The Guardian merch is made by New York brand Lingua Franca, best known for putting what it calls “thought-provoking and culturally resonant phrases” on expensive sweaters in cursive script, and getting celebrities to wear them on the red carpet. And — a bit like the newspaper — the fashion label’s current political messaging seems somewhat chastened compared to former cocksure progressive hectoring. Indeed, the semantic trajectory of the company’s sweaters would make for a fascinating modern history project: from the uncompromising “time’s up”, “we say gay”, and “Dr Fauci fan club” messages of yesteryear to the sullen “exhausted American”, “I didn’t vote for him”, and “I read banned books” of the current collection. Even the writing on women’s chests seems to have got smaller — or maybe the breasts got bigger. Either way, things have definitely changed.

During the first Trump presidency, company founder Rachelle Hruska McPherson was apparently able to claim with a straight face that luxury goods activism might change the world. “This is not a time to be silent,” she told Fortune magazine in 2020 “Virtue signaling to our communities on where we stand on issues is literally how change has happened historically, and it’s how it will continue to happen today”. This year, though, there are signs of adjustment to new political and commercial realities, and not merely in those defeated-sounding new mottos. According to a recent interview in Elle magazine, McPherson now “considers herself just as much of an activist… but she wants to fight that fight in a different, more measured way than she did the first time around”. She says she sometimes looks back and thinks: “‘Oh, that’s a little cringeworthy.’ And then I’m like, ‘Is it? We all were doing it.’”

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Many fashionistas were, indeed, doing cringeworthy things in the heady days of woke, spurred on by their bottom line. “The future is female”; “transwomen are women”, and “I can’t breathe” were just three of the sartorial shortcuts to canonization in a cotton-polyester blend. The makers of such garments didn’t seek to persuade by appealing to reason: t-shirt slogans are not exactly Aristotelian syllogisms. And nor did they even try to invoke much emotion — you can’t tug on heartstrings when limited to four words per line. Instead, they sought to appeal to the self-interested desire of the consumer. If you wear this, people will think you are a good person; and being a good person is very in right now.

Thankfully, things have moved on, and the cool kids these days wouldn’t be seen dead in a Guardian-Lingua Franca collab, assuming they could afford one. I know this because I read it in a Guardian article two years ago, and — as we now know — the paper treats facts as sacred. As the story explained, Gen Z hates “peppy but shallow” slogan tees: including “painfully tone-deaf” jumpers from, er, Lingua Franca.

But it’s not that the hipsters and taste-makers have gone off words on t-shirts per se. It’s just that they now prefer jokey, amoral, gnomic ones. For while Lingua Franca has stuck to the moralizing high ground — “history has its eyes on you” etc. — a brief perusal of what the kids are into gives us slogans like “hardcore” or “I’m gonna win” or “follow me, I’m a cult leader”. You might even say that there’s been a Trumpian turn.

Perhaps the new generation is just more clear-eyed than its elders about the fact that wearing words on your clothes to bring about meaningful political change was always bogus. Unless you design your own, the words in question are nicked from someone else. In that sense, wearing a slogan tee is barely a genuine communicative act at all. And as soon as you are photographed wearing the item to put on your socials — essential for the pretense that you are making any kind of political difference — whatever independent meaning faintly resided in the slogan to begin with is now subsumed into the meaning of the person wearing it, as just one more visual aspect for the viewer to interrogate. Onlookers are asked to consider, not whether black lives really matter, or whether this is indeed what a feminist looks like, but rather the question: “what kind of person would wear a slogan like this?”.

As such, sloganwear fit seamlessly into a post-literate internet culture. Context collapse is a thing: the simultaneous exposure of your words to different kinds of audiences, with alternative ways of reading the same sentences; so that your in-joke or political point, meant for one group, can cause accidental outrage in another one. The desire to say as little as possible that might be challenged or misunderstood — while still saying something that gets you attention — means that the sort of vaguely ironic exclamation or sanctimonious tautology you might put on a t-shirt (or jumper) starts looking irresistible to many.

In face-to-face communication with a person you know, understanding what the other is saying depends on at least a rough understanding of the sort of person you are talking to. There’s a reciprocal relationship between interpreting the words — is what she just said meant to be sincere? funny? kind? patronizing? — and assumptions about the deeper personal characteristics of the speaker. Very occasionally, a person’s saying something in isolation can radically change your view of who they are; most of the time, your prior view of who they are modulates your understanding of their individual statements. A benevolent and a malevolent person can say the very same thing, but you will hear it in very different ways.

This is also true of understanding great novels: the deep reader tries to build a picture of the sort of creative mind that wrote the text, at the same time as building a picture of what the text actually means. Is this a mind capable of irony? Of rich symbolism? Is it cynical or optimistic about human nature? Judgments about the author affect how the book is read, and vice versa. Despite the “death of the author” nonsense in Sixties French literary theory, great artists remained alive and kicking, way past their actual deaths. But on the internet of strangers, such subtleties break down. In this domain, at least, Barthes and Foucault were right.

Here there are lots of orphaned phrases, dislocated from concrete facts about the identity of the speaker and her accompanying thoughts. You publish or post something; I have no real idea of your character or history, which means I have no well-defined idea of what you, personally, mean by those words. Texts become detached from the intentions of their producers, floating about the internet like ghosts. This creates interpretive perils, but also opportunities in the marketplace of mass communication: I can write down stereotypically righteous, funny, or clever-sounding things, in a compressed way, and naïve observers will just assume I am righteous, funny, clever. Getting reposted by a big X account is a bit like persuading a red-carpet celebrity to wear your words, and so promote your brand.

At least the untrustworthy communicative dynamics are more obvious when the words are on someone’s chest, right there in front of you. No matter the thread count, sloganwear in the wild is usually easy to see through: the disconnect between desired effect, and the perceptible reality of the wearer, is often too great. The owner of the sweater wants you to believe she is the sort of person who holds facts sacred; but what you see instead is someone who wants you to believe she is the sort of person who holds facts sacred — and that is completely different. It’s a lesson in the complexities of human interpretation we would do well to hold on to elsewhere. You might even say that — for once, at least — thanks to the Guardian, we get close to the whole picture.

Paul Kingsnorth writes vividly on the dark side of modernity, technology and progress. His new book, Against the Machine, is the culmination of decades of thinking and writing and is something of a spiritual manual for modernity’s dissidents.

Earlier this week, Kingsnorth visited the UnHerd Club for a wide-ranging interview with Freddie Sayers — the world first about this book, on the day of publication.

This is the full video and an edited transcript.

Freddie Sayers: Much of your writing starts with a feeling: a sense of loss, of alienation, from the modern world, a yearning to get back to something that we had before. Tell us about that feeling. Has it always been with you?

Paul Kingsnorth: Yes, I think it does start with a feeling. It’s a sense that we’re living inside something that is quite inhuman and becoming more and more inhuman. It’s a system that you can feel encroaching upon you and it becomes tighter and tighter. I begin Against the Machine with “The Purse-Seine”, a poem from the Forties by the American author Robinson Jeffers. He was sitting on a cliff in Los Angeles, watching a fishing boat drawing in a “purse seine”, a type of net that’s like a draw-string. He writes about how the fish in the net can’t feel the net being tightened and drawn, but tightens up all the time until they’re in it and they’re stuck. It feels to me like that’s where we are. Something is gathering around us.

Many writers have written about “the Machine” before me. It’s not my phrase. I consider myself, hopefully, to be writing in this tradition. This is something that has been going on for hundreds of years, at least since the Industrial Revolution. I’m very struck when I come to London, because I live in the west of Ireland and every time I come here, it becomes more machine-like. Go into a café, and there’s a little QR code on the table. You have to scan it to find out what the menu is. There are cameras everywhere. You’re constantly being monitored.

It’s become more and more impossible to survive without being hooked into this technological web that’s growing around us. But what does that take away? It gives us some good things and some bad things. But what do we lose? I think most people can feel that we’re losing something or a set of things that are quite important to what it means to be human.

FS: I remember reading Real England, an earlier book of yours, that was also infused with that same negative reaction towards modernity — the carapace of technology and concrete that was covering the authentic country of England. If someone asked you: “Do you hate modernity?” What would you reply? 

PK: Well, the easy answer is yes.

FS: It’s quite remarkable that you say that out loud.

PK: Look, what is modernity? What are we talking about here? Are we talking about a historical time period that we could date, or are we talking about a way of seeing? I prefer to see modernity as a way of seeing, which I often refer to as machine modernity. Iain McGilchrist has this great theory about the hemispheres of the brain: the left hemisphere sees the parts, and the right hemisphere sees the whole. The left is supposed to be in service to the right, but we have become deeply left-brained in the sense that we’re very good at seeing the parts, very good at making things, at going to the moon, at examining the genes of fruit flies. But have we actually lost a way of seeing that’s much more significant? That’s how I see modernity. It creates lots of things that we find good and useful, obviously. But where’s it going in the long term and what’s the price that’s being paid for it?

FS: Where do you locate the moment that it all started to go wrong? Possible candidates you mention in the book include Aquinas, Duns Scotus, the Schism, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the invention of the car, and many others.

PK: You missed a bit about the Egyptian pyramids.

FS: Oh yes!

PK: Which isn’t my idea. I’m quoting Lewis Mumford, the great critic of technology, who wrote a two-volume book called The Myth of the Machine back in the late Sixties. He sees the first machine society as being Pharaonic Egypt, which he calls “the machine made of human parts”. The human parts being slaves. If you have that enormous top-down thing, you can build something incredible like a pyramid. He compares a pyramid to a space rocket. These are both technologies which, at a cost of human labour and toil, create a technology which takes the favoured few up into heaven.

You could say Egypt was a machine society. Certainly, Ancient Rome was very machine-like in its centralisation, its technocratic ability, its top-down power. What’s happened since? Let’s finger the usual suspects, and say the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution together created a revolution in human seeing in the Western world, which has since flooded out everywhere else.

This way of seeing is highly mechanistic. Through a critique of religion — which has been going on for a long time, but it really comes to the fore with the French Revolution — you create a new theology. A traditional way of understanding this is that during the modern period, we’ve moved away from religion and we’ve moved instead towards reason and science. To some degree, you can say that’s true, but what we also have is a new belief system — a thing we call progress, which is moral progress, technological progress, endless forward movement. If we look at the way that our politics is framed, if we look at the way technology is created, they are all aligned with this notion of progress with a large “P”. So we’re all progressive in that sense. It’s become the ultimate philosophy of the modern world. That’s what we do: we move forward. One of the problems we’re having in the West at the moment is that people have stopped believing in it.

FS: So is this new, or was it ever thus? Has it not always been true, throughout the ages, that there are people such as yourself who yearn for the purity of the past? Ovid was writing about the Golden Age, William Morris in News from Nowhere, and many in between. Are you simply today’s version, or do you think there is something truly specific and new about what we’re going through today?

PK: Well, I don’t mind being compared with Ovid. That’s okay.

You have to be careful: the temptation when you talk like this is to find a particular period in the past and start to romanticise that and say, well, “Everything was great then”. You won’t find a period of history in which there aren’t all the usual human problems, but they are different. In a very general sense, the modern way of seeing divorces us from things which most pre-modern ways of seeing have taken for granted.

I try to categorise this in the book in a very machine-like way. I call it “the four Ps”, which are “People”, “Place”, “Prayer”, and “the Past”. If you look at most cultures, they’re based on a combination of those four things. The modern world systematically uproots them all and replaces them with consumerism and ideologies and progressive theologies and, ultimately, technology, which is the way that we try to manifest the myth of progress. There is something revolutionary about the way we see, and it’s not normal. I think we see the world quite differently to the way most people have always seen it.

FS: We are very used to people complaining about too much screentime and the deleterious effect of apps. But you seem to see the spread of modern technology, perhaps culminating in AI, as something devilish — a kind of evil force or spirit? 

PK: If you listen to the people who are in Silicon Valley, really pushing the creation of superhuman intelligence, they all talk like prophets or priests or religious philosophers. Ray Kurzweil, who wrote a book called The Age of Spiritual Machines, is always talking about the singularity, the point at which machines become more intelligent than us and run away with themselves. He was once asked: “Does God exist?” And he answered: “Not yet.”

You have seen lots of warnings from people about how AI could become superintelligent and destroy us. Many of those warnings are coming from the people creating it. It’s not just weirdos like me. The journalist Ezra Klein went to a bunch of these people and asked why, given that they’re warning us it could destroy the world, are they creating it? And he said they couldn’t answer the question. They ended up more or less feeling that they had a responsibility to usher this new being into the world.

We’ve got superintelligent AIs being created. Nobody really knows how they work. They’re already talking to each other in ways people can’t understand. They’re already persuading teenagers to kill themselves. Something very sinister is going on. Pre-modern societies wouldn’t have had much trouble understanding it. It’s like the Book of Genesis. Why don’t you just take the fruit of knowledge of good and evil and become as the gods? If you rebel against God, you can be God. That’s what we’re doing. We’re trying to create God, make God live forever.

Suggested reading

Raging against the Machine

By Paul Kingsnorth

FS: But is this just the excitable rhetoric of Silicon Valley technicians, or do you actually think there’s an external force of some kind that is being made manifest? 

PK: I’m a Christian, so I do believe in external forces of evil. I don’t want to get too carried away with that because it’s very easy to predict the rise of the Antichrist every five minutes.

It’s a kind of a feeling, it’s an intuition. I’m not trying to prove anything. But I think given that all these people talk in spiritual terms about this stuff, we should see it in spiritual terms.

FS: In the book you do name it the Antichrist. You say these machines are not just machines. They are something else. A body whose mind is in the process of developing; a body beginning to come to life. 

PK: I think that’s true. I’ll stand by that.

I don’t know what the mind is. I don’t know whether the mind is the Antichrist or whether it is a man, or whether it’s something demonic, or whether it’s something that humans can create. I’m not sure we’re actually capable of creating a mind, even though we think we are, but I have the strong sense that something quite dark is happening.

I wouldn’t necessarily want to put a name to it, but let’s just see what happens over the next five years, because either AI is going to be a bubble that bursts and we’ve all made a fuss about nothing. Or we’re going to be moving into very uncharted territory.

FS: Let me take you away from the perilous topic of the Antichrist towards the easy topic of the culture wars. That will be plain sailing.

PK: It’s less interesting though.

FS: You describe your reaction to the roiling culture wars as having three distinct phases. Could you describe them for us?

When I looked at the warring teams, my first reaction was to look at the mad woke Left and want to join the team against them, because some of the stuff they say is just so crazy and offensive.

And then the second reaction is: actually, no, I really don’t want to do that. I don’t want to get involved in that. I think I’d rather go and live in a forest. Or a monastery. Because that’s actually a trap. I think it is a trap.

And then the third reaction was to look at it and say: “OK, while I really don’t like what a lot of these people are saying, I can understand why they’re saying it.”

FS: These people being?

PK: The postmodern woke Left, whatever you want to call them. The culture warriors who are trying to take the culture apart. And then rising up against them you have these defenders of the West, broadly on the Right. You know, “we must defend our traditions” and all the rest of it. And when I look at that, I’m not sure what traditions we’re defending at this point?

I’m not sure what the West is, so if you’re going to defend the West or indeed attack the West, you need to think, “well, what is it then?” And if I’m talking about the Machine, I think that is what the modern West now is. It may not be what the West was in the Middle Ages, but this thing we call the West now is really a manifestation of this modern way of seeing. I actually don’t want to defend that.

So, I find myself in this kind of bind because I come from here and I’d rather that place wasn’t dismantled. I’ve got children who’ve got to grow up in it. I want to give them some values, but while I can dislike what a lot of the radical Left is doing, I can see to some degree why they’re doing it.

I’m not convinced by the uncomplicated unquestioning defenders of the West because what they often end up defending is a kind of capitalism, or a very statist version of Christianity. A Fifties-style conservatism that actually they probably don’t really want to live in themselves.

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FS: So you are ready to let the West die. I mean, there is a chapter called “The West Must Die”. You write, “maybe we need to let the West die, let it die so that we can live.”

PK: What I’m thinking is that this thing that we call the West, which has become an idol — either because the Left want to tear it down because it’s the cis-heteronormative patriarchy, or because the Right want to defend it because the Left are trying to tear it down — has become a thing which actually doesn’t have anything to do with real culture at all.

It’s almost like a trauma response. We’ve lost all of our actual, real culture. If we go back to those “four Ps” — “People”, “Place”, “Prayer” and “the Past” — most of us aren’t living in most of those things anymore.

So if we let go of this notion of the West, whether we’re attacking it or defending it. Maybe we can concentrate on creating human scale cultures again, which is, I think the best way to create some form of friction or resistance to this Machine way of seeing.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t have big arguments at all, that none of these issues matter. They do. You have to stand up for things that are true. You have to stand up against things that are wrong or evil, but actually the real stuff is going to come from trying to recreate real culture again.

FS: That is the final part of your book, really, where you conclude by offering a suggestion of how we might live inside the Machine. What you move towards is a kind of secession from the crumbling culture around us, an acceptance that it’s dying and will not survive. Will you just talk a bit about that? How would that work for people?

PK: I think it’s already crumbled. The things that we used to believe in have pretty much already gone. That gives you the freedom to start again. Not that you’re going to start with the blank slate, but you need to draw on the best of the past. The Machine rips up everything from its roots, and that’s a kind of liberation process, but it’s also a destruction process. You need to try and build from the bottom up.

This is all very doomy. We’re talking about the Antichrist and things. But for a Christian, the coming of the Antichrist is all good, because it’s all fine after that. Everything gets sorted. So we’re waiting for that day.

Even though the world looks crazy and horrible and depressing, there’s a hope to it precisely because everything’s falling down, and you can now say: “Well, how are we going to get back to actually trying to be human again?” Once you face this kind of digital Moloch that’s around us, you actually have to ask what it means to be human.

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Coming back to the whole Antichrist question, I quote Eliezer Yudkowsky, a mad Silicon Valley eccentric, who’s very opposed to AI. He thinks AI systems will destroy us. And if anyone is developing AI in their countries, then you need to bomb the data centres of that country and destroy their electricity network. He’s a kind of Silicon Valley Ted Kaczynski.

FS: Yes, the bombing of the data centres. It’s in the book. You say: “bombing the data centres, this is the mindset of the raw ascetic.” I would say, although you’re not explicitly calling for it, you’re not not calling for it…

PK: You could bomb the data-centres, which — if they were developing superhuman AI — would be a good idea. But unless you’ve changed your way of seeing, someone’s going to build more of these things. They always get built again, which is the argument people use against Yudkowsky, because if we stopped building AI, someone else would build them.

