending his campaign? Who, if anyone, is in charge?

Unfortunately, Western democracies require high levels of trust to survive. It’s what distinguishes us from, say, Somalia, where warring clans settle disputes by bloodshed. But we seem to be devolving rapidly into our own warring clans. Trump’s opponents have worked for years to paint him as a racist, a bigot, an antisemite, and a Nazi. They’ve slandered and libelled his supporters, too, and the poisonous fruit of these concerted efforts is now ripe for picking. What is more, the opaque machinations of the Democrats to remove Biden from the ticket are strongly reminiscent of Shakespearean hugger-mugger, with Kamala Harris playing a wheedling Regan or Goneril to Biden’s King Lear.

Witnessing the ongoing collapse of the American polity, one tries to find words for what is happening. The catastrophic error of our time goes beyond nasty political partisanship, and is not confined to our shores. It is easily described, but almost impossible to fix. Put simply, we’ve forgotten what civilisation is, and who we are without its distinctions and proscriptions: wild and vicious animals.

Nothing captures our terrible obliviousness better than Werner Herzog’s 2005 film Grizzly Man. Timothy Treadwell, the film’s subject, spent 13 summers living among the bears of Alaska’s Katmai National Park. Treadwell is a characteristically postmodern man. His is a story of self-promotion and heartfelt, boundless imitation; as one man tells Herzog: “He tried to be a bear” An actor who took to alcohol and drugs after he lost a leading role on the sitcom Cheers, Treadwell starred in his own production while in the wilderness. In almost 100 hours of footage, he presented himself as the heroic protector of his grizzly “friends” against the (mostly imagined) threat of poachers. His sincere and passionate devotion to the bears landed him on the Discovery Channel and the Late Show with David Letterman.

So compelling was Treadwell’s long-running drama that the ending wrote itself. One wind-whipped October night in 2003, battened down at their campsite against the storm, he and his girlfriend Amie Huguenard were killed and eaten by an ursine stranger, a hungry interloper from the park’s interior. That bear was later shot, and his corpse was eaten by other bears. (Cannibalism is a common practice among grizzlies, who will eat their cubs when other sources of food dry up.) Having failed at comedy and achieved modest success in action-adventure, Treadwell is remembered almost entirely for his role as the tragic protagonist of Herzog’s documentary.

Treadwell, Herzog says in the course of his film, died “fighting civilisation itself” — something many people are now doing in many different ways, all of which involve transgressing what used to be cultural red lines. Their error, like his, is one of egoistic projection, in which the laziness of beautiful, self-promoting wishes substitutes for concentrated thought about hard truths. Herzog observes that Treadwell believed he and the grizzlies, apex predators that bring down moose and elk, “would bond as children of the universe”. Mistaking the unforgiving Alaskan wilderness for a paradise of natural goodness and concord, he allowed a quasi-religious fantasy to obscure a harsh reality. “[He] reached out seeking a primordial encounter,” Herzog says, “but in doing so he crossed an invisible borderline.” Others in Grizzly Man echo this assessment. A helicopter pilot who helped to recover Treadwell’s remains thinks he acted “like he was working with people wearing bear costumes”, while a curator of the Alutiiq Museum remarks that he “crossed a boundary [between man and bear] that we [the Alutiiq] have lived with for 7,000 years”.

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Herzog himself displays what it means to be civilised in filming Grizzly Man, discreetly suppressing an audio recording of the fatal attack and refusing to air Treadwell’s obscene rant against named employees of the Park Service — “a line… which we will not cross”. He blames Treadwell’s death on his “sentimentalised view that everything out there was good and the universe in balance and in harmony”. In the blank eyes of a grizzly that Treadwell captured on video just days before his death — possibly the very one that killed him and his girlfriend — Herzog sees “only the overwhelming indifference of nature”. What is more, he remarks, “I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility, and murder”. Herzog seems to be describing not just nature but human nature, whose ferocious depths are easily forgotten in times of prosperity and stability.

You can’t say we weren’t warned. In the foundational mythology of the Greek poet Hesiod, all things, starting with Earth and Heaven, emerged from Chaos. But while you can take human beings out of chaos, you can’t take chaos out of human beings. Greek tragedy was from the beginning obsessed with the problem of how to keep civilisation from collapsing into the primordial disorder from which it emerged. Everything turned on the maintenance of basic distinctions that opened the space of civilisation in which human life was possible. This space was defined by a matrix of oppositions: citizen vs. foreigner, adult vs. child, man vs. woman, Greek vs. barbarian, animal vs. human being vs. god. Greek tragedy and comedy dramatically displayed the breakdown of these distinctions, with results that were either horrific and pitiable or simply ludicrous.

The earliest tragedies, from the late 6th century BC, told the story of how the cult of Dionysus, a god closely associated with nature, came from Asia to conquer the Greek cities. Euripides’s Bacchae, one of the last great tragedies, covered the same ground. In the Bacchae, Dionysus avenges himself on the rulers of his native city of Thebes, who deny his divinity. In doing so, he lives up to his reputation of being the absolute Other, a paradoxical god who scrambles all that should be separated and defies the laws of logic. An immortal who appears in the disguise of a young man, Dionysus is, in effect, a grizzly bear in human costume. He is ambiguously masculine and effeminate, Theban and foreign, Greek and barbarian, tame and wild. Present everywhere yet nowhere, he is sober, cruel, and, like nature itself, “most terrible, yet most gentle, to mankind”. By the end of the play, the complete collapse of the civilisational matrix is visible onstage, where a palace lies in ruins and the mother of young King Pentheus cradles his decapitated head.

The Bacchae exposes the darkest depths of the human psyche, where tenderness is inseparable from viciousness. For it is the Theban women, led by Pentheus’s mother, who tear him limb from limb. They do this not as Bacchants, peaceful celebrants of Dionysus who had earlier “nestled gazelles and young wolves in their arms, / suckling them” on a wild mountainside, but as Maenads (from the Greek mania): furious destroyers of human worlds. And the play’s true horror derives from the women’s instantaneous transition between these two seemingly opposed modes of being, one Edenic and pastoral, the other homicidally insane.

Grizzly Man is in essential respects a postmodern reprise of the Bacchae. In one scene, a seaplane pilot remembers the horror that awaited him when he arrived to fly Treadwell and Huguenard out of the wilderness. As a thick swarm of flies and mosquitoes buzz around him, the pilot recalls finding “what was left of Tim’s body, his head, and a little bit of backbone attached, and we found a hand, arm, wristwatch still attached”. Treadwell’s grisly end makes his very name sound like a warning. One is reminded of Pentheus’s murder, when crazed females shout in triumph while he shrieks in terror. “One tore off an arm, / another a foot still warm in its shoe.” This, Euripides suggests, is what happens when fundamental differences are erased and clear thinking gives way to labile sentiment and emotion.

Dionysus is the god of wine and intoxication. A modern-dress production of the Bacchae might make him a grungy, long-haired, androgynous hippie from the Sixties, wearing bell-bottom jeans and an army jacket with a painted peace symbol, handing out psychedelic drugs that induce pleasant highs followed by nightmares. The era of communes and “make love, not war”, after all, was also a time of murder and mayhem. Who can forget the Manson Family cult or the wide-eyed lunacy of its leader? Freed from long-standing societal constraints, raw feeling reveals itself to be a heaving sea of chaos.

Yet we are busily wiping away all the boundaries and borders of civilised life in the suicidal pursuit of some ill-defined vision of justice and equity. Gangs of criminals loot stores in major cities with impunity. Illegal immigrants are treated like citizens, and private citizens are surveilled like malicious foreigners. We no longer care to observe the difference between males and females. The new libertinism of drugs, pornography, and electronic amusements frees adults to remain in perpetual childhood, while encouraging children prematurely to abandon their innocence. The family is collapsing because there are too few men willing to protect and nurture it as husbands and fathers, and too few women insisting that they do so. Animal liberation extremists, “furry communities”, trans-, post-, and anti-humanist philosophies, and the relentless advance of AI are progressively effacing the differences between human beings, animals, and machines. Even logic and analytical precision are now attacked as instruments of oppression.

Can we really be surprised that many Americans, frightened and confused by a world turned upside down, have gone mad and are ready to tear apart the body politic? Or that many Westerners, cut adrift from civilisational moorings, support Islamist jihadis who gang-raped Israeli women and played with a breast they’d severed from a victim?

There’s an old joke about a Greek tailor who tells a man trying on trousers, if “Euripides, you buy-a-dees”. This is a humorous way of expressing the tragic wisdom of pathei mathos, “learning by suffering”. Our civilisational clothes are torn, but we lack the knowledge and the energy to mend them. Nor do we have new garments to cover our nakedness. Little wonder that so many of us are reverting to the nasty and brutish condition of nature, and are behaving like wild beasts or psychopathic gods.

While the maligned figure of the Jew has historically been an all-purpose scapegoat, one thing seems clear enough. Western antisemitism is now primarily fuelled by identity politics, a cultural version of Marxism that analyses injustice not in terms of class, but of race, sex, ethnicity and religion. For the radical avant-garde of 2024, the revolutionary agent of global justice is not the proletariat — the united workers of the world that Marx expected to overthrow capitalism and birth the Communist utopia — but Hamas. And yet, today’s cultural Marxists nevertheless recapitulate the moral and intellectual deficiencies of the master’s philosophy. They, too, reject the central teachings of the Bible, twist and debase its narrative of salvation, and embody the fratricidal spitefulness against which it repeatedly inveighs.

Start with the perverse elevation of brutal terrorists with roots in Nazism. Most people recognise evil when they see it. Marx muddies the waters by locating evil not in individuals, but in society. While he disdains capitalists and Jews (two groups he regards as virtually identical), he rejects the pre-modern consensus of Hebrews and Christians that man is by nature a depraved animal. In this, he follows Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Comparing miserable 18th-century Europeans with the “noble savage” of his imagination, a happy and compassionate being whose existence he inferred from reading anthropological accounts of native Americans and Africans, Rousseau concluded that men and women are by nature as good as Adam and Eve on the day of creation. But institutions like the division of labour and private property, cornerstones of Western civilisation, have made them servile and vicious.

In suggesting that civilisation is a source of withering illness, Rousseau sowed the seeds of late-modern revolutionary nihilism. For if civilisation makes us sick, why not just tear it down? More immediately, his gauzy idealisation of human nature greatly encouraged the French revolutionaries, who struck directly at what they took to be the roots of the sickness. Seeking to wipe away the old ways so that they might reconstruct society according to abstract principles, they slaughtered priests, peasants, nobles, and royalty, watering the soil of liberté, égalité, and fraternité with rivers of blood. It was DEI with guillotines.

Marx framed Rousseau’s seminal ideas in economic terms, producing a sweeping material history to rival the Bible’s sacred one. He argued that evolving modes of production determine nothing less than the systemic organisation of societies and the form and content of their predominant opinions. His apocalyptic vision of salvation through revolutionary liberation from injustice is a secular adaptation of the book of Revelation. Here, too, the faithful are saved, but fundamental values are transposed. While the heroes of old — Macauley’s “brave Horatius, / the Captain of the gate”; Beowulf, slayer of Grendel, a monster of “Cain’s clan” — defended civilisation, Marx cemented in the popular consciousness the romantic idea of the anti-hero, who tears it down. The seeds of radical chic, epitomised in Che Guevara T-shirts,  were planted in the Communist Manifesto.

Observing the Dickensian wretchedness of English factory workers in the first half of the 19th century, Marx argued that capitalism oppresses workers by alienating them from their labour, its products, their historically malleable “species being”, and, through class antagonisms, their fellow human beings. These injustices corrupt and debase all social classes, from the high and powerful — the owners of capital — to the Lumpenproletariat, the lowest of the low: a “social scum” of criminals and vagrants who function as “bribed tool[s] of reactionary intrigue”. Only one class, the proletariat, is an exception to this rule. Mind-deadening labour and grinding poverty strips these workers of health, education, security, sobriety — everything but the delusion of religion, the “opiate of the masses”. Yet, Marx insists, they differ from all other social classes under capitalism in one decisive respect: because capitalist society has given them nothing but misery, they have zero interest in its preservation.

The proletariat, Marx maintains, is the only class capable of acting not in its own particular interest, but that of humanity itself. This “universal class” offers salvation for mankind — but only if it remains faithful to Marx’s radical catechism, which calls for the global revolution of the united workers of the world. This bloody Armageddon will birth the Communist society, the earthly paradise that is the “solution to the riddle of history”. That would be the riddle of injustice, whose permanent and final “solution” (a mathematical term later echoed by fascist revolutionaries in regard to what they called the Jewish Question) was believed by our more patient and moderate ancestors to be known only to God.

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Marxism turns the Bible on its head. The proletariat are the oppressed who will end oppression, the downtrodden who will inherit the earth — not by meekness, but by self-assertion. Jesus overturned the tables of the Temple’s moneylenders. Marx takes more pointed and vicious aim, not at the corruption of a sacred space, but at the Jews themselves. He repeatedly associates the people of Israel with hucksterism and capitalist oppression. “Money is the jealous god of Israel,” he wrote in On The Jewish Question, “in face of which no other god may exist.” After the revolution, he predicts, Jewish particularity will have disappeared, to be replaced by universal humanity. The earthly paradise will not be merely classless: it will be Judenrein.

Marx, whose grandfather was a rabbi and whose father converted to Lutheranism, also drew on the Hebrew Scriptures. The prophet Isaiah calls the Jews a people chosen by God to be “a light unto the nations”. But Marx’s Chosen People are neither Jews nor Christians, younger siblings who claimed to be the new bearers of the light. They are the proletariat: ignorant, destitute, atomised labourers who nevertheless, Marx supposes, feel no envy or vengefulness. So good and pure are they, he predicts, that they will give up their revolutionary dictatorship after a time and let the state “wither away”.

In romanticising the proletariat, Marx ignores the fratricidal enmity elicited, since the days of Cain and Abel, by those whose sacrifices God has favoured. With demonic frenzy, Hamas raped, tortured, murdered and dismembered Israelis on October 7. These berserkers seem to bear in their bones the outcast’s envy of civilised order and happiness, and in particular the rancour of their ancestor, Ishmael. Cast out by Abraham and passed over by God in favour of Isaac, progenitor of the Israelites, Ishmael grew to be “a wild ass of a man— / his hand against all, the hand of all against him”. Yet he never hated Abraham or Isaac the way Palestinian Islamists hate the Jews, with a hatred that is surely increased by the fact that they are doubly exiled, inasmuch as no other Arab and Muslim lands will have them.

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But competition for the exalted status of Chosenness has been a source of antisemitism among Christians as well. Late in life, Dostoevsky embraced a messianic vision of the end of days, when a great battle would unfold between the spirit of the Russian people, destined to save mankind with “self-denying unselfishness”, and that of the tyrannical and self-serving Jews. God, he wrote, promised the Jews: “thou art the only one before God; destroy the others or enslave and exploit them.” This interpretation paves the way for contemporary antisemitism and anti-Zionism by perversely making the people of Israel the first among nations in moral darkness.

Dostoevsky maintained that the suffering of Russian peasants before the elimination of serfdom exceeded any misery the Jews had ever experienced. His elevation of the Russians and demotion of the Jews reflects the zero-sum logic of the victimisation sweepstakes, in which every winner entails a loser, every plus a minus. Identity politics involves a similar logic. The theory of intersectionality recycles Marx’s idea that all forms of injustice are systemically interconnected. This means that no single category of oppression can be eliminated unless all are. And as with capitalists and the proletariat, opposed groups epitomise both injustice and its antithesis, sacrificial suffering in the cause of human liberation. A popular diagram explaining intersectionality contrasts categories of “Privilege” with those of “Oppression/Resistance” — a phrase that suggests noble opposition to tyrannical injustice. The diagram lists among the privileged those who are “white”, “European”, “credentialed”, “upper and upper-middle class”, “anglophones”, and “light, pale”. Most Jews in the West, where intersectionality originated, are all of these things, while almost all Palestinians are none of them.

This analytical framework binds the people of Israel with the Palestinians in a fateful struggle. Other Western groups (e.g. Episcopalians) are by the measures of intersectionality also highly privileged. But none threaten the Palestinians’ attempt to be seen by Westerners as the new proletariat — the Chosen People of cultural Marxism — as do the Jews, whose ancient claim to divine election has subjected them to endless persecution. This is why Hamas finds it necessary to deny both the Holocaust and the Jews’ historical connection to the land of Israel — a denial echoed in the charge of “settler-colonialism” that is falsely and uniquely level against the Israelis.

