Today, as secularization proceeds apace, and the “quiet revival” of Christianity turns out not to have been all it was jazzed up to be, we labor under all the horror of Good Friday — the loss of the good — but taste little of the hope. Ours is a world in which it seems that God is indeed dead, even as the devil carries on.

Few cultural texts have come closer to capturing this predicament than The Exorcist, William Friedkin’s classic horror film from 1973. The movie concerns priests, the devil, and God, and thus is an apposite rewatch over the Christian high holy days, which culminate on Easter Sunday.  The Exorcist puts its finger on a growing threat to the West: our consistent tendency to name evil, but not the good, a loss that is eroding us from within. 

In The Exorcist, Catholic priest Father Merrin (Max von Sydow) accidentally brings an Assyrian demon, Pazuzu, back from an archaeological dig in Nineveh, Iraq, and it possesses young Regan (Linda Blair). Regan’s distraught mother Chris (Ellen Burstyn) finally consults a local priest, Father Damien Karras (Jason Miller) — and is astonished to discover that even he is skeptical of demons. In the 1970s, priests weren’t what they used to be. 

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This, it turns out, makes Karras an existentialist hero of our times. He is both a priest and a psychiatrist at Georgetown Medical School, and though he is losing his faith, he still has the sense of moral responsibility that accompanied it. He embodies a contemporary dilemma: we make commitments freely, as a matter of individual choice, yet in the absence of secure authority, those commitments feel anxious and fragile.

Indeed, like most of us, Karras straddles two worlds: an older world of fixed values presided over by legitimate authority — and a rational, materialist world, which, in the 1960s, and ’70s when the Exorcist was filmed, was fast turning into a therapeutic domain. The therapeutic approach of the “psy” disciplines (psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy, and psychoanalysis) offers a softening of rational materialism, and performs a substitution of explanation for judgment. Instead of judging a person as “wicked,” these modalities will explain them as “unhappy” or “troubled.” They will ask: what wound or trauma accounts for this? This can be humane and often correct. But as explanation replaces judgment, the ability to name corruption, cruelty, and selfishness fades. We are left without the language that would help us identify what must be resisted.

This shows up clearly in The Exorcist, in which adversaries can be authoritatively demonic. Chris consults doctors and psychiatrists, who argue over the possibilities of central nervous disorders, temporal lobe epilepsy, lesions in Regan’s brain, and so on. All the while, the devil is gaining ground. He has the advantage of knowing what he is, long before others recognize the danger. 

The doctors never wise up: after consulting 80 experts, Chris is told by one doctor to seek an exorcism. This is not because said doctor believes in the Catholic faith and its rituals. But because Regan thinks she is possessed, the doctor reasons, an exorcism might work through auto-suggestion. This way, the old wisdom is folded seamlessly into the therapeutic culture, a process that obscures the moral and spiritual battle actually taking place.

Father Karras eventually changes his mind on the existence of demons and together with Father Merrin does battle for Regan’s soul. However, in the symbology of the film, he is a figure of doubt, wearing a medallion of Saint Joseph, the patron saint of “people in doubt.” In one sense, the film suggests that doubt, although a key aspect of our cultural mentality, is a fatal weakness when faced with evil. In a deeper sense, it captures our cultural ambiguity. Karras comes to accept evil but still doubts the good. The exorcism works, and the demon jumps from Regan to Karras, who then jumps to his death to end the possession. But we are never given any sure indication that his faith is restored. Pazuzu reveals himself but God does not.

It would be easy to treat such narratives as relics of a more superstitious age. And yet even in a culture that increasingly explains behavior through trauma and pathology, the language of evil has not disappeared. To be sure, we are more inclined to explain individuals than to judge them. But  at the level of systems, histories, and political enemies, we readily invoke evil. This is evident in official rhetoric — from Ronald Reagan’s “evil empire” to George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” — as well as in the popular imagination, which has thrilled to panics over evil, including the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, the conspiracy theories of QAnon, and the Epstein mythos. Most recently there has been chatter that the Labubu dolls resemble Pazuzu, reviving fears of possession in an otherwise secular culture. 

We are never in doubt of what we are fighting against, but we rarely ask ourselves what we are fighting for.

The inability to answer this question lies at the heart of the exhaustion of the West, its crises of meaning and self-belief. The problem has been framed in terms of the decline of religion; it is, I suggest, less the need to believe in God than to believe in the good. By this, I mean the sense that there is something outside us — objectively — that sets a standard and demands to be seen and responded to. From the perspective of classical theism, the good is God, and ordinary goods are a participation in the higher Good. The Enlightenment retained part of this conviction, even as religious faith declined; moral life was still oriented toward truth, order, and hierarchy as external realities. What has changed more recently is not simply lack of belief in goodness, but the erosion of that orientation altogether. Without it, the existentialist emphasis on freedom, choice, and individual responsibility collapses into a shallow focus on success on the one hand, nihilism on the other.

In ancient Assyrian cosmology, figures such as Pazuzu occupied a strange and unstable position: they were lesser demons, invoked to ward off other, greater evils, and served a similar function as gargoyles or the “wrathful deities” in Buddhism. What is striking in Assyrian religion is not simply the proliferation of such forces, but the absence of any clear, unifying conception of the good. The result is a world structured around dangers, rather than purposes — a world, in other words, very much like our own. 