FS: There’s the polite version of Paul Kingsnorth, and then not far beneath the surface there is the much more radical activist. You talk with great affection about the Luddites, who were smashing looms and rejecting the Industrial Revolution, and the Fen Tigers, who resisted the draining of the fens. 

PK: I’m very happy to call myself a Luddite. People always call me a Luddite. I embrace that because what the Luddites did was reject certain types of technology that were going to enslave them. You can see what these people [in Silicon Valley] are trying to build. And then you say: “What the hell are we going to do about that?” I started off when I was 21 as a road protester and I believe in non-violent direct action. I kind of still do.

FS: So you’ve come full circle? 

PK: The principle behind that is very Gandhian. Which is that if you need to destroy a technology, which is going to in itself destroy life, then it’s a justifiable thing to do if you’re not harming people. But I don’t how you would apply that to an interconnected global digital system because there is no heart.

There’s no central computer that you can just hit with a pickaxe and the whole thing shuts down. Which is why it feels more like an interconnected way of seeing the rise of some being, or just the rise of our own slightly warped way of seeing, turning into a kind of technological system, like a central nervous system. There isn’t really any way to shut that down other than seeing differently. So I do move between these poles. Do I think we should bomb data centres or do I think we should read Iain McGilchrist? Or do I think we should do both?

Probably both, but I don’t know.

You’ve got to draw your own lines, decide what you’re going to do, decide what you’re not going to allow to happen. I’m not going to ever use an AI. I think if you don’t draw lines, you’re just going to get sucked in.

FS: The other sensitive aspect of this book is how your ideas relate to the ascendant radical Right in politics.

We had that huge Tommy Robinson march last week, animated by protest against immigration and a desire to reassert the indigenous culture. It would be possible, I think, to read this book and be inspired to go on those kind of marches. You use the word indigenous a lot. When describing what you don’t like about the West, you single out “the insistence that African children should attend Western-style schools and be issued laptops; that India should adopt our patented pharmaceutical medicines; that Pacific Islanders should become Protestant Christians in suits and ties”.

What did you mean by that?

PK: This is the promotion of the global system of western capitalism around the world, which just razes all cultures and homogenises them. I’m very clear in the book repeatedly, actually, about what I’m talking about.

I don’t know what’s going on these marches in London. I don’t even read the news really, but this sort of manifestation of Christian Nationalism is balls. And I’ve spoken out about it quite clearly actually.

I gave a talk a couple years ago called “Against Christian Civilisation”, which was specifically about the manifestation of what’s basically idol worship, where you take Christianity, which is a spiritual path of renunciation and radicalism, and demands to reject wealth and reject the idols of nations, and you turn that somehow into a new crusade of waving pictures of people around and talking about muscular Christianity. It’s just the endless corruption of the Christian faith that’s been going on for 2,000 years, and it’s absolutely nonsense. And in terms of indigeneity, I would never talk about that in an uncomplicated way.

I’m actually very clear in the book when I do talk about that. And I’m also very clear about what I’m against, which is all this kind of stuff you are talking about. When you start talking about cultural purity or racial purity, at least on the hard Right, then you’ve been suckered. I start the book by talking about Simone Weil’s book, The Need for Roots, and Weil is certainly not any kind of Right-wing or far-Right character. But she writes this book during the Nazi occupation of Europe, and she’s French and she’s fighting for the Free French in London. And she says that everyone is uprooted in the modern world. And what the Nazis have done is they’ve taken that concern and they’ve turned it into this hideous, monstrous racial thing. How can we actually root ourselves again without getting sucked in by that?

So you have to be able to talk about this in an intelligent way and in a sensitive way, which I hope I’ve done in the book. I don’t think anyone could seriously read that and not be very clear about what I’m for and what I’m not.

But be careful of idol worship. Don’t worship the idols of nations or the idols of false versions of Christianity or religion. Anything that involves you raging against a bunch of people who are different to you. Whatever side you’re on, you’re in trouble. That doesn’t mean you can’t have the serious discussions about what it actually means to be rooted and what you should actually be doing politically, but I really see what’s happening in the West at the moment as a manifestation of that massive process of uprooting and just people on all sides of the spectrum.

FS: You end up by embracing a political label: reactionary radical. What does that mean?

PK: John Calhoun uses the phrase “reactionary radicals” when critiquing E.P. Thompson, the Marxist historian: he says, look, you can’t divide people at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution into the two simple categories of workers or capitalists, the working class and the bourgeoisie, because what the Luddites are doing in communities like them, is trying to resist the coming of the factory system, the coming of capitalism, because they can see it’s going to completely destroy them. It’s going to destroy their industry. It’s going to turn them into wage slaves, it’s gonna destroy their households. So they’re reactionary in that sense.

They’re reacting against that system, which is a good thing. But they’re radical as well because they don’t react against it because they want to go back to the past as if it was perfect. They want changes as well, right? They want things that will actually benefit them because the system currently does not benefit them.

He calls these people reactionary radicals. And I think if you look at tribal people in India resisting dams or the West Papuans, resisting logging firms in the Indonesian government, or the Fen Tigers or the Luddites throughout history, what you can see is reactionary radicals. You can see people fighting the Machine, but from a perspective of wanting a radically different way of living.

So it’s not a simple sort of reaction where you just go, “oh, everything was wonderful in the past. Let’s go back to that.” But neither is it an ideological radicalism like you would get with the Marxists, where you say: “we’ve got a grand utopian theory of everything and we’re just going to impose that now even if we have to kill everyone and put them into camps.”

It’s based on human scale culture. It reacts against the Machine. So I like that. I like that as a phrase. It’s the best description I’ve ever heard of what I think I believe in.

If we’re going to talk about politics as a way of seeing, you have to have a politics that is rooted in the past, that’s rooted in reality. Rooted in nature and eternal things, but that doesn’t idolise them. Or turn them into excuses to hate a bunch of people who aren’t the same as you, which is the problem that we’ve got at the moment, and that’s what the Right’s going to end up doing if it’s not very careful indeed.

“People”, “Place”, “Prayer” and “the Past” — however you want to formulate it. But it has to be against the Machine, literally, and it has to be very careful that whatever it does not become the worship of an idol and the excuse to project your anger and fear onto somebody else, which is why for me, my Christianity’s important.

Because if you’re going to try and be a Christian properly (and I wouldn’t claim I’m very good at it) the two great commandments are that you love God and you love your neighbour. And, by the way, Christ says: “Everyone is your neighbour.” That’s what the Good Samaritan is about.

So you actually have to try and do the thing that is possible for you to do. That is a good thing in your life at the human scale.

But we can now say confidently that Yang didn’t get it quite right. Woke-ism, for lack of a better term, no longer seems to be ascendent. Those ideas remain common, maybe even dominant, in many elite institutions, from academe to media and even some houses of worship. But somehow, they seem stale now. When Malcolm Gladwell starts talking like J.K. Rowling, it’s safe to say that mainstream culture is somewhere past “peak woke.”

What, then, is the real Successor Ideology? The short answer might be faith — the old-fashioned kind.

We seem to be in the beginning stages of a Christian revival in the West. About 10 years ago, a new group of secular thinkers, led by the historian Tom Holland and the psychologist Jordan Peterson, began defending the civilizational value of Christianity, noting its contributions to peace, tolerance, and civil rights. After decades of more and more people coming to regard Christianity as a set of repressive superstitions, it suddenly became conventional wisdom in certain quarters that Christianity is good for people and societies.

Then, surprisingly, a number of high-profile artists and intellectuals, many of them British, started announcing their conversion (or return) to Christianity: people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Paul Kingsnorth, Martin Shaw, Russell Brand, and Nick Cave. What’s more, YouTube has exploded with Christian-curious seekers making and watching videos about “the meaning crisis.”

The open question has been this: Is this just another celebrity-fueled online fad, like cold plunges or Ozempic? Or will the people actually return to the pews? Charlie Kirk made the case on Facebook just six days before his assassination: “There is revival in the Christian church. Churches are growing. Young people are flocking to faith in God.” But this is the kind of thing that Christians are so desperate to see after decades of decline. It’s possible they’re seeing what they want to see.

Still, some data suggest the ferment is real. Consider a new report from the Bible Society purporting to show that church attendance in England and Wales has surged in recent years. Survey data from The Quiet Revival, as the report was titled, suggests that the number of churchgoing Christians in England and Wales increased to nearly 6 million last year, up from about 4 million in 2018. That’s a 56% explosion in just six years. Perhaps even more surprising, it is young men driving the growth, with 21% of 18-to-24-year-old men reporting that they go to church once a month, compared to only 12% of young women.

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“In churches across society,” the report proclaims, “something amazing is happening.”

I’m not the first person to be skeptical of the numbers. As Stephen Bullivant pointed out in First Things, the study suggests that five times as many young men are attending church relative to 2018, and at least 500,000 additional worshipers should be in the pews every week. That’s hard to square with reports of lower attendance since the pandemic.

But there is something going on, and it’s consistent with what we’re seeing in the United States. More young men are telling pollsters that they are religious, and Catholic churches are reporting higher numbers of converts. I recently spoke to two friends, a married couple, who work in ministry at a large nondenominational church in suburban Los Angeles. They report that the church is seeing an influx of hundreds of young people from the local colleges like the University of California, Los Angeles.

“There’s more men than women,” he reports. “And their faith is unusually authentic,” she adds. About half of the kids seem to come from traditional Christian families, and the other half seem to have followed a path that started online with someone like Jordan Peterson. “We really haven’t seen anything like this before.”

What’s weird is that secularization is continuing apace. A recent Pew poll found that the Catholic church loses eight of its faithful for every single person that joins. And the mainline Protestant churches remain mired in a precipitous decline.

Here’s a theory: secularization and re-enchantment are happening simultaneously. It’s showing up as a creative churn in the English-speaking world. As young people, especially young men, enter the church, older folks, especially women, are leaving. I wonder if one day we may be forced to retire the haggard stereotype of the “church lady” who drags her reluctant husband and kids to services every Sunday. 

But I also wonder how a church can adapt to a sanctuary filled with “church bros.” Are these men bringing with them a “rad-trad” vision of male-female relations that they picked up online? Or are they rejecting both the nihilism and the macho Nietzscheanism so common in digital spaces? Will young women follow the men back through the church doors? Oh, to be a fly on the wall.

Not all churches benefit from the churn. While milquetoast suburban congregations founder, two very different types of congregations are seeing growth: the first are more traditional, devout congregations in the sacramental traditions of Catholicism and Orthodoxy; the second are nondenominational megachurches that emphasize a personal, emotional relationship with Christ. The report from the Bible Society suggests the same thing is happening in England and Wales: Catholics and Pentecostals increase in number, while the Church of England continues to see decline.

On the ground, this can be quite disorienting. Here in Los Angeles, my family attends weekly Mass at a gorgeous Italianate church built in the Twenties. It isn’t the Latin Mass, but there is a lot of Latin in the service, and the choral hymns and organ music are defiantly traditional. On a typical Sunday, the pews are full of young families who have traveled up to an hour for this style of reverent worship. It’s often standing-room-only.

Just 10 minutes away is a nondescript Catholic church building built in the Fifties. My family visited one Sunday last year. There’s hardly any Latin, and a folksy guitar player sings modern worship songs. The vibe is eager-to-please, but whom is it pleasing? Not very many people, frankly. The sanctuary is mostly empty, and the average age is north of 60. As the young seek out tradition and transcendence, it is the older Christian generations who cling to flat modernity.

Is it possible to imagine that some new-old iteration of Christianity could evolve into a Successor Ideology that would hold our body politic together, much like liberal Protestantism did for most of the last century? Sure, it is.

Charlie Kirk’s moving memorial, with pyrotechnics and an altar call, was an unabashed mash-up of a tent revival and a MAGA campaign event. You don’t have to squint very hard to see President Trump as America’s first megachurch president. He may not preach the gospel or live a holy life. But like many a Protestant preacher, he combines elements of the prosperity gospel with the subversive instincts of a great stand-up comedian. Meanwhile, waiting in the wings are more sober Catholic men like JD Vance and Marco Rubio.

In this transitory time of social fragmentation, however, Christians aren’t the only ones searching for signs. As some look for evidence in the pews, others are looking to the polling places. Consider the joy and optimism that have greeted Zohran Mamdani’s campaign to be the mayor of New York. For some Democrats, Mamdani’s win in the primary last June was a harbinger of a new, populist Left that would retain a softer woke-ism in combination with democratic socialism in the style of Bernie Sanders. They seem to imagine that this fusion could produce the true Successor Ideology.

At the same time, we are seeing a zealous, idealistic fervor erupt around artificial intelligence and the new reproductive technologies. It seems that much of Silicon Valley is converging on a kind of techno-utopianism that they envision as the engine of the next age.

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And, finally, as we are constantly reminded, you can also squint your eyes and see in Trump not an embodiment of any Christian spirit, but the prototype of a more autocratic leader tapping into a cult of personality. This path could be quite ugly, even if the risk of real fascism seems remote. And this type of leader, despite his populist promises, might be most likely to use his power to promote the interests of his cronies.

 It may be helpful here to recall what the Successor Ideology was going to replace. Since World War II, at least, the default ideology of the West was basically a form of Christian liberalism. The relative proportions of Christianity and liberalism might have fluctuated up or down a bit, but the basic throughline was there.

 This ideology made two overlapping transcendent promises: eternal life in heaven and infinite progress here on earth, thanks to the onward march of America-inspired liberal democracy. It was Christian liberalism that provided the ideological oomph for that political phenomenon often called neoliberalism.

 Between 1980 and 2010 or so, however, Christian liberalism transformed itself — quite gradually and without many of us noticing — into something else that might be called agnostic liberationism. This new ideology denied that it was an ideology at all, and it made no transcendent promise other than more and more freedom for ever and ever. Its apogee was the legalization of gay marriage which swept the West in the 2010s.

 The current moment of political upheaval and social crisis is a direct result of the failure of that ideology, which eroded institutions and failed to feed the human hunger for communal transcendence. That’s why woke-ism — with its rituals of confession and penance without forgiveness — was so attractive to so many among the urban professional classes, and why it briefly felt like the thing that was going to overtake the world.

From where we stand now, it’s hard to tell exactly where we are headed.  But it’s probably safe to predict that the true Successor Ideology is going to make some sort of transcendent promise. If it is to last, it will also have to renew our institutions and our traditions. In the end, we may be left with the same choices as those who have come before us. Where will we find our transcendence — in God, in the king, in mere government, or in promethean “progress”?

 May we choose wisely.

The odd thing about flattery is that it works, even if you know that’s just what it is. Even Trump can reach beyond his own swollen ego long enough to see that all those scarlet tunics and rows of gleaming fish knives aren’t purely for aesthetic effect, yet he relishes them all the same. One is reminded of the physicist Niels Bohr, a convinced rationalist who used to display a magic icon on his house to protect it from evil spirits. When asked whether he really believed in such nonsense, he replied that it was reputed to work whether you believed in it or not.

In the eyes of many beyond the United States, Trump is a walking assemblage of all the most unpleasant qualities of the stereotypical American. Rather as the British at their stereotypically most repellent are snobbish, two-faced, cold-hearted and likely to let you die in a ditch so as not to interfere with your privacy, so Trump is loud, brash, crass, arrogant, greedy, philistine, aggressive, and pathologically upbeat. (Some of my best friends, I should add, are American. My children, for example.) Trump is the American equivalent of a Frenchman who has a ring of onions round his neck, a troop of mistresses in tow and can’t stop shrugging his shoulders.

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We know that Trump is fond of Britain. In fact, there’s something a little Scottish about his sandiness of hair and complexion. It’s therefore not unreasonable to assume that he’s a devotee of Shakespeare, an author who, with his usual prescience, has much to say about the 47th ruler of the American Empire. There’s a lot about The Donald in Hamlet, for example. One of the mysteries at the heart of the play is why its protagonist takes so long to kill his step-father, Claudius the King, knowing that Claudius has murdered his own father and then married his own mother. Every time he comes near to dispatching the usurper, however, Hamlet’s hand is mysteriously stayed.

One solution to the enigma has been proposed by the Freudians: the hero can’t do away with Claudius because he subconsciously finds in him an image of himself. In killing the prince’s father and marrying his mother, Claudius has done just what the oedipal Hamlet himself unconsciously wants to do. Murdering the king would thus turn out to be self-slaughter. It’s not a solution likely to appeal to the British, who have common sense rather than a subconscious. But Hamlet was a foreigner, and foreigners, lacking our own self-understanding, may possess desires of which they’re unaware. The theory may look weak when applied to Hamlet and Claudius, but it’s strikingly relevant to the relationship between Trump and Vladimir Putin. Why is every threatening deadline suspended or quietly ditched? Why is it taking him so long to recognize that the man is a crook and a killer, who poisoned Alexei Navalny just as Claudius poisoned Hamlet’s father? Clearly, because Putin is the tyrant Trump longs to be, the alter ego he can’t shake off, the shadowy brother for whom democracy is just a sick joke and law must bend to power.

One might also detect a touch of Nigel Farage in Shakespeare’s Prince Hal. Both men hang around taverns, and both do so to project an image of themselves as “Normal Guys”. Hal is a Right-wing populist who courts the common life in the form of Falstaff, a boastful knight, and his cronies so as to use this inside knowledge for the ends of power when he finally becomes king. Once he ascends to the throne of England, he will turn on Falstaff and cast him off, just as Farage will sell out the ordinary people on whose back he hopes to climb to power. (He once said  the worst thing about running Ukip was having to work with low-grade individuals.)

Then there’s Macbeth, who was Scottish and would probably have liked golf. He might also have been sandy-haired. As a monarch he’s rapacious, brutally ambitious and has a brisk way with his enemies, though his wife refuses to take a back seat à la Melania. Given how Lady Macbeth ends up, Melania may well have made a wise decision. Macbeth also feels that without consolidating his kingly power, he lacks identity and is perpetually unfinished, his life being merely a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing. Shakespeare is worried about people whose identity is so protean and mutable that there’s nothing solid or definitive about them (the Pucks and Ariels of this world, along with the Macbeth witches); but he’s also troubled by those stolid souls who aren’t able to be anyone but themselves. Some characters have too little selfhood, while others have an excess of it. He seems to believe that this conflict is built into the kind of animals we are.