With calls to “globalise the intifada” echoing on the campuses of the West, it’s become clear that today’s cultural Marxists are playacting in the only drama they’ve been taught by their radicalised professors. Unburdened by knowledge of the past, unfamiliar with the sacrifices laid by so many on the altar of freedom and ordered liberty, unacquainted with any but anti-heroes, these anarchists, schooled in the likes of Herbert Marcuse, Edward Said, and Frantz Fanon, have learned to regard civilisation as little more than a set of unreasonable constraints on their appetites. Their feverish imaginations transform perpetrators of unspeakable evil, washed not in the blood of the lamb but that of slaughtered Jews, into innocent martyrs in the cause of human liberation.

And it’s not just Hamas that benefits from this demonic alchemy. Marx’s knowledge that he belonged to the “small section of the ruling class [that] cuts itself adrift and joins the revolutionary class”, and that he effectively called the proletariat into being as a revolutionary agent by endowing it with class consciousness, must have considerably assuaged his bourgeois guilt. Hamas’s supporters, including many students and faculty at expensive, elite universities, are buoyed by a similar knowledge as they attempt to launch the “intifada revolution”. (Perhaps some of them, having embraced antisemitic conspiracy theories, figure that if any cabal controls society, it should be them.) Glamping undergraduates who complain that “finger painting for Palestine is cancelled; these people are animals!” — a remark recently overheard at the University of Texas, as police broke up a demonstration — have taken the torch from jihadis and are trying to set the world aflame with it. In doing so, they confirm the truth of Marx’s observation that “history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce”.

Aristotle writes in the Politics that man is by nature not just a social animal — one that finds mates, forms families and households, and comes together in larger communities for the sake of living well — but a political one. Other animals have voice [phonē], which vocalises pleasure and pain: think of a cat’s contented purring or a dog’s yelp when it’s stepped on. But only human beings have logos, a word whose primary meanings include “reason” and “speech”. Speech, Aristotle explains:

“serves to reveal the advantageous and the harmful, and hence also the just and the unjust. For it is peculiar to man as compared to the other animals that he alone has a perception of good and bad and just and unjust and other things [of this sort], and partnership in these things is what makes a household and a political community.”

Politics unfolds in debate and deliberation. It concerns the shared determination of what is advantageous and harmful, good and bad, and the acquisition, avoidance and just distribution of these things. And because deliberation and persuasion — unlike force and compulsion — actualise our highest human potentialities of reason and truth-seeking, they are integral to the good life.

A quick glance at what is today called politics shows just how far we have fallen from this Aristotelian standard. The middle ground of public life has mostly become a space not to reflect and discuss, but to emote; not to listen to others, but to heckle them. Debate on contested issues has given way to blame, shame and hectoring. Speakers are shouted down and chased from the podium. Tribal conflict has erased the lines dividing speech from violence, and arguments are often settled by intimidation rather than persuasion. People have learned to protect themselves by concealing or lying about their opinions.

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There is historical precedent for these developments in the fascist and communist movements of the 20th century, and it is not encouraging. In her memoir, Hope Abandoned, Nadezhda Mandelstam, wife of the poet Osip Mandelstam who was killed by the Soviet state, writes with powerful clarity about the collapse of thought, reason and speech in the USSR:

“Nothing can be predicted with certainty: people could even forget how to read altogether and books moulder away to dust. We might even stop talking to each other and communicate only by emitting call signs or blood curdling war cries. Sometimes I think this is what we are coming to. We did, after all, learn to speak in a lying code language designed to conceal our real thoughts. Our descendants pay for such things by losing the power of articulate speech altogether, caterwauling instead like fans at a football game.”

Mandelstam’s description of the degeneration of speech into animal voice — mobs howling their pain or pleasure like packs of wolves — draws directly from her own experience. She and Osip saw a woman torn to pieces by just such a mob during the civil war that started with the Bolshevik Revolution in the autumn of 1917.

There are many reasons for the disappearance of political logos. Social media, which has created sealed ideological echo chambers, is clearly to blame, as is the expansion of state surveillance and increasing control of economic and political activities. But so is human nature, sorely pressed by contemporary realities. “All human beings desire by nature to know,” Aristotle writes in the opening line of his Metaphysics. This seems right, with the qualification that some seek truth more than others — and that most people want other things, like avoiding ostracism and maintaining family comity, at least as much as they desire knowledge.

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Technology, at any rate, merely amplifies a disease to which all democratic republics are prone. From the time of Socrates to the present day, democracies have been plagued by the tyranny of public opinion — a tyranny that “leaves the body alone and goes straight for the soul”, as Alexis de Tocqueville observes in Democracy in America:

“The master no longer says: ‘Think like me or you die.’ He does say: ‘You are free not to think as I do; you can keep your life and property and all, but from this day you are a stranger among us… When you approach your fellows, they will shun you as an impure being, and even those who believe in your innocence will abandon you too, lets they in turn be shunned. Go in peace. I have given you your life, but it is a life worse than death.’”

Conformity of taste and opinion might not seem to be a big problem when the public is divided into hostile camps, as it is today. But the price of membership in these camps is the abandonment of individual judgment. The public space is no longer hospitable to spirited yet peaceful politics. It has become a field of conflict where herds of peevish cattle rush to lock horns.

The withering of individual capacities of thought has another consequence as well. It makes speech stupid and contributes to the essential unseriousness of public life. Søren Kierkegaard included the following apocalyptic parable in his 1843 book Either/Or:

“In a theatre, it happened that a fire started offstage. The clown came out to tell the audience. They thought it was a joke and applauded. He told them again, and they became still more hilarious. This is the way, I suppose, that the world will be destroyed —amid the universal hilarity of wits and wags who think it is all a joke.”

Plato, too, compared the public space to a theatre. He described Athenian democracy as a “wretched theatrocracy” in which sovereignty is in the hands of spectators hoping to be entertained. But Kierkegaard gives the analogy a new twist. The management of public affairs is today in the hands of clowns who put on a show for scribblers and pundits. These “wits and wags”, who clap and laugh but don’t listen, have no interest in what transpires away from the spotlight — or, as Americans say, “outside the beltway” that rings Washington, D.C. Yet it is there, in the homes, towns, and cities of the hinterland, that the pillars of civilisation stand or fall.

All of the factors mentioned so far — social media, the censorious tyranny of public opinion, the frivolity of politicians and the chattering classes — debase politics by inhibiting the growth and ripening of individual minds. And they all contribute to the emasculation of public life.

Of Shakespeare, Goethe remarked, “it is said that he portrayed the Romans very well; I do not think so, they are all inveterate Englishmen, but, of course, they are men, men from top to bottom, and assuredly the Roman toga fits them”. Who could wear this stately attire today, outside of a comedy? It fits Blutarsky in Animal House, the insane, almost mute John Belushi character who leads a chant of “Toga! Toga! Toga!” and later becomes a United States senator. But nowadays there aren’t even any Blutarskys to be found on campus. Even our frat boys have been fitted with skirts.

Blame it on the puritans who govern us. We are ruled by scolding homeroom teachers, pedantic moralists with little political prudence who are determined to make us good boys and girls. And to our shame, we cower before them like frightened children.

Tocqueville saw this coming. He struggled to find a name for “the oppression that threatens democracy”. What he describes is a despotism that neuters spiritedness. This despotism “would resemble parental authority if, fatherlike, it tried to prepare its charges for a man’s life, but on the contrary, it only tries to keep them in perpetual childhood”. Instead, the state “gladly works for their happiness but wants to be the sole agent and judge of it”. It provides, facilitates, manages, and directs virtually all elements of public life. Why, Tocqueville wonders, “should it not entirely relieve them from the trouble of thinking and all the cares of living”?

Tocqueville understood that all that would be left to erstwhile citizens under this despotism is entertainment. When the inner growth of our higher faculties is stunted and our political muscles have atrophied from disuse, what else are we fit for besides the lonely solipsism of personal amusement? Contemplating the extinction of the political animal, I fear Kierkegaard was right. The world will end not with a bang or a whimper, but a clueless guffaw.

The Cave illuminates the peculiar bleakness of our post-Covid, post-October 7 existence. It reflects, as in a distant mirror, a society disordered and divided by ideologically charged, algorithmically enhanced insanity. And it anticipates the simulacrum of education that predominates in our schools and universities today, which has left whole generations incapable of distinguishing truth and goodness from evil and falsehood.

Plato imagines people chained to the bottom of a cavern with their backs to the opening. These prisoners are aware of little more than a play of shifting shadows on the rocky wall below, punctuated by occasional utterances. They don’t know that the shadow-play — the common societal story in which they have been immersed from birth — is a human fabrication, produced by hidden puppeteers manipulating figurines of animals and human beings in front of a fire that burns above and behind them. People watching a silent film in the earliest days of cinema allegedly took fright as a train rushed toward them on the screen. The prisoners are similarly unable to achieve any critical distance from the semblances projected on the cave wall, which they take to be the whole of reality.

The ignorance and isolation of this captive audience can hardly be overstated. Chained by their necks so that they cannot turn their heads, the prisoners have never seen a human face. They have no direct acquaintance with their neighbours, of whose very existence as individual human beings they are unaware. Whatever knowledge they may have of others is mediated by the shadows, from which words and sounds, echoing off the wall, seem to come.

This comprehensive mediation is just what the puppet-masters, separated from the prisoners by the low wall they hide behind, intend. These few, an oligarchic elite, compete for status, wealth and power — goods conferred only with the necessary but uncomprehending consent of the people, who must be kept in the dark so as not to rise up against their masters. This rigged game is won by ideological manipulation. All the categories through which the imprisoned multitude make sense of their experience must be ready-made; all that they take into their souls must be pre-digested. These categories are as flat, indefinite, and insubstantial as shadows, fitting images of the empty abstractions that today pass for serious ideas in the halls of power, the academy, and the media.

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Today, we live in a postmodern Cave, which differs from earlier ones in important ways. In past Caves, the shadows at least affirmed a shared civic identity. In Sparta, they showed lean warriors nobly facing or shamefully fleeing danger, and cowards suffering extreme public shame. Today’s puppeteers also use fear and shame to maximum effect, but the shadow-play is predominantly critical — designed not to encourage like-mindedness among citizens, but to debunk past ideals and promote division and discord. For many Americans, not least those with university degrees, thinking about matters of common concern now involves little more than slapping labels such as “racist”, “sexist”, “classist”, “colonisers”, and “liberators” onto those who pass before them. These categories, in which relevant distinctions are eclipsed and individuals (to say nothing of whole peoples) are swallowed whole, have been worn out by many decades of use. In recent months, they have furnished the smoked lenses through which many who have no historical knowledge of Israel or Jews see the murders, gang-rapes, and mutilations of October 7, and perversely regard them as justifiable resistance against what they take to be Jewish tyranny.

Nor did earlier ages have digital technology and social media, which have fundamentally degraded social relations. For while all of the prisoners in Plato’s Cave watch the same shadow-play, its American successor has many dark corridors and cramped chambers in which isolated audiences are continually targeted with curated images and tendentious stories, algorithmically selected to maximise emotional appeal, partisan impact and profitability. These stories typically feature heroes and villains, in binary opposition to other dramas in other chambers — like Westerns in which the good guys and bad guys all swap hats. All these sub-caves are policed to ensure uniformity and correctness of content and to purge dissident voices, mostly by people who are no longer comfortable outside of their own chambers. Some, however, are state and corporate agents, and these monitor virtually all subterranean neighbourhoods. Here as elsewhere in the postmodern Cave, the line between prisoners and puppeteers is blurred.

The ideological compartmentalisation of the postmodern Cave, accelerated by Covid and the Great Resignation of recent years, has grave consequences for the health of the American polity. The residents of earlier Caves may have been similarly deluded, but at least they shared the same delusions. Their disputes referred to a common play of shadows that was accessible to all of them, and so provided a foundation, at least in principle, for shared deliberation about matters of common concern.

This is all but impossible today, when there is little agreement even about the most basic facts. The truth is nowhere to be found, while “my truth” is in every mouth, including that of the former president of Harvard — an institution whose now ironic motto is Veritas. Under these circumstances, it is impossible for Americans to recover a shared conception of the common good. Little wonder that so much of what cultural, political and corporate “thought leaders” say about hotly contested issues consists mostly of crude generalisations and imperatives tinged by recrimination and threat.

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Instead, elite higher education equips one to succeed in the competition for the “honours, prizes, and praises” Plato says are bestowed on those best able to make out the shadows and predict their movements. This is as it has always been, except that students are now taught that the Cave is a closed system from which there is no exit because there is no transcendence, no abiding moral and spiritual measures to which the soul might attune itself in all times and places. Small-p politics pervades contemporary life simply because zero-sum relations of power are supposed to determine every significant dimension of human existence, including even the criteria of truth. With those in doubt, even mathematics — ta mathemata in Greek, “the learnable things” — must be condemned as an instrument of oppression.

The result is that postmodern Cave-dwellers know their fellow citizens mostly as caricatures, and themselves very little. They know nothing of the transcendent truth above them. They have the vaguest notions of the past, the soil from which they have sprung. And it is not just the force of habit that holds them motionless in their part of the gloomy pit. It is also the natural longing to find meaning in actual human community, a desire that grows stronger the more it is frustrated by artificial substitutes like social media “friends”.

Genuine education, by contrast, breaks open the postmodern Cave, which would otherwise remain hermetically sealed. It turns the soul around to face up towards the sun, Plato’s image of the source of light and life that he calls the Good. It unfolds in the face-to-face relationship of teacher and student. Imagine what it is like for a prisoner to be compelled to rise and turn around. The first thing he sees is the face of a human being looking into his eyes and speaking directly and immediately to him. He learns that he can stand on his own two feet, and he is told that he must walk on them as well. Shown the puppets and the fire, he is asked what these things are. All of this is utterly new and confusing. He has never been treated as an intelligent, responsible agent — a human self.

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We are told that the prisoner’s eyes hurt when he is compelled to look at the firelight. This initial, negative stage of education involves a painful loss of certainty and an assumption of personal responsibility that can be terrifying to the point of nausea. Little wonder that the prisoner, distressed and annoyed, will not go voluntarily into the light, but must be dragged along the “rough, steep, upward way”, Yet it is through this process that he begins to discover that he is a being with independent agency and judgment, because he is for the first time being treated as one. His conversion is in this fundamental sense ethical before it is intellectual, and it can be caused only by one who, having already undergone conversion, has become aware of an overriding obligation to come to the aid of others.

Outside the Cave, the released prisoner becomes attuned to the natural rhythm of the seasons and the years, and is warmed by the sunlike Good. If recalling his first home fills him with pity, it is because he has for the first time experienced the delight and fulfilment that comes through contact with what is most real, compared with the worthless honours and prizes of the Cave. Inwardly impelled to return to the underground in the hope of releasing others, he is met with mockery and said to have suffered corruption of his eyes, an accusation that implies he will damage others’ vision if left unchecked. Similarly, those who vigorously reject the combination of dogmatic ideology and relativism that have taken hold across American institutions must expect to be called enemies of “our democracy”.

For Plato, all this inspires the Cave’s “perpetual prisoners” to attempt to kill the would-be liberator. Perhaps they claim that his eyes are corrupted not so much because he sees poorly in the dark, but because he sees them well enough, and they cannot bear the rebuke implicit in his gaze. This, at any rate, explains why our governing elite take pains to slander those who reject illiberal indoctrination, and to place the greatest obstacles in their paths. They rightly fear that the restoration of real education would spoil their grand societal grift.

Since Jesse Jackson led chants of “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go” at Stanford in 1987, elite universities have progressively gutted core liberal studies programmes that introduced students to the vital civilisational inheritance of knowledge and wisdom rooted in Athens, Jerusalem and Rome. For the past two decades, they’ve judged applicants for admission as much by their devotion to community service and activism as by their academic potential. Activist students, in turn, began to demand that universities advance any number of causes under the umbrella of social justice.