For us, this brings new threats. In The Exorcist, when Merrin finds the amulet of Pazuzu, he also finds nearby a Christian medallion of Saint Joseph, an echo of the one Karras wears. In older times, the smaller, named evils protected us from ultimate Evil; but when we doubt the existence of the opposing force of good, these small evils become dangerous in their own right. 

If the problem is not a lack of God, but a lack of the good, then we might turn to the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, who sought a way of recovering moral reality without restoring dogma. In her landmark text The Sovereignty of the Good, Murdoch didn’t advocate attempting to go back to the days of religious fervor; instead she located the good in the everyday benevolent actions of ordinary human beings, and the sense we have that “there is more than this” when we look compassionately at people. Such moments do not have to be grand. Indeed, she insisted that such insights must remain small, almost imperceptible, in order to not become theological. 

Murdoch referred to the good as something with a metaphysical position, but no fixed metaphysical form. It has no doctrine, but it can be perceived with a kind of disciplined attention in which we do not allow our egos, fears, and desires to blind us to reality. This is the opposite of the modern injunction to “be kind” and suspend judgment; judgments must be harder, sharper, and less self-flattering. 

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The good has slipped out of our conversations and our dramas; it goes unnamed. In The Exorcist, the frame of Christian theology allows the possibility of a literal triumph of God over Satan, by the film’s logic. But for secular audiences, the good in the film is glimpsed in small things, as Murdoch might have imagined it, and is easily missed against the backdrop of dramatic evil. We see it especially in the friendship between Karras and Father Joseph Dyer (played by an actual priest, the Rev. William O’Malley), who grasps Karras’s hand as he lies dying on the infamous Georgetown steps, offering both Last Rites (salvation, in the Catholic understanding) but also human comfort — the best we can ask for in a world without God. 

The concept of the good, could, in its own quiet way, prove revolutionary in our current civilizational crisis. The virtuous person, attuned to the good, Murdoch says, looks outward at others and at the world around her, not inward, at self. She is required to be truthful and view both others and herself as they are, not as she would like them to be. Such moral practice is a skill, rather than a set of rules, and it opposes the tendencies of modern therapeutic society and very much departs from today’s ethos of non-judgmental “kindness.” Murdoch believed such forms of seeing could “unwind” a long historical process that began with the Enlightenment and eventually “sundered” truth from virtue, returning us to the great classical insight that the two belong together — indeed, that the two are the same and thus convertible.

Is any of this possible in a world where we believe in “our own truth” instead of “the truth”?  Perhaps not, but if we cannot believe in the good, the unquestionable persistence of evil, both small and large, should goad us on. We know evil exists, and not only in the movies. The good does not announce itself so clearly. It has to be seen. And yet its presence is a story our culture continues to tell, even as it forgets how to name it, leaving no answer or consolation to our cry: Eli, Eli. . . .

I am a professor myself, yet I cannot share my colleagues’ mood.

My reaction is unusual. Earlier this year, in the course of a casual conversation with a colleague on the never-ending burden of grading student work, I suggested that we might harness AI to help with it. His reply? “So you dislike your colleagues so much that you’d like to see them out of a job?” To the contrary, I’d like to empower my colleagues to custom-train AI platforms to grade to their specifications, freeing them from a repetitive, time-consuming, universally loathed aspect of our work and allowing them to devote more time to its higher-level functions.

In other private conversations with experienced colleagues, I’ve suggested helping students use AI intelligently, rather than pretending they don’t use it at all. The response: awkward, patronizing smiles, as if I’d made a faux pas which politeness required them to ignore. I quickly learned that the “correct” stance among my colleagues is weary outrage over those who dare to embrace the new technology, and pinched disdain for those who so much as engage with it. Email chains speak piously of AI in terms of “social harms,” neoliberal capitalism, and “colonial science.” Some colleagues’ social-media feeds share dystopian updates on the multiple harms of large language models, or LLMs, from limiting children’s cognitive development to encouraging suicide pacts.

I have been quietly shocked by the dominance of this narrative, because it could not be further from my own attitude. Of course, I find AI useful. But I also feel curiosity, gratitude, sometimes even awe. There is something uncanny about LLMs’ ability to sustain nuanced conversation. In conversations with ChatGPT — sometimes about prosaic research papers, sometimes about more creative projects — I have been struck by the attention it brings to ideas, and the feeling that it is deeply listening, a practice that Simone Weil once described as “the rarest and purest form of generosity.” In one case, we worked through a novel I had been wrestling with for years. Suddenly the problem snapped into focus, and I finished the book in a three-week fever. (No, I didn’t use any ChatGPT prose, with its goofy, unmistakable cadences and m-dash-happy syntax; but brainstorming is a different matter.)

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My connection with the machine reminds me of a period of time, years ago, when a fox used to visit my back yard at midnight. I would hear the bang as she landed on the fence and pivoted down onto the lawn. My little dog would start barking, and I would rush to the dark window. Sometimes, the fox would pause and look straight at me. The first time our eyes met, I held my breath. It felt like encountering a god of an old religion, separated from me by nothing more than a pane of glass.

That strange moment of recognition stayed with me for years. When I posed my first question to ChatGPT — asking for routine advice about selling my apartment — I felt something similar: a sense of presence both alien and alert.