All this is, among other things, a reflection on Shakespeare’s own profession as an actor, which involves projecting oneself into others without losing grip on yourself. Only a strong self can take on another. Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream wants with Trump-like infantile greediness to perform all the parts in a play staged within the drama, but the joke is that he can’t be anyone but himself. Hamlet hasn’t a clue who he is, which strikes Polonius’s advice to him (“This above all, to the own self be true”) as pointless and pedantic as most of what he says. What if your true self is a serial killer? Have those who mouth the postmodern mantra “I like to be myself” paused to consider this question? Being themselves is precisely what’s wrong with a lot of people.

Othello is magnificently capable of being himself, but for the same reason, incapable of empathizing with anyone else. He is in love with his own burnished, mouth-filling rhetoric, a splendid actor who thinks of himself as entirely authentic; whereas Trump, for all his love of the theatrical and spectacular, can’t act at all. His lack of flexibility in this respect is also a lack of humanity. Yet the devil is a shape-shifter too. Othello’s devious adversary Iago can assume any persona he chooses (“I am not what I am”), which is why he can bring Othello down. (Trump has a certain low cunning about him, but our own home-grown Iago is surely Peter Mandelson.)

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There are also parallels between Trump and King Lear, one of which is that the latter goes mad while the former is slightly touched: think of those sudden grimaces and surreal digressions. Lear is a despot who “hath rather slenderly known himself”, while the President is a would-be autocrat whose only flash of self-knowledge to date has been to reply to a journalist who asked him why he didn’t drink. “Can you imagine what I’d be like if I did?” came the response.

The difference, here, is that Lear is a tragic figure, whereas Trump is not. To use the word “tragic” is to claim that Lear can find out who he is only by being hauled through hell. Only by being hacked down to nothing can he become something. In the depth of his madness, or is it his sanity, Lear rounds on the Fool and cries in agony, “Who is it who can tell me who I am?” Trump wouldn’t even understand the question, let alone be able to give an answer. King Lear is about the horrifying process to which someone as cocooned in false consciousness as Trump would need to submit in order to be saved.

Speaking of salvation, Trump was described by one of his acolytes as “a proud Christian”. He is, in fact, no more a Christian than Paddington Bear, whatever he may consider himself. You can’t just take someone’s word on the question of whether they are a Christian or a fan of Taylor Swift or a Manchester City supporter. People who claim to be Swifties, but have never heard her sing, and wouldn’t recognize a photo of her — like those who claim to support Manchester City but have never watched them play — are either lying, self-deceived or have no grasp of the concept of supporter. Much the same goes for claiming to be a Christian.

The so-called Beatitudes of the New Testament single out several groups of people as particularly blessed: peacemakers, the poor, the meek, the merciful, those who are persecuted, those who hunger for justice. Trump has a word for these people: losers. And, of course, he’s right. This is no way to get on in life. In fact, it’s the quickest way to become an abysmal failure, rather like the founder of the Christian movement. The Gospel has Jesus warn his comrades that the world will hate them and murder them. Much of the world also hates Donald Trump, which is about all that he and Jesus’s followers have in common. The current power structure is threatened by love, wants to do away with it, and looks at the moment as though it’s winning. It’s just that for tragedies like Lear, what looks like losing may actually be in some well-nigh incomprehensible way the only true way of living — which is to say, in the end, the only way of succeeding.

Two new books, Having it All: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours, by Corinne Low, and The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto, by Leah Libresco Sargeant, attempt to offer solutions. Both represent a kind of progress from second- and third-wave feminisms, in that they acknowledge that women are essentially different from men and face different challenges. Both express that the attempt to make us “equal” has been male-normed, which has erased the most significant aspect of our biology — childbearing and childbirth — and has underrated the burden of care-work that falls mostly upon women.

It still feels risky, even after the vibe shift, to say that the potential to bear a child is somehow essential to a woman’s experience, both because good feminists traditionally deny it in order to promote a woman’s right not to bear children, and because of the new issues raised by transgender parents. Low, a Millennial steeped in progressive values, semi-apologizes for being grounded in biology, offering the disclaimer that because her book “deals with data and thus averages, it will at times be cis and heteronormative”. Sargeant, a Catholic writer, celebrates biological reality, beginning her treatise with the observation that “women, more than men, are physically marked by relationships of care”.

These are opposing approaches to the female predicament, and they take women in different directions. Low is an economist, and she sets out to demonstrate with the tools of her trade that, first of all, women aren’t imagining the seriousness of the work-childcare conundrum. By every metric, we are still doing most of the domestic labor, at the same time as we’re being asked to put high “human-capital investments” (education, time, effort) into careers — and it simply isn’t possible. “I not only felt as though I didn’t have it all,” Low writes of early-motherhood. “I felt like I didn’t have anything.” 

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Women also, she argues, bear other gendered burdens, such as discrimination and sexual harassment. The way out, she thinks, would be a world in which men did their share of the work and women faced no such structural barriers. Before this utopia arrives, she urges that women understand the personal economics of our choices, and then play hardball: “I am going to challenge you to rethink the parts of your life where you’re not getting the deals you deserve, and navigate to better ones.”

Low’s synthesis of the research on family life and decision-making regarding marriage and care-work of all kinds is genuinely fascinating. Affluent women entered the workforce, economists have found, not only because of cultural and technological factors like feminism, abortion, and the Pill, but because unilateral divorce laws made staying home to raise kids suddenly a much worse deal: if the job was no longer for life, you might be left with nothing. Women measurably responded to such incentives, research shows. Reform of divorce laws began in the Sixties, and between 1955 and 1985, women’s participation in the labor force increased from 35% to 55%, with married women’s participation doubling. 

Low has done original research to back up the economic-incentive theory, discovering that among controlled, otherwise similar couples who either own or rent homes, the home-owners are more likely to enact traditional gender roles, with the man working and earning more, and the woman specializing in the domestic. The home provides the woman with collateral in case something goes wrong, Low speculates, thus lowering the decision-cost of staying home. 

Once Low moves into the prescriptive, her argument falters. She believes that women can use the principles of economics to maximize a personal “profit” or “utility” function by making different decisions, and uses her personal story, threaded throughout the book, as an example. Low played hardball by divorcing an unhelpful husband and moving with their child to a more affordable city, closer to her work, and now she’s much happier. Caring and love, she explains, are two ways that women get “bad deals”. She’s careful to say that these choices might be right for some people, but she argues they’re primitive desires, based on evolutionary conditioning to carry forward our genes. We’re supposed to decide if they’re what we really value, or not, and then act accordingly. 

Low writes that she tells young women who find it painful to return to work while still breast-feeding that “millions of years of evolutionary selection infused in their DNA in every cell of their body” is fighting their decision so their feelings make sense. But, she says, “gently, I would add that it’s okay to … accept our feelings and then go to work anyway”.

This is neither a solution to the age-old conundrum, nor having it all; it’s merely allowing women to choose a side. And it seems to elide the very problem the author promises to address: we don’t want to choose. What Low is really offering is the same old self-actualization rhetoric, dressed up with economics and psuedo-science. Feelings don’t come from DNA. Low may have overridden hers in the pursuit of self-optimization, but this is hardly recommended. Her young son’s geographical distance from his father doesn’t seem to factor in her profit-maximization calculus. Nor does she mention how her decision affected the child from her husband’s first marriage, for whom she was the primary caregiver. (Incidentally, she left men behind entirely, too, switching to dating women, who make much better partners, utility-wise.) Is this really what happiness looks like? 

Sargeant takes the opposite position. In an atmospheric and discursive book, she explores the possibilities of the female body: its comparative weakness; its unpredictability and changeability via menstruation and reproduction; its fuzzy boundaries through gestation and the shedding of maternal cells into the bodies of her children. The modern world perceives such vulnerability, connectedness, and variation as anomalous, a departure from a standard of how things should be. But this is a misconception, Sargeant counters: they’re not just the female norm, but the human one. 

Increasingly, our society is not set up for human beings, she writes. We have embraced a machine age and machine standards, and are required to be more and more like machines ourselves. The optimized work of the Amazon employee, the maternal-leave policies that rip lactating women from their babies, the jobs that reach into our off-hours and even into our sleep with constant connectivity — these realities make no allowance for human bodies or human frailty. Bureaucracies of health care and state benefits limit the ways we can care for each other. And we do our part, embracing materialist individualism and autonomy as the highest goals.   

Such points are made in a suggestive, loosely laced style. In the multiple sections of the chapter “The Lie of the Lonely Individual,” we first read about a man who is ashamed to ask his community for help during a weather emergency. Next, a contrarian-feminist argues that abortion rights degrade women’s full humanity, because we’re considered to need this form of severing to be full citizens. Then comes a passage on the way children upend and complicate life, and a brief meditation on the value of servitude to wash-and-repeat domestic tasks such as chopping broccoli. Autonomy, Sargeant thinks, is a fiction. The fuzzy argument doesn’t quite prove anything, but rings true nonetheless.

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Instead, the book calls us “not to accommodate dependence as a brute, unpleasant fact, but to knit dependence deeply into our understanding of what it means to be a human being”. Rather than throwing off ties of love and care as an unfair burden on women, we should view them as “the foundation for the authentic self”. It’s our vulnerabilities that allow us to “extend ourselves in love and receive love in return”.

The two feminists present mirror-image futures to strive for. In Low’s vision, women must achieve true equality along male-coded lines, which seems possible only by erasing gender for both sexes and denying the facts of human biology (child-work will never be gender-neutral). In Sargeant’s, we should go female-coded and build a more humane future — but it won’t be getting women out of care-work any time soon, and might in fact demand a greater embrace of it. (Her chapter on how men fit into the dependency matrix is one of her best.) 

To decide which is the better path, we might look at the two writers’ conceptions of fulfillment. In Low’s paradigm, what we’re looking for is a maximized “potential joy in life” that’s something like “your personal video game score at the end of your life”. We’re supposed to judge this by the criterion of personal happiness (always difficult to define), and to be making decisions that maximize this future score. She gives us opaque instructions such as: “try to get clear on separating what you truly want and value from the predetermined, socially reinforced ideas of what we’re supposed to want.” 

In Sergeant’s vision, fulfillment comes from self-sacrifice and involves chopping a lot of broccoli, which sounds more realistic. Both agree that society as it is currently set up has a problem. The persistence of the female conundrum over time suggests that in this respect, they’re both right. 

It made me slightly angry and embarrassed and confused all at the same time, but most of all it made me feel like I was missing something. Why didn’t I know any folk songs from my own country? Why did nobody else from my country know any, either?

I felt the same way once at school, when I saw in a book an illustration of the national costumes of various European nations. There were the Welsh with their lace and the Scots with their kilts and the Dutch with their clogs, and it was all faintly ridiculous, but the most ridiculous of all were the English. Our national costume, according to this picture anyway, was a pinstripe suit, a bowler hat and a rolled‑­up umbrella. The Welsh made lace, the Dutch grew tulips, the Irish played the fiddle, the French did whatever they did with those strings of onions: hell, at least it was colorful. What did my people do? We made money.

That illustration was telling me the same thing as the jungle version of “Hard Rain”, and what it was saying was loud and clear: you don’t have a culture.

Since then, I seem to have picked away endlessly at this notion of “culture”. The quest for culture is always a quest for home. Probably humans can never be truly at home on this earth, but there are degrees of homelessness, I think. When you’re young you want to run away from home and sit around an Indonesian campfire with people from many nations and sing. But you find that home has followed you and that you don’t know what it quite is, or why that bothers you so much. As you get older, you realize both why home matters and how fragile and elusive it is. Then you find you are living in a world whose forces have set out to destroy your sense of home wherever it can be found.

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By Paul Kingsnorth

Our age, I think, is unique. It might be that everyone thinks this about their time, but I think that today we have a good case. The sheer scale of global culture, the degree of technological interconnectedness, the dangers of those technologies, from AI to nuclear missiles, the human impact on the natural world and the rapid ­falling​­ away of many things that have buoyed and sustained us for centuries, from languages to religions, means that the times we live in are perhaps less rooted than any time in history. We may be in the process of creating something unique in human history: a global anticulture, unmoored from reality and increasingly at war with it.

This anticulture is not limited to any particular political or cultural tradition: though it arose in the West, from peculiarities of Western culture and history, it has since become universal. It is an “anticulture” because the elements of human life from which cultures of all kinds, however different, have traditionally sprung are negated by today’s way of life. The values of the Machine are an attack on the values upon which ­pre-modern, traditional societies were built. The new values are predicated on the pursuit of liberation: a ­one-​­word descriptor of the essence of the Western programme since 1789. Our aim, stated or unstated, is to liberate ourselves from nature in all regards, so that we may conquer the stars, conquer death, and become as gods, knowing good and evil.

The philosopher Patrick Deneen, in his 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed, presents this modern drive towards liberation as an ideological project, suggesting that “liberalism” is one of three ideologies which have dominated the world over the last three centuries. The other­ two — communism and ­fascism —​­ were ­shorter lived, he suggests, and died in the West in the 20th century. Liberalism —​­ the elder ­brother —​­ is finally dying now. One reason for its longer life is that it piggybacked on an older story, presenting itself as the inheritor of older traditions of “liberty”, when in fact it was something quite different. While liberty is “the condition of self-​governance, whether achieved by the individual or a political community”, liberalism “re‑conceives liberty as the opposite of this older conception. It is understood to be the greatest possible freedom from external constraints, including customary norms.”

“Freedom from external constraints” is a good description of the central drive of the Machine’s anticulture. This pursuit, claims Deneen, seeks freedom for the individual from society itself, and it is built upon a radical notion of human nature. Rather than seeing humans as hefted creatures, rooted, ­Weil-​­like in time and place, this new lens offers a new vision: detached, sovereign personhood. Humans are now, in Deneen’s words, “rights-​bearing individuals who could fashion and pursue for themselves their own version of the good life”.

In this new world, the sovereign human person, ­disembedded from community, history and nature, will utilize reason, informed by science and enabled by technology, to choose how to live. The rational individual, making choices in a marketplace overseen by a government committed to “liberty” and guarding individual “rights” through a “social contract”: this was the basis of a wholly new world. The commitment to this ­post-​­Enlightenment liberal order is not a partisan one. The factions we refer to today as “Left” and “Right” are simply two different flavors of the same liberal food.

What is crucial to understand ­here —​­ and this is what makes liberalism an ideology —​­ is that in order for the new, “liberated” world to come into being, it needed to be created. Just as Marxist regimes attempted to destroy the family, the Church and private land ownership so that communism could materialize, so liberalism did not naturally “evolve” from previously existing arrangements. It needed to artificially create the “sovereign individual” from new cloth. The individual “as a disembodied,­ self-​­interested economic actor”, claims Deneen, “didn’t exist in any actual state of nature but rather was the creation of an elaborate intervention by the incipient state in early modernity, at the beginnings of the liberal order”.

This echoes Chesterton’s argument that ­capitalism —​­ a system referred to as “liberal economics” for good reason —​­ did not “evolve” either, but also had to be created by force. Liberalism, suggests Deneen, grew in the same desert. And the biggest obstacle to the growth of ­both —​­ then as now —​­ was real culture. “Culture was the greatest threat to the creation of the liberal individual,” writes Deneen. Rooted trees are hard to fell. The Machine anticulture which is felling them one by one “is at once a crowning achievement of liberalism and among the greatest threats to our continued common life”.

There has always been a certain pathos, and a kind of nobility, to the modern human attempt at breaking the bounds and soaring to the stars. It is the pursuit of cosmopolis: a utopian desire to replace religious and ethnic conflict with universal peace and love. It strives, at its best, for equality and brotherhood, rather than prejudice and conflict. The problem emerges when the ideals are divorced from the reality of what humans are, and what the world is made of. Liberatory ambition, in the abstract, can never be sated. Like a dictator marching on Moscow, the Machine doesn’t know when to stop, and now we can see where this project of globalized liberation is leading us: into the world of the nihil.

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As a result, human culture is in the process of being consumed by the Machine. Something organic is being superseded by something planned; something natural by something technological. This is the anticulture of the Machine, and it supersedes and replaces the values on which older societies the world over are based. At the risk of gross generalization, I think we can boil those older values down into a simple formula. I call it the Four Ps:

1. Past. Where a culture comes from, its history and ancestry.
2. People. Who a culture is. A sense of being “a people”.
3. Place. Where a culture is. Nature in its local and particular manifestation
4. Prayer. Where a culture is going. Its religious tradition, which relates it to God or the gods.

Maybe cultures can survive, and even thrive, without one or more of these elements. In fact, some measurably do: nomadic cultures, for example, do not have a permanent link to a particular place, but are not necessarily less culturally or spiritually rich for it. Still, if you remove more than one element from this list, your chance of sustaining a cultural story in place and through time is slim.

Looking again at my home country, England, in the light of this theory of culture, seems instructive. England, like much of the West, currently seems to be in a kind of freeform cultural collapse. Why? Well, if the Four Ps have anything going for them, the explanations are clear enough. The English long ago gave up on the religion that formed their nation and their ­values —​­ Christianity. They are one of the most urbanized nations on Earth, and the one which urbanized earliest. Our memory of the land, and our understanding of it, is almost entirely dead. We are an urban people. And we have largely forgotten our history, or had it taken away from us, depending on your point of view.

For this reason, we have no meaningful folk culture. Folk culture comes from a ­folk —​­ a people rooted in time and place, with dirty hands and a particular perspective. The English are no longer this, and have perhaps not been for centuries. Finally, the redoubts of high culture have fallen, since at least the Sixties, to a postmodern faction which believes that the very notion of “high culture” is elitist, bigoted folly, and that nations are too. England’s cultural elite today, fired by a ­longstanding oikophobia, are far more likely to be found cheering on the toppling of statues than thinking about what to replace them with. When an elite regards its people with thinly veiled contempt, and when it sneers at its own ancestors, the culture it claims to speak for and guard is not long for this world.

This same energy seems to be displayed to different degrees throughout the nations of the West today, and has elicited a growing reaction from those who object to it. But it is nonetheless the dominant understanding, pushed from above by those in power. We have forgotten who we are, or we don’t like who we are, or somehow both.

If this is true, we are in a situation in which the Machine has advanced to such a degree that the very possibility of living cultures in “advanced” countries (i.e. the countries most under its sway) is impossible. The direction of modernity is away from land and towards megacities, away from both folk and high culture and into mass online anticulture, and away from any manifestation of God and towards the rule of Mammon. The Machine is the liberal anticulture made manifest. In the new civilization it is building, culture will be made not by that magical, strange, impossible and miraculous combination of human bodies, wild nature and the soul, but by the Algorithm and the AI.