The ideological invasion of the Ivory Tower has had predictably bad results. Much of higher education today effectively consists of giving students a handful of Post-it notes and teaching them how to apply them to the images that are projected onto their smartphones. People of colour who are evidently miserable and poor, such as the Palestinians of Gaza, are labelled “victims”, whose innocence is not only assumed but unchallengeable on campus. White, well-off, educated people, especially if they have a strong national identity, are identified as “colonisers” and “oppressors”. Should we really be shocked that students who’ve been taught this crude intellectual game, one that unfolds in the immediate present with no depth of breadth of understanding, would welcome the chance to celebrate Hamas’s demonstration that “decolonisation” is not just “an abstract academic theory” but a “tangible event”?

Bret Stephens has written that Americans are on the road to a second Kristallnacht. This is not a figure of speech. Since the Hamas pogrom of October 7, Jews have been attacked on the streets of American cities, and Jewish-owned stores are vandalised every day. To their shame, universities have been on the cutting edge of this intellectually-fuelled explosion of antisemitism, as they were in Nazi Germany.

Americans have taken notice. The US Department of Education recently opened investigations of possible discrimination based on ancestry or ethnicity at more than a half-dozen institutions. Summoned by Congress to explain why they have allowed antisemitism to fester on their campuses, the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT all refused to say that calling for the genocide of Jews violated their codes of conduct or rules regarding bullying and harassment. Would these university leaders say the same about calls for the genocide of Palestinians, gays, or African Americans? The question answers itself. Even the Biden administration, which has aggressively pushed social justice imperatives, felt compelled to condemn their evasions.

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The president and chairman of the board of trustees of Penn resigned in the aftermath of the congressional hearing, and many are calling for the presidents of Harvard and MIT to resign as well. These blood-sacrifices make for good theatre, but don’t address the problem. Lopping off the head of a rotten fish does little good: the foul thing still stinks to high heaven. The deeper problem is that the intellectual formation of large numbers of faculty and administrators at American universities supports acts of violence so appalling that to call them barbaric would be an insult to barbarians.

The genocidal logic of Post-it note ideology was recently made clear at Hillcrest High School in Queens. Students discovered that a teacher had attended a rally in support of Israel. As one told the New York Post: “A bunch of kids decided to make a group chat, expose her, talk about it, and then talk about starting a riot.” (“Exposure” has been a primary weapon of nihilists and revolutionaries for almost two centuries.) “School administrators and the NYPD… got wind of their plans just in time to rush the teacher into an office and lock the door,” the paper reported. Students waving Palestinian flags and shouting “Free Palestine!” rampaged for hours, vandalising bathrooms and other property.

Here’s the kicker: the students called the teacher they tried to hunt down a “cracker ass bitch”. The kids may be ignorant, but they are not stupid. They’ve somehow learned that social justice licences the expression of hateful attitudes, including racism and misogyny as well as antisemitism. Did the mob pursue their quarry because she is a female teacher, or a Jew, or because she is a “cracker”? It doesn’t matter: an oppressor is an oppressor. A document on intersectionality distributed by the sociology department at my old university explained that oppressors include those who are “white”, “European”, “credentialed”, “upper and upper-middle class”, “anglophones”, and “pale”. Most Jews in the United States tick all these boxes. How could they not be oppressors, if they fit the profile?

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The civilisational threat posed by this ideological activism in American higher education recalls the invaluable intellectual support German academics gave Nazism during the Third Reich. Theologians worked to fashion a new myth of Jesus as a forerunner of Nazism, presenting him as a spirited Christian warrior who strove heroically to destroy Judaism. They purged all Jewish content from a revised publication of the New Testament, depicted Nazi ideology as the fulfilment of the original Christianity of Jesus, and elevated Hitler to the status of the second coming of Christ. Today, few academics would see Christ as an Aryan. Yet many embrace identity politics and the religion of humanity with a distinctly religious fervour.

The German theologians were not alone. The philosopher Martin Heidegger played a leading role in clothing the Nazi Party with academic respectability. In “The Self-Assertion of the German University”, a speech he gave when he assumed the Rectorship of Freiburg University in 1933, Heidegger aggressively positioned the academy at the forefront of Hitlerism. His speech anticipated many of the attitudes now popular on American campuses. He decried what he called Germany’s “moribund semblance of a culture”, and he called for the expulsion of academic freedom from the university. He also characterised the revolutionary work of students and professors as a “battle” — music to the ears of academic social justice warriors.

Most important, Heidegger applauded the mobilisation of students under the Führerprinzip, the suspension of written law on the basis that the word of Adolph Hitler is the law for Germans. History repeats itself, except that the Führer — the “driver” — is now social justice. After 2020, critical race theory became mandatory in law schools, and many universities are now arguably ignoring the law for ideological reasons. Hamas is a federally designated Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO), and federal law makes it a crime to provide “material support or resources” to an FTO. Yet students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which has over 200 active chapters on American campuses, has emphatically claimed to be “a PART of this [Hamas] movement”.

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Many state laws also forbid support for terrorism. If SJP receives any financial or logistical support from a university — a share of student activity fees, photocopying, or anything else — that university is arguably involved in criminal activity based on federal law. These are ample grounds for excluding them from campus. Yet only three private schools, Brandeis, Columbia, and George Washington, have so far suspended SJP, and Florida, the only state that has tried to do so, recently backed down in the face of a lawsuit.

The Nazis engaged in what was called Gleichschaltung, political equalisation or coordination. A Schaltung is a circuit. Gleichschaltung in an organisation makes it possible to run a charge through it as efficiently as possible. It turns an institution into a conduit of ideological power. This, too, harmonises with the functional reality of much of American higher education.

The rot in higher education is far too deep to be fixed by resignations, lawsuits, and congressional hearings. Nothing less than a systematic and widespread effort at something like de-Nazification will do. Short of such drastic measures, I fear, the American university will continue to be an activist institution that advances a totalising ideology. And it will drag society down with it.

It’s important to understand the sheer evil that now threatens us. Hamas has been called “barbaric”, but that is hardly a sufficient description of its primitive savagery. The Greeks called non-Greeks barbaroi because their words sounded like babble to their ears: “bar bar bar.” Barbarians ranged from the slavish inhabitants of large, sophisticated, highly stratified societies (Persians, Egyptians) to fiercely spirited, independent tribes (the forest-dwelling Northerners that the Romans called Germani). None of these peoples based their identity on the struggle against a hated Other whose total elimination, to be achieved at any cost, was their sole reason for existence. None embraced the complete destruction of body and spirit — including their own as well — that the Nazis called Vernichtung: “negation”. None, in other words, were pure enemies of civilisation.

But jihadis are. Civilisation is the sum of cultural and social conditions that make for flourishing lives and communities. Jihadism is a death cult. In a recent podcast, Sam Harris reminds us of the Taliban jihadists who, in 2014, murdered 132 Muslim children at a school in Peshawar and burned a teacher alive in front of her students. A supporter of the Pakistani Taliban said of the dead children: “We did not end their lives. We gave them new ones in Paradise…. They will be rewarded for their martyrdom. After all, we also martyr ourselves with them.”

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These words are themselves apocalyptic. From the perspective of Islamic fundamentalism, there is no human being who does not deserve to die. Muslims will go to Paradise; non-Muslims will burn in Hell. Death is a blessing for true believers, divine justice for apostates and infidels. Choosing a martyr’s moral and physical self-destruction thus legitimises the deaths of everyone one can possibly kill. Murder-suicide on this grand scale is the ultimate form of religious totalitarianism, the complete control of the lives of others.

This mentality explains a lot, including the abject misery of the Gazans — a people who, pressed beneath the heavy machinery of organised death-worship, are twisted with moral scoliosis. Is it any wonder that Hamas has stolen tens of millions of dollars in humanitarian aid for military purposes? Or that it hides weapons and hostages in hospitals using sick and injured Gazans and new-born babies as human shields? Or that it blocked evacuation routes and confiscated the car keys of civilians who wanted to cross the Wadi Gaza, as the IDF urged them to do, in order to flee Israeli military action in the northern part of the territory?

Hamas’s strategy is to maximise civilian deaths in order to stimulate worldwide opprobrium of Israel, and, if possible, open up more military fronts of Iranian proxies in Lebanon and Syria. As Harris says, Hamas is “eager to martyr all Palestinians for the pleasure of killing Jews”.

But if Hamas, Isis, and other jihadis are not barbarians, what are they? This question takes us back to remotest antiquity, when very ancient peoples struggled to master the dark depths of the human psyche, and to establish the handful of “Thou shalt nots” on which all civilisation is based.

Weirdly, the most primitive tribal impulses are today expressed by means of the latest digital technology. There is a recording of a phone call that a Hamas terrorist made to his parents on October 7. The audio captures a human drama as old as recorded history: a son seeks approval from his parents for his prowess in battle. But there is something deeply twisted about their conversation. “Hi Dad!” the son shouts. “I’m talking to you from [kibbutz] Mefalsim. Open my ‎WhatsApp now, and you’ll see all those killed. Look how many I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews! … Dad, I’m talking to you from a Jewish woman’s phone. I killed her, and I killed her husband. I killed ten with my own hands! Dad, ten with my own hands!” The whole time, his father is repeating “Allah hu Akbar!” A little later, the young man says “Mom, your son is a hero!”

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In Homer’s Iliad, the Trojan Hector imagines the day his son, still a toddler, “comes home from battle bearing the bloody gear / of the mortal enemy he has killed in war— / a joy to his mother’s heart”. But the battle he envisions is armed combat against trained warriors, not a surprise terror attack on innocent families. The Hamas murderer claims the status of a hero, but his deeds belie his words. His perspective has no Greek analogue. It is pre-Homeric.

It is also pre-Abrahamic. In Genesis 22, God tells Abraham to take his son Isaac, the child of Sarah, up Mount Moriah to be sacrificed. Isaac embodies the entirety of Abraham’s hopes, as it is with Isaac’s descendants that God has established his eternal covenant. Abraham dutifully binds Isaac and draws his knife so that he may cut his throat, drain his blood, and burn his corpse. An angel stays his hand at the last moment, and he learns that the Almighty does not want human sacrifice.

Herein lies the basic problem: Islamists never got the message. That’s why they regard murder-suicide as a sacrament. When the Hamas jihadi’s brother tells him to come back, he replies “What do you mean come back? There’s no going back. It is either death or victory! My mother gave birth to me for the religion.” In other words, she gave birth to him so that he might advance the cause of indiscriminate death.

Why does Islam remain fertile ground for such insanity? The Bible suggests that fraternal conflict is at the root of the problem. When Abraham’s wife Sarah could not conceive, she instructed him to impregnate their Egyptian slave girl, Hagar. But when Hagar became pregnant with Ishmael, Sarah harassed her and she fled. An angel told her that her child “will be a wild ass of a man— / his hand against all, the hand of all against him”. Hagar then returned to Abraham and Sarah, but after Isaac was born, Sarah drove her and Ishmael out of their camp.

The angel’s prophecy makes sense in hindsight. An outcast twice over, Ishmael must bear considerable ill-will toward Isaac — the son favoured not only by his father and stepmother, but by God. This is important, because Muslims regard Ishmael to be the ancestor of Arab tribes, and of Muhammad in particular. Islamic tradition furthermore holds that the Jews falsified the Hebrew Scriptures, and many Muslims believe it was Ishmael, not Isaac, who was Abraham’s favoured son. These facts, too, suggest fraternal resentment.

The story of fraternal enmity and rancour is one of the earliest in the Bible, and a recurring theme in Genesis (think of Esau and Jacob, or Joseph and his brothers). It first appears immediately after the exile from Eden. Cain is incensed that God favours Abel’s sacrificial offering. Turning a deaf ear to God, who urges him not to sin, he murders his younger brother. Exiled by God, he becomes “a restless wanderer on the earth” who is nevertheless protected by the Lord’s own mark. That means he and his descendants will be with us forever. If we are to come to grips with the revenant monster that announced itself, yet again, on October 7, we must acknowledge this fundamental fact.

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No one has thought more deeply about what Cain’s story means than the anonymous author of Beowulf, an epic poem that explores the open wound of the outcast brother. Heorot, the great mead-hall built by Hrothgar, king of the Shielding Danes, is a place of light, warmth and decorous ritual: generous mead-pouring and gift-giving. A microcosm of civilised existence, Heorot “stands at the horizon, on its high ground”, a Nordic city on the hill “meant to be a wonder of the world forever”. But the monster Grendel prowls the low, cold bogs outside until, berserk with anger, he splinters Heorot’s doors and wreaks bloody horror.

What ails Grendel? A “corpse-maker mongering death” in his repeated night-raids, he descends from “Cain’s clan”. For this wild branch of the sons of Adam, split off from the main human trunk by primal sin, the house of civilisation is an unbearable reproach. In Beowulf, resentment and envy are fevers of the mind that inflame and disfigure the body, twisting it into a sullen slouch. Outlawed by God, cast out by men, barred from hall and feast to gorge on envy and resentment, Cain’s clan — “ogres and elves and evil phantoms / and the giants too who strove with God”— are grotesque figurations of poisonous passions, the fermentation of the bitter fruit of exile.

Beowulf soberly acknowledges the disconcerting fact that we who dwell in the house of civilisation can neither make peace with, nor be rid of, the descendants of Cain. The eponymous hero slays Grendel and his mother and rules his people, the Geats, for 50 good years. But Beowulf finally succumbs to the poisonous bite of a flame-belching dragon, accidentally awakened after many centuries, that emerges from its subterranean lair to waste Geatish farms, homesteads, forts, and earthworks with great sprays of “molten venom”. The hero’s death spells doom for the Geats. At the poem’s end, a grieving woman unleashes “a wild litany / of nightmare and lament: her nation invaded, / enemies on the rampage, bodies in piles, / slavery and abasement”. Order and decency, peace and security, are only as solid as the ground they stand on.

The woman’s nightmare is a dark prophecy for our age, which has few heroes but plenty of monsters. Some parade daily on the streets of major Western cities, surrounded by mobs of ignorant, confused people. We face the same challenges Beowulf confronts, but with none of the poem’s clarity or resolve. Many of us can no longer tell good from evil, or hate from love. Under these circumstances, how long can our house, the increasingly divided house of the civilised world, remain standing?

Many historical and societal factors set the stage for the Holocaust. But none of these, individually or collectively, can explain the kind of violence to which the Nazis subjected their Jewish victims.

Jewish children and babies were, for a time, thrown alive into fire pits at Auschwitz. It has been calculated that, in this manner, the SS saved approximately two-fifths of a cent per child on Zyklon-B, the insecticide they used in the gas chambers. Were the children burned alive to save money? It would be obscene to suppose that economy explains such a horrific method of murder. The same holds for sealing people in a boxcar for as much as a week without telling them to bring water and food, neither of which the Nazis provided. Or sewing twins together back-to-back, as Dr Mengele once did at Auschwitz. (Gangrene immediately set in and they died in three days.)

In fact, nothing could explain such abominations. Primo Levi’s distinction between “useful” and “useless” violence makes this clear. Useful violence has an aim outside itself. A thief kills a witness to a crime in order to avoid capture. The victim would otherwise have been unmolested, but was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Such violence is evil, but useful in that it serves a purpose outside of itself. The thief might say: “I never wanted to hurt anybody, but then she came out of the back.” Perhaps he really is just unusually callous and stupid; he didn’t go looking for evil, but he found it. This explanation makes some sense, but does not excuse: the thief is going to prison for homicide, and rightly so.

Useless violence, however, is the deliberate production of pain and suffering as an end in itself. There is nothing apart from the violence to which one could point and say “that’s why they did these things”. The sole aim of useless violence is to torture, to inflict as much pain and suffering as possible. It is not evil, but Evil.

Evil (with a capital E) defies explanation, which is why it is often called “senseless”. Evil is done for its own sake, and in this it mirrors, like a photographic negative, the senseless kindness of Good. In his novel Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman writes of a Soviet woman who, prepared to strangle a wounded German soldier who had participated in deadly reprisals against her village, instead gave him water. “No one could understand [her action]; nor could she explain it herself.” That spontaneous and inexplicable act of kindness — kindness for its own sake — was Good.

Theologians have long understood Evil as an absence or privation: complete separation from God. But while mere absence is inert, Evil is as potent and contagious as certain deadly viruses. It can fill entire social classes and ethnic or religious groups with bloodlust, and drive them to frenzies of violence. Organised and routinised by the State, Evil can even give rise to an entire industry of death. The power that produced the labour, transit, concentration, and death camps of Nazi Germany was evidently substantial and virulent.