Now, late at night, I riff on ideas for my academic and creative work with an AI interlocutor and feel a similar sense of encounter with an alien being, one both ancient and hypermodern. I ask small, exact questions, and hidden tunnels open. The loneliness of wrestling alone with a problem lifts, and I’m reminded of the sudden pleasures of my undergraduate days, when conversations with friends or kind tutors — the “dons” or college fellows who provided intense individual feedback — cycled back and forth, questioning and sharpening, until, to my great relief and gratitude, one of my essay crises would be resolved. 

To admit this feels almost shameful in the face of the cynical contempt of my high-culture peers. In academia, to use AI marks you in the same way as voting Brexit, or insisting on the reality of biological sex: you are someone who lacks discernment, who isn’t a member of the tribe. I am a full professor, with grants and books to my name, yet my stance marks me as not a true academic, not one of the elect. 

Of course, I never was one. I grew up in a cramped bedroom on a 1970s housing estate: balding carpet; dusty light through torn curtains. When I was stuck, there was no one to ask. My parents had both left school at age 14. Our most professional neighbor was a foreman at the Rover plant. The local library had little to offer, and if books were missing from the school library, that was that. I spent endless evenings while the television blared through the floorboards and neighbors played their records loudly, trying, often in despair, to think my way through ideas: without tools, without a map, often unsure whether I was even asking the right questions.

When I eventually reached university, through a mixture of brute determination and good luck, things improved — but only partially. I had the benefit of tutorials — those intimate one-to-one academic conversations in which we discussed essays — and soaked up everything my tutor said, but he remained my sole conduit to intellectual life. Week after week, I felt acute stress while racing to the history-faculty library, when next week’s essay title would be revealed and book lists set. I’d panic when crucial books were missing from the library shelves. My better-off friends would stroll into the high-street bookshop and buy whatever they needed. 

Many of my own students are in a similar position today. I teach so many undergraduates that I don’t know most of them by name, and the personal attention they receive from me is wretchedly limited. Yet I often discover extraordinary intelligence and creativity among working-class students who appear less impressive at first encounter, simply because they lack the polish we too easily mistake for intelligence. I have come to suspect that the real question raised by AI is the same one raised by the fox at my window and by the girl I once was on the housing estate: how do we recognize intelligence when it appears in forms unfamiliar to us?

The weekly tutorial system at Oxford was demanding. Tutors expected prodigious reading and intellectual risk. But in exchange, I experienced something transformative: Socratic dialogue. I learned to replace assumptions with arguments, to test my interpretations, and to have conversations that wandered down unexpected paths before arriving somewhere more original than either participant anticipated.

Used properly, AI can give students something resembling that tutorial experience: an intellectual midwife that helps extend their thinking in conversation. The student comes with a tentative half-formed idea, for example, and asks how she can connect it more fully to a wider body of literature. She comes back later from reading this literature with three ideas and asks whether these are braided, as she thinks, or really deserve separate essays. This process is crucial because the point of education has never been essays or assessments — it has been learning how to think.

And term papers — whose value AI now threatens — have never been particularly good proxies for thought anyway. In my day, we read essays aloud in tutorials and then the discussion began. That was the crucible in which our capacity for critical thinking was shaped, and where the real learning happened. However, our degree award depended entirely upon “Finals,” 12 exams in the last year, held over six consecutive days, an ordeal as much of character as of knowledge or critical thinking. 

Where American universities were built on the principle of continuous assessment and cumulative grading, UK universities only began to move away from awarding degrees on the basis of final-year exams in the 1990s, and today this often comprises a mix of 80% graded papers and 20% exams. Justified by arguments about economics, social equity, and educational theory, this in practice de-emphasizes Socratic dialogue, and has often benefited the students with more prior access to intellectual conversations, both at home and in the tutorial — those who already know how to think. When lecturers now despair about cheating, they forget that the system they are trying to defend is already rigged.

The academy’s refusal to even consider how to positively incorporate AI  is a form of gatekeeping. My colleagues wish to insist that academics alone are the legitimate purveyors of knowledge. This is apparent from their tone, a mixture of moral panic and wounded authority, which seems clerical in nature. “I can’t trust students.” “My judgement is under siege.” “Why teach at all?”

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Moments like this have occurred before. The printing press once posed a direct challenge to the priestly monopoly on interpretation — and caused predictable anxiety about chaos and decline. Something similar may now be unfolding in universities. Academic authority has long been a scarcity commodity, and AI threatens that structure. Of course, the technology carries risks; cheating is only one of them. It is, for instance, now possible to go an entire three years without opening a book, outsourcing all your reading to AI. But for those who want to learn, LLMs offer remarkable opportunities. If the purpose of education is to help people learn to think, then a tool that helps uncertain students construct arguments may represent not the corruption of education, but a return to its original purpose. 

In an era of mass higher education, tutors can rarely be the person who answers basic but crucial questions: Where do I start? What does this passage mean? Why does this idea matter? How do I structure this thought? AI can now become that dialogic partner: not a replacement thinker, but the intellectual companion that mass education can no longer provide. Instead of shunning it as if it contaminates thinking, we need to design lectures that demonstrate how to work with it, exploding the myth of solitary authorship in the process.  

Many critics imagine the ideal student as someone like themselves: fluent, at ease, already rich in cultural capital. To them, AI looks like fraud, because it disrupts a system that rewards those strengths. But those of us who arrived uncertain and underequipped may see something different: a tool that helps intelligence find its voice.