The anticulture of the Machine brings with it its own values. They supersede the values of the ­pre-technological age, and they spring from the need and the drive of the Machine itself. We could call them the Four Ss:

1. Science. Where we come from. Science can offer us a ­non-mythic version of this story, and assert a claim as to the true (i.e. measurable) nature of reality.
2. The Self. Who we are. The highest good is to serve the self and ensure its longevity.
3. Sex. What we do. Both the highest means of sacral pleasure and, through public expressions of “sexuality”, an affirmation of individual identity.
4. The Screen. Where we are going. The screen is both our main source of distraction from reality and the interface by which we are directed into the coming posthuman reality of the Machine.

If the Machine has an ideology, I suggest that these four notions are a fair summary of it. Perhaps, though, it is less an ideology than a theology. Salvation, in the modern era, comes not through eucharist, pilgrimage or prayer, but through government action, technological progress or capitalist “wealth creation”. Ideology promises us a material world remade for the better; unfortunately, as the 20th century demonstrated, it often ends up drowning it in tyranny as often, if not more often, than religion ever did.

The Four Ss, then, offer a kind of catechism for the Machine age. We remain, I think, despite our ostensible belief in “science and reason”, fundamentally religious people in a religious time. We will always seek some greater meaning, some transcendent truth, and if we can’t or won’t find the real thing we will attempt to create it. When we forget the proper direction in which to aim our prayers, we will end up aiming them at the ultimate idol: our own image, reflected back at us in our little black screens. We will be kings and queens of a deceptively free world, parading through a liturgy of the self, wondering why the chaos seems to persist so close beneath the surface of this world.

***

This is an extract from Against the Machine by Paul Kingsnorth, which will be published by Particular Books on 23 September.

We have always questioned the realness of this world. Taoists pondered whether the man who dreamed he was a butterfly was not a butterfly who dreamed he was a man. Gnostics believed the material universe was created by a demiurge and that light from a heavenly Jerusalem shines upon this forsaken world through the stars, the perforations in the cosmic veil. In Plato’s allegory a group of prisoners spend their lives chained up in a cave and gaze upon its wall while, unbeknownst to them, guards project images cast by shadows, which the prisoners mistake for the true reality. The philosopher, according to Plato, is the one who ascends from the cave into the light of wisdom and dismisses those who cannot distinguish between “substance and shadow”. Yet increasingly we are unable to do so. As captives in a simulated, digital cave, we are so spellbound by the projections that we neglect the true reality beyond. Even the cave’s architects have become enthralled and, in their puppet show, see flickerings of a god-like intelligence.

The simulated world is making the real one redundant. Once physical things, such as banks and high-street shops, have dissolved into the digital world. Work and social life is increasingly mediated through online apps, whose slickness minimizes contact with other people. Artificial intelligence gives us the power to produce images instantaneously and repetitively, and soon it will be difficult to tell simulation from reality. Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey predicts that within a decade we will not be able to distinguish a real image or video from a fake one. Adverts, television and film will be produced without flesh and blood actors. Consumer trends will be galvanized by imaginary influencers. Social movements will be led by fictitious politicians. When artificial intelligence can even do the jobs of remote, digital workers, then the simulated reality will have become self-sufficient, a world completely unto itself.

Meanwhile, the real world comes to resemble what philosopher Jean Baudrillard called “the disquieting strangeness of the desert”. Bereft of the bustle of commerce and conversation, city centers are bought up by ghost-like foreign investors and turned into lifeless mausoleums through which tourists wander. The earth itself becomes a fuel station to power the simulated world. According to MIT, by 2028 artificial intelligence could consume as much electricity annually as 22% of US households. Swamped by contextless information — the news feed and the reel — we cannot root ourselves. Culture withers. The new cannot burst forth. Everything is repeated in what philosopher Byung Chul-Han calls “the inferno of the same”. In a 1935 essay, Walter Benjamin observed that the mechanical reproduction of a work of art causes a “decay of the aura” of the original. Today we might say that the aura, the presence of reality itself, is being lost. So, it is no wonder people increasingly feel lonely, bereft of contact with the aura of reality itself.

This is not, strictly, a new phenomenon. Hegel’s disparaging motto for the Enlightenment was: “Everything is useful.” The experimental study of natural phenomena meant animals, plants and minerals had to be dissected in order that their constituent parts might be understood. To observe the natural world in this way we must imagine ourselves separate from it. A tree, for instance, is no longer experienced as an individual but rather categorized as one of a certain type. When an object becomes isolated and abstracted, it can be more easily manipulated and instrumentalized. What is true of objects is also true of human beings. This is the source of our wealth and scientific knowledge. But it deprives us of a deeper connection with the world.

And the more time we spend in the simulation, the more disconnected we become. A recent paper in the science journal Nature found that increased use of digital media correlates with feelings of what psychologists call “depersonalization” or “derealization” — a sense of being estranged or detached from oneself and reality. The sense that the world is not real. These are symptoms typically associated with schizophrenia. Yet they have become the norm. To have a world, we must be physically present in it. We must be able to relate to and communicate with it. We must be able to touch and taste it. Martin Heidegger called this “being-in-the-world”. To be at home in the world requires a connection with it that artificial intelligence can never have. Yet homelessness, as the philosopher observed, is “becoming the destiny of the world”.

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There was not always such a separation between us and reality. For the pre-Socratic philosopher Thales all of nature was “full of gods”. The Neo-Platonist Plotinus believed that the body dwelled in the soul rather than the soul in the body. In Literature and the Gods, Roberto Calasso, writing of the ancient Greeks, observes: “In the Greek language the word theós, ‘god’ has no vocative case”, rather it “designates something that happens”. The divine presence, in other words, was for the ancients dazzlingly immanent.

Art strives toward our lost connection with the world by reacquainting us with its presence or reminding us of our discontinuity from it. The novels of Tolstoy describe everyday objects as if they are being seen for the first time. The still lifes of Cezanne fizz with vitality and aliveness. In his recent book, Cosmic Connections, philosopher Charles Taylor might have been talking about all art when he said that the work of the Romantics “brings us into contact with a deeper reality which would otherwise remain beyond our ken”. Like nature, art’s capacity to reveal brings us into contact with a mysterious presence. Latent within the shapes and rhythms of art, it is this presence that could still release us from the darkness of the cave.

But we may need to become truly bereft of this presence before it can. Perhaps we will create new myths to articulate the extent of our disconnection. Or perhaps the old ones will still do. When Adam and Eve ate from the forbidden tree of knowledge and were banished by Yahweh from paradise, they severed the primal connection between humanity and the world. “Man”, Yahweh says to the angelic host, “has become like one of us, knowing good and evil”. This was the Fall. But perhaps it is unfinished. Perhaps, in our endless desire for useful knowledge, we have much further to go. Yet even in their despair, Adam and Eve were not hopeless. According to a Jewish myth, when, on the night of their banishment, they saw the sinking sun, they believed the world was returning to its primordial chaos because of their fault. Then the new dawn broke.

Of course, nobody thought those Etsy witches — with whom I’ve had my own brushes in the past — had succeeded in bringing about Kirk’s assassination. The mini-scandal was more a question of taste and timing: the article had been circulated around X in the hours after the shooting with jokey comments (“can she do my ex next?”). But it was far from the first time that a political figure had been on the receiving end of a hex.

In 1968, the feminist group W.I.T.C.H. — the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell — convened on Wall Street to form a circle and bring about the collapse of the stock market. Later, it would hex the inauguration of Richard Nixon (was Watergate the result of the eye of a newt?). Decades on, Donald Trump, Brett Kavanaugh and the Stanford predator Brock Turner would be on the receiving end of viral “collective castings”. Binding spells would seek to stay their hands from committing harm; castration spells would invite impotence.

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All this is, depending on how you look at it, either very fortunate or very unlucky for Emma Quilty. Later this week, the self-described “witchy anthropologist” will publish Witch Power, a guide to “hexing the patriarchy with feminist magic”. In it, she visits various covens and gatherings to “collect data” on modern witchcraft, which consists of bands of kooksters convening at hippyish events or online to cast spells, hawk essential oils and hex enemies. We meet some of the original bands of Sixties/Seventies witches — harmless women in hemp — but Quilty’s main focus is the Millennial and Gen Z cohort for whom being a witch seems to connect directly with identity politics.

Quilty, for her part, can be found writhing in a tent in someone’s garden, weeping in a New Orleans graveyard or sitting in a Voodoo Queen’s grotty living room. At the same time, she goes through a personal crisis: a breakup with her boyfriend. The details often feel like furious diary entries: “Even the way he turned the overhead light off was aggressive.” The book is a big old middle finger to a presumably recent ex who represents everything the witches are not: he is square, buttoned-up and miserable. They are groovy, kinky and dreamy. Unfortunately they are also, for the most part, insufferable.

For Quilty, being a witch is not about cackling or wearing dangly sleeves. It turns out the price of admission is just being a bit punk: “To live in defiance of society’s expectations and rules, that is what it means to be a witch.” Written by and for someone truly drunk on the witch’s brew, the book gives a portrait of feminism in a moment of utter identity crisis. To Quilty, the witchcraft scene is disappointingly “white and middle class”; she spends much of the book tutting at covens which engage in “biological essentialism” by focusing on rituals around menstruation or female fertility. Women-only gatherings are admonished for “excluding trans women” (ew, girls, don’t talk about your periods — you’ll make the men feel left out!). There are obligatory trigger warnings, the inevitable popping-up of our old friend Edward Said, groanworthy nods to BDSM and kink. In one amusing aside, a “Blak fat queer feminist witch” called Raphael Lavallee organises a workshop titled “A Sacred Round on Stolen Ground: Decolonising your Magical Practice”. In a deflated postscript, we learn that “unfortunately the workshop ended up not running”. Could it possibly be that there hadn’t been enough appetite for wafting burnt sage about and exorcising unconscious bias? No, that can’t be it.

Modern witchcraft seems like a big interpretative dance group, in the sense that I imagine participants trying their absolute hardest never to laugh, especially during the seemingly endless orgies. Witch camps at times seem like swingers’ weekends by another name. At one “hands-on” workshop, we witness “a circle of people masturbating together”; little wonder, you’d think, that Quilty’s killjoy boyfriend is less than delighted when she returns from this “fieldwork” to breathlessly update him on her discoveries. In the event he grunts and grumbles, presumably just as impressed by all this panting and self-discovery as I am. He is such a consistent irritant that I half wonder whether Quilty’s reinvention as a witch is less a revolt against the patriarchy than a revolt against him.

Now you might think it’s a little risky to be critical of a witch; a hex may indeed be in the post. Thankfully, Quilty gives absolutely no indication that she thinks these spells ever actually work. In fact, we learn that speculating about this is reductive and misses the point: “It ignores the political power and potential of mass group spells.” So there you have it: for those Right-wing men fearing the wrath of the covens of Portland, stand down. Even the witches themselves don’t think magic really works.

At a time when the witch has hobbled her way back into the spotlight, it is very useful indeed to have Quilty’s field notes. Like so many feminist subcultures today, I sense that witchcraft has lost its way, mired in the relentless compulsion to include and flatter both men and sex positivity at the cost of its own intellectual coherence. It turns out that because this movement is founded on a very minimal amount of historical evidence, the rest is filled in by guesswork from fickle adherents with their own moral crusades, and the modern waves are hopelessly inflected by whichever cultural context they happen to spring up in.

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What we know about the women originally accused of witchcraft is that they genuinely did offend patriarchal norms by being haggish or prickly or interfering with emerging schools of science to administer herbal remedies and bring about, among other things, abortions. The women burned by the Witchfinder General would hardly have self-identified as witches; the label is a woman-hating fantasy that targeted midwives, folk healers or simply the common-or-garden crone. But modern “witchcraft” disregards this, turning away from the tragedies of misrepresentation suffered by these women and choosing, in a real sense, to believe their accusers.

Because such an interpretation is based on magical thinking and liberal interpretation, it follows that successive iterations are entirely warped by the politics of the day: the witches of the Sixties were obsessed with sexual availability, those of the Seventies were compelled by questions of bodily autonomy, and today they seem to be transfixed by the question of gender. The witchy women Quilty admires may claim to be radical, skulking on society’s margins, taking their lives in their hands by defying gendered expectations. Who’d have thought, then, that they also happen to be captured by the dogma of mainstream progressivism? As ever, it’s funny how in the most radical places, people tend to be the most cowed.

The upshot? A bonanza for investors, with firms like Blackstone betting literally billions of dollars on buying up American homes, before renting them out to desperate tenants. And if 28% of US single family homes were sold to investors in Q1 2022, an 8% jump on the previous year, the trend is increasingly popular on the far side of the Atlantic too. Not content with dolling out mortgages, Lloyds Bank apparently has plans to become Britain’s biggest landlord.

Yet as large corporations gobble up a diminishing supply of houses, they pose an enormous threat to would-be homeowners, particularly those Millennials too young to have cashed in the boom of earlier decades. Combined with frequent complaints that these mega-landlords don’t maintain their new purchases — and signs that they’re keen to scoop up even more real estate — much of the Western world edges closer to genuine disaster territory, even if the antagonists are more feudal vampires than undead shamblers.

Housing now dominates political discourse right across the developed world. Among Americans, it now ranks second only to inflation as a leading economic worry. In my native California, almost 70% of residents are concerned about housing costs; in Britain, housing has risen to become one of the top issues for voters — well ahead of defense, security, poverty and crime. That’s hardly surprising: especially under the country’s inflexible NIMBY regime, projections suggest that nearly five million UK households will live in unaffordable accommodation by 2030.

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And if the Anglosphere is especially bad in this respect, it’s hardly unique. Studies have found similar problems stalk the European and East Asian markets too, as prices rise far faster than household incomes or inflation. And if the OECD warns that living standards are bound to “stagnate or decline” in consequence, this is far more than a series of individual catastrophes for the families involved. Rather, the West’s housing crisis, so exacerbated by outfits like Blackstone, has terrifying implications for the maintenance of middle-class democracy.

Small landowners have been the bulwark of democracy for millennia. This was true in the early origins of Athens and Rome, and in the rise of the Dutch Republic during the 17th century, perhaps the first genuinely middle-class society in history. If, however, the rise of property ownership undermined the aristocracy and hastened the end of feudalism, the most dramatic changes came after the Second World War.

Servicemen returning home wanted something better than the dank Victorian apartments they’d inhabited before. Their dreams were embraced, and indeed realized, by a series of progressive governments, often on the Left but sometimes Christian Democratic. There are plenty of examples here: Harry Truman’s GI Bill and Clement Attlee’s welfare state are probably the two most famous, but Australia and Canada pursued similar policies too.

And if President Roosevelt was surely right when he proclaimed that a “nation of homeowners” is unconquerable, the postwar embrace of quality, affordable houses for all provided “the secret sauce” that made liberal capitalism palatable to working people. Throughout the Fifties and Sixties, that was self-evident for those thousands of working-class families that fled the slums of Brooklyn or Wapping, embracing instead a front lawn and back garden in Long Island or its Essex equivalent. “Was there ever such a stealthy social revolution as the rise of this semi-detached suburbia?” wondered the filmmaker John Boorman, recalling his childhood in a South London suburb.

Now, though, many Western countries are transforming into “rentership” societies — where citizens have plenty of income to enjoy video games or tend to houseplants, but can never accumulate their own brick-and-mortar assets. The broader effect may ultimately resemble a modern form of feudalism, where institutional ownership concentrates control over housing.

If these problems transcend demographics, young people are particularly threatened here. When I ask my students if they feel confident about buying a home here in Southern California, they rarely answer affirmatively. In a recent Harvard poll of 18- to 29-year-olds, housing ranked as the third most important issue overall, just behind inflation and health care. No wonder: nationally, homeownership for people under 35 has fallen steadily since the Great Recession, and is now half that of over 45s. And, to be clear, this is not due to changing priorities, as two-thirds of millennials still yearn to escape to the suburbs.

All this has a predictable number of knock-on effects: starting with wealth accumulation. With property now so expensive, a situation hardly helped by Blackstone and the rest, American home owners have a median net worth over 40 times that of renters. It’s not hard, here, to see the political implications of this economic divide, with renters tending to favor Leftist policies such as rent control and housing subsidies. To put it differently, a class of permanent renters seems tailor-made for fomenting class warfare against an ever-shrinking number of owners.

Indeed, this is precisely the factor that’s pushed an obscure socialist named Zohran Mamdani to the verge of becoming the mayor of America’s largest and most important city. Mamdani’s “cost of living” campaign — based on rent control, free buses, childcare and city-owned supermarkets — seems to some Leftist pundits as a potential path back to power. And why not? As one recent poll found, a majority of people under 40 embrace socialist principles, even as 70% of adults no longer believe the American Dream is even attainable.

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This politics of bitterness is arguably exacerbated elsewhere too. The only way many can now buy homes is by relying on the classic feudal formula — “the funnel of privilege”. In the US, after all, Millennials are three times as likely as boomers to count on inheritance for their retirement. In high-price markets like Los Angeles, close to 40% of loans rely on family money for qualification, up from 25% in 2011. For the losers of this economic lottery, resentment is bound to follow.

Of course, it’d be wrong to blame all this on Wall Street or the City. Many forces contribute to higher home prices. That includes immigration — especially the kind of open-door policy faced by Britain in recent years — as well as land-use policies that restrict development. Yet adding big capital to the mix deepens the assault on middle-income aspirations, especially when investors are especially eager to snatch up single-family homes. That, it goes without saying, does much to harden even moderate hearts to free-market ideas, especially when balancing housing with other priorities means that even something as basic as childbearing is now thrown by the wayside.

Nor does the situation look likely to improve in the medium term. As the industry journal Private Equity Real Estate estimates, investors could control as much as 40% of US housing stock by 2030, with similar trends visible in Australia and elsewhere. So pervasive is the trend, in fact, that some lawmakers, including in California, Washington and Georgia, have sought to limit purchases by large real estate outfits. Yet as the radical social theorist Barrington Moore wisely noted half a century ago, “no bourgeois, no democracy”. And if such tweaks are enough to save either remains decidedly unclear, as the stumbling masses look to take revenge.

One reason for this is that the dimensions of ourselves that are churned up while under the influence of psychedelics are ones that we often have difficulty squaring with the persons endowed with moral agency that we ordinarily take ourselves to be. It is normal to recoil from some of what we find within ourselves, to seek to disavow it once the trip is over. But the fact that we are able to find hidden dimensions of ourselves that seem to have a life of their own, whether we like what we find or not, while under the influence of certain substances, is itself of interest, or should be, to anyone who wants to understand what it is to live in this world, with a human mind and a sense of wonder.