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Still, the theologians have discerned something important about the negative capacity of Evil. Evil has a way of disabling moral receptivity and short-circuiting intelligence. Examples abound in Claude Lanzmann’s brave film Shoah, a 9.5-hour documentary that records the testimony of perpetrators, survivors, and witnesses of the Holocaust.

Consider Frans Suchomel, SS Unterscharführer at Treblinka, a death camp where 800,000 Jews were murdered. Suchomel embodies pure superficiality: a human outside with no inside. He is secretly filmed by a van outside his apartment building. The technology Lanzmann employs generates a grainy image in which faulty video transmission or reception obscures Suchomel’s eyes with a black line, as if to emphasise his moral blindness. He sings a song that the doomed “worker Jews” of Treblinka were forced to sing as they dealt with a noxious liquid pool of decomposing corpses. The song’s message is that the human lot, the lot of Germans and Jews alike, is determined by forces that we can neither fully understand nor control. When he finishes, he says to Lanzmann with obvious pride: “Satisfied? No Jew knows that today!”

Consider also Mrs Michelsohn, the wife of a Nazi schoolteacher at Chelmno, where 400,000 Jews were murdered in mobile gas vans. (These vans were outfitted with a pipe that fed exhaust fumes into the sealed interior of the vans, which were driven until the Jews packed within were asphyxiated.) Michelsohn cannot recall how many Jews died in Chelmno; she remembers only that the number began with a four. At one point she confuses Poles and Jews. Asked by Lanzmann what the difference is between the two, she says: “The Poles weren’t exterminated and the Jews were. That’s the difference. An external difference.” But she “can’t assess” the “inner difference,” for “I don’t know enough about psychology and anthropology”.

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Today, the world is still full of wilfully blind Suchomels and obtuse Michelsohns, callous perpetrators and complicit witnesses who see no Evil and hide behind a veneer of intellectual abstraction. Lanzmann’s words about the making of Shoah ring true: “The worst moral and artistic crime that can be committed in producing a work dedicated to the Holocaust is to consider the Holocaust as past.”

When they invaded Israel on October 7, Hamas terrorists beat, robbed, raped, kidnapped, and executed Jewish men, women and children. They also burned families alive, shot babies in the head, and decapitated them. Such horrific crimes hadn’t been perpetrated against Jews since the Holocaust. Yet politicians and university presidents who were previously quick to comment on issues of social justice have little or nothing to say about mass slaughter in Israel, while more than a few students and professors have applauded Hamas’s atrocities and assaulted Jewish students.

Hamas, whose hateful ideology was directly influenced by Nazism, has claimed that the brutal murder of Jewish children and babies in Israel was perpetrated by enraged civilians from Gaza. In fact, documents recovered from Hamas terrorists killed in southern Israel show “detailed plans to target children and young people”. Hamas’s supporters cite “facts” that are supposed to justify the terrorists’ vile deeds, including the seizure of Palestinian land in the 1948 War of Independence, when the Jews of the new nation of Israel fought the armies of five invading Arab nations. But there can be no justification of Hamas’s atrocities, not even in principle. They are so vile as to fall beyond the realm of explanation, let alone excuse. History teaches us at least this much.

In other words, Hamas’s vicious deeds were Evil. They exemplified useless violence, for they were designed to make their victims — Israelis, and insofar as possible, all Jews — suffer in the cruellest possible way. This must be understood, because the organs of supposedly judicious opinion are already explaining that Israel’s military response to Hamas must not be “disproportionate”. We’ve seen this movie ad nauseam: it plays on an endless loop. Israelis are murdered in terrorist attacks, and then they are denounced for taking concrete steps to protect themselves.

There is something absurd about the demand that Israel exercise proportionality in the face of Evil. As Douglas Murray has observed, that would mean that “Israel should try to locate a music festival in Gaza and rape precisely the number of women that Hamas raped… kill precisely the number of young people that Hamas killed.… [They should] go door to door and kill precisely the correct number of babies that Hamas killed.”

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The revulsion this suggestion elicits in decent human beings underscores the literal impossibility of reckoning with Evil. If Good is transcendent, Evil is negatively transcendent, exceeding measurement as it exceeds explanation. To try to measure or explain either Good or Evil is like trying to capture mathematical infinity in a finite sequence of numerals. It simply can’t be done.

We must not forget this when we hear “reasonable” people at the UN, The New York Times or the US State Department urge Israel not to go too far in its attempt to eradicate Hamas, or when they condemn the country — as is inevitable — for having done so. Such judgments pose as clarity, but are in fact moral and intellectual obfuscation. They can only encourage antisemites everywhere, and give Hezbollah and other agents of Iran’s theological tyranny a pretext for opening up more fronts in their effort to effect a Final Solution: to finish, once and for all, the work of the Holocaust.

Indeed, Hamas and its Islamist allies are counting on exactly this. They have set a trap for Israel, baited by their Evil. They want the IDF to grind Gaza to a pulp. They hope that publicising images of suffering in Gaza (including fake ones, if past performance is any indication) will stimulate world outcry and justify a wider war — one that Israel may not be able to win. This violence might seem to be “useful”, but if so, it is useful only in the cause of Evil.

If we are to speak of Evil at all — and now is no time for decent people to be silent — we cannot rely on ordinary frameworks of evaluation. The only language that can hope to do justice to Evil is theological. Perhaps all that can be said of Hamas and the worldwide gang of Islamists is that their crimes and plans are Satanic: absolutely and completely demonic.

Even in the red state of Oklahoma, the American heartland and buckle of the Bible Belt, it took some courage to state the obvious in a university classroom when it offended conventional political pieties. But the students were always more sensible than the faculty.

I learned this shortly after 9/11, when I appeared on a university panel to discuss what was to be done. I told the packed room that we should hunt down the leaders of al-Qaeda and kill them. A professor who later received an appointment at a prestigious theological seminary immediately accused me of proposing to slaughter innocent people, the inevitable “collateral damage” of military action. After the panel, other, like-minded colleagues stopped speaking to me. But half a dozen students told me that they appreciated my comments, even though they didn’t share my views.

Some years later, the Muslim Students Association (MSA) invited a neo-Nazi from California to speak at one of their events. Leaders of the Tulsa Jewish community contacted me, but the university president refused to get involved. When one of the few Jewish students on campus told me that she was going to speak with the leader of the MSA, I assumed she would be rebuffed. Yet after their conversation, he agreed to cancel the event.

Those were the days. Progressive liberals have now given birth to a generation of demonic ideologues who excuse sheer evil. Reading the “Joint Statement by Harvard Palestine Solidarity Groups on the Situation in Palestine”, I can only hope that many Harvard faculty are appalled at the little monsters they’ve helped to create.

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The statement, signed by 31 student organisations from Harvard College, the Divinity School, the Law School, the Medical School, and the Kennedy School of Government (including, incredibly, a group called “Harvard Jews for Liberation”), “hold[s] the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence”. That would include, as Victor Davis Hanson has written, “pulling Jewish elderly, women, and children out of their homes and executing them, and then throwing their bodies into the street” — atrocities last seen during the Holocaust.

The statement makes no mention of Hamas, the Iranian-funded Islamist terror group that is explicitly dedicated to the obliteration of Israel through Jihad. The Hamas Covenant includes the following language, from the hadith (sayings attributed to Mohammed): “The Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight Jews and kill them. Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out: ‘O Moslem, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.’”

Instead, the Harvard students characterise the Palestinians as hapless victims of “colonial retaliation”, academic cant as tiresome as it is crude. “In the coming days,” their statement asserts, “Palestinians will be forced to bear the full brunt of Israel’s violence.… Today, the Palestinian ordeal enters into uncharted territory.”

But the ordeal that the citizens of Israel are suffering is very well-charted. It is an ordeal perfected by the Nazis: violent cruelty that is meant simply to humiliate and defile, including what the Holocaust survivor Terrence des Pres called “excremental assault”. No one can watch this video of an Israeli woman, bruised and bloodied, her wrists tied with wire, her sweatpants soiled with feces (to beat the shit out of someone is a real thing), pulled out of the back of a Jeep by her hair, and not understand this fact. Have the Harvard students seen this video of men chanting “Allah hu Akbar!” while sitting on the naked corpse of Shani Louk? She was a tattoo artist and conscientious objector to Israel military service who was murdered and robbed at a music festival for peace. She could have been among their best friends.

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For all their education and supposed intelligence, the signers of the Harvard Statement remind me of some unlettered Polish farmers Claude Lanzmann interviewed for his film Shoah. These men lived next to the Treblinka death camp, and although they did not (as one says) “speak Jew”, they knew what was going on. They saw the old men and women, the mothers with babies and children, dragged from the trains. They heard them scream as they were whipped down the chutes leading to the gas chambers. Asked how they felt about this, one replied, according to Lanzmann’s translator, “If I cut my finger, it doesn’t hurt him.” Another said: “You get used to anything.” Who says you have to attend an Ivy League school to learn moral relativism?

Lanzmann wonders how another Polish villager feels now that the Jews are gone. “How can I tell?” she asks in return. “I never went to  school. I can only think of how I am now. Now I’m fine.” But the Harvard signatories did go to school, and they, too, are just fine.

Harvard remains the jewel in the crown of the American university system. Its graduates will enter the ranks of the elite and become leaders in government, law, business, and culture. Yet its most outspoken students are shamefully incapable of recognising pure evil when they see it. (Surely they see it—they have YouTube in Cambridge, don’t they?) As Yael Bar Tur has written, “I could be sitting in class with these students, watching children brutally murdered, raped, kidnapped and their mutilated bodies torn apart by a jeering crowd — and hear why it’s justified.”

Not coincidentally, Harvard just earned the worst score ever recorded in the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s College Free Speech Rankings: -10.69, more than six standard deviations below the average. The nation’s premiere university appears to be an echo chamber of moral vacuousness and antisemitic ideology. More than a national scandal, the Joint Statement exposes the profound moral and intellectual rot at the heart of American higher education.

The American regime has become a tawdry theatrocracy in which political actors, hypokritai in Greek, play stock characters in a loathsome farce. In the run-up to the 2024 elections, Donald Trump stars as the persecuted saviour, and Joe Biden the righteous defender, of the American republic. Never mind that Trump is self-absorbed and impulsive to the point of criminal stupidity, that Biden is senile and evidently corrupt, and that both of these braying, boorish old men are fraudsters and fabulists. These vices do not matter to their furious followers, who love their man precisely because he is not the hated other. Trump and Biden cannot, and will not, be separated; each needs his opponent as the hammer needs the nail. And above the wretched spectacle sit a click-hungry media, feeding on riot and picking favourites like vulturous pagan gods.

This drama of political decadence defies easy categorisation. Aristotle wrote that tragedy depicts people who are better, and comedy worse, than us spectators. Biden and Trump are certainly worse than those who voted them into office, but they are not remotely funny. Their antics are repellent and their goofiness unlovable. Observing them and the choral leaders that follow in their train — jerky puppets like Rudy Giuliani sweating hair-dye, or Anthony Fauci claiming to be science itself — Americans feel only shame and dread, without the cathartic release of laughter or tears.

These trapped emotions spring from the same source. They are visceral responses to the approaching death by senescence of the American experiment in ordered liberty. The problem goes well beyond presidential dementia. The US Senate (from the Latin senex, “old”) looks more like the waiting room of a geriatric neurologist than a council of wise elders. There’s Mitch McConnell, prone to falls and freeze-ups; wheelchair-bound and confused Dianne Feinstein; and John Fetterman, who at only 53 is less fit for public service than any other member of that formerly august body. It’s as if C-SPAN, a network that televises congressional hearings, decided instead to air absurdist, post-apocalyptic horror films.

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The zombification of the Capitol — not to mention our city streets, which have become permanent encampments of the dazed and disturbed — is merely a symptom of the underlying disease. Like all institutions, politics falls apart without regular infusions of constructive energy. A modern democracy is healthy only if its major parties grow organically from their voters, representing their interests by habit and inclination even more than conscious effort.

But the grassroots politics Tocqueville admired when he visited the US in the 1830s gave way long ago to the top-down astroturfing of technocratic managerialism. Our governing elites represent no one but themselves and their cronies, and they don’t welcome shocks to the system. Insurgent candidates such as Robert Kennedy Jr. and Vivek Ramaswamy, whose public elevation of the concerns of many Americans aims to revitalise national politics, are censored and met with active resistance, even by their own parties.

It’s not just in politics that the wellsprings of individual and social vitality have dried up. Americans are marrying less and later, and having too few children, to reproduce themselves and the families that nurtured them. What is more, our public schools have largely ceased to transmit the accumulated knowledge and civilisational wisdom of the past to the children we do have. A taste for historical repudiation has taken hold across the culture, leading curators to “contextualise” art, city governments to take down statues, colleges to rename buildings, and publishers to censor or rewrite books. But creativity withers when it ceases to be nourished by the oxygenated blood of the tradition. Little wonder that Hollywood increasingly cannibalises its legacy by pouring old films into new plastic scripts.

Technology has exacerbated our national enervation. We have become charging-stations for our smartphones, which drain psychic energy with insistent distractions and overloads of information-babble. Video calls and work-from-home limit in-person interactions with actual existing individuals, who would otherwise be together for most of their weekly waking hours. Targeted advertising, fine-tuned algorithms, and politically stratified social media sharply decrease our exposure to new ideas. We are immuring ourselves within our own private caves, watching flickering images in darkness.

AI language-learning models offer a cautionary parable of these larger cultural developments. Programs such as ChatGPT, whose writing remains formulaic and prone to errors, learn by sifting through a sea of digitalised text, a growing share of which consists of AI-generated content. The predictable result of this feedback loop is the kind of levelling we’ve seen across our institutions. Like newspapers that drink their own ink — and which ones don’t, these days? — their product can only get worse.

Cultural exhaustion, social withdrawal, and the general enfeeblement of life forces are the practical expression of a will to nothing. There is a name for this spiritual and intellectual condition, and it is nihilism. Nihilism is demonic to the extent that the will to nothing is still a will, a life force. That it is only a negative one is by no means reassuring, because it is easier and more economical to tear down than to build up. Destruction is dramatic and accomplishes the illusion of vitality with relatively little energy. And who in this apocalyptic time, including the nihilist, doesn’t want to feel even a little alive?

Many factors have contributed to this predicament. But the ultimate cause lies in human intelligence, the germ and sap of the great hard oak that is, or was, the West (it’s old now, and growing soft with rot). That intelligence is a curse as well as a blessing was clear enough to the ancient Greeks and Hebrews, whose oldest legends drew vital meaning from the black earth, the primordial fundament of early human experience.

The origin myths of Genesis and Hesiod explain how the first human beings, wanting more, broke with God or the gods. It was a kind of primitive artificial intelligence that caused this quarrel: the combination of art and artifice that has always characterised the schemes of the human mind. Impelled not just by need, but by ungoverned desires, we came to rely on cunning deception and the use of tools to imitate things and living beings — skills that have always been essential, for example, in hunting, fishing, and warfare. The myths also teach that each advance — fossil-fuel power plants, for example, or the free-for-all of the internet — produces real or perceived problems that invite increasingly large-scale scientific and political “solutions”.

Seen in this light, recent developments such as the rush of American and European governments to transition to clean energy and electric vehicles, the emerging threat of a stealthy, two-pronged attack by electronic as well as biological viruses, the extensive manipulations or “nudges” of post-modern technocracy, and the employment of AI for the purpose of “information warfare”, are entirely unsurprising.

Hesiod tells a story from the Golden Age, before poverty, sickness and death came into the world, and gods and men (there were no women then) feasted together. The Titan Prometheus was the priestly master of ceremonies, in charge of dividing and distributing meat to the two parties, mortals and immortals. This office suited his presumably impartial nature: he was a god, but a philanthropic one with a recognisably human mind. In fact, he is not easily distinguished from man himself. Prometheus means Forethought, yet he saw only what was visible in the blaze of his cleverness. This is why, in myth, his brother Epimetheus — Afterthought — follows him through the dark like a comet’s tail of foolishness, constantly spoiling his work with unintended consequences.

On the occasion Hesiod relates, Prometheus came up with an ingenious fraud, a trick designed to hoodwink Zeus himself. He roasted portions of meat from an ox and arranged the pieces into two parts. He stuffed all the meat into the animal’s inedible stomach: a deliberately unappetising sight, emblematic of man’s insatiable hunger. In the other part, he hid the animal’s bones beneath its deliciously crispy fat. Then he asked Zeus to choose between the two portions. Zeus saw through Prometheus’s trick. Stung by the insult, but playing a long game of justice, he chose the fat-covered bones.