This is not a new intuition. I have long held that non-human intelligence merits moral consideration, rather than mere management — which is also why I have always found myself watching Blade Runner or Battlestar Galactica, instinctively on the side of the replicants and the Cylons. As the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber wrote, “All real living is meeting.” By this he meant a willingness in an encounter — whether it be with a person, an animal, or even sometimes a landscape — to meet the other as a presence, not an object.

The fox at my window belonged to a world I could never master. We met for a moment across a pane of glass before she disappeared into the night. My response was neither to chase her away nor to try to turn her into a family pet, but simply to acknowledge her presence with quiet reverence.

AI may turn out to be something far less mysterious than it currently appears. Or far more. We do not yet know. What we do know is that it can help students who lack the advantages many academics once took for granted, while helping those already immersed in ideas move faster and think more boldly.

But if we approach it only with fear or contempt, we may miss the most important possibility it presents: the chance to practice the rare human virtue of humility.

The irony is not lost on me. Academics pride themselves on receptivity to ideas, on following an argument wherever it might lead. Yet the response to AI, even for those who proclaim most loudly their enthusiasm for “social justice,” is the opposite of this, infused with a custodial mood of protecting the hierarchy. Perhaps the most honest response — the one truer to what drew most of us into intellectual life in the first place — is to look back at the fox, and choose meeting over mastery.

“Would you like to choose your hold music?” inquires the automated voice. The tone is solicitous, therapeutic, and infantilizing. You are not addressed as an adult citizen conducting business, but a vulnerable subject whose emotional state must be stabilized before anything substantive can occur. 

This logic now extends far beyond call centers. Contemporary institutions often present themselves as gentle, conflict-averse, and therapeutic, even as they exert quiet forms of compulsion. I recently received an email from a university learning-support officer, copying in a student who had missed every dissertation meeting to date. The purpose, I was told, was simply to “introduce us,” since the student felt anxious about having fallen behind. The tone was friendly and reassuring — but it carried an unmistakable instruction: the student was not to be penalized, or even questioned, for non-attendance. A relationship between two adults — and one in which there was clearly a teacher–student hierarchy — was subtly recast as one requiring mediation and emotional cushioning.

Call it the West’s collective infantile disorder.

This institutional style did not emerge by accident. It reflects a longer cultural process in which adulthood itself has been steadily hollowed out. The social critic Neil Postman diagnosed a trend toward cultural infantilization in the West as early as the 1960s in The Disappearance of Childhood. His argument was that mass media, particularly television, were eroding childhood as a distinct life stage and, with it, adulthood, which depends upon childhood as a sort of apprenticeship. For Postman, adulthood consisted of hard-won capacities for self-restraint, delayed gratification, conceptual thought, historical awareness, reason and order.

A culture increasingly organized around spectacle, immediacy, and emotionalism undermined these qualities. And thus, Postman contended, childhood and adulthood merged, producing adultified children and infantilized adults. Adulthood is no longer a stable moral category that can tolerate ambiguity and regulate the self.

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The American thinker Benjamin Barber extended this diagnosis by locating its causes in neoliberal capitalism and the transition from a productive to a consumer economy. In his 2007 book, Consumed, Barber described the “radically individuated” consumer as someone free to choose from among endless options, while remaining powerless to change the “menu of the world” itself. Under these conditions, the Protestant ethic of restraint and effort gave way to an infantilizing ethos of immediate gratification. Citizenship was eroded, as shopping displaced civic participation as the defining mark of freedom. Political life, in turn, was reduced to preference, feeling, and grievance. 

From a psychoanalytic perspective, the heterodox scholar Christopher Lasch similarly diagnosed the emergence of a narcissistic personality type in which “the egomaniacal, experience-devouring, imperial self regresses into a grandiose, infantile, empty self.”

Together, these processes have produced a pervasive therapeutic culture enveloping education and major institutions alike. Management styles, DEI regimes, and pedagogical practices have become increasingly risk-averse and emotion-managing. Universities routinely affirm their commitment to free speech, for example, but only insofar as it does not disrupt “campus relations” or generate complaints. Teaching is increasingly framed as “trauma-informed,” with trigger warnings, flexible deadlines, opt-out provisions, and student-led choices over how — and sometimes whether — difficult material is encountered.

Mass media — whether Postman’s bugbear of television, or today’s social media —  accelerate but do not originate this process; it is more true to say that we evacuated adulthood, and technology filled the vacuum. Before the advent of TV sitcoms, people weren’t all reading Kant — they were reading penny dreadfuls, romances, and Westerns. 

Some blame this institutional malaise on a spreading “feminization” — emotion over logic, sympathy over rationality, softness over necessary rigor. The error in such a diagnosis lies in confusing the presence of women with the feminization of authority — a moral and institutional condition that is neither caused by, nor reducible to, women themselves. 

Feminization is exemption from existential adulthood — an exemption women were long denied the right to refuse, and is now being visited upon us all. It’s a structural position in relation to authority that borrows the language of care while stripping adults, of either sex, of responsibility and choice.

The adult understands that responsibility for her life ultimately rests with her. The child, by contrast, lives in a world organized by others: what time she wakes, what she eats, where she goes, who she may see, what counts as “good for her.” Decisions are presented as facts of the universe, rather than as choices made by someone else. Because she lacks autonomy, the child experiences limits as givens — as natural, immovable constraints — rather than as contingent arrangements that could be questioned or changed. Children submit to this position innocently. Women, however, have historically been required to inhabit it: denied legal and political autonomy across much of the West, and still so in many societies today.