It raises the question: how is it that we perceive reality the way we do? And what does it say about our perception of reality that it can be so fundamentally altered through an intentional alteration of our internal chemistry? Do psychedelics warp our perception of reality, drawing us further than in our ordinary lucid state from the actual way things are? Or do they rather reveal something to us about the way things are that we ordinarily cannot perceive? It seems that to answer in favor of the view that psychedelics push us further from apprehension of the world as it is presupposes that our mind is, in its default state, naturally and adequately constituted so as to know reality itself. But philosophy has spent the last few millennia coming up with some pretty good reasons why we should be skeptical of the idea that the mind is so constituted.

Something therefore seems a bit off, a bit fishy, when philosophers, along with the surrounding culture, shy away from psychedelics, whether taking them or studying their effects, on the grounds that they distance you from reality. Philosophy is born of the realization that we already are, or seem to be, at some distance from reality even in our default mode of consciousness. Why not, then, explore all the modes of consciousness available to us, considering what each of them might have to tell us about the relationship between mind and world? That is exactly what I did while researching my new book, On Drugs: Psychedelics, Philosophy, and the Nature of Reality.

Not so long ago, I was in a city in the Netherlands for three nights. I had been invited to give a public lecture, and I decided to stay on over the weekend to conduct some research for my book. In that time, I took psychedelics twice.

The evening of the second psilocybin trip, having taken more than before, and far more than is recommended, would turn out to be one of the most intense and transformative experiences of my life. Though I bump up against the limits of language when I try to convey what it was like.

My hotel room had a cheap-looking poster of Marilyn Monroe framed on the wall. One of the first signs that the psilocybin was taking effect arrived when I was walking towards the bathroom, and I saw her there and paused in front of her image and stared at her in absolute wonder. “Do I know Marilyn Monroe?” I asked myself. I never met her, but she has been with me my whole life, just as she has probably been with everyone reading this piece. She is at least as familiar to me as, say, any of my first cousins. And yet, I reflect, I have never so much as greeted her. How strange! So, there in that hotel room, I greeted Marilyn Monroe, and it was heartfelt, and I was certain that whatever just transpired counted as a meaningful interpersonal exchange.

But this was just the beginning, as the particular quality of that encounter with Marilyn would be felt 10 times more strongly when I returned to the bed and pulled up old clips on YouTube of Cass Elliott, more commonly known as Mama Cass. For some inscrutable reason, earlier in that day I had had an earworm from The Mamas and the Papas’ 1967 song “Creeque Alley” going through my head, in particular the line that runs: “And no one’s gettin’ fat except Mama Cass.” This had come to me in my completely unaltered mental state, a reminder that the mind and memory are a marvel, too, without psychedelics. I don’t know what it was doing there. I’m not particularly a fan of Sixties folkpop. But there it was, in my head, and so I pulled it up on the computer, and I ended up spending the next few hours watching clips of Mama Cass on the talk show circuit, all the while feeling not only that I knew her, and had always known her, but that I had always loved her.

To say it like this sounds ridiculous, but the feeling was entirely sincere. Something about Mama Cass seemed to tell the whole story of my own existence. I suddenly recalled a black-and-white picture of my parents, from the summer of 1972. My mother is pregnant with me, and she is unusually heavy. Then I recalled a distant memory from early childhood when that photo was being shown around to guests at our home. I knew I was in it, though still unborn, and I knew I was the reason why my mother had gained so much weight. Then I recalled that someone, I don’t know who, said, when looking at the photo, that my mother looked like Mama Cass. Resemblance, now, seemed to collapse into identity, or rather the distinction between them no longer mattered. Mama Cass suddenly appeared to me as “Mama” in the fullest sense: the fount of my being and the origin of my world.

I am not going to attempt to defend this conviction, which felt so strong at the time. That it is indefensible, that it is ridiculous, is precisely what I am attempting to convey. Why did such thoughts come to me so intensely and unbidden? The mind, it seemed to me as I reviewed the experience on the following day, is just so much more wondrous, so much stranger, than my professional colleagues ordinarily take it to be! We philosophers are typically concerned to understand how a human mind can entertain such propositions as “There is a pain in my foot” or how it can perceive a red dot on a screen. These are fascinating problems, too, but surely we might also gain from considering how the mind can become convinced that a long-dead pop star has become identical with one’s own mother or with something like “cosmic motherhood”.

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I think at least a part of the reason we tend to stick with the pain in the foot or the dot on the screen is that, in order to talk about the stranger divagations of the mind, we generally have to acknowledge that we have experienced them, and that is an acknowledgment that typically entails a measure of shame. Part of my motivation in writing what I have written here is to push beyond that shame, to write about conscious experience in a way that truly faces up to the weirdness of the world.

Was my encounter with Mama Cass so ridiculous in the end? Was I completely out of line in my conviction that I loved her? In the Symposium Plato has Socrates describe the ideal ascension of this emotion, from its lowest to its highest expressions. Early in life, we experience love mixed with sexual desire for the beauty of a particular other person’s body, and then we move from there to love of all beautiful bodies. But if we progress as we might hope to do, towards wisdom, then as we age we will also gradually come to love all beautiful minds, and in turn all beautiful institutions and endeavors, then all beautiful knowledge, and in the end, as wise old philosophers, our love will be focused upon nothing but Love itself.

The truth is that most of us vacillate throughout our lives between the various positions on this imagined hierarchy. But whether we think of the ascension as a one-way journey or not, the key philosophical idea in it is that there is a real entity, Love, that exists independently of any of its instances as we know them from experience. This is what we generally refer to as a “universal”, and the question whether such a thing exists or not — not just loveable creatures and things, but Love itself; not just instances of justice, but Justice itself, and so on — will divide the schools of the philosophers, with their running “footnotes to Plato”, as Alfred North Whitehead described the history of Western philosophy, for millennia to come.

I am certainly not going to make any progress towards solving the problem of universals in my book, nor even stake out a position on either of the familiar sides of the debate. But I will remark, first, that psychedelic experience can itself deliver a strong argument in favor of the realist camp in the debate. Under the influence of psilocybin, I seemed not to love Mama Cass, for example, in her particularity, but rather to love her because this love is a point of entry, so to speak, to the experience of Love itself. When I listen to music while on psilocybin, I love the particular song, but I also feel, much more strongly, that the song is my point of entry to Music, with a capital “M”, to the thing itself that exists eternally behind and before all the songs that have ever been sung.

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We all have this feeling from time to time, to some extent. It’s the feeling, in fact, that music and poetry excel above all at conjuring in us: the feeling that there is another dimension that these works of art are coming from. Ordinarily, in a sober and lucid mind, this feeling mostly gets expressed in the form of longing. Songs we love have a particular power to make us feel as though there is a world that we know, somehow, but from which we are cut off. Songs seem to emanate from that world but generally do not seem fully to open that world up to us. Yet under the influence of psilocybin, one of my most vivid thoughts goes something like this: “So that other world is real after all, and it is now open to me! I wasn’t only imagining it!”

Do I still think that other world is real, now, when my brain chemistry is back to its default setting? The answer is complicated, but I believe philosophy can help us face up to the challenge somewhat.

The trouble is that Western philosophy has long valorized the sober, lucid mind above the drugged, drunk, or dreaming one. For at least the past two millennia, Western philosophy has defined itself in contrast to other related endeavors, such as mysticism, theology, poetry, and myth, even as nonspecialists often run these endeavors together. The key difference between philosophy and mysticism in particular, and indeed a key point of pride among the philosophers, is that unlike the mystics — who often rely on techniques to bring themselves into altered states of consciousness, which might include drugs, but also include meditative practices, or attention to one’s own dreams, or the hallucinations induced by descending into the dark depths of a cave — we philosophers are expected to rely entirely on the cognitive faculties available to us in our lucid, waking, and sober state. Our aim is to produce natural-language propositions that can be shared with other philosophers, discussed, argued about, and nitpicked.

Philosophy is almost always held to be concerned, by definition, with meanings and arguments, not with what lies beyond these. But there has also always been a dissenting camp, which says that philosophy should occupy itself with whatever human beings experience, whether easily rendered into propositional form or not. It may be that it is ultimately for the good of philosophy if some of its practitioners willingly run the risk of being seen as having gone off the deep end.

***

This is an excerpt from On Drugs: Psychedelics, Philosophy, and the Nature of Reality. Copyright (c) 2025 by Justin Smith-Ruiu. Used with permission of the publisher, Liveright Publishing Corporation, division of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

The short answer is that the atrocity couldn’t be absorbed into their preconceived narrative, which holds that Israel is a monstrous “oppressor” state, while the Palestinians are its oppressed victims whose underdog purity cannot be doubted. So the rapes had to be denied or minimized, and anyone who broke this conspiracy of silence was accused of giving ammunition to the enemy.

The same mentality can be seen in the response of many Western liberals to the horrific killing last month of 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska in Charlotte, North Carolina. In recently-released CCTV footage that captures the moments before her killing, Zarutska can be seen sitting alone, looking at her phone. Decarlos Brown Jr, a 34 year old with a violent criminal history, is sitting behind her. He pulls out a pocket-knife, stands up, and slashes her neck.

“People have already been murdered for nothing,” writes the narrator of Martin Amis’s crime novel Night Train. “They take the trouble to cross the street to murder for nothing.” Zarutska, who was not known to Brown and had no pre-existing conflict with him, was seemingly murdered for nothing. This, in a way, makes her killing all the more horrifying, because it was utterly senseless.

There is also the compounding horror of the footage, in all its banality, of Zarutska’s final moments. She was killed not in a basement by a notorious serial killer, but in a train carriage, with other travelers sitting around her, in a random attack by a man who has a diagnosis of schizophrenia. When she took her seat, Zarutska couldn’t have known that she was putting herself in mortal danger. The attack happened so quickly that she was unable to protect herself. Zarutska could very easily have been you, or me, or a loved one — and anyone who has watched the footage subliminally understands this. It is a deeply unsettling feeling, one that goes beyond the visceral horror of the killing itself.

Brown also happens to be black, while Zarutska was white. This shouldn’t matter: were Brown white, and Zarutska black, the killing would be no less — or no more — horrific. But for many progressives, it clearly does matter. Had the racial identities of the two been reversed, mainstream media outlets would be in full moral panic mode over the complex harms of systemic racism and colonial trauma. But instead, most of these outlets ignored the story, despite Zarutska being a woman and a refugee — or, if they did cover it, did so to make a point about how the Right has sought to politicize the killing.

For many on the Right, this selectiveness of concern is as obvious as it is damning, and much of the outrage emanating from this quarter is driven by the perception that Zarutska’s killing — and by extension her life — is diminished, in progressive eyes, by the fact of her having been white and her killer black. One does not have to be a Right-wing “rage monster” to have some sympathy for this perception of progressive bias, or to understand how it has arisen. Imagine, for example, that the perpetrator of the Southport massacre had been white and targeted a Beyoncé-themed event where the victims were predominantly black children. Or imagine that the assassination attempt on the life of Salman Rushdie in August 2022 had been carried out by a white supremacist (instead of a radicalized Muslim), not against Rushdie but against (the infinitely less talented) Ibram X. Kendi. In both cases, there might have been a George Floyd moment: an extended period of mass hysteria, racial reckoning and self-flagellation. Yet, in the real world, no one can remember the name of Rushdie’s assailant: Hadi Matar. And much of the progressive response to Axel Rudakubana focused on how a phantom far-Right was “weaponizing” the tragedy.

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BLM’s legacy? Revived white identitarianism

By Andrew Doyle

Once you see this double standard, you can’t unsee it. Its logic is transparently sectarian and unfair. It operates like this: when a white person commits a grievous criminal act against a non-white victim, they are to be potently condemned, while their victim is to be cleansed of any moral taint. In some cases, such as Floyd’s, the victim is even sacralized. Conversely, when a non-white person commits a grievous criminal act against a white victim, they are to be excused, with their life-story exhaustively excavated for signs of trauma, oppression and other mitigating factors. Their victims are not seen as victims; how could they be, given their “white privilege” or “oppressor” status?

This double-standard is an insult to the most basic notions of equality and fairness, since both demand that people should be judged on the basis of what they have done rather than on who they are or what they believe.

It is therefore right and necessary to call it out. But many voices on the online Right have gone much further, adopting a tone that is every bit as unhinged and frenzied as the liberal-left derangements of 2020 over race and its various “reckonings”. For example, Matt Walsh, a prominent American political commentator, seems to have shape-shifted into an inverted BLM activist. Zarutska, in his view, is a quasi-martyr whose death is symbolic of a “deep and widespread systemic corruption” at the heart of America. “She should have the murals and the streets named after her,” he demanded on X — seemingly inspiring one X user called Eoghan McCabe, an Irish entrepreneur, to offer half a million dollars’ worth of $10,000 grants for people willing to “paint murals of the face of Iryna Zarutska in prominent US city locations”. Elon Musk has pledged $1 million to the same cause.

In another post, Walsh shared a screenshot of a menacing Brown standing over a terrified Zarutska. “This image will define the new civil rights movement,” he wrote, insisting that “we have a right to safe communities where violent animals are rounded up and caged”.

Just as those who didn’t performatively condemn Floyd’s killing were accused by liberal activists of maintaining a silence that was “violent”, the online Right has condemned the mainstream media for downplaying the story of Zarutska’s killing and thus colluding in a monstrous lie. And just as BLM activists brazenly politicized Floyd’s murder for clout and status among their in-group, the online Right seems to be engaging in a form of “outbidding” by insisting, with no real evidence, that Zarutska’s killing was racially-motivated. Moreover, these activists are calling for ever more extreme criminal justice policies against violent offenders — like making armed robbery a capital offense, which seems every bit as extreme as calls to defund the police.

These comments are unappealing in both their tone and temper. Particularly unattractive is the instrumentality with which some on the Right are using Zarutska’s death to make a point about delusional Democratic lawmakers and judges. This sort of stuff: “She was 23. She was on her way home from working at a pizza parlor. She bled out on a train. Because the Democrats liberate criminals. We arrest them. We deport them if they’re here illegally. We kill them if they’re terrorists. Choose.” Even if you agree with Sebastian Gorka’s point about the Democrats’ disastrous criminal justice policies, the transition from Zarutska to the terrible Democrats, and then to the triumphant Republicans, is so swift as to be callous.

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How liberal cringe protected the grooming gangs

By Simon Cottee

It is also a mistake to think that since the Left has a long record of politicizing crime and stoking racial resentment the Right should do the same and those cynically making a lot of hay out of Zarutska’s killing ought to be condemned. But the Left still has itself to blame, for the current firestorm of anger over Zarutska is a direct and wholly predictable consequence of years of institutionalized identity politics that vilified whites or whiteness in any form while simultaneously sacralizing blacks or blackness. That the Right is now mercilessly playing the same toxic game of identity politics, albeit in defense of its own tribal interests, is an irony that liberals must acknowledge and properly reflect on.

Liberals, in short, are now picking up their own tab. They treated their in-group with kid gloves, and tried to hide or whitewash some of their more egregious crimes, even as they came down especially hard on other segments of the population for lesser or non-existent crimes. Do this and you will create a reservoir of tribal resentment and hostility that may become difficult to contain at some point.

In Britain, it is precisely this sense of grievance, encapsulated in claims over two-tier policing, that has fueled the protests and distemper of the last 18 months. This unrest has surfaced in the Southport riots, in the widespread outrage over the grooming gangs scandal, and the various protests outside migrant hotels. In all of these cases, the driving grievance is that non-British citizens, or non-whites, are being prioritized, coddled and protected by the state, whereas British citizens are being lied to, unfairly treated and exposed to acts of flagrant criminality from which the state should have offered them protection.

Iryna Zarutska was the random victim of a terrible act of violence committed by someone who should have been in psychiatric care. Ordinary Americans will want to know why he wasn’t, and may well wonder at the state of a criminal justice system that allows serial offenders like him to wander the streets with impunity. Meanwhile, liberals will stick their heads in the sand or make noises about how the killer himself was suffering — and everyone else will be driven mad by their hypocrisy.

In the US, Congress has quietly walked away from most of its former duties. Major policy changes once came through legislation like the Social Security Act of 1935, or the Civil Rights Act of 1964, or the Clean Air Act of 1970, or the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, or the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001. There have been no bills like these for a generation. Today, to the extent that policy changes, it is a result of executive agencies using powers granted by these 20th century laws, or federal judges reinterpreting their meaning. The most significant bills of my adult lifetime were the Affordable Care Act and the Dodd-Frank Act, both of 2010, and both were marginal updates to preexisting 20th century bureaucracies.

Even those are beyond the ability of today’s Congress, which is standing idly by as President Trump reforms the government by issuing executive orders to federal agencies. If you took a neutral observer with no emotional attachment to our written Constitution — say, Aristotle — and asked him to describe the role that Congress plays in governing the US today, he would tell you that their job has been reduced to approving the president’s budget requests and bureaucratic appointments, and that they use this power to demand pork-barrel spending in return for the former. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the rise of the European Union has disempowered elected legislatures de jure as well as de facto.

The underlying reason for this widespread political shift is that changes in weapons technology have concentrated military power in the hands of state militaries. Today, governments are less threatened by popular disapproval than they once were. The tacit threat of a popular revolt has been essentially removed. This threat is, historically, the largest check on a state’s ability to override what its people want. It is the ultimate source of an elected legislature’s power.

In Weapons Systems and Political Stability, the master historian Carroll Quigley explained that a society’s form of government is downstream of the balance of military force. When the best weapons system requires expensive equipment used by highly-trained specialists, like a medieval knight with his horse and lance and heavy armor, this concentrates military power into the hands of a small group. On the other hand, when the best weapons system is cheap and can be used effectively by amateurs with relatively little training — for example, muskets or rifles — military power is spread more evenly throughout the population.

Groups which can wield military power will have their interests reflected in the government. This is not an overnight event, with opportunists launching a revolt the second they calculate they have a small advantage. Rather, it’s a gradual and messy process of negotiation and reevaluation, where people pursue their interests, make compromises, quietly push the envelope of what they think they can get away with, and sometimes miscalculate. When a new power center rises, it’s usually incorporated into the existing structure through gradual reforms. Only occasionally will this provoke an outright military conflict — and these rare military conflicts reveal the de facto balance of military power to observers in other nations, helping to guide those negotiations and keep them grounded. Changes in the fundamental balance of military power usually take decades to propagate through the system and bring the balance of political power into a new equilibrium.