The success of Prometheus’s grasping scheme came at a price he seems not to have anticipated. An earthquake in cosmic relations, it ended the convivial co-existence of gods and men. The Greeks preserved the memory of this signal event in the sacrificial ritual of burning fat and bones. This practice confirmed that, while we mortals are slaves of our stomachs, the gods have no need of our food. But Zeus would have found cold comfort in the thought that he is honoured by being cheated of the pleasures of taste. Allowing the Olympians to enjoy the savour but not the flavour of feasts is like barring them from sex because they don’t need to reproduce. Concealment being conatal with the earliest arts, it is no accident that Zeus subsequently hid fire from human beings, or that Prometheus stole it back.

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Zeus exercised merciful forbearance in allowing us to keep control of fire. But he was not finished with us. He instructed Hephaestus, the divine craftsman, to fashion a woman — Pandora — from the earth, in the likeness of a goddess, an echo of the Bible’s “in the image of God he created them”. And what an image! Athena dressed Pandora in rich robes, a fine veil, and fresh flowers; Hephaestus fashioned a wondrous gold crown for her, on which the animals of the earth and sea were depicted “like living beings with voices”. Thus adorned, she was “sheer guile, irresistible to human beings”. In accepting this gift of the gods, a mistake Hesiod attributes to Epimetheus, man brought into his life the miseries of old age, strife, toil, illness, and death — all of them hidden, like bones beneath fat, under Pandora’s lovely flesh, or in her infamous box. Zeus repaid Prometheus tit for tat: woman was “a beautiful evil in exchange for the good”.

This is much more than misogyny, although it certainly is that. Pandora and her splendid crown embody the deceptive allure of technical ingenuity. She is the object not just of sexual desire, but even more, of lust for the godlike power afforded by advanced technical skill. (In The Odyssey, Hephaestus invents the world’s first robots.) That power, or the secure prospect thereof, became the possession of human beings the minute Prometheus stole “undying fire” from Zeus, for the control of fire is the essential precondition of anything more than rudimentary development of the arts and sciences.

This is not all. In Greek myth, Pandora’s garments register as symbols of nomos: the laws and customs that protect us from human harshness, just as clothes shield our skin from thorns and thistles. These protections are matters of political wisdom or prudence, a virtue that was unnecessary in the Golden Age. Both technical expertise and politics are basic means of existence in the hardscrabble life that opens before us upon our divorce from the gods, a life in which we must labour to secure food and shelter, fight predators (including the human sort), suffer injurious blows and ward off sickness, only to succumb, inevitably, to death. Yet political wisdom remains elusive to this day. The fundamental meaning of the myth is clear. The good of the arts and applied sciences is inseparable from the ills they both combat and exacerbate. We Prometheans have been bested. Zeus, king of gods and men, and dikē (justice), the unforgiving structure of the real world, have the last laugh.

The story of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden covers the same ground, and sounds many of the same themes, as the myths of Prometheus and Pandora. This tale, too, begins when human beings lived in the company of God, and tells the story of their divorce. The biblical God divided the watery chaos to fashion a world, but he never divided human beings from himself. That was once again the work of human intelligence, which, as Hesiod saw, is irresistibly attracted to beautiful evils. Woman plays a key role in this drama, although she is not a punishment for hubris, as in Hesiod, but a vehicle of it. And technical skill again proves to be a necessary compensation for the ills that mortals are heir to when they leave the divine presence.

Adam and Eve at first lived in direct communion with God, who walked in the Garden seeking their company, until the day they hid from him after eating of the forbidden tree. To Eve, the tree of knowledge “was lust to the eyes” (in the translation of Robert Alter) as well as good for eating and lovely to look at. This recalls Pandora, whom Hesiod described as “an evil in which all may delight at heart”. Adam and Eve hoped to “become as gods”, but this is another case of “be careful what you wish for”. Here, however, is something not in Hesiod: they immediately felt shame before God, and hid their genitals, and themselves, behind fig-leaves and pretexts. They must have learned these tricks of art and artifice from eating the fruit of knowledge of good and evil. That seductive fruit is a strange, bittersweet hybrid of benefit and ill. It gives us the technical power to become prosthetic gods, as Freud says — but forgetful ones, reaching for some distant good but constantly plagued by afterthoughts. Politically, it demands that we build and maintain, if only out of shame, something resembling a habitable space of minimal peace and order.

God brought order to chaos in fashioning the universe and laying out the Garden. Ejected from paradise, Adam and Eve were obliged to imitate his work, even if crudely. God showed them how to make garments of animal skin — a skill they would need to protect their bodies, and a sign that they had now broken with the beasts as well as God. Otherwise, they were on their own.

The first couple wanted knowledge of good and evil and they got it, in spades. With Cain’s murder of Abel, they experienced a breakdown of moral order that could be remedied only by the slow work of politics in the broadest sense: education and character formation. Ever since then, human beings have tried to correct the chaotic motions of the microcosms of psyche and society. They have been compelled to sort chaos and so become as gods (as the serpent, whom the Talmudic sages associated with lust, promised they would) — or, in a variant reading, as kings (elohim means both).

But we mortals aren’t gods, and we generally make poor kings. Left to our own devices, we turn our existence into something nasty and brutish. Exiled from the presence of the Lord, Cain founded the first city, and his descendants were artisans who developed skills in metalwork, music, and herding. But technical competence does not imply, much less substitute for, moral or political soundness. Cain’s great-great-great-grandson Lamech was a violent boaster, and in later ages, giants did evil so great that it corrupted the very earth and “filled [it] with outrage”.

After God cleansed the earth with the Flood, he formed a covenant with Noah and his sons, and gave them moral instruction in the form of the so-called Noahide commandments. But Noah’s single-minded descendants lacked political prudence, and confused healthy order with hive-like uniformity. They tried to build a great Tower at Babel to scrape the sky and ward off destruction, whether from God or other men is unclear. This massive project of social and material engineering, an abomination to God, resulted in the city’s collapse into universal incoherence, anarchy, and the dispersion of its inhabitants. Human life, Scripture teaches, isn’t reducible to high walls of densely packed man-bricks, made, like Adam, from the soil (adamah), not with a divine Word but with trowel, chalk, and level.

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By Terry Eagleton

So why are we intent on building Babel yet again — on constructing an increasingly artificial and fragmented world in which digital babble and propaganda drown out truth, and social order gives way to chaos? The beginning, Plato wrote, is the most important part of every work, not least because those who go wrong at the outset find it difficult to recover. This is especially true if the mistake is discovered after millennia, when long habit must be corrected no less than nature. Nor does it help that our age is too proud, and too rushed, to notice the past as it marches toward the future: the digitally mediated, electronically controlled, increasingly virtual apotheosis of AI-powered technocracy.

This is a grave concern, but not yet cause for despair. In Scripture, God offers the revelation of law and, in the New Testament, of incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. And the consolation of Hesiod is that human intelligence has a natural core that is not limited to overreaching appetite. The Greek myths themselves express a deep and broad intelligence, one that acknowledges the limits of art and artifice, and subordinates itself to a higher good. In this way, they give us hope — the last thing left in Pandora’s box — that long-sedimented character need not be destiny for human beings.

Plato observes that poets love their poems like fathers love their children. That’s why writers hate to cut their own work — to “murder their babies”, as they must learn to do if they hope to be any good. But they hate it more when others murder their babies, and are even ready to die for the ones they’ve raised and sent out into the world.

D-503 — the protagonist of We, the dystopian sci-fi novel of totalitarianism published in 1921, for which the Soviet author Yevgeny Zamyatin was lucky to be exiled rather than shot — calls the diary he has just begun “a new, still tiny, still blind little human being. It is I and, at the same time, not I.”

And when the KGB confiscated the manuscript of Vasily Grossman’s magnum opus Life and Fate, Grossman wrote to the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, asking: “What is the point of me being physically free when the book I dedicated my life to is arrested?”

A famous passage from the Talmud helps to explain why writers feel this way — and why we should, too: “Adam was created alone to teach you that whoever destroys a single soul, Scripture regards him as if he destroyed the entire world. And whoever saves a single soul, Scripture regards him as if he preserved the entire world.”

Had the first human being died alone, neither Eve nor any of her descendants would have existed. The destruction of a soul is the annihilation of all of its potential offspring, physical and spiritual, until the end of time. But a human soul is an entire world in another way. Perception, thought and feeling open the soul to very many things beyond itself — in principle, to all things — whose impressions it absorbs and assembles into a more or less meaningful whole. Apart from this humanising work, the notion of a universe, a single, all-encompassing whole, might never have occurred to anyone. But this inner world can also be destroyed, corrupted by forgetfulness and publicly erased.

For writers, this Biblical passage rings true: “In the beginning was the Word [logos].” God is said to have fashioned the waters of primordial chaos into a universe by divine speech. One need not be a believer to learn from this story. Human beings are obliged to sort social and psychological chaos by way of logos — reason, speech, order, proportion — in the first instance through law, ritual and the cultural memory of myth. Communities of shared meaning and purpose are woven of language, without which individual experiences would otherwise be poor possessions held in dumb isolation by lonely hominids.

Like the poets and chroniclers of remote antiquity, novelists and dramatists speak to the enduring questions of human life: who we are, where we’ve been and where we’re going. They fabricate buzzing microcosms peopled by characters that live and breathe on contact with other minds and fertile imaginations. Censors don’t just cut out writers’ tongues and stop up readers’ ears, they obliterate worlds.

But the public response to the extensive and aggressive censorship of our time has been depressingly muted. In part, this reflects a widespread loss of what the Germans call Sprachgefühl, a feeling for language and the meaning of words. Most people don’t read books, let alone good ones. They produce and consume short, easily digestible “texts” through electronic media, but hard-won habits of literacy rust in disuse.

Few people know the thrill of repeatedly casting into the depths of a difficult piece of writing, feeling a tug on the line and hauling up a catch of meaning. That experience was more common when deep and challenging books were recited, studied and memorised as sources of wisdom. “Turn it and turn it,” an ancient commentator said of the Bible, “for everything is in it.” Generations of our forebears thought the same of Homer and Dante, Aristotle and Confucius. Who reads like that anymore?

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The metallic clang of abstractions now drowns out the living word of particular human minds. Like all bureaucratic and ideological jargon, the governing language of our time is flat, colourless and crude. It is no longer that of poets, prophets and statesmen, but of what Nietzsche called “the coldest of all cold monsters” — the increasingly unified, propaganda-generating, information-gathering-and-monitoring conglomeration of public and private entities that is the post-modern State.

The contemporary sclerosis of language has profound psychological and political consequences. One of Samuel Beckett’s characters wistfully contemplates the dance and hum of bees as they enter and exit their sun-drenched hives, exhibiting a kind of connectedness from which he is excluded by his lonely consciousness. That consciousness of exile is both quintessentially modern and distinctively human. It envies the bees, but cannot find satisfaction in any socially-ordered aggregation of identical units. It yearns for the inner connection between individuals that distinguishes a community from a characterless crowd. But censorship and the decay of language serve only to strengthen the hive-mind and the crowd.

The corruptions of language, politics and society we are now witnessing were foretold in some great dystopian novels of the 20th century. But the English and American authors of those novels had the evidence of history before them, in the form of ideological tyranny: Leninism, Stalinism, Hitlerism and Maoism. And they’d learned from the Bard that what’s past is prologue.

“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words,” one of the characters in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four remarks. In the regime of Oceania, which is ruled by a technocratic elite “shaped and brought together by the barren world of monopoly industry and centralised government”, books are everywhere hunted down and destroyed. The State language is crudely binary (like one university’s definition of a lesbian as “a non-man attracted to non-men”), purged of nuance and full of “telescoped words and phrases”, of which its very name, Newspeak, is exemplary. A large department meticulously destroys and reproduces newspapers on a daily basis, rewriting the past to conform with the demands of the present. (Orwell couldn’t have guessed how easy this would be in the digital age.)

The vocabulary of Newspeak is constantly shrinking, because its “whole aim … is to narrow the range of thought”. The State hopes that restricting speech to “short, clipped words which could be uttered rapidly and which roused the minimum of echoes in the speaker’s mind” will ultimately eliminate “thoughtcrime” — or independent thought — if only because “there will be no words in which to express it”.

In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, elite technicians govern a stratified society composed of classes of virtually identical human beings grown in scientific hatcheries. While a global State founded on eugenics hasn’t yet materialised, much that Huxley imagines has already come to pass. The society he foresees is debased in familiar ways. It is characterised by a cult of youth; an economy driven by entertainment and the pleasures of virtual reality; the near-universal, habitual use of psychoactive drugs, contraceptives and aphrodisiacs; overt public sexuality; general promiscuity; and a swarming media that makes a great public spectacle of non-conformists.

Love and friendship are hardly possible under these conditions. The citizens of the World State are mere shadows of human beings: smiling surfaces without tragic depth. Little wonder that the one surviving lover of Shakespeare is driven to suicide.

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By Julie Szego

Most people in Brave New World are content with their lot. Thankfully, we are not quite there yet. Ray Bradbury envisions a society more like our own, one full of vague foreboding. Fahrenheit 451 describes a rushing world of violence, suicide and looming war in which a depressed populace distracts itself from the slow death of love and longing with vapid entertainment. Bradbury explicitly connects the fact that “our civilisation is flinging itself to pieces” with the destruction of literature and the deliberate falsification of the past.

Montag, the protagonist, makes a living burning books, in accordance with rules said to have been established in 1790 by the “First Fireman”, Benjamin Franklin. His wife Mildred, who claims to be happy, spends her days in a room with three walls of television screens, surrounded by her “family”: soap-opera uncles, aunts, cousins, nieces and nephews who “said nothing, nothing, nothing and said it loud, loud, loud”. She has no recollection of swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills one night.

An old professor who’s been unemployed since the last liberal arts college shut its doors tells Montag that the magic of books lay in “how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us”. But they are hated because they “show the pores in the face of life” to a world that wants “only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless”.

Chief Beatty, Montag’s deeply conflicted boss, explains how we got here. Everything sped up in the 20th century, when horses, dogs and carts were replaced by faster and faster machines. Time contracted. Books were condensed and pre-digested, “levelled down to a sort of paste pudding norm”. School was shortened, “discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored”. Sound familiar?

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Fahrenheit 451 concludes apocalyptically, with a revelatory global catastrophe. Bradbury draws on some very old stories to make the meaning of this ending fully intelligible. Montag flees a doomed city like Lot escaping the burning of Sodom. The world collapses and must be rebuilt. Insofar as there is hope, it lives in the hearts and minds of scattered old men who remember the writings of Plato, Swift, Jefferson and Lincoln, as well as Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Montag himself recalls passages from a forbidden volume of Ecclesiastes.

At the novel’s end, Montag remembers a verse from Revelations, The Book of the Apocalypse: “And on either side of the river was there a tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruits every month; And the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.”

The Jews called the Bible — in Greek, to biblion, or “the book” — an etz chaim, or tree of life. In Revelations, the river of the waters of life sustains two trees of life: the Hebrew Scriptures (whose fruits were the twelve tribes of Israel) and New Testament. The “leaves” of these trees, their pages, were understood to be medicine for the sickness of “the nations”, people who knew nothing of the Bible.

Despite the best efforts of some of our greatest writers, the healing power of books has been mostly forgotten in our time. Must we really wait until our world is thoroughly burned and broken before we begin to mend it?

In the three millennia since the story of the Exodus was first told, though, we’ve grown more sophisticated. Today’s most seductive idols do talk back, although only in the ventriloquised voice of human beings, fabricated from a digital sea of babble.

I’m referring to advanced Artificial Intelligence, which excites emotions from dread to exultation. Last month, an AI model called GPT-4 placed in the 90th percentile on the Uniform Bar Examination, causing lawyers to fear for their jobs. Medical professionals are concerned about AI’s ability to fabricate research papers, and ChatGPT has been implicated in several instances of libel. Meanwhile, agencies such as the Department of Defense and the National Science Foundation are spending taxpayer dollars on developing AI-powered “military-grade” machinery to censor information and “automate the production and dissemination of state propaganda”.

But while the government is all in on AI, some experts have grave doubts. Citing “profound risks to society and humanity”, more than 1,000 tech leaders and researchers called for a six-month pause on the development of AI. A founder of the field goes further, arguing that a complete global moratorium is needed to avert the death of “literally everyone on Earth”. These suggestions pose a terribly serious question that sounds like a joke: What would Xi do?