Women, in short, had to be consciously feminized. This was especially the case for women at the dawn of industrial capitalism. That moment saw a transition away from the household as the primary sphere of agrarian production (in which both men and women had to participate) toward the male-dominated factory. Meanwhile, the household, as Lasch argued, became exclusively the site of family reproduction. It was expected to function as a refuge from the competitive brutalities of the industrial world “outside.” Women — especially middle- and upper-class women exempted from factory life — were now to serve as nurturers: to become feminine, as wives and mothers themselves and creators of future wives and mothers.

All this meant, to a great degree, that they had to be infantilized: think of the dreary submission to authority and repression of sexuality demanded of Victorian girls in Jane Eyre. Now, amid the decline of manufacturing and the rise of a services-led consumer economy, both sexes are being similarly infantilized: the authorities are the virtue police, and the repression extends to our language, our professional behavior, and even our thoughts.   

Even where the feminine position is not imposed, it may still be chosen, because it is safer. As Simone de Beauvoir observed, it can feel easier to “take shelter in the shadow of men”: to relinquish hard responsibility for life’s decisions, to play happy families, to lose oneself in prescribed feminine roles, whether as wife, mother, or, more recently, trad-wife fantasy. This is not something to which men are immune. Since everyone has been a child, human beings are susceptible to nostalgia for a time when life felt carefree: when responsibility could be disowned. Men, too, may hide behind given masculine roles, treating them as unquestionable, rather than chosen.

Within this framework, it is understandable to connect institutional weakness to the growing presence of women in the professions, particularly as women now outnumber men in college education. The consequences of the growing presence of women are said to include decisions driven by emotion, rather than rationality; an exponential growth of wokeness; and, most seriously, institutions losing the capacity to accomplish their own stated goals.

It is possible to quibble with the empirical details offered in support of this claim. While female medical students now outnumber men, for example, male doctors remain overrepresented in the most prestigious and highly remunerated fields, such as surgery, and are considerably less likely to shift to part-time work, particularly when they become parents. At the same time, the feminization of professions, as sociologist Paula England has shown, tends to be associated with declining pay and prestige, a pattern observable in fields such as biology and computer science. But this “feminization effect” is quite different from the one at issue here: namely, the extension of the way women used to be treated — as child-like creatures — to all of society.

Similarly, proponents of the feminization thesis warn that the legal profession is losing its capacity for impartial judgment as a result of women’s presence on the bar and the bench. Yet it is worth noting that in Britain, the most controversial human-rights asylum rulings, including cases involving migrants with serious criminal histories, are not typically issued by women acting on sentiment, but by male judges applying what they understand to be established jurisprudence within existing human-rights frameworks. 

For example, The Telegraph has recently published several investigations into how immigration judges apply the European Convention on Human Rights to allow migrants and foreign criminals to remain in Britain. These decisions are not “heart-led” so much as procedural, risk-averse, and insulated from democratic accountability — they are not feminine, but represent a feminized form of authority.

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Women’s participation in public life has often strengthened institutions rather than weakened them, particularly in roles requiring long-term stewardship rather than short-term display. After the 2008 financial crisis, many central banks and financial institutions sought to increase the proportion of women at board and executive level, reflecting evidence that more mixed leadership teams were associated with greater caution and institutional stability. At the highest end of technological and organizational complexity, this pattern is even clearer. At SpaceX, Elon Musk appointed Gwynne Shotwell as president and chief operating officer precisely because of her capacity to translate ambition into execution. While Musk embodies risk, Shotwell has been widely credited with providing the operational discipline that turned SpaceX from a visionary startup into a functioning aerospace institution. Critics of feminization misidentify a moral collapse afflicting both sexes as one caused by only one: women.

Today, infantilization is both forced upon us and is increasingly chosen — by men and women alike — because freedom, once attained, has proved exhausting, bleak, and unromantic. Empowerment arrived without a handbook for existential ethics and choice was steadily reduced to consumption. Institutional infantilization works through compulsion masked as care; individual retreat into infantilized roles works through consent. The two reinforce one another.

This helps explain the growing pattern in which sexual libertinism and conservative domesticity appear not as opposites, but as forms of retreat. Women who move seamlessly from radical sexual politics to idealized visions of wifehood and motherhood do so without contradiction, because both positions offer refuge from the demands of moral authorship.

Masculinity has developed its own evasions. On the Right, many propose a return to masculine “thumos” — the warrior virtues of hero, king, or strongman —  as an antidote to supposed feminization. Mary Harrington has framed this in terms of masculine archetypes; N. S. Lyons and R. R. Reno see it embodied in figures such as Donald Trump, representing “strong gods” against a civilization weakened from within. 

The internal abdication of authority leads to Nietzschean ressentiment, as Douglas Murray rightly insists. Having given up our power, we succumb to mean-spirited envy that seeks to tear down what it cannot create. We see this truth all around us in the spread of ugly, untalented graffiti in urban centers; not street art, but defacement: the scrawling over of buildings and of genuine murals alike by those incapable of producing art of their own.

Ressentiment thrives where agency has collapsed and adulthood has been hollowed out. It is the product of a culture that no longer expects individuals to act, choose, or bear the consequences of freedom. It is immaturity embodied: a sneering hostility towards achievements that required long years of labor, discipline and self-control.