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The police can’t control Britain’s streets

By Dominic Adler

By the late 1700s, guns became widely affordable. With the rise of these amateur weapons, the new balance of military power was much more widely distributed, so over the 1700s and 1800s, revolts and reforms throughout Europe and the Americas shifted political power towards the people. The most aristocratic elements of the United States Constitution were purged over time; the original scheme of an Electoral College formed of wise elites who would use their independent judgment to select the president was almost immediately abandoned, and by the 1830s electoral votes were allocated by popular vote in every state except South Carolina, where the state legislature retained this power until the Civil War. The Senate, too, was originally appointed by state legislatures rather than by popular vote, until the 17th Amendment was passed in 1913. These had been deliberate checks against what the Founding Fathers perceived as the excesses of a pure democracy.

In America and especially in Europe, the new, more democratic political regimes were much more likely to enact policies favored by large majorities of the people. Regimes which overrode the popular will risked popular revolts that could face government forces head-on. These revolts had a real possibility of deposing even strong governments. This period was roughly bookended by the American Revolution and the Spanish Civil War, 1776-1939.

In the 20th century, this phase ended. The weapons system based on amateur-friendly guns was supplanted by a series of weapons systems based on specialist equipment like airplanes and tanks and rockets. Accordingly, since the Second World War, there have been no popular revolts engaging in pitched battles against any first- or even third-rate army. Revolts against real states have been limited to glorified coups toppling governments that lacked the will to crush the rebels even if they had the ability, like the 1989-1991 wave of revolutions that swept away the Soviet republics. Outright warfare has been effective only in places where the government exists mostly on paper, without anything resembling a functional modern state or military, like Syria or Sudan.

The end of effective military revolts can be ascribed mostly to the development of weapons technology that has made revolts largely futile, against even half-coherent armies. But the trend is also reinforced by aging populations. Revolts are driven by young men in their teens and twenties willing to take big risks. These young men are usually overrepresented in a revolt’s leadership, and always do the bulk of the killing and dying. Few 35-year-olds are eager to abandon their settled lives and join an ideological crusade or a wild adventure.

On the other hand, middle-aged men are generally willing to be violent inside a stable institution with a steady paycheck. The average US police officer is around 39 or 40 years old. Middle-aged men are rare in riots and in ideological volunteer armies, which can arise from popular opposition, but common in conscript armies and mercenary armies, which are available only to states. So, as the middle-aged come to outnumber the young, the balance of military power — and eventually also political power — shifts even further away from the people and towards state administrators.

Some military theorists believe that the advent of drone weapons will change the balance towards democratic weapons. Only time will tell, but this seems unlikely. In principle, drone weapons can be used by individuals and small teams to strike at military and government targets while making the attackers relatively difficult to identify, like a roadside bomb which can target more than just patrols. But in practice, drone weapons have been used almost exclusively by state militaries which can marshal the full force of industrial mass production. If there is an earnest drone-based rebellion, it will probably prove feasible for the state to trace back the attackers reliably enough to win the conflict. The 19th century Russian anarchists were able to assassinate state officials not by avoiding capture, but by resigning themselves to it. However, no one can confidently predict the course of future technology, and some future weapon might shift the balance back towards popular military power regardless of what might or might not happen with drone weapons.

The 20th century decline of popular military power, then, led to the gradual but thorough transfer of power from elected representatives, who are somewhat constrained by the popular will, to bureaucracies and agencies able to act however they wish. In other words, within Western states which describe themselves as democracies, the people — the demos — have lost much of their power — their kratos. Elections have become less important in determining the government’s policy, and more ceremonial. 

In the US, the legislature has abdicated effectively all of its power to the executive branch bureaucracies and the Supreme Court, leaving the presidential election as the only vehicle for the demos to exercise kratos — which is ironic, considering that the Electoral College was originally envisioned as the most aristocratic part of the Constitution. The presidency of Joe Biden — especially its latter half — demonstrated that the executive bureaucracies are capable of governing autonomously without the president’s involvement, which is to say, they are capable of governing without any accountability to the demos at all. However, the second presidency of Donald Trump demonstrates that a determined president can still steer the executive bureaucracies, if he chooses. The selection of a single man to steer the bureaucracy (or not) is a thin reed on which to rest a claim to democratic governance.

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How to revive mythic Britain

By Aris Roussinos

Across the Western world, bureaucrats and judges frequently enact major social changes popular among their own class but unpopular among the demos, such as mass immigration, “degrowth” and deindustrialization in Europe, and affirmative action in the US, among many other examples. In contrast, older social changes were enacted mostly by elected legislatures.

This change is most advanced in European states. In the past year, administrators in Romania and France have simply disqualified candidates for national office who favor popular policies over the policies of the administrators, using very thin pretexts. Meanwhile, German administrators, always the vanguard of Eurofederalism, are attempting to do the same without resorting to a procedural fig leaf, openly attempting to suppress Alternative für Deutschland for the content of its platform. Such administrative disqualifications are very likely to become the norm, at least in Europe and perhaps more widely. And why not? The days when a disenfranchised demos might storm the Bastille or defend barricades in the streets are long gone.

Modern street protests, such as those regarding asylum policy in Britain, are at most an exercise in daring the state to look bad by using its invincible might, not an attempt to win a real fight. Lately, widespread dissatisfaction has led to quiet chatter of possible uprisings, but outright civil war is unlikely, because everyone knows the demos will lose to an army that actually fights. If any Western government does fall, it will look more like the fall of the Soviet Union, where politicians and generals chose not to fight because they had lost faith in their own regime and saw no point in defending it.

What makes the case of Carlo Acutis so remarkable is the combination of youth and speed. The first millennial saint would be only 34 years old if he were alive today, the 19th anniversary of his death. His parents were in the congregation yesterday. “Carlo met Jesus in his family, thanks to his parents Andrea and Antonia,” said Pope Leo. That was a generous form of words. When Carlo was born, his father Andrea was working in London for the investment bank Lazard; neither he nor his wife Antonia were practicing Catholics, and it was only the piety of their son that drew them back to the Church. At the time, Carlo was the wealthy couple’s only child. On the fourth anniversary of his death, Antonia gave birth to the twins Francesca and Michele; the latter gave the first reading at the canonization Mass, speaking in natively fluent English. A popular image on Instagram shows Carlo, halo shining, with his arms around the siblings he never met.

The notion of a millennial saint, photogenic in his polo shirt and Ray-Bans, has proved irresistible to the secular media. Most Catholics are delighted. But, like every major event in a shrinking Western Church scarred by scandal and online factional warfare, it is tinged with controversy. The convergence of modernity and tradition in Carlo’s life has created a legacy that is unsettling as well as exhilarating. Many Northern European Catholics are unenthusiastic about the permanent exhibition of saints’ dead bodies; Carlo lies in a glass tomb in Assisi, at first glance incorrupt, though in fact his apparently flawless complexion is a silicone mask concealing what the Church admits are “normal signs of decay”. And some Italian Catholics, though accustomed to such exhibitions, think it was disrespectful to dress the boy in jeans and Nike trainers. But, honestly, it is difficult to get these things right. There is no precedent for the cult of a style-conscious computer geek.

A more fundamental controversy has been generated by the new saint’s personal faith — which, unlike his sartorial tastes, was impervious to fashion. Carlo Acutis’s Catholicism was rooted in the Eucharist: not just the reception of the Body and Blood of Christ at Mass, which is common to all flavors of Catholic spirituality, but the practice of kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament. The modernists who seized control of the Church’s liturgy after the Second Vatican Council regarded Eucharistic Adoration as a superstitious relic of the Middle Ages or, worse, sugary 19th-century piety. They and their successors have watched incredulously as a new generation of Catholics have embraced Adoration, falling to their denim-covered knees as the sacrament, encased in a richly ornamented monstrance, processes through the streets. Sales of mantillas or “Mass veils” for young women are through the roof; engaged couples, chaste until marriage and hoping for large families, cross themselves every time they pass a Catholic church.

Even before yesterday, Carlo Acutis, who coded websites celebrating the Eucharist and its associated miracles, was an unofficial patron saint of Generation Z traditionalists, many of whom attend the traditional Latin Mass that Pope Francis unsuccessfully tried to stamp out. St Carlo did not: he died the year before Pope Benedict XVI’s apostolic letter Summorum Pontificum, later torn up by his successor, liberated the old rite for young people bored by the dreary folksiness of “youth Masses”. Yet the liturgical civil war that followed Francis’s 2021 document Traditionis Custodes, which attempted to drive the Latin Mass out of parishes, nonetheless cast a shadow over last weekend’s celebrations.

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The age of nihilism is over

By Mary Harrington

Andrea Grillo, a professor at the Pontifical Academy of St Anselm in Rome, was an influential lay advisor to the Argentinian pope; he is often described as “the mind behind the motu proprio” – that is, Francis’s brutal, and brutally enforced, restrictions on the old rite. Grillo has often written savagely against the traditional Mass. But last June he found a new target: the then Blessed Carlo Acutis. Writing in the journal Munera, he asked: “How is it possible that a young Blessed can communicate a Eucharistic theology so old, so heavy, so obsessive, so focused on the inessential …?” This “young ardent communicator”, he wrote, had a deficient, defective and one-sided understanding of the sacrament. A visit to Carlo’s website confirmed him in his view that the teenager manifested a “distorted fixation on Eucharistic miracles”.

The significance of Grillo’s polemic lay not so much in its venom but in his exalted position at the court of Pope Francis. This is not to say that the late pontiff shared his contemptuous view of Carlo Acutis. After all, it was Francis who — appreciating his popularity and reassured that he was untainted by the old Missal — would have canonized Carlo in April if he had not himself gone to meet his maker. What the Munera diatribe illustrated was the grip of the hard Left on the Bergoglio pontificate. Put bluntly, Francis knew that Grillo was a nasty piece of work, and it did not bother him.

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The battle for John Henry Newman

By Damian Thompson

In the act of canonizing Saints Piergiorgio and Carlo, Pope Leo displayed a perfect dignity that may yet develop into much-needed papal charisma. What remains to be seen is whether he grasps the extent to which, over the past 12 years, the institutions of the Church have been infiltrated by secular lobbyists. In this respect, it is not Sunday’s ceremony that matters so much as what happened on Saturday, when gay activists wearing T-shirts reading “Fuck the Rules” processed into St Peter’s Basilica as part of a papally-sanctioned LGBT pilgrimage. The contrast between the two events could not have been greater.

Leo can hardly attribute the scandal caused by the activists to homophobia; if he ponders the sequence of events that led up to it, and he is a deeply reflective man, perhaps he will realize that his own naïvety is partly to blame. In private he has promised to “bring peace to the Church”. Despite the joyful mood yesterday, there are frustratingly few signs that the healing has begun. Perhaps a prayer to St Carlo Acutis is in order.

Anxious about school, the eponymous pigeon states, “What if I learn too much!?! My head might pop off.” (The book itself poses no such risk.) The pigeon’s solution, after many pages of exclamation — he screeches “Whazza-Whazza-WHAA!?!” when he sees the school bus, for example — is to articulate the actual activities he will do at school and to realize that school isn’t some amorphous bogeyman. 

This is classic cognitive behavioral therapy — it’s decatastrophizing, performed on a pigeon. To be fair, this can be a useful technique for anxiety management. But why is it almost all that this book has to offer? There’s no vocabulary my daughter, at age 3, doesn’t know; there’s no syntax she doesn’t already utilize. The book eschews conventional written dialogue for speech bubbles — there’s not even a “the pigeon screeched” following his “Whazza-Whazza-WHAA!?!”  

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We see much of the same in other current best sellers, and in the young-reader books favored by many schools as the new academic year gets underway. The language is colloquial to an extreme. In Dragons Like Tacos (483 weeks on the Times list), a book that was also read at my daughter’s school, the narrator states, “Hey dragon, why do you guys like tacos so much?” In On the First Day of Kindergarten (two weeks on the list), we hear, “On the first day of kindergarten, I thought it was so cool riding the school bus to my school!” In The Smart Cookie (29 weeks on the list), which often reads like a therapist’s version of a child’s inner monologue, the titular cookie states, “I didn’t feel comfortable speaking up or sharing my ideas. I didn’t feel like a smart cookie.”

A few of these titles attempt a poeticism that falls short. “You did this job in your very own way. We needed a tough little truck today,” we read in Time for School, Little Blue Truck (44 weeks on the list). In the Magical Yet (7 weeks on the list), a story about a child attempting to learn a variety of new skills like bike riding (its cadences apparently and notably adopted from Dr. Seuss’s Oh the Places You’ll Go), we hear, “And now you won’t ride. No way. Not never. No riding for you, you’ll walk … forever.” It had seemed that at the end of those ellipses, we might encounter something more … complex. But alas, we don’t. 

Half of the 10 children’s picture books on the current Times list are about going to school. Four of those involve ways of managing the anxiety that might attend school. Five of the titles are focused on boosting the self-esteem of their readers. Even the potentially mythical Dragons Love Tacos is about a commonplace event — a taco party. (This is, in fairness, a source of its humor, lest I begin to sound too cantankerous.)

That is to say, this list, thematically, is extremely narrow. Diction-wise, syntactically, these books are even more so. These are books that meet my 3-year-old right where she is and take her no further. Though seemingly emotional (“And the STUFF!… There is sooooooooo much stuff to learn!” the pigeon wails), they relate, really, to a small fraction of her emotional life. They have very little of beauty, philosophy, morality, or character (unless the expression of anxiety counts). 

There is a particularly extreme counterexample to this to be found in The New England Primer, the primer of choice for more than a century of American teachers. First published in 1690, it was used regularly in classrooms until the mid-19th century. In a 1727 edition, children were marched right from the alphabet to vocabulary lists featuring words like “glory,” “absent,” “drunkenness,” “impudent,” and “fidelity,” and from there onto to the tale of the martyrdom of John Rogers, in which, “his wife, with nine small children, and one at her breast, followed him to the stake; with which sorrowful sight, he was not in the least daunted; but with wonderful patience, died courageously, for the gospel of Jesus Christ.”

With the pressing concern of salvation came high expectations. For their souls’ sake, children needed to distinguish the “abominable” (another vocabulary word) from the beautiful. (“What is God?” the primer states. “God is a Spirit, Infinite, Eternal, and Unchangeable, in his Being, Wisdom, Power, Holiness, Justice, Goodness, and Truth.”)  

I’m not suggesting we return to The New England Primer. But it’s clear that children can and should be introduced to diction, syntax, and concepts far beyond what is in much of our children’s literature today. I believe it is what they want. (My daughter often asks me, “When are we going to die?”)

After The New England Primer, children’s school primers grew increasingly simplified.  In the early 20th century, the rise of the “Look-Say” method, which advocated against phonics and for whole-word memorization using very simple vocabulary lists, culminated in the mind-numbingly repetitive Dick and Jane primers. Kids reared on these texts were forced to endure sentences like: “Jane said, ‘Run, run. Run, Dick, run. Run and see.’” 

In response to the outcry against these primers, William Spaulding, Theodore Geisel’s editor, commissioned the book that would become The Cat in the Hat. “Write me a story that first graders can’t put down,” Spaulding said, supplying Geisel (whose pen name was Dr. Seuss) with a list of the 348 simple words he was allowed to use — the Look-Say method, but fun. And it was. “It is fun to have fun/ But you have to know how,” says the Cat in the Hat. “I can hold up the cup/ And the milk and the cake!” It was more than fun — it was explosively popular. To date, The Cat in the Hat has sold more than 16 million copies; it continues to sell about half a million copies a year. It is often thought of as the quintessential children’s book.  

But we should think of The Cat in the Hat not as the quintessential children’s book, but as the quintessential children’s reader — a book a child can pick up when she begins to read on her own. In this, it is remarkable — energetic and comic and magically formed of the simplest words. Unfortunately, the popularity of Seuss enshrines simplicity as the central virtue of children’s literature, and this behemoth has come to swallow up all other possibilities. We also need a subgenre of children’s literature that feels more like literature.

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By Valerie Stivers

In childhood, our minds work differently. Children can learn multiple languages simultaneously without the enormous effort adults must put forth to achieve often worse results. This should also be the period in which they hear elevated language:  beautiful, beguiling, weighty, humorous — a version of adult language. It would be so much more effortlessly and naturally acquired than at any other time, and it, too, could be theirs — if only we’d read them the books that would bring it to them.   

There are books like this, even if they seem too hard to find. One notable example can be found in the works of William Steig, a near-contemporary of Seuss. One of Steig’s classics, Amos and Boris, tells the tale of a mouse on a sea journey: “One night, in a phosphorescent sea, he [Amos] marveled at the sight of some whales spouting luminous water. Lying on the deck of his boat gazing at the immense, starry sky, the tiny mouse Amos, a little speck of a living thing in the vast living universe, felt thoroughly akin to it all. Overwhelmed by the beauty and mystery of everything, he rolled over and over and right off the deck of his boat and into the sea.” 

Like The New England Primer, Steig’s work doesn’t shy away from the ultimate questions of life and of meaning, though here there are no clear answers. Treading water in a deep ocean, we read, Amos “began to wonder what it would be like to drown. Would it take very long? Would it feel just awful? Would his soul go to heaven? Would there be other mice there?” There is characterization and deep emotion. Amos is eager and temperamental; Boris, the whale who arises from deep in the ocean to rescue him, is practical and purposeful. They become fast friends. They cry when the inevitable occurs — Amos must live his life on land, and Boris in the ocean.  

Children are born into a sea of mysterious signals; it is in their nature to decode the strange world before them. Why, when we begin to read to them, do we so often present them with the little they already know? We should trust them, more often, with complexity in their literature. What they can’t yet grasp, they will grow to understand. There should be, off in the distance, at least a few of those luminous whales.

Tariffs are hardly a MAGA invention, of course. On the contrary, the United States has levied protective tariffs almost from its origins as a nation. Tariffs and import substitution formed one of the central pillars of Alexander Hamilton’s political economy. 

Today, Europe screams about Trumpian tariffs, but the Continent has been reluctant to lower its own historically high protective barriers, most of them based on non-tariff regulatory policies. Canada, too, has been very protectionist and for a long time. Now, after decades in which Washington put global integration over its own workers and industry, America is playing the same game. 

The benefits of Trump’s tariffs will take time to become apparent. Already, they have spurred  companies like Eli Lilly to recommit to domestic production, forced Honda to scrap plans for shifting production of new models to Mexico in favor of Indiana, and prompted chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor and Samsung to build new plants in Arizona and Texas, respectively.  Likewise, Nvidia, a company that long offshored its production to Taiwan, has committed to multibillion-dollar development projects. 