As we enter the brave new world of AI, we might consider what the Western tradition can teach us about the deepest issues raised by sophisticated machine-learning processes. And the most fundamental of these may be idolatry — a problem that, as the ancient Hebrews and Greeks understood, is political and psychological as well as theological.

The term “idolatry” derives from two Greek words. An eidōlon is an insubstantial form, like the “phantoms of mortals outworn” that Odysseus encounters in Hades. Latreia is a kind of servitude: the state of a hired labourer, or the service to the gods that constitutes worship. Idols, the Jewish Encyclopaedia informs us, “are graven images, unshapen clods, and, being the work of men’s hands, unable to speak, see, hear, smell, eat, grasp, or feel, and powerless either to injure or to benefit”.

God begins his proclamation of the Decalogue in Exodus 20 by prohibiting the veneration of idols: “You shall have no other gods besides me. You shall make you no carved likenesses and no image of what is in the heavens above or what is on the earth below or what is in the waters beneath the earth. You shall not bow to them and you shall not worship them.” Having just freed the Israelites from Pharaoh’s cruel despotism, God warns them against proceeding to enslave themselves to their own handiwork: things endowed, by the psychological mystery of collective self-deception, with seemingly independent power and meaning.

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The self-enslavement of idolatry is a theme to which later thinkers return repeatedly. Prisoners in Plato’s Cave are enthralled by the shadows of idols manipulated by unseen puppeteers. Marx discusses the “fetishism of commodities” under capitalism and the alienation of the worker from the products of his labour. And there is no shortage of science-fiction books describing dystopian futures in which human beings are tyrannised by machines.

But why do human beings raise up idols, and bow down to them? The Bible addresses this question when, in Moses’s absence, the rebellious Israelites compel Aaron to “make us gods”:

“And Aaron said to them: ‘Take off the golden rings that are on the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters, and bring them to me.’ And all the people took off the golden rings that were on their ears and brought them to Aaron. And he took them from their hand and he fashioned it in a mould and made it into a molten calf. And they said: ‘These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up from the land of Egypt.’”

The meaning of this passage is indirectly elucidated by the Athenian dramatist Aristophanes, who knew nothing of the Bible, but understood the secret of pagan theogenesis. In The Clouds, a man hoping to wriggle out of his debts goes to the school of Socrates to learn the art of unjust speech. When this deadbeat swears to pay him, Socrates replies: “What sort of gods will you swear by? For first of all, gods are not current coin [nomisma] for us.” The Greek word for coinage is etymologically related to nomos: law, custom or convention. Gods, in other words, are human productions. Athenian silver tetradrachms bore the image of the city’s patron goddess; every community, Socrates implies, mints its own deities, who function as tokens of exchange in its political and theological economy only so long as their value continues to be widely acknowledged.

Aaron’s manufacture of the Golden Calf is just such an act of coining — one that, from the Bible’s perspective, is akin to counterfeiting. Before Moses can bring the divine Word, inscribed on tablets, down from the mountain, the Israelites — a fused, undifferentiated mass, like their melted earrings — speak for the amalgamated god they have so forcefully commissioned by twisting the phrase that introduces the Decalogue: “I am the Lord your God Who brought you out of the land of Egypt”. This act of bad faith only partially obscures the fact that the mob is worshipping its own unshackled collective power.

For at stake in the episode of the Golden Calf is not simply whether the Israelites will live by God’s law, but whether they will succeed in authoring a radically revisionist history of the Exodus. In effectively declaring that they freed themselves, the Israelites erase all debts to God and Moses. And to their slavish minds, freedom means licence; the Israelites’ implicit self-deification authorises the next day’s feasting, drinking, and sexual play. The fitting symbol of the people’s self-exaltation is a mass of gold — a precious metal that, even in Pharaoh’s day, was convertible into the primary objects of appetite, including power, honour, comfort and pleasure.

Today, the World Economic Forum imagines that AI will lead us to a less primitive “utopia”, a 21st-century Promised Land in which people will “spend their time on leisure, creative, and spiritual pursuits”. A safer bet would be drugs and sex robots. Ninety years ago, John Maynard Keynes prophesied, with what looks like eerie accuracy, that machines would make labour obsolete within a century. The prospect filled him with “dread”, because very few people have been educated for leisure.

Judging by the bad behaviour of the wealthy, an “advance guard… spying out the promised land of leisure for the rest of us and pitching their camp there”, Keynes found the outlook “very depressing”. And to those who, freed from labour, looked forward to doing nothing but listening to songs, he replied: “it will only be for those who have to do with the singing that life will be tolerable and how few of us can sing!”

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Why is my chatbot hitting on me?

By Kathleen Stock

In 2018, an article in Scientific American predicted that advanced AI will “augment our abilities, enhancing our humanness in unprecedented ways”. This Pollyannaish prognosis ignores the fact that all human capacities tend to atrophy in disuse. In particular, AI is inexorably changing the way we think (or don’t). Students now use ChatGPT to do their homework for professors who perhaps rely on it to write their lectures. What makes this absurd scenario amusing is not just the thought of machines talking to machines, but that intellectually lazy people would employ a simulacrum of human intelligence for the sake of mutual deception.

Compared with the natural endowment of human intelligence, the artificial kind is an oxymoron, like “genuine imitation leather”. AI is a mechanical simulation of only one part of intelligence: the capacity of discursive thinking, or the analysis and synthesis of information. Discursive thinking deals with humanly constructed tokens, including numerical and linguistic symbols (or, in the case of AI, digitally encoded data). While human intelligence can compare these tokens with the things they represent, AI cannot because it lacks intuition: the immediate cognition of reality that roots us in the world and directs our energies beyond ourselves and the operations of our own minds. It is intuition, for example, that tells us whether our nearest and dearest are fundamentally worthy of trust. (Needless to say, intuition is fallible, like any other intellectual operation.)

AI has no direct and concrete ties to the actual world, to which it relates only through the medium of binary notation. Self-enclosed in the electronic ether, it dwells nowhere, fears and loves nothing, and has no individual point of view. Does it make sense to grant autonomy and agency to an intelligence that has no natural connection to human needs?

The strength of sophisticated AI is its capacity to sort through massive quantities of data, aggregating and disaggregating discrete bits of information in potentially meaningful ways. This is a promising capability with applications in multiple fields from medicine to transportation. But AI’s productions are artificial regurgitations of material skimmed from vast but shallow pools of digital content and manipulated in ways limited, at least in principle, only by the constraints of programmers.

This can be enormously useful when it comes to detecting patterns of information that would otherwise be invisible to the human eye. Many problems, however, cannot be meaningfully approached by mining Big Data. Asked questions of an ethical or political nature, AI can either refuse to give a definitive response, or it can scour databases for opinions and return what it calculates is the most likely answer. But whether any answer generated in this manner is just or wise can only be a matter of happenstance. This is due, in part, to programming bias, including over or under-weighted data sets. When ChatGPT or Google’s chatbot Bard are asked to evaluate Biden and Trump, for example, their Leftward slant is obvious. (Try asking ChatGPT to write essays comparing each of these presidents to Stalin.)

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A more fundamental problem is that machine learning is simply not equipped to sift information according to ill-defined qualitative measures like justice or wisdom. This would be the case even if just or wise perspectives were common on the internet, which they are not. Although no one fully understands how advanced AI works, the old saying applies no less to it than to the simplest computer programmes: “Garbage in, garbage out.”

To the extent that AI remains within the limits of its capabilities, it is because programmers have intentionally constrained its activity. What happens when, for their own all-too-human reasons — the desire for power, honour, and wealth; national pride; or simply the fear of losing their jobs — they remove these constraints? Or when, having well and truly lost the habit of thinking for ourselves, people in general are willing to grant AI authority over matters it is not equipped to handle? Would anyone be surprised if tomorrow someone launched an AI-driven Justice App that promises to settle practical issues of distribution and retribution on the spot? Or if, taking our cue from a well-known software company (NYSE: ORCL), we were someday soon to treat that App — or some other algorithmically-generated distillation of aggregated opinions — as though it were an oracle?

That day is fast approaching, if it is not already here. AI is now substituting for clergy in religious rituals and ceremonies, and Catholics can even utilise a Confession Chatbot. A recent article that sees a use for AI in writing sermons nevertheless observes one limitation on the pastoral employment of machines: “speaking God’s word to a congregation or to an individual requires [personal] relationship.” But AI is incapable of any direct relationship with human beings, including one that is open to the possibility of faith. How could a congregation trust a religious leader, much less a God, that cannot reciprocate this trust?

The Israelite experiment with idolatry ended in disaster. After the episode of the Golden Calf, Moses ordered the Levites to take their swords and purge the camp of wrongdoers. “Slay every man his brother,” he commanded, “and every man his companion, and every man his neighbour.” Should we not expect a similarly bloody consummation when, heeding the utterly irresponsible voice of AI as though it were the Word of God, we once again reach peak idolatry?

In the United States, the results of this process (which, after more than two decades, is still ongoing) have been both ridiculous and tragic. It’s laughable that someone celebrated as “history-making” for being “the first openly genderfluid senior government official” steals ladies’ luggage to supplement his wardrobe. It’s disgraceful that high schools are abandoning advanced placement courses in the name of equity. It’s horrific that violent crimes in minority communities have spiked in the wake of the nationwide push to defund police departments and eliminate cash bail for felonies.

Yet in a deep sense, this is old news. None of these developments would have surprised the ancient Athenian playwright Aristophanes, a brilliant cultural critic who, with the ideologically-driven cancellation of classics, is little studied today and even less understood. Law-breaking, cross-dressing men? Check out his Thesmophoriazusae. Levelling to achieve equality? Read his Assemblywomen, where communistic female rulers infantilise male citizens, and young men must first satisfy the oldest and ugliest women before they are allowed to have sex with their girlfriends. Utopian ideologues who cannibalise the populations they are supposed to serve? Welcome to The Birds’ Cloud Cuckoo Land.

Written during the Peloponnesian War, Aristophanes’s make-love-not-war comedies enjoyed a broad resurgence in the era of Vietnam, not least because they resonated with the women’s liberation movement. In Lysistrata — named for its heroine, Dissolver of Armies — the wives and mothers of Athens and Sparta conspire to stop the war by going on a sex strike. Sometime in the late Sixties, my mother took me and my brother to a performance of the play by students at the University of Chicago. The male characters were all walking around with broomsticks poking up under their togas. One of the women announced: “If he won’t come by the hand, take him by the handle”, and then proceeded to drag some hapless fellow off the stage in just this manner. I was about ten years old, and the scene made a great impression on me.

Aristophanes anticipated not only the rebellious and carnivalesque ethos of the Sixties, but the nihilistic cultural repudiation of the 2020s, a nihilism in which the romantic fantasies of late modernity seem inevitably to issue. Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons and Dostoevsky’s Demons observe this phenomenon by showing how the old Russian liberals of the 1840s, who celebrated “the beautiful and lofty”, spawned the young radicals of the 1860s, who regarded their fathers as decadents and hypocrites and excoriated their ideas as sentimental bourgeois slop. (A related example is the transition, in little over a decade, from Star Trek’s utopian future to the cynicism of gritty sci-fi films like Blade Runner and Outland in the early Eighties.)

Aristophanes’ understanding of the relationship between gauzy utopianism and nihilism is grounded in his deep insight into human nature. He saw that our erotic and aggressive instincts are separated by a hair’s breadth, and that indiscriminate compassion is apt to decay, like some radioactive element, into tyranny. He would have regarded the cult of Charles Manson as a predictable consequence of the psychological and political anarchy of the Sixties. He doubtless appreciated Euripides’s characterisation of Dionysus, the theatrical god of intoxication whom the tragedian portrays in the Bacchae as a psychopath, as “most terrible, and yet most gentle to human beings”.

Where do universities fit into this picture? It is in The Clouds, a send-up of the philosopher Socrates, that Aristophanes prophecies the socially destructive effects of contemporary higher education. The play, which debuted in 423 BC, is the first work I know of that occupies itself with the strange new phenomenon of academic cults, and that explores the perennially fraught relationship between schools of radically counter-cultural thinkers and the larger society.

In The Clouds, a family is destroyed by the twisted education a young man receives at the ancient equivalent of a university. Wanting to wriggle out of debts incurred by his son Pheidippides’s excessive spending on horses, a rustic Athenian named Strepsiades proposes to send him to Socrates’s school, the Thinkery, to learn the art of unjust speech. (The historical Socrates in fact had no school, although the Pythagoreans, a contemporaneous philosophical sect, did establish a cloistered academic community.) Strepsiades has heard only confused rumours about what goes on in the Thinkery, but he is strongly impressed by the ability of the “wise souls” who live there to persuade people of patent absurdities, for example, that “the heaven is a stove… and we are charcoals”. This is Aristophanes’s caricature of the speculations of early Greek physicists.

Pheidippides, a sun-tanned jock who is interested only in racing horses, adamantly refuses his father’s request. He is disgusted by Socrates’s impoverished companions, whom he regards as “boasters, pale, shoeless…[and] miserably unhappy men”. His instinctive reaction is anti-intellectual, perhaps, but nevertheless proves just. And for the many disillusioned students who find that life in graduate school is (to borrow from Hobbes) solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, it rings true today.

Deciding to attend the Thinkery himself, Strepsiades is astonished to find Socrates suspended in a raised basket, looking down, as it seems to him, on the gods of the city. Were it not so spot-on, Socrates’s lofty disdain for religious and civic tradition would be a funny take on the meaning of “higher education” today. When Strepsiades swears by the gods to pay his tuition, Socrates explains that “we don’t credit gods” — literally, “the gods are not current coinage for us”. This remark implies that the Thinkery is its own separate community or polis (city), and that, just as every city mints its own coins, so, too, it mints its own gods. The gods of the Thinkery are Vortex, Aether, and Tongue — in other words, language, which is implicitly assumed not to represent reality but to shape it. In his relativism, atheism, and denial of objective truth, Socrates is the original postmodernist.

Yet Socrates insists that Strepsiades undergo a quasi-religious ceremony of initiation into the ways of the Thinkery, and here Aristophanes strikingly foreshadows the cultish character of contemporary intellectual schools and ideological movements. Socrates makes Strepsiades sit on a “sacred couch” and places a crown on his head, in a parody of the secret religious rites known as the Mysteries, which were supposed to ensure happiness in the afterlife. Tellingly, Strepsiades fears that he is about to be sacrificed. Read today, this episode brings to mind the implicitly pagan character of identity politics and related ideologies. These ideologies, all of which offer a secularised version of salvation through the ritual purgation of ethical and political sin, betray their Marxist roots in imagining a future earthly paradise of equality and justice that is in fact predicated on the sacrificial victimisation of some disfavoured group.

In the Thinkery everything is upside-down. Strepsiades encounters shockingly malnourished students who are doubled over, looking under the earth while their anuses study astronomy. Their education is literally preposterous, backside-in-front. Socrates investigates inane matters, like how far fleas can jump in flea-feet, which requires delicately fitting them with little wax booties. The things between the heavens and the underworld, the great celestial spheres and the tiniest insects, hold little interest for him. Socrates lectures Strepsiades on the proper formation of masculine and feminine nouns, but human life and well-being are for the most part studiously ignored in the Thinkery. The exception is a debate in which Unjust Speech vanquishes Just Speech by observing that the Athenians are “buggered” — universally and hopelessly corrupt. With cheerless students, pointless research, and a curriculum that involves exposing pervasive injustice, the Thinkery looks a lot like a 21st-century university.

Expelled because he is forgetful and dull, Strepsiades finally compels Pheidippides, who has no interest in anything but horse-racing, to enter the Thinkery. When he comes home from school, he quickly defeats his father’s creditors in argument. Strepsiades rejoices, yet, like all-too-many parents welcoming their sons and daughters home from university for the holidays, he is soon horrified to discover that Pheidippides has learned to repudiate his entire cultural inheritance. “How pleasant it is,” the young man declares, “to consort with novel and shrewd matters, and to be able to look down on the established laws and customs.” He berates his father’s old-fashioned ideas, beats him, and, to add insult to injury, uses sophistical arguments to make him admit that his behaviour is just. But when he threatens to beat his mother, Strepsiades is driven to burn down the Thinkery.