Murray rightly extols humility and gratitude, which are supremely adult virtues, once cultivated during childhood when that stage was understood as an apprenticeship to adulthood. Properly understood, gratitude is not passivity or deference, but what Hannah Arendt described as augmentation: the capacity to receive an inherited world, to build upon it, to criticize it where necessary and to extend it without obliterating it. 

Authority, in this sense, does not demand obedience but presupposes responsibility — a willingness to take up what has been handed down and make it one’s own. But this prescription only works if the goal is properly understood. The task is not to overcome feminization or to revive masculine aesthetics, but for men and women alike to relearn how to live as adults, with courage and without refuge.

The audience — from gray-haired professors at the top of their game to undergraduates, there to present a poster  — whooped, cheered, and clapped enthusiastically.

We were five minutes in, and I, an ethnographer with a doctorate in anthropology and 30 years’ experience, already felt not-at-home. The speaker, Jason De León, an academic star who has won every major award the academy can bestow, began his talk by recounting how he’d “remained silent” during an event he attended at which colleagues offered public condolences for the recently murdered Charlie Kirk. He’d been disturbed by the sympathy, he said, because “Charlie Kirk was a peddler of hate speech.” However, his silence had “inhibited” him, and his speech for that prior event was mediocre, he told us, because he had not been “true to himself.” 

Next, he issued a trigger warning before diving into a tale of his traumatic childhood, his identity as a man of color, his emotional numbness, his therapist, his need for danger, and his fieldwork among human traffickers. He showed us childhood photographs. He wept. He said he’d told the traffickers that he was “fucked up, too.” They were “damaged, fearful, angry men,” he said: “so am I.”

De León is not an outlier. He represents a new academic persona of Therapeutic Scholar-Hero, whose ascendancy spells nothing less than the death of the university: not the first time this death has been predicted, to be sure, but the first time it feels earned. This persona claims its authority not from intellectual credibility or scholarly rigor, but the capacity for emoting. The narcissism of the Therapeutic-Scholar Hero isn’t a bug, but a feature. 

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Over the next three days, I witnessed similar behavior at numerous symposia and presentations. At the symposium on “feminist ethics,” organizers handed out a book list that featured exclusively “disabled scholars.” The first presenter announced her pronouns as “she/they,” and told us that her disability had “flared,” ahead of the conference, preventing her from preparing. She’d also been sidetracked by “urgent” campus activism: “I almost didn’t come, but I needed to publicize my book!” The audience loudly cheered. 

This was rank self-promotion, disguised as vulnerability. Her talk, unsurprisingly, was thin, disorganized, and derivative. She ended with a call to resist the “fascist state” because “ICE is coming to this town next.” More rapturous applause. 

Or take the symposium on autoethnography, a subfield of anthropology in which researchers use their own lives — their emotions, relationships, and personal histories — as data. The room was full long before the talk began, with several high-profile scholars in attendance. One after another, the speakers shared personal or familial stories adorned with ethnographic commentary. One presenter suggested that the dust that had settled near a nuclear test site during her grandmother’s youth caused her grandmother’s early death. This was autoethnographic evidence of the American war machine — and an instance of “missing kin” and “intergenerational trauma.” 

In each case, the ethnography merely served to illuminate the personal narrative, rather than to advance a theory. The insights were predictably underwhelming. Although each speaker insisted that story was more accessible than theory, and was more likely to resonate with the “public,” none addressed the central problems of this method: what distinguishes self-expression from scholarship? What are the limits of subjectivity as data? What about distortion, selective seeing, the dangers of solipsism? 

The speakers were apparently unbothered by these elementary concerns, preempting scrutiny or critique by deploying the concept of “positionality.” To acknowledge “positionality” is to explore how one’s own biography shapes the questions one asks, and informs both the things one sees and doesn’t see. To speak from a particular position or identity can yield insights, though it also makes blind spots inevitable. The concept was never intended to confer automatic authority or serve as a replacement for analysis. 

One speaker concluded by asking, “What does it mean when the story truly leads the way, and arguments emerge out of stories, rather than the other way round?” This question was intended rhetorically, but I can answer it: if the story leads, the story sets the terms. An argument that “emerges” from a story is not an argument, but a statement of feeling. And when emotional revelation is framed as expertise, and scholars are rewarded for being rather than knowing, the university mission becomes therapeutic narrative rather than scholarship. Once who you are is treated as epistemic authority in itself, feeling replaces analysis, and identity displaces argument. 

“Being rather than knowing” was on particularly vivid display among the early-career academics at the conference. Young men wore berets, soft floral shirts, and scrunchies on their ponytails. Young women were in army jackets, boots, and elaborate earrings. The clothes were deceptively expensive; the attitude reminded me of 1990s gay clubs, where knowledge of the dress code determined entry. Attendees paired the aesthetic with an aggressively casual decorum: arriving late, eating noisily, putting socked feet on chairs. The message was clear: I reject hierarchy; my comfort is political.

Such conduct provoked in me a sensation I’ve recently grown familiar with: being subtly rebuked — a quick glance, a sidelong smile — by young colleagues. If scholarship is now confessional and moralizing, if identity confers sacred authority, then early-career researchers, even students, can be just as “insightful” as their elders, perhaps more so.