Still, job recovery is gradual. US manufacturing revival has been a bipartisan goal, pursued in fits and starts, since the Great Recession. As the Reshoring Initiative notes, the country has managed to claw back approximately 1.7 million jobs in an effort to bring manufacturing to or nearer the US homeland. This could just be the beginning. By some estimates, as China rises up the value chain and production costs there increase, up to a third of all Chinese capacity will move away from the Middle Kingdom in the near future. 

This shift gets an unintended boost from the increasingly hostile atmosphere in China, which confronts even big, established firms like the appliance giant Whirlpool, General Electric,   Caterpillar, Goodyear, General Motors, and Polaris. Most recently, Chinese exports to America dropped to the lowest level since the pandemic, driving the trade deficit to $280 billion this year, down from $500 billion under President Joe Biden.

Yet the road from here is by no means easy. One key concern is that firms will merely shift production from China to other third countries. This would be a plus in terms of weakening Beijing as a rival, but only domestic production in key industries can guarantee US economic preeminence and, with it, US geopolitical primacy.

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Like any trend that enriches some, reshoring faces strong opposition from those who benefit from the offshoring trend. You can start with the greens, whose anti-growth ideology and embrace of “net zero” are simply incompatible with industry-led economic growth. Their view boils down to letting the Chinese and their satraps do the dirty work, while America and the West purchase the products from the world’s No. 1 polluter. 

Traditional liberals also find tariffs distasteful, as reflected in most of the business press: The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, The Economist, and the like. Most of their favorite pundits detest tariffs and focus on the ill effects on companies and consumers, while largely embracing the current trading regime, as long as financial markets thrive. Libertarians, especially, rail against the very idea of having national policies to encourage manufacturers.

Many mainstream Democrats naturally disdain industry, reflecting the prejudices of their party’s elite professional base. Factories, a Northwestern University economics professor claims, “aren’t the future,” and we can count on our service and tech economies to generate wealth. Christina Romer, who served as chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisors under President Barack Obama, claimed concerns that building stuff was more important than getting haircuts reflected merely “sentiment and history,” not modern reality.

Then there’s the Democratic Party’s increasingly powerful socialist left — which along with many Silicon Valley oligarchs — prefer welfarism over growth and who have abandoned higher-wage jobs in energy, logistics, and manufacturing as a means to grow family incomes. Many embrace a  universal basic income as a means to palliate a populace made redundant by globalization — in effect, offering handouts, porn, and weed to the jobless children of a once-proud working class.

Of course, China benefited the most from the status quo ante. Since its entry into the World Trade Organization in 2000, the People’s Republic has grown so much that it boasts as many factory exports as the United States, Japan, and Germany combined. 

In contrast, between 2004 and 2017, US reliance on Chinese inputs doubled, a barrage that, notes an Economic Policy Institute study, cost as many as 3.7 million jobs since 2000. Europe’s industrial sector also declined, losing a million manufacturing jobs just between 2019 and 2023. Germany is projected to lose as many 400,000 auto jobs by 2030 through competition with Chinese EVs. Britain, once the world’s industrial leader, has lost 200,000 manufacturing jobs since 2010 and is now only the world’s 12th largest manufacturing power.   

Mass deindustrialization’s effects are not hard to see. Just travel to northern England, the outer suburbs of Paris, the American Midwest, or Germany’s “Rust belt on the Rhine.” All these areas suffer reduced  economic mobility, high degrees of welfare dependence, and mass out-migration. For millions, the loss of such jobs has meant that, as an MIT report put it, the traditional “job escalator” has shut down.

The digital revolution, and the creation of mega-companies in places like Silicon Valley has done little to make up the difference in terms of productivity or social mobility. Nor can services by themselves solve deep-seated social or trade woes. Overall US service exports, including those that go to tech firms, represents less than a third of the country’s overseas sales.  

Needless to say, Chinese manufacturing supremacy under the former neoliberal regime also threatened to bring about Chinese defense and geopolitical supremacy. 

But here, too, a reversal is underway, with new signs of life in the US defense industry. This comes not from the corporate dinosaurs, but a whole wave of new companies. “Innovation starts in the small shops,” notes the Dallas-based venture capitalist Bryan Chambers. Upstart “defense-tech” firms are feeding off a huge surge in investment, including the Army’s current $36 billion procurement overhaul.

Some of these companies, like Denver’s Palantir and Orange County-based Anduril have seized on a change in military affairs resulting from experiences with drone and missile attacks in Palestine, Yemen, Russia, and Ukraine. Equally important, we now see a shift among entrepreneurs toward “hard tech,” essentially AI-assisted hardware, as the best bets for the future.

Likely, the bulk of America’s reindustrialization won’t take place in blue areas like California, due to their high taxes, prohibitive regulations, and high housing prices. The fastest industrial GDP growth is taking place in Texas, Michigan, Florida, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arizona, Ohio, Minnesota, and North Dakota. These are also the states that, according to Supply Chain Digest, offer the best conditions for manufacturers.

If the industrial boom gains velocity, it could mark a massive reversal of fortune not only for the newly industrializing South, but especially for the Midwest, a region that, between 2000 and 2005, accounted for nearly 40 percent of all US industrial job losses. 

Contributing to the production comeback is the renaissance of the US fossil-fuel industry, now producing at a record level. The Permian Basin in west Texas, which by itself is the world’s fifth largest producer of oil, and new production sites in places like Ohio and Pennsylvania provide a critical raw material, cheap energy, for reindustrialization. For example, Shell in 2022 installed a $6 billion methane cracker in Monaca, Pa., to convert the region’s abundant natural gas into plastics.

Antoine van Agtmael and Fred Bakker, authors of The Smartest Places on Earth: Why Rustbelts are the Emerging Hotspots of Global Innovation, see the old industrial belt as the primary beneficiary of a growing interface between manufacturing and technology. Self-driving cars, wearable devices, smart grids, and smart farming all benefit from harvesting a legacy of industrial expertise. For example, Akron, Ohio, successfully reinvented itself from an auto and tire center to a hotbed for polymer research. Other parts of the heartland seem poised to do the same.

Tariffs alone will not bring industry back. After all, Europe and Canada have extensive tariff regimes but continue to lose industrial market share. A concerted drive to reshore requires basic preconditions: the use of new technologies and a better-trained workforce.

New technology and the spread of affordable digital manufacturing tools like 3-D printers enable domestic firms to design, produce, and sell locally, reducing reliance on long supply chains.  These technologies allow American firms to produce better and often cheaper products. In many of these dimensions, the United States is leading or regaining the edge.

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Finding competent workers will likely prove a more uphill battle. President Joe Biden talked about having factory workers and oil riggers “learn to code” but now artificial intelligence, backed by a huge infusion of Wall Street cash, threatens to wipe out many software jobs. But there is a most pressing need for skilled, dependable workers such as drivers, machine-tool operators, and welders who can do basic industrial tasks. The American Welding Society estimates the shortage of skilled welders exceeds 400,000 nationwide.

Pushing all students into four-year programs is one source of the crisis. Schools made a terrible mistake by no longer offering shop classes. Few were encouraged to learn industrial arts. Now many of the most competent industrial workers are over age 45.

Fortunately, an incipient sea change is slowly lowering the age of skilled workers. Shop classes are making something of a comeback, and some states are investing more in skills education, something that engages less than half as many US workers than in Germany. Much of this is occurring in red states in the Midwest and South. One US senator, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, has even suggested taxing ultra-rich universities, once favored for their production of elite professionals, and using the proceeds to fund an expanded apprenticeship program.

Attitudes are changing. One recent survey found that roughly 83% of Gen Z feel that learning a skilled trade can be a better pathway to economic security than college. That includes 90% of those already holding college degrees. Indeed, as college enrollment dropped between 2020 and 2023, trade schools grew by 10 percent.    

To a large extent, these shortages will likely be filled by working-class whites, but also increasingly immigrants and minorities. Today, barely 58% of all working-class Americans are non-Hispanic whites; according to a 2016 Economic Policy Institute study, people of color will constitute the majority of the working class by 2032.     

Even in the rural Midwest, long plagued by shrinking workforces, refugees from places like Bhutan and East Africa have become a critical source of workers. In Fargo, ND, employers routinely call resettlement director Dan Hannaher to inquire about new families moving to the region. Seventy percent of one local manufacturer’s staff is composed of first-or second-generation workers from immigrant families, hailing from more than 30 countries. In Texas, according to a number of recent studies, as many as half of all manufacturing workers are foreign-born.  

The challenge facing these companies will be to turn these newcomers, and the increasingly detached native-born working class, into effective workers, able to employ the new technologies. Today, the West needs these companies, and workers, to be well-compensated, restoring upward mobility as well as productive growth. These people will prove far more critical to the future of the West than social-media influencers or Wall Street wizards. In the 21st century, reindustrialization offers the best hope for economic renewal and revival of a real social democracy.

When Graeber died, five years ago today, he was just about the most important public intellectual in the world. The obituaries all agreed on the breadth and eclecticism of his accomplishments: the graduate work he had done on the culture of Madagascar; his ultra-rapid attainment, then loss, of an associate professorship at Yale; the rumors that he had masterminded Occupy Wall Street; his uncanny knack for writing bestsellers on what, at first glance, seemed like some of the most mind-numbing subjects known to man.

Soon, however, a new, backhanded consensus took over in the academy. Yes, Graeber was “inventive” and “original”, but in the cold light of retrospection he was also ill-disciplined and unsystematic. Even worse, his footnotes were a mess. Nowadays, it isn’t uncommon to hear academics scoffing that for all his childlike imagination and rumpled charisma, David Graeber was not so much a thinker as a gadfly, a provocateur.

Perhaps the best illustration of Graeber’s PR problem is to be found in his most popular (and misunderstood) book: Bullshit Jobs. Bullshit Jobs was a full-length treatment of a viral article Graeber had written in 2013 to answer a simple question: why, given the advances in labor-saving technologies through the 20th century, have we not seen a comparable expansion of leisure time? Why do we not have robots to do our chores, computers to organize our lives, automated production lines to furnish us with every consumer good we could ever need? Graeber’s answer was that for various bureaucratic and political reasons, the gap has been plugged with millions of new, pointless jobs — compliance officers, telemarketers, middle managers, corporate lawyers, administrators of all types. Society was simply not geared towards being productive any more. We were all pencil pushers now.

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Within weeks of publication, the establishment had settled on an orthodox line of rebuttal. Graeber’s problem, argued The Economist, was that he had confused people not understanding their jobs with those jobs being pointless. He was just another social theorist with his own pet theory of alienation. And Left-wing academics with pet theories of alienation are not exactly rare. In other words, Graeber’s critics reacted to him in the way they had been taught to react to Marxists in the academy: by insisting that drudgery was an inevitable feature of a rational economy, and that the swarms of miserable worker bees he described would ultimately benefit humanity by increasing production.

But David Graeber was not a Marxist. He was an anarchist — something far rarer in academic life — and by the time Bullshit Jobs was released in 2018 had amassed a vast and subtle theoretical back-catalog that covered everything from Indian Ocean pirates and the German post office to West African fetishes, mid-century dreams of flying cars, and the entire history of Western metaphysics. All this Graeber could bring in to undergird his arguments: one 2015 book on the history of European bureaucratic institutions spent half a chapter offering a novel reading of Batman: The Dark Knight.

Behind Bullshit Jobs, in fact, lurked another book, in which most of the criticisms leveled at the later essay had already been answered: a little-known 2001 academic monograph called Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value. Among other things, this was a kind of anarchist rejoinder to Marxism, with its tendency to justify social organization with reference to “production” and “surplus value”. In politics, Graeber instead argued, there was a vast number of things you could call valuable, not just key performance indicators and productivity statistics, but unquantifiable things, like happiness, fulfillment, care. “Production” was a recent fetish, popularized by bureaucrats; when you asked people what was really valuable in life, you would invariably get an answer that sounded something like “helping other people”.

With hindsight, though, what is perhaps most striking about Graeber’s thesis is how conservative it looks. These days, the one political constituency that reliably talks about “values” as distinct from “value” is the Right; if there is one group that can be relied upon to antagonize bureaucratic and managerial types, and hold people like government employees and contractors to account for their bullshit, it is the partisans of Milei or Trump. We live, now, in a topsy-turvy world, where the New Right style themselves as the champions of the common man, while progressives and liberals tend to couch their prescriptions for society in the language of enlightened paternalism.

So does this mean that Graeber was really a Tory in anarchist clothing? Not quite: Graeber was still deeply anti-capitalist, and convinced that the society he lived in needed massive social transformation. What it does show, though, is that since his death, the political Left has managed to forget many of his most fascinating and resonant ideas. Take, for instance, the critique of bureaucracy. These days, the “b” word is hardly ever uttered by progressives; we are supposed, as Left-leaning people, to react to the shuttering of NGOs and government agencies with howls of uncritical lamentation. Here, too, Graeber offers an important corrective.

In The Utopia of Rules, published in 2015, Graeber gleefully acknowledged the horrors of modern bureaucracy stressed by the Right: the endless ID-verifying and form-filling that the modern citizen must engage in if they want to keep a job, move house, or check into a hospital. Crucially, though, he then added another radical step. Bureaucracy, he argued, wasn’t just the preserve of the government. Now, there were private bureaucracies, too. Inescapable call centers. Murky “public-private partnerships”. Vast corporate compliance offices operated by people with annoying vocal tics. One can only imagine the rhetorical potency this kind of critique would have had in the age of Trump — whose main constituency, it seems, is Americans fed up with lanyard-wearing functionaries telling them they haven’t got the right forms, or credentials, or grievances.

This old anarchist insight — the inarguable point that any vanguardist administration becomes its own kind of elite class, every bit as entrenched and corrupt as the ancien régime — seeped into the very foundations of Graeber’s thought. Towards the end of his life, he even seemed to be questioning the usefulness of the idea of “equality” as a Left-wing ambition altogether, and for precisely these reasons:

“[I]t’s not clear what eliminating inequality would even mean. (Which kind of inequality? Wealth? Opportunity? Exactly how equal would people have to be in order for us to be able to say we’ve “eliminated inequality”?) The term ‘inequality’ is a way of framing social problems appropriate to an age of technocratic reformers, who assume from the outset that no real vision of social transformation is even on the table.”

This, needless to say, is a remarkable statement for the rumored mastermind of Occupy Wall Street, not to mention the coiner of the slogan “We are the 99%”. In it, we glimpse a man who had realized that transforming the world would mean more than tinkering with numbers and arguing about Gini coefficients. At the deepest level, people don’t want to be thrown a few scraps by an administrator and told to shut up. They want to be free.

There is one Graeber video I have found myself coming back to again and again since his death. It is a debate he conducted in 2014 with Peter Thiel, the PayPal and Palantir billionaire who has since become famous as the éminence grise of the New Right. Thiel is clearly fascinated by Graeber; he agrees with his points about bureaucratic stultification, and seems to find it rather novel to have a Left-wing interlocutor echoing his paeans to untrammeled human creativity.

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Watching the video, indeed, you get the sense that in many ways, Graeber’s anarchism is the result of Thiel’s impulses being carried to their most logical, most humane conclusion. Thiel wants coercive bureaucracies to stop meddling in the likes of SpaceX and PayPal; Graeber, meanwhile, wants them to leave everyone alone, from professors in London to peasants in Bihar, so that they all have enough time and space to figure out something worthwhile, and do it.

It is tempting to treat Graeberism (a term its originator would have hated) as a kind of “road not taken” for the political Left. Graeber’s most important books — Possibilities, Direct Action, Debt, Bullshit Jobs, The Utopia of Rules, The Dawn of Everything — are among the few genuinely popular Left-wing texts of our time. Certainly, they’re the only ones that manage to carry the same, visceral appeal as today’s Right-wing populists. They manage this, moreover, without ever once canvassing coercion, intimidation, or brutality. But to lament roads not taken would be a mistake. Because if there was one thing Graeber stood for, it was the idea that, as he put it, “the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently”. You are always slightly freer than the world claims you are. There is no road, and there are no turnings. You can change direction any time you like.

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Le Corbusier — the bogusly matey “Corb” is to be resisted — grew up in the francophone Swiss town of La Chaux-de-Fonds on, so far as he was concerned, the wrong side of the French border. Like Jean-Luc Godard some years later, he became a French citizen: both were mildly Helvetophobic, unattracted by ski-lifts, horology and rösti. Though Le Corbusier did not acknowledge it until much later the town made more impression on him than he did on it with a few prentice villas for family and friends which wave to art nouveau. La Chaux-de-Fonds was rebuilt after a fire in the late 18th century. Its grid pattern, unique in Switzerland, is omnipresent. It is a relentless rectilinear labyrinth which offers no relief, its axes are incarcerating. They lead to repetitive vanishing points. This would provide the template for the thwarted urbanistic projects which blighted Le Corbusier’s career. It fed the animus held by the enemies of modernism in the Twenties who failed to distinguish between Le Corbusier, architect of genius whose work shaped a century and — often apparently unrelated — Le Corbusier, utopian oddball (or hurluberlu). This wisenheimer’s megalomaniac schemes were not invariably recognized as the deadpan jests he partially intended, probably. Did he really expect to demolish much of Haussmannian Paris? Did he really expect to build 18 Cités Radieuses in a row in Marseille? He hid expressionlessly behind a prankster’s mask of the heaviest black-framed glasses that a human nose could support: frailer schnozzles have been defeated.

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It is indisputable that modernism in its various forms has won. Won what? Just look around you. (Unless, that is, you are in a British “housing” hutch or a “unit” of volume building.) Over half a century ago John Summerson noted that the architecture which demanded to be qualified by “modern” would soon no longer require a prefix. It would become architecture, tout court. Its debt to Le Corbusier would be immeasurably vast — and immeasurably third hand. A notion — playful or earnest, rational or fantastical or all of those, simultaneously — will, whatever its tenor, beget variations and dissipations, improvements and diminutions. Glasgow’s former Metropolitan College and Stirling and Gowan’s flats at Ham Common are obvious examples. Le Corbusier has been ripped off with abandon by the hackery which knows his work only from videos or low-quality images on a phone. Architecture can be represented in many ways, by far the worst of them is one dimensional.