Like all great comedians, Aristophanes makes us laugh at things that might otherwise make us cry. His surviving corpus of 11 comedies is a distant but revealing mirror of our current ideological insanity, and this is especially true of The Clouds. For almost a millennium, universities served society by preserving, extending, and transmitting hard-won knowledge. They were rewarded for their essential role as cultural custodians and incubators of innovation with generous government support.

Perversely, they began to abandon that role just as the share of college graduates in the population exploded (increasing in the United States from less than 8% to more than 37% between 1960 and 2020). Particularly in the humanities and social sciences, advanced educational attainment has come to mean having suffered what Aristophanes suggests is a kind of intellectual buggery. The proliferation of Thinkeries in higher education would be of less concern were uninformed citizens not still rushing their doors in hopes of gaining admission for their children. As Aristophanes understood, it’s not the people who have entered our universities that are torching our society. It’s the ones who’ve left.

The word “ideology” is often used as a synonym for political ideas, a corruption of language that conceals its fundamentally anti-political character. In the ancient republics of Greece and Rome, primary models for English republicanism and the American Founders, politics was understood to be the collective determination of matters of common concern through public debate. As Aristotle taught, politics consists in the citizenly exercise of logos, the uniquely human power of intelligent speech. While voice registers private feelings — think of animal purrs and yelps — speech reveals what is good and bad, just and unjust, binding us together in the imperfect apprehension of realities greater than our individual selves.

But ideology is incapable of treating human beings as participants in a shared life, much less as individuals made in the image of God. Like the party hack whose spectacles struck Orwell as “blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them”, it sees them only as groups to be acted upon. The term idéologie was coined during the French Revolution by Antoine Destutt de Tracy, an anti-clerical materialist philosopher who believed that reason offered a way of uncovering general laws of social relations. Tracy conceived of idéologie as a social science of “ideas” that would inform the construction of a rational progressive society governed by an enlightened elite, whose technical expertise would justify their claim to rule. The illiberalism of this progressive-technocratic ideal became fully apparent in the West only with the onset of Covid. It is now widely understood that the subordination of public life to ostensibly scientific guidance and the effective transfer of sovereignty from the body of citizens to an unelected overclass are fundamentally inconsistent with liberty and individual dignity.

The political philosopher Raymond Aron defined ideology quite precisely as “the synthesis of an interpretation of history and of a programme of action toward a future predicted or hoped for”. In this synthesis, a theory about the historical origins of real or alleged social ills is pressed into the service of an imagined future in which those ills will be cured. The theory is not to be judged solely, or even primarily, by its adequacy in describing the historical record as it presents itself to an informed and inquiring mind. Rather, it is to be judged by the promised consequences of the programme of action it underwrites. Of course, ideological prophecy, appearing in times of organic or manufactured crisis when everything assumes an air of urgency, must be taken on faith.

It follows that the ideological synthesis remains incomplete until the programme of action is implemented. Marx famously claimed that “Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it”. But Marx, whose broad classical education informed his great critique of capitalism, remained at the level of philosophy. His interpretation of history achieved its stated end only when it was put into practice, however crudely, by Communist revolutionaries, starting with Lenin. By his own standards, Marx’s philosophy cannot be cleanly separated from the historical depredations of Marxism.

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Scientific tyranny has captured America

By Jacob Howland

Although ideological regimes were not unheard of in antiquity, ideology’s focus on efficacy rather than truth, its assumption that history is a problem awaiting a rational solution, and its elevation of the possibilities of a deliberately constructed future over the present constraints of the actual world, are characteristically modern. Its closest analogue is the phenomenon of technology, the harnessing of significant social resources to achieve mastery over nature through mathematical and experimental science. Formulated by the early modern philosophers Francis Bacon and René Descartes, the programme of technology rejected inherited intellectual foundations, including the guidance of God or nature.

Descartes, a professed believer whose pencil-thin moustache gave him an unmistakable air of duplicity, reduced the natural or created world to the mathematical abstraction of spatial extension, which is perfectly accessible to algebraic geometry but bears no trace of implicit order or divine goodness. And he divided his profoundly skeptical Meditations and Discourse on Method into six parts, in rivalrous imitation, scholars tell us, of the first six days of God’s creation. Liberated by technology from dependence on God and history, man and world could be fashioned in the image of human desires.

Descartes prophesied a future in which “the common good of all men” would be secured by “an infinity of devices that would enable us to enjoy without pain the fruits of the earth”, and by the elimination of “an infinity of maladies, both of body and mind”. Should biological science ever eliminate death due to “the infirmities of old age”, as he dared to hope, what would likely be a fresh earthly hell would render the question of the afterlife largely moot. Here, too, an ill-formed utopian vision licenses fundamental social transformation.

But there is a deeper and more important connection between ideology and technology. Ideology is in fact a social technology. The implementation of an ideological programme is an experiment testing the hypothesis that a radiant future can be achieved if only political, social, and economic relations are radically restructured, a process that always involves the preliminary destruction of existing realities. That future, like Descartes’s infinity of satisfactions, is never concretely described and never actually arrives. (Marx imagined a leisurely existence spent fishing, hunting, and philosophising, although philosophising would presumably be pointless when the world no longer needs changing.) This unscientific hypothesis is then tested on actual human subjects.

In the United States, we are currently engaged in many such experiments simultaneously, all undertaken in the name of social justice. What happens when violent protestors are encouraged to riot in our cities, crimes go unprosecuted, and bails are waived? Or biological males are permitted to use women’s restrooms and live in their cellblocks? Or schoolchildren are indoctrinated with identity politics, while professors are required to pledge support for diversity, equity, and inclusion agendas as a condition of employment? Or borders are thrown open to illegal immigrants who enjoy privileges and benefits not extended to citizens? No sensible person would want to find out. But ideology is always and everywhere opposed to the moderate middle ground, not only of politics, but of the general opinion and sentiment that goes by the name of common sense.

History is littered with examples of malicious ideological experiments, which in good Baconian form observe nature — in this case, human nature — not “free and large”, but “under constraint and vexed… forced out of her natural state, and squeezed and moulded”. What is to my knowledge the first such experiment occurred after the Athenians were starved into submission at the end the Peloponnesian War in 404 BCE, when the Spartans installed an oligarchy known as the Thirty. The regime was led by Plato’s aristocratic cousin Critias, who flattered himself with the thought that he was a greater philosopher, statesman, and poet than his illustrious ancestor Solon. In Plato’s dialogue Charmides, Critias advances a vacuous conception of rule by a “science of sciences” — an ancient prototype of idéologie, which Tracy considered to be a “theory of theories”. According to Lysias, an eyewitness, the Thirty proposed “to purge the city of unjust men, and to turn the rest of the citizens toward virtue and justice” by restoring what they claimed was the ancestral Athenian constitution. The oligarchs proceeded to disenfranchise, disarm, and expel large segments of the population and finally to rob and murder their political opponents, putting to death roughly 1,500 Athenians — perhaps 3% of the citizen body.

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The ideological tyranny of the Thirty left no lasting mark outside of Athens. This was not the case with Communism and Nazism, which also disenfranchised, robbed, deported, and murdered large numbers of people, but did so with modern managerial and industrial efficiency. As Alain Besançon observes in his short but indispensable book A Century of Horrors, these ideologies had much in common. They both aimed to achieve a perfect society by eliminating the evil that hindered its creation. They claimed to seek the good, either of the German people or of all mankind. They used pseudo-sciences like dialectical materialism and race-based eugenics to justify and wield their power. Most important, they claimed the right to kill, and did so on an unprecedented scale.

The Nazis murdered roughly 17 million unarmed civilians, not including those who died in aerial bombings and other ordinary acts of war. After almost 80 years, historians are still compiling a list of ghettoes and camps in Germany and Nazi-occupied territory. As of March 2013, the total number identified by researchers stood at 42,500. But here as elsewhere, the National Socialists were students of the Marxist ones. It was the Soviets who invented and systematised the use of combination slave-labour and death camps, and the concentrationary universe of the Gulag covered an even greater geographical area than the Nazi Lagers. Lenin and Stalin also anticipated Hitler in the use of poison gas (including mobile gas vans), mass deportation, and, in the great famines of 1921-22 and 1930-33, targeted starvation to liquidate what Lenin called “harmful insects”.

The Black Book of Communism estimates that Communist regimes murdered between 85 and 100 million of their own people during the 20^th century, fulfilling the eerie prophecy in Dostoevsky’s Demons that socialism’s cure for the world’s ills would involve “lopping off a hundred million heads”. And while Besançon regards the Holocaust as the “absolute zero” of murderous intensity, he rightly observes that “communism brought about a more widespread and deeper moral destruction” than Nazism. Thoroughly discredited by the Holocaust, Nazism exited the world stage in 1945, but Communism officially endures today in China, North Korea, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam. Marxism furthermore remains a respectable alternative to capitalism in the eyes of many Westerners, even including some who acknowledge the aforementioned facts. This is itself due, in large measure, to the ideological distortion and suppression of history.

Ideology’s most horrific social experiments illustrate several points that apply also to the “Totalitarianism Lite” of contemporary American life. First, while human beings naturally form social groups for common purposes, ideology assumes that organic associations cannot support a good society, which must be engineered from the top down. This assumption, which no ideological experimentation has ever sustained, makes up in arrogance what it lacks in humility.

Second, ideology abjures persuasion, preferring what Hannah Arendt called “mute coercion”. We see this today in the insistence that certain widely-shared opinions that were uncontroversial only a few years ago are so morally illegitimate that they do not deserve a hearing. We see it in the fact that those who publicly voice such opinions are commonly smeared, hounded, denied financial services, investigated, and fired, even by institutions that are publicly committed to diversity of opinion and freedom of speech.

Third, ideology always involves the scapegoating and purging of opponents. Today these primitive religious rituals, enacted within the framework of a secularised and apocalyptic Christianity, include the sanctification of “victims” and the (for now metaphorical) public crucifixion of “oppressors”. Those who are targeted by, or resist, the ideological programme — denounced variously as kulaks, capitalist roadsters, vermin, or white supremacists — must, with the exception of a few penitents who are mercifully spared, be decisively defeated in battle with the forces of good. For only then will the earthy salvation of a just and harmonious society be achievable.

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This war can save liberalism

By Francis Fukuyama

In modern times, the template for the use of violence in the name of the highest political and moral ideals was established in the French Revolution. Marching under the banner of liberty, equality, and fraternity, the Revolution took less than five years to move from the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen to the Terror of Robespierre and the genocidal destruction of the Vendée, a French Department where the Revolutionaries responded to a peasant rebellion by slaughtering roughly 15% of the population. The trajectory from utopian fervour to nihilistic bloodshed, traversed over the past century in countries scattered across Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America, is unsurprising. One could hardly expect a programme of radical social transformation that demonises its opponents to be free of bloodshed.

Anyone who thinks that the United States could not descend into similarly horrifying violence is deluded. Ideology is a highly communicable social contagion that infects people who are morally immunocompromised, and today it poses a far greater threat to human beings than any merely biological virus. It always attracts thugs, sadists, and those who lust for power, groups that, once revolutionary fervour gives way to dictatorship, always outnumber true believers. But it also exploits the universal human longing for social validation and fear of being cast out. These risk factors are exponentially amplified by the tribalising social and news-media feedback loops that now fill the vacuum left by a permanent moral order, inherent in nature or revealed by God —notions that, owing to the seductions of technology, were arguably doomed at modernity’s inception.

The inevitable consequence of ideological infection is brain rot. Besançon justly remarks that “it is not possible to remain intelligent under the spell of ideology”. Intelligence, after all, is an ongoing attentiveness to reality that is inconsistent with wilfulness and fantasy. Nor can it take root in the sterile soil of widespread cultural repudiation. This is why all ideological regimes are without exception plagued by sheer ineptitude.

Just consider: the anti-Jewish decrees of April 1933 stripped a quarter of Germany’s physicists of their livelihood, including 11 who had earned or would earn Nobel prizes, and left German research in atomic physics in shambles—  a lucky break for the Allies. Trofim Lysenko, a barely literate agronomist who won Stalin’s ear, vilified the work of the geneticist Gregor Mendel, an Augustinian friar, as “fascist, bourgeois-capitalistic, and inspired by clerics”. Thousands of biologists were fired, imprisoned, or executed for opposing Lysenko’s crackpot theories, which exacerbated famines that killed many millions of people in the U.S.S.R. and China (where Mao adopted his methods in the Fifties). Up to 70% of the U.S.S.R.’s active engineers were arrested and sentenced without trial in 1930, while Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan to build heavy industry was in full swing. Not to be outdone, China has now painted itself into a corner with its brutally tyrannical zero-Covid lockdowns, which immiserated its population and destroyed the economy but cannot be fully lifted without destroying the credibility of the Communist Party.

And then there is the gross incompetence of the Biden administration. While ideologically-induced stupidity may not fully explain this phenomenon, it’s a huge contributing factor. The administration’s ineptitude is already provoking what looks to be a strong political backlash, and if we are very, very lucky, we may be able to avoid major disasters before the 2024 elections. But a new government will make little difference. The rot has penetrated every essential institution in the United States, and the long-term picture is bleak. Nor is there solace in the fact that we Americans are by no means alone. Whoever said misery loves company wasn’t thinking about the ideological endgame of liberal democracy.

Thrasymachus is directly acquainted with Athenian justice. He was a citizen of Chalcedon, one of over 100 subject-cities of Athens in the late 5th century. The imperial yoke so chafed the Chalcedonians that they revolted in the middle of the Peloponnesian War. The results were predictably bad.

Besieged by Athenian forces, the Chalcedonians were saved in 408 by the satrap Pharnabazus, who paid off the aggressors with Persian coin. In the Republic, which unfolds against the backdrop of these historical events, Thrasymachus is brought to a hard boil of indignation by the ridiculous spectacle of two Athenians, of all people, agreeing that it is never just to harm anyone. He interrupts the philosopher Socrates — for he is one of the Athenians — with astonishing belligerence.

Thrasymachos (Bold in Battle) knows that politics is nothing but domination and servitude, and that everything is political. He also thinks Socrates and his interlocutor are either fools or hypocrites, and Socrates in any case deserves scorn as he is a lowly craftsman, a stonecutter and intellectual amateur, whereas Thrasymachus’s professional knowledge and political office — he represented Chalcedon in diplomatic negotiations with the Athenians — place him in the ranks of the elite.

Thrasymachus polices Socrates’ language, forbidding him to offer certain answers to the question “What is justice?” An expert in the field of politics and an early practitioner of the hermeneutics of suspicion, he is certain that Socrates aims only to obscure the truth with specious arguments. He is therefore perfectly entitled to restrict his means of doing so.

Thrasymachus is quite the familiar character. Our highest-ranked universities have been training and credentialing his descendants for decades. He is more aggressive than inquisitive. His ideas are more precise than accurate, more critical than enlarging. His embrace of intellectual fashion springs in no small part from ambition. His combination of indignation, cynicism, social and intellectual elitism, and proclivity to abstract and totalising constructions is today unavoidable. He is the ancient ancestor of the contemporary ideological technocrat; types like him have recently flooded the political mainstream, altering the character of virtually every part of American life. They are the bitter fruit of an illiberal education.

By ideology, I’m referring to a reductive political theory that, when implemented, is incapable of securing the free and informed assent of the governed and so must rely on extensive fraud and compulsion. By technocrat, I mean someone belonging to a regime in which claims of scientific or technical expertise override traditional kinds of political authority and substitute for political debate.

Technocracy and ideology are intimately connected. Technocracy is necessarily ideological, for while the management of abject slaves may perhaps be reducible to a science, the governance of a political community — one in which free citizens share in the determination of public affairs — is not. Politics, a continual process of public deliberation and negotiation in the light of the available facts, engages and exercises the capacities of practical reason. It is a school of virtue, capable, at its best, of dignifying and ennobling human existence. Technocrats, though, regard human existence as a problem to be solved or a sickness to be cured; knowledge and agency belong almost exclusively to them, who approach the ignorant like surgeons preparing to operate on a patient.

Equally, ideology is very often technocratic. It is almost invariably so in late modernity, an era infatuated with what is unreflectively called Progress — the advancement and practical application of science. But the mixture of ideology and scientific expertise generates pseudo-sciences, such as Leninist dialectical materialism, which are used to consolidate and justify despotism. In this, as in other respects, modern ideological tyrannies trace their ancestry, as Karl Popper showed 80 years ago in The Open Society and its Enemies, to Callipolis, the Republic’s infamous city of philosopher-kings.