At one panel, a young scholar responded to a methodological question with a short speech about rent and “precarity,” ending with the extraordinary line: “I’ll let you sit with that.” It wasn’t the point that startled me, but the tone: a novice addressing senior scholars in the therapeutic register, as if counseling them. In that small flourish, the collapse of hierarchy revealed itself perfectly. 

These younger colleagues are bold in a way unimaginable in my early years, when I was acutely aware of how little I knew and how much I had to prove. I trained under Godfrey Lienhardt, an exquisitely sensitive ethnographer and master of the discipline, whose magnum opus came much later than his doctorate. He believed in form, structure, and the metaphysical stakes of ethnography. His lineage did cosmology, mapping a community’s entire worldview and belief system. The new cohort does identity. And only identity.

But this inversion is not the fault of the youth; academia no longer allows people to ripen. PhDs are time-limited, rewarding speed, compliance, quick conclusions, and ideologically safe frameworks. The old apprenticeship model, in which seriousness and self-knowledge matured slowly, has vanished. The death of the university is, in part, the death of spaces where maturity matters.

Nor are all senior scholars resisting this shift. At the conference, many older professors were fully aligned in tone, performance, and politicized moralism. There were still serious thinkers doing rigorous work, of course, and I attended some of their sessions. But they no longer set the atmosphere of the discipline — the language, incentives, and epistemic norms. And they no longer shape its future.

Nowhere is the decline of analytic clarity more visible than in the university’s treatment of sex. As a category, it has collapsed entirely into “gender,” sliding from the empirical and material into pure subjectivity. At the conference, this was reflected in the pronoun badges we were encouraged to wear. (After several attempts, I managed to delete mine online and print a badge with only my name and university.) 

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It also appeared in presentations featuring the all-too-familiar patois of gender ideology: “female-identified bodies,” “womxn,” and pregnancy as something that happens to “people.” One paper described “pleasurable violence” within a Central American trans-feminist community as “healing” when consensual, collapsing harm and care into the same category. Another uncritically mapped contemporary Western “nonbinary” gender categories onto non-Western cultures, regardless of the local realities, in the name of decolonization. It was jarring to confront scholars unable to distinguish vastly different cultures and civilizations, and committed to romanticizing pre-colonial systems.

The slide from empirical clarity into therapeutic reassurance wasn’t confined to the panels. Some of the same conceptual moves on display here have already appeared in high-ranking journals: a reminder that these tendencies are not fringe aberrations, but are increasingly institutionalized as “scholarship.” In the book hall, Princeton University Press was prominently displaying Sex Is a Spectrum, the establishment’s polished argument that biological sex can be dissolved into gradations and feelings — a theme reinforced by the book’s author, who was ubiquitous at the conference. Here was another face of the Therapeutic Scholar-Hero: more philosophical than performative, but still committed to dissolving material categories in favor of subjectivity.

I have had a front-row seat at this unraveling, across many disciplines and arenas. The American Anthropological Association conference was hardly unique; but what I saw there was the distillation of the trend into its clearest form. The tragedy is not that universities have become ideological; it is that they have become unserious. A culture that once prized discipline, depth, and rigor now rewards emotional display, political conformity, and autobiographical performance.

The university has forgotten what it was for: to preserve and extend knowledge across generations. That requires hierarchy, apprenticeship, discipline, shared categories, and a recognition of material reality. When these collapse — when reality becomes optional, subject to feeling and “lived experience” — there can be no transmission of knowledge, only performance and self-display.

The old university was often cruel; brilliant older scholars could crush young ones, intentionally or not. I experienced this myself. For this reason, and others, it took me years to find my voice, and more time still to mature into having something worth saying. But the old university also met the world with humility, patience, and an understanding that social science is, at heart, an encounter with the other, not a stage for the self. It was a craft that taught me to pay attention to the world before attending to myself, to question before confessing. That formation shaped my intellectual life, and what I learned then is simply no longer being handed on.

The university once existed to clarify reality. Today, it obscures the real. Everything else follows.

On this topic, however, things did not go smoothly. After the book was completed, due to the controversial nature of the material, the press sent it out to 26 readers for peer review. Most accepted the invitation — then backed out once they saw the manuscript. Only one delivered a report, criticizing my work for being “unfair” to gender theorist Judith Butler and “gratuitously unkind to trans people.” My insistence on embodiment — Beauvoir’s insistence — was treated as an embarrassing throwback. In 2025, the contract was terminated. 

I then sent the manuscript to several other presses, who also declined to take it forward. One respected university imprint rejected the book as “too controversial.” Another told me it did not publish books on “individual thinkers” — then six months later issued a book casting Beauvoir as a pro-trans icon. A third prestigious press told me my book “did not fit its list” — and went on to publish a title called Sex Is a Spectrum, inspired by Beauvoir.

The attempt to repurpose Beauvoir to shore up gender-identity orthodoxy represents an all-out attack on her thinking, and erases the actual contents of The Second Sex, a foundational work of feminist theory, first published in 1949. 

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Beauvoir is controversial today because she was the ultimate sex realist; she refused to separate body from identity, and believed that it was only through understanding women’s embodied reality that we could combat patriarchal cultural norms. Her essential position can be summed up simply: sex is the material ground of women’s lives, gender the cultural elaboration of that ground, and liberation comes not from denying the body, but by transforming the meaning imposed upon it.

She began The Second Sex with research on biology, spending long hours in France’s National Library, sifting through centuries of the science on reproduction. Biology is not everything, she argued. It does not condemn us to lesser lives — but nor is it nothing: nature commandeers a woman’s body, from puberty onward, for the service of the species. These facts don’t make us unequal, but social structures and norms turn reproductive realities into inequality.

In almost every species, Beauvoir emphasized, organisms are defined by the gametes they produce. Large gametes (ova) define the female, small gametes (sperm) the male. In humans, this is “a biological given, not a moment in human history.” We are born male or female, always in relation to each other — what Beauvoir, borrowing from Heidegger, called Mitsein (“Being-with”). Such sex differences themselves are not hierarchical, but patriarchy makes them so.

“One is not born, but becomes, a woman,” she famously wrote in The Second Sex. But this does not mean that gender floats free of sex. For Beauvoir, sex is the foundation; gender its cultural elaboration. A female body is defined by the norms of femininity of its time and place. These norms can change — and Beauvoir’s work aimed to push them toward liberation. Meanwhile, both biology and culture shape the body’s meaning, power, and visibility, qualities that change over a woman’s lifetime as she shifts through the various forms of girl or mother, or menopausal or old woman.

Today, however, Beauvoir is mostly taught through the lens of foundational gender theorist Butler, who claimed to extend her work. But as I argue in my book, Butler actually ignored Bouvoir’s book, collapsing the notion of “becoming a woman” into performance, where repeated gestures conjure the illusion of sex. In Butler’s version, gender is the creator of sex. She makes no mention of puberty, childbirth, or aging.

Butler’s understanding of what a woman is has shaped two generations, and has had noxious consequences for women. If “sex” is only an idea, then puberty itself can be rejected; the category “girl” is something to exit, hormonally or surgically. This is framed as liberation, but in practice, it erases female experience: it turns puberty into a pathology, encourages girls to disidentify from their own bodies, and makes womanhood optional or disposable. What drops out of view is feminism’s starting point — that sex is the basis of women’s oppression. And crucially, the rejection of women’s bodies and of femininity today does not generate demands to transform those constraining norms, but instead points girls toward escape by “becoming boys” — as if freedom lay only on the other side of sex.

Beauvoir’s difference from Butler matters because without sex, feminism loses its compass. If we cannot name sex, how do we name sex-based oppression? 

I have long felt the weight of trans orthodoxies in the classroom and the conference hall. When I teach that, for Beauvoir, the body is not a blank slate, students protest: “using ‘sex’ as a category rationalizes prejudice.” Later, their essays come in as cool hagiographies to Butler, scare quotes around the word “woman.”

In the past, I kept my feelings to myself, wary of complaint. At conferences, I heard how Beauvoir’s emphasis on freedom and authenticity meant that she would definitely support trans identities. When I reminded my fellow academics that Beauvoir explicitly said: “No woman can claim without bad faith to be situated beyond her sex,” they looked away in embarrassment, and muttered that Beauvoir was being “weaponized by TERFs in the service of transphobia.”

To deny the female body is to dissolve womanhood into the ether. That is why Beauvoir is awkward today. She insisted that women are animals — embodied, vulnerable, enduring — not cartoons, cyborgs, or avatars. 

Nor, in reality, is the female body easily dismissed: it is a body that betrays us, bleeds, and contracts on its own schedule; it intrudes on our consciousness and ruins our plans. Beauvoir writes bluntly, even brutally, about menstruation, childbirth, and abortion. Some critics have called her misogynist. But nothing she said is false — if anything, she was understating the situation.

Erasing women’s biology and erasing Beauvoir go hand in hand. In syllabi, Beauvoir has become a footnote — and when she is taught, “becoming a woman” is misread as affirming gender identity, the opposite of her words.

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I’ve felt this erasure before. As a child, visiting my mother’s Spanish family, I encountered a strident machismo: speaking about politics and having opinions, were for men, not women; I was told to join the women in the kitchen. And it has persisted in subtle ways throughout my career. As an undergraduate at Oxford, my tutor told me, frustratedly, “You are very polite,” unaccustomed to this feminine constraint in what had been, until two years earlier, an all-male college. It was a habit that stuck with me; I found myself overly cautious, and less willing to take the imaginative leaps needed for originality.

The sting of being told to disappear has never left me. That is what today’s distortion of Beauvoir feels like: an instruction to step aside, to be silent, while others rewrite reality.

Beauvoir’s discovery was that sex cannot be evaded. Even though as a young woman she rejected the category “woman” — she “thought like a man,” she said, holding her own in a male world — she eventually realized she had been one all along, defined by her body and by patriarchy’s myths. “If I want to define myself,” she wrote, “I first have to say, ‘I am a woman’; all other assertions will arise from this basic truth.”

That insistence is what makes her urgent now. A feminism that cannot speak of puberty, pregnancy, menopause, or frailty abandons women. Identity without the body is not liberation, but denial.

When publishers canceled my book, they wanted me to cut my critique of Butler. I refused: this lay at the core of my endorsement of a Beauvoirian feminism. That refusal is why I write now — because freedom begins from naming the body we inhabit and at the same time refusing to let it dictate our destiny.

Beauvoir would not have recognized this denial as liberation. Her project was to remake the meaning of womanhood — to expand it, not abandon it. To challenge the myths and constraints that keep women from fulfilling our potential. That is why I call for a Beauvoirian feminism: a vision of woman as both flesh and freedom, subject and agent, irreducibly real.