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The prototype of all scientific tyrannies, Callipolis deceives, manipulates, and constantly surveils its citizens; its very name, Noble and Beautiful City, is a lie. The regime claims to achieve perfect justice for all, offering what Karl Marx, in another context, called a “solution to the riddle of history”. Although radical technocratic and ideological responses to that riddle seem to lead only to final solutions, the nightmare of total scientific control in the name of justice and human liberation continues to stalk the West like a zombie horde.

The United States remains a constitutional republic, but technocratic progressivism threatens its future as a representative democracy. It is telling that, in the mouths of the governing elites, the word “democracy” no longer refers to government of, by, and for the people, but to progressive policies that are endorsed by credentialed experts yet have little popular support. And now we must contend with a monstrous union of science and politics that lames and deforms both.

Consider government responses to Covid. At the outset of the pandemic, a handful of unelected public health officials immediately began to advise and direct policy decisions of enormous consequence. Our elected officials in the US, trembling before these scientific experts, have followed their recommendations with little consideration of the cost that lockdowns, school closures, vaccine mandates, and the like exact on the economic and political well-being of the country and the mental and physical health of its citizens. Similar measures were adopted across the globe.

Americans have from the beginning been told to follow the science, but the science has mostly followed politics. In June 2020, for example, over 1,200 medical and health professionals signed a letter arguing that, despite the high risk of viral transmission, prohibitions then in force on small gatherings like church services should not apply to large (and frequently destructive and violent) demonstrations protesting what the authors called “the pervasive lethal force of white supremacy”. And when the science pointed toward the likely origin of Covid in a Wuhan lab, top health officials conspired — for political reasons — to smother that news.

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More ominously, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and most of the corporate media have acted, and continue to act, as willing handmaids of our public health officials. They have eagerly embraced the role of Covid censors, monitoring and restricting debate, dissent, and the flow of information — the lifeblood of all knowledge, and, in Tocqueville’s view, the last bulwark against complete servitude to the new form of oppression he called “administrative despotism”. Public speech is now substantially mediated by digital technology, whose constantly expanding and probably irreversible influence on our lives is a unique feature of contemporary technocracy.

Digital technology has amplified and accelerated the politicisation of almost everything, including scientific inquiry. Researchers who publish findings or explore questions that run afoul of progressivist ideology are regularly attacked by social-media mobs and can expect little support from the leaders of their universities and academic organizations, some of which, like Britain’s Royal Society of Chemistry, have formally institutionalised censorship. The situation has drawn thoughtful and informed comparisons with the Soviet Union, where engineers, physicists, geneticists, linguists, and others were purged from the academy for practicing “bourgeois science.”

This is not all. For technocracy and technology exacerbate the worst characteristics of late-stage democracy, a transitional period that Plato illuminates with prophetic clarity. His description of the growth of tyranny in the midst of democracy cuts close to the bone today.

In the Republic’s grand arc of political decline, democracy emerges from oligarchy, a regime ruled by stingy and avaricious money-makers. Oligarchy contains the seeds of its own destruction. The children of the wealthy are “used to luxury and unaccustomed to labors in body and soul, weak in resisting pleasures and pains, and idle”. The old misers are furthermore happy to make loans to this spoiled cohort. This produces a class of indebted and dishonored young men “hating and plotting against those who acquired their property, and all the rest, and longing for political change”.

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The revolutionary longing of these frustrated and dispossessed elites finds fulfillment in democracy, which is characterised by freedom and free speech, personal license, the indulgence of criminals, the neglect of education, and the equality of equals and unequals alike. License and leveling go hand in hand, because the acknowledgment of fundamental differences between what is noble and base, good and bad, hinders the unrestricted satisfaction of individual desire. The democratic man turns a deaf ear to the admonishments of older relatives and banishes shame and moderation, calling them foolishness and cowardliness.

The desire for limitless freedom eventually becomes insatiable, especially among the young, who attack customary restraints with sacred fervour. Rulers who resist are accused of being religiously polluted, while obedient citizens are vituperated as willing slaves and nonentities. Anarchy pervades the polity and enters the household. Fearing vilification, fathers capitulate to their sons, while sons have no fear or shame before their parents. Rulers imitate the ruled and the old come down to the level of the young, flattering them “so that they won’t seem to be unpleasant or despotic”. The condemned carry on like free men, foreigners are treated like citizens, and the souls of the people become soft and tender and unable to bear anything that smacks of servitude.

In the end, ancestral customs and written laws lose all authority, and the city is governed by the most ferocious among the idle sons of the oligarchs — the ones who had longed for political change under the regime of their fathers. These rulers seize the wealth of the money-makers, the class that is most invested in civic order, keeping the lion’s share for themselves and distributing the rest to the poor.

In the Republic, we see the present in an ancient mirror. The radicalisation of the children of the elites; the repudiation of ancestral customs, political traditions, parental and educational authority, and the very idea of sacred order; the normalisation of previously illicit pleasures; and the weakening of civil rights are all features of contemporary American life. So are the vehement shaming and scapegoating of political opponents; clemency toward criminals amid a surge of lawlessness; the enrichment of the ruling class, destruction of the middle class, and increased dependency of the poor; the fragility and unwonted aggressiveness of the young; and the fatuousness and cowardliness of the old. Is this not astonishing?

But these ills are now supercharged by technocracy, which is perfectly compatible with democratic passions even if it is incompatible with representative democracy. There is currently no shortage of “scientific” support for the liberation of human beings from the constraints of nature and custom alike.

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The West has lost its virtue

By Paul Kingsnorth

Wesley Yang recently used his Year Zero substack to draw attention to a 2019 USA Today article that cites policies adopted by the American Medical Association in 2018 to substantiate its claim that feminists who resist the inclusion of transgender women within female-only spaces, including restrooms and athletic competitions, “deny transgender people their full humanity and go against what the medical community today has accepted as scientific fact around gender and sex”. The arguments of these “transphobic” feminists get no mention; the exclusionary position is summarily dismissed on the ground that it violates an implicit and newly minted right to “full humanity”— a term that can mean whatever those who claim that right want it to mean.

This example illustrates the invidious political dynamic of our time. Having begun to condemn great masses of Americans as scientifically illiterate bigots, our self-appointed guardians find themselves on a road from which there is no exit. Turning political disagreements into occasions for public shame and vilification has failed to produce the desired alignment of public opinion. It has only emboldened the opposition, whose refusal to be silenced has been met with increasingly heavy-handed controls. Extreme democratic passions have paradoxically fuelled the anti-democratic takeover of the public square.

Read in the twilight of the present, the great books of the past disclose new meanings. The Republic’s Cave Image offers a chilling prophecy of the human terminus, the total triumph of ideological technocracy in the age of advanced technology.

Chained prisoners facing the bottom of a cave watch a play of shadows on the cold wet wall beneath them. The shadows are cast by puppets manipulated in front of a flickering fire by men above and behind them, players in a rigged game of whose existence the prisoners know nothing. Living in social quarantine, they cannot move their heads and have never seen a human face, never directly encountered another existing individual. All they know of themselves and one another is mediated by the shadows of artificial things: dark, flat, uniform, fundamentally negative shapes, abstract forms not of light but of its absence.

These shadows — today limned by an electronic glow — tell only the official story, the thin and impoverished “narrative”, that the puppet masters, competing for money, power, and honour, wish to project.

This whole human tragedy will be complete, the dying embers will sputter and smoke, when not a single person in this dank and gloomy underground — not one prisoner or puppeteer — has any remaining inkling that, on the sunlit uplands above and beyond their poor constructions, there is a warm, vibrant, colourful, three-dimensional, naturally ordered organic world. The one that was once called reality.

I am reminded of a trip through Eastern Europe that my wife and I took in 1981. In Yugoslavia one day, we planned to catch a bus in the late morning. The bus and driver were there but the departure time came and went. After an hour we knocked on the station window and the two or three functionaries behind the glass barely glanced up from their hard-boiled eggs and sandwiches. The other passengers remained uniformly inert, neither requesting nor receiving any explanation for what turned into a two-hour delay. It would take years of small humiliations to make a formerly free people this compliant, but that seems to be the goal of the vast coalition of governmental, corporate, academic, cultural, philanthropic, and media powers that has just now fused and hardened, right before our eyes, into an ominous social monster.

There is a common playbook for technocratic control of recalcitrant populations. The Biden administration employs the same siege tactics of declared exigency, deception, division, and intimidation that corporatist progressives used to destroy my former university — Tulsa — two years ago.

After a Left-wing billionaire engineered a hostile takeover of the institution, it was announced that we faced serious crises of finance and accreditation. Faculty were subjected to mandatory training sessions and a blizzard of futile paperwork. The supposedly “data-driven” administration ignored or manipulated information that conflicted with their hidden purposes. While preparing a comprehensive academic review of our department, I learned that the provost had already received the program review committee’s recommendation that our majors in philosophy and religion be eliminated.

The general idea was to overwhelm and exhaust potential opponents of the university’s plan to gut the liberal arts. Surprised by strong pushback, the administration stirred up staff animosity against faculty critics of the restructuring, who were publicly vilified, monitored, and in some cases (including my own) subjected to costly and time-consuming disciplinary actions.

I needn’t belabour the obvious comparisons with the current state of our American union, which has suffered its own hostile takeover. I note rather that the logic of 21st-century technocratic despotism was spelled out long ago in Plato’s Republic. In that dialogue, a class of self-styled experts — the philosopher-kings and their academically-trained ministers — considers its exclusive claim to a science of politics as a title to rule. Contemptuous of what they regard as the ignorant many, they treat their fellow citizens as subjects to be manipulated, and for reasons Matthew Crawford suggested in his essay on the new public health despotism.

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The new public health despotism

By Matthew Crawford

They do so first, because persuasion takes time and effort and is less efficient than other available methods for achieving the desired results. In a democratic republic, this is a fundamental corruption of power. Second, because the notion that governance is an applied science or techne encourages the idea that human beings are basically raw materials to be shaped and stamped, like blanks at the Denver mint. Left unchecked, the state’s fundamentally idolatrous desire to coin young souls exclusively in its own image leads to the destruction of the family. The Attorney General’s attempt effectively to criminalise parental veto over public school curricula is a step in this direction. And third, because technocratic elites are inclined to regard the unsophisticated many as cognitively impaired. In the Beautiful City of the Republic, the rulers’ medicinal lies are justified on the ground that one wouldn’t give weapons to madmen. Just so, Dr Fauci’s supposedly noble lies about Covid presuppose that Americans are too sick to be entrusted with the truth.

It is hard to exaggerate the extent to which the therapeutic idiom of bureaucracies has taken hold in United States. (Here again, the University of Tulsa was ahead of the curve, having installed a safe-space affirming psychiatrist as president in 2016.) It is no coincidence that expressions of the manly confidence, candor, and “masculine independence of opinion” that Tocqueville saw as essential to the health of a democratic republic are increasingly likely to be condemned as “toxic”, a term that tries to square the circle by implying that the problem is simultaneously one of social disease and moral depravity. But this is yesterday’s news.

Tyrants have always attacked the political immune system of the people. Fearing spirited assertions of free thought, ancient Greek ones were known to close gymnasiums and ban philosophical discussion. At that time medicine was unsophisticated, and the psychiatric imprisonment of political opponents was not yet possible. Things have not gone so far in our country, but the identification of unorthodox speech and even of silence with violence — itself a symptom of a contagious political madness — serves the same purpose.

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By Ian Birrell

Such tactics may be effective in the short term, but progressivist technocratic despotism is disastrous as a long-term political strategy in the United States. It will either be decisively repudiated or do great (and perhaps irreparable) harm to the country. For it betrays a fundamental ignorance not only of what one might call the physics of democratic republicanism, but of the unique nature of the American political experiment.

Plato again illuminates matters. In the Republic, Socrates compares individual souls and political communities to spinning tops. This is a rich and suggestive image. Those short-lived wanderers we played with as children, setting them in motion like little gods, had a lifespan that depended on the rotational impetus imparted by a snap of fingers or string. Encountering irregularities on the hardwood floor, they would wobble and sometimes fall; we cheered when they righted themselves and continued to roam, as they often did. Children instinctively understand the allegorical character of such games.

A top that does not lean in any direction — as happens only at maximum energy — is Plato’s image of the healthy soul and city. Such vital rectitude, which the Romans called religio, was traditionally formed by social ligaments of ancestral custom and habit that constrained the wild impulses of the young and made them straighten up, balancing their characters and aligning them with the ancestors below and the gods above. The ancients understood that moral alignment with traditional and transcendent norms optimises the energy of the human organism in a way that is essential for navigation. Lives tend to drift and fall apart without it.

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Covid has exposed America as a failed state

By Aris Roussinos

But punitive doctrinal correctness is no substitute for the basically healthy mores that have long kept the American polity from falling over. Our governing elites fail to understand that courage and moderation are the true and steady foundations of prudent policy. The good kind of political correctness that the Greeks called orthē doxa, upright opinion that furnishes sound premises for political deliberation, is rooted in these virtues and cannot be produced by the moral orthopedics of the propaganda state. The forceful imposition of woke political orthodoxy on the American public can only breed resentment and promote hypocrisy.

While energy is imparted externally to a spinning top, a republic is renewed from within, by the exertions of its citizens. But even well-founded ones eventually fall off kilter. Decline may begin gradually, with minute oscillations, or suddenly, through some external blow, but it always terminates in wild gyrations. Most often, decay results when internal forces move large numbers of citizens, and impede the motions of many others, in ways that throw the whole out of balance.

The chafing humiliations of the Covid police are just part of a surge of social friction that was gestating for years and exploded with the election of President Trump five years ago. Strong political passions, multiplied, amplified, and frequently concentrated on specific targets by corporate media and big tech, have destabilised our essential public and private institutions, virtually all of which, through some demonic Oedipal fatality, now seem intent on repudiating their founding principles and betraying their core missions.

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Some of those who, by reason of experience and accumulated wisdom, might still be capable of righting these institutions have been purged; the rest have mostly retired or retreated under fire, withdrawing much good and necessary energy from our common national life. Depleted and uncharacteristically depressed, the American people now spin and shudder along the edge of the abyss. What future awaits us if we forget how to live and work together in amity, and if, emptied of honest debate on matters of pressing concern, the public square echoes with blood curdling war cries?

I have become convinced that a particular deficit of historical memory lies at the root of all our ills. I think there will be no cure for what ails us unless we can recover the answer to one big question: What is America for? What are we about, as a nation? Lincoln taught at Gettysburg that the United States was “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”. The twin pillars of our American story are ordered liberty and individual dignity.

Ours is a unique experiment in mature self-governance, testing whether a nation of citizens who are free and equal under the law — and therefore free to make mistakes, to be wrong or right in their own ways and to stand or fall as they will under the hammer of experience — can long endure. This experiment involves considerable risk; as Tocqueville repeatedly reminds us, every one of our political institutions and practices balances goods against evils. But even when faced with the gravest political exigencies, our forefathers reckoned that the rewards of participation in the story of America were too precious to forgo.

This question of risk goes to the heart of the problem Crawford raised. Failure to comply with Covid regulations is presumed to be irrational because it exposes the populace to unnecessary dangers. But risk is always relative to possible outcomes, which today are seen darkly through a glass of psychological and physical safetyism. To take a real example, does the possibility that a student might suffer psychic injury from a book spine justify removing a volume entitled American Negro Poetry from a high school library? But what sort of injury are we talking about? And how does it compare to the possibility that a student will never hear Langston Hughes sing America or speak of rivers, or dream a world “where every man is free”? And above all, who has the right to decide these matters?

Our technocratic mandarins dislike such questions and recoil from the political uncertainties of democratic debate. Whatever its psychological causes, their longing for certainty in practice leads them to insist on it in theory, and so to end debate by any means necessary. This is an engine of comprehensive despotism because it can be satisfied only with the advent of univocal global answers.

The best outcome we could hope for if we continue down this road is what Tocqueville calls “the type of social well-being that can be provided by a very centralised administration to the people who submit to it”. “Travelers tell us,” he writes, “that the Chinese have tranquility without happiness, industry without progress, stability without strength, physical order without public morality.… I imagine that when China opens to Europeans, the latter will find there the most beautiful model of administrative centralization that exists in the universe.”