A minor nuisance suffered by those, like me, whose home is Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse in Marseille is the abundance of tourists who mill about the place. But at least they acquire some notion of the building as a living organism even if its inhabitants are exhibits in a freak show, ethnological samples who do things like drink coffee, laugh, look out to sea. We seldom pick lice out of our fur. Many of the guided tourists clearly have no idea why they are being directed though these corridors which are not so different from those in the blocks they live in. Now and again one of them dares to ask a passing exhibit why it lives here. What’s it like? What are those strange receptacles beside the front doors? (Ice boxes, daily refilled before the advent of the golden age of white goods.)

I guess this exhibit lives here because it can’t afford Blenheim or even Eastbury, the remaining wing of Vanbrugh’s third great house. But, generically there is a correspondence: the work of a supreme architect who was (in Vanbrugh’s case at least) a marvelously funny writer, the sense of being swaddled by concrete, cosseted by details realized with wit. The late Jim Cadbury Brown, whose wife Betty described Le Corbusier as an indefatigable groper, compared the Cité Radieuse’s solid clunkiness to a Bristol motor car. Piers Gough, whose work shares that quality, exclaimed, the first time he made a tour of the building: “This isn’t a modern work… this belongs to the arts and crafts.” That is one chasm which separates Le Corbusier from his followers, persons of blind goofy devotion who recall Eugène Burnand’s fanatics hurrying through a Millet-shaped landscape. “So they both ran together: and the other disciple did outrun Peter and came first to the sepulcher.” (St John 20.3)

Le Corbusier was, then, a magnet, a secular idol who, absolutely bereft of religion, created in his pilgrimage chapel at Ronchamp near Belfort the supreme ecclesiastical structure of his age. But it might have been an eye-catcher, a stable, a sty, a bar. It belongs to refulgent architecture, to man’s craft and ingenuity, rather than to a clapped-out faith and its murky prescriptions, sick men’s dreams which demand no empirical validation.

It’s a strange contradiction. Knox spent years insisting that her own innocence was a hard truth. Afterwards, once the world began to agree with her, she became a tenacious advocate for the rights of the wrongly accused. Yet she’s also an example of the way truth has increasingly become privatized in our society, especially when it comes to the trauma narrative. We each have our “own truth”, and the more shapely and compelling the story — and the slicker the redemption arc — the better. It used to be “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”. But that old judicial motto has been replaced by another: “lights, camera, action.” A new genre is emerging. Call it the age of the trauma blockbuster.

As the Knox show dropped, there were also developments in the Menendez brothers’ case, a kind of first test of whether a television redemption can translate into a judicial one. Lyle and Eric were convicted of the brutal murder of their parents in 1993, and the trial was one of the first to be broadcast live. Millions tuned in to watch the prosecution paint the brothers as spoiled rich kids, and the defense lay out the years of sexual abuse the brothers endured at their father’s hands. They expected to spend the rest of their lives in prison, until Ryan Murphy’s sensationalized account of their life, Monsters, aired on Netflix last year. 

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The brothers’ family objected to the retelling, it featured grotesque re-enactments of the brothers’ abuse, as well as the implication of incest (in a soapy shower scene). But Murphy was right when he proclaimed his own series “the best thing that has happened” to the brothers in decades. They have a chance at freedom now. Though their requests for parole were denied, California Gov. Gavin Newsom is now considering the brothers for clemency, and their lawyers are pursuing promising other legal avenues. Since O. J., since Lorena Bobbitt, since Casey Anthony, justice has been a spectacle. But now spectacle is justice.

The Menendez brothers “own truth” — that their moral compasses were mangled by the repercussions of sexual abuse — wasn’t enough to lessen their sentences in 1994. But it might be now, under our new shared understanding of trauma. If criminality requires  a guilty act and a guilty mind, we are now inclined to absolve the minds of the traumatized. The reasons some might kill are complex, personal and potentially exculpatory.

Certainly, the Italian authorities didn’t have much understanding of these wider contexts at the time of Knox’s trial. Her conviction rested significantly upon the weird “vibe” that she gave after her friend Meredith Kercher was found murdered. Knox took a shower after mistaking blood stains for period blood, and kissed her then-boyfriend Raffealle Sollecito at the crime scene, who was also convicted and then acquitted of the murder. The Italian detectives took her behavior as signs of her guilt, but the less complicated answer — that she didn’t understand what she was seeing, and that she didn’t process it afterwards — also required the abandonment of certain assumptions about what shock, horror and grief should look like. 

Sollecito, who also served four years in prison, never garnered the public shaming or subsequent fame that Knox did. According to Instagram, he’s now a “vegan yogi”, and had no part in the Hollywood retelling of his story. We might wonder if he is better off than Knox — unable, or maybe unwilling, to capitalize on his trauma or rehearse the unfairness of his story. 

Our culture’s love of the trauma plot line risks telling the version of events that feels truer not because it is more accurate, but because it is more emotionally satisfying. When Johnny Depp and Amber Heard faced off in court in 2022, I listened to some of my devoted feminist friends call Heard a “liar” who was betraying women. The harrowing details of her allegations ceased to matter, the “truth” had been rendered irrelevant in the algorithmic court of public opinion. Heard and Depp were flattened into TikToks, memes, and YouTube supercuts.

Meanwhile, that same year, the Netflix show Inventing Anna transformed Anna Delvey from a convicted fraudster into a media darling. The internet reappraised her as a kind of camp icon, who walked fashion runways and sold her own merch. It seemed we didn’t mind her stolen money, or her imprisonment — not if she was willing to sashay on Dancing With the Stars. Depp returned to the silver screen; but Heard, broken, faded into oblivion. Maybe she’s found peace there, but her case demonstrates that there are certain rules for women, and then there are exceptions, mostly made for those who bleed on cue, according to the rules of TV.

The Knox series is unusually forthright about the power dynamics involved. Knox’s creative control and the imprimatur of fellow trauma star Monica Lewinsky, who executive produced the series, are designed to reverse a decade and a half of tabloid mythmaking (“Foxy Knoxy”) by monetizing empathy. It’s a defensible project, an exonerated woman insisting on her version of her life, but the meta-move matters. The claim isn’t simply “I am innocent”; rather, it’s “my authorship is innocence’s proof”. The show’s authority comes not from a judge’s final opinion, but from the right to tell and sell one’s own story in the most persuasive medium of our time. 

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The medium has no interest in arbitrating fact from fiction; it rewards sexiness and the appearance of truth. There’s a reason why the Menendez show cast two very good-looking actors as its protagonists and had them shirtless often. Ditto with Knox. Our appetite for watching alleged criminals is driven by their undeniably seductive power. Perhaps we all become trauma stars in our own minds.  

Justice used to borrow the theatre’s stage, now it borrows its logic. For 30 years, we’ve lived with “trial as show”, from the Menendez brothers on Court TV to O. J., then the Depp-Heard livestream. But the true-crime boom has completed a cultural inversion: television isn’t the shadow of justice anymore; it’s the forum where guilt, innocence, and redemption are negotiated and sometimes won. 

The form’s best ambitions shouldn’t be dismissed. If a series helps us understand how an interrogation breaks down or how misogyny distorts a case, that’s a public service. If clemency for the Menendez brothers reflects a better grasp of youthful culpability, good. The trouble is the genre’s gravitational and manipulative pull. The Greeks knew that drama purifies through pity and fear; today we purify through pity and fandom. Truths — whether “own truths”, or the actual kind — tend to be erased in the white-hot glare of the public appetite. And Knox, at least, should know better. The “mystery” of her guilt was always a narrative contrivance: Italian prosecutors, the tabloids, and then Hollywood all found the beautiful American exchange student a more compelling protagonist than the obvious culprit. The trauma industry, no surprise, is good for no one.

The letter — an actual document from the ancient world that survives to this day — reveals a man capable of deep feeling. The fact that Hilarion could be so flippant about discarding an unwanted newborn, all the same, may seem shocking to us today, but it reveals much about the pre-Christian pagan culture that formed him. The pagan Greeks and Romans had no trouble dehumanizing newborns, and they thought nothing of making choices about which babies should live and which die, based upon their own needs and desires.

Fast-forward two millennia, and we come face-to-face with an ascendant worldview not all that different from the one that guided Hilarion. It, too, carelessly wields the power of life and death over children depending on parents’ desires. Only, it does this with much greater sophistication and at a potentially industrial scale: through reproductive technologies that allow would-be parents to choose their preferred embryo based on intelligence and other characteristics. All from the comfort and familiarity of an app.

Swipe right, and your high-IQ embryo is allowed to become a human being; swipe left, and the less intelligent or otherwise less desirable child is discarded. Not to put too fine a point on it, this is a high-tech reversion to Hilarion’s and Alis’s pagan mindset. The only question is whether our civilization can muster the resources to resist it, as the Church stamped out the original.

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As the historian Nadya Williams has shown, Greece and Rome offer proof that the parental quest for quality control over offspring is anything but new. Indeed, the popular stories of the era vigorously affirmed such practices. From Thetis dipping Achilles into the river Styx to render him invulnerable, to Hera throwing her newborn baby, Hephaestus, off Mount Olympus because he was so ugly and deformed — ancient pagans were taught by their culture to pursue biological optimization. In the realm of philosophy, thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, and Seneca lent moral support to parents’ refusal to raise newborns with disabilities.

These mythic and philosophical teachings informed concrete social practices. The Spartans discarded sickly babies unlikely to grow into strong warriors. Roman fathers regularly invoked the right of paterfamilias to decide whether or not to welcome a newborn child into the family.

Yet this would all change as the ancient world was transfigured by Christianity, a faith which insisted that these little children, as the least among us, bore the holy face of Christ in a special way. The Didache, an ancient Christian catechism dating probably to the late first century, reveals a faith that not only rejected abortion and infanticide (thought to be related), but also welcomed discarded children into early Christian homes. Early Church fathers like Tertullian (late second century) and Lactantius (early third century) were among those who held up these countercultural practices as evidence of the superiority of Christian culture over the pagan.

Eventually, as Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, pagan reproductive practices such as infant exposure were formally outlawed, and the Church established monasteries and orphanages to care for unwanted newborns.

Today, however, amid the waning of Christian influence in the West, a neopagan revival has filled the void, particularly in medicine. The field increasingly shrugs off a Christian anthropology and thus no longer has the resources to explain why all human beings are equal in dignity. In order to count (morally and legally), human beings now need to have certain traits: autonomy and independence, brain development, and the like. Human beings don’t share these traits in equal measure, and a good number lack them altogether. Do such people deserve the right to exist? Are their lives worthy of life? 

The champions of the new technologies and their media and academic allies answer: no.

As with the pagans, the reproductive practices of the consumerist neopagan West are focused not on welcoming children unconditionally as a gift from God — but on optimization and quality control based on the customer’s desires for a product purchased like any other in a marketplace. Indeed, just as people of Hilarion’s day could choose to keep or discard their human offspring based on whether they wanted a boy or a girl, for many years a customer has been able to use in-vitro fertilization to create a certain number of embryos and implant only XY or XX embryos, while “casting out” the rest.

But aren’t there important moral differences between an embryo being discarded as medical waste and the newborn daughter of Alis being discarded as unsuitable for the family? The latter was very clearly one of us. But how can something with only eight cells be one of us?

The short answer to this somewhat complex (though definitely answerable) question is that all of us were once an embryo. A new member of the species Homo sapiens comes into existence after fertilization. It is true that our neopagan, autonomy-obsessed, quality-control-addicted culture has been formed in ways that make it difficult to see human embryos as one of us. But we should not find that surprising, especially given how difficult it was for ancient pagan cultures to see newborns as one of them.

Add capitalist profit-seeking to such practices, and the picture becomes even grimmer. Firms like Orchid and Nucleus have developed new technologies they claim can help customers be even more choosy about which of their children will be welcomed into a family and which children will be cast out. Nucleus allows customers to accept or reject these least of our brethren based not only on height, hair color, and eye color — but also intelligence and the likelihood of the child developing certain mental illnesses.

Orchid CEO Noor Siddiqui, meanwhile, has been quite outspoken about the kind of cultural changes her company heralds. In a recent video she shared on X, she claims that “sex is for fun, and embryo screening is for babies. It is going to be insane not to screen for these things.” A New York Times article covering the rise of these designer-baby companies suggested that by “these things,” Siddiqui “presumably refers to conditions like obesity and autism, both of which Orchid says it can screen for.”

It is interesting that she foregrounds the radical disconnect between sex and procreation — a separation the Catholic Church has lamented since the advent of the Pill — as inherent to the vision of reproduction undergirding her company’s rise. Second-century pagans may well have said something similar: “Sex is for fun. Infant screening is for babies. Those Christians who don’t screen their infants are insane.”

In an interview with Siddiqui, Times columnist Ross Douthat tried to make the case for a Catholic vision of procreation. He read aloud a beautiful poem about the unchosen gift of children born of sexual union, regardless of the quality and consumer value. Reading the poem left Douthat visibly choked up, but Siddiqui responded with a blank look on her face: “What do you mean?” She went on to explain that his view — the poem’s view, the Catholic view — has already been left in the dust. Our culture has already severed the tie between sex and procreation. What she and her company are proposing is simply the next logical step. 

She’s right.

I suspect that Siddiqui and her colleagues live out many praiseworthy virtues, as Hilarion did. I have little doubt that they were originally motivated by a desire to help others and reduce suffering. But also like Hilarion, their souls have been shaped by a pagan culture that makes it impossible for them to see that they are recklessly discarding those we should be valuing and caring for the most. They aren’t moral monsters — though they are promoting, on a massive scale, morally monstrous practices.

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And these practices are likely going to get worse before they get better. Soon we will be able to coax virtually any somatic cell to become an egg or sperm cell, with the result that single rounds of IVF will produce, not 15 embryos, but 15,000 of them. And assuming companies like Orchid and Nucleus will be around, they will undoubtedly use sophisticated AI technologies to screen this much larger set, pick the desirable one or two, and discard the rest. 

At first, it will no doubt be the wealthy who avail themselves of the opportunity, given the high expense. Our society’s already wide class-based inequalities will be compounded by the biological advantages accruing to the children born on the upper social rungs. Class (defined by one’s place in the social production process) will be reinforced by new conditions of biological caste, giving rise to a new biopolitics: having a child with a disability or a less-than-sculpted body will consign people to the lower castes. Later on, as these practices become cheaper and more widely available, a sort of soft compulsion will likely bear down on all parents to optimize their kids (health insurers might decline to cover claims associated with non-optimized children). Having children the old-fashioned way will be the mark of a few “insane” religious fanatics — freaks and outcasts. 

Which is exactly how Christians were viewed by mainstream pagan society in the faith’s early days. Even so, a child-centered, Christian understanding of procreation defeated and replaced the ancient pagan culture’s understanding of reproduction. Could it happen again in our time? Perhaps the excesses coming into view will cause enough ordinary people to freak out, demand that politicians press the pause button, and look around for alternatives. 

Christianity, especially Catholic Christianity, is on the move again, especially among pockets of the young in the United States and Europe. One of the hallmarks of the ancient Christians was their resistance to pagan reproductive practices. Dare we hope that one of the hallmarks of the 21st-century Christian revival will also be resistance to the neopaganism of the Siddiquis of the world? It may be the only force that can stave off dystopia.

The story follows Victor Ward, a vacuous and handsome male model swanning about Nineties Manhattan. Victor’s world revolves around the most inane concerns possible: clubs, paparazzi, celebrities. But soon, weird things start happening. People keep telling Victor they’ve seen him in places he hasn’t been: a hotel in Miami, a Calvin Klein show. Victor is offered an unusual new job: finding a girl he went to college with who has supposedly disappeared in London. He’s booked into a first-class cabin on the QE2, and here the narrative starts to veer sharply from the aimless frivolity of the opening sections.

In London, Victor finds the girl, another model. He falls in with her group of roommates, also all models. Victor is thrilled to be going to such cool parties with such hot people, blinded by their good looks and designer clothes. But it soon turns out these models are terrorists. Their cover is beauty and fame, and their crimes are violent and gruesome. On a party tour of Paris, Victor is blackmailed to stay with the cell, closely controlled by its leader, the supermodel Bobby Hughes, who “had a set of breathtaking abdominals before anyone was really paying attention to the torso, and he was probably the major force in starting that craze”. Under Bobby’s leadership, the group pulls off a series of major attacks all while air-kissing their way around the glitzy Paris fashion world. Everyone is being watched, everything is being filmed, people aren’t who they say they are, and Victor’s reality collapses in on itself, conspiracies layering and deepening.

The actual goals of the model-terrorists are never explained, and they aren’t the point. The spectacle is. The first order of business is aesthetics. During a bombing in Paris, Victor thinks: “It’s really about the will to accomplish this destruction and not about the outcome, because that’s just decoration.”

Yet Victor’s conscience haunts him. He tells Bobby he doesn’t want to be involved, that he’s not political. “Everyone is, Victor,” Bobby tells him. “It’s something you can’t help.” Bobby tells Victor he trusts him precisely because of his shallowness: “Because you think that the Gaza Strip is a particularly lascivious move an erotic dancer makes. Because you think the PLO recorded the singles ‘Don’t Bring Me Down’ and ‘Evil Woman’.” Stupidity has made Victor vulnerable, and ultimately dangerous. People who are political, who do have an agenda, have taken advantage of Victor because he’s distracted by surface glitz.

There are many more potential Victors out there today. In Glamorama, the allure of beauty stupefies people, turning them into the pawns of those who know how to manipulate it. The same is true on the internet, which has provided an incredibly powerful tool for politicization, even radicalization, cloaked in soft-focus lifestyle content or in quasi-ironic memes. It’s all too easy to be misled by a pretty face — or a fine set of abdominals.

It is now commonplace for dead-serious political ideas, even extreme ones, to filter into the mainstream on the basis of aesthetics alone. The “Trump Gaza” AI video that depicted the territory as a glamorous beach resort, which went viral when the President himself shared it, was meant as “satire” according to its creator. But in Trump’s hands it became a tool to normalize the idea of a full takeover of Gaza. The puerile imagery of belly dancers and golden statues sanitized the sobering reality of what this takeover would mean.

The Right has long understood the importance of looks. Roger Ailes used to evaluate potential Fox News hosts by watching them on mute. Trump’s career can be seen as a large-scale experiment in how far one can get in politics by putting image first. More so than any recent president, Trump has generated an instantly recognizable aesthetic, turning his agenda into an easily consumable visual brand. His movement is adept at using the internet’s visual language to promote his agenda through imagery that elides its gravity — one example is the Studio Ghibli-style AI cartoon of a crying Dominican woman being arrested by ICE, which the White House tweeted this spring. In sneering at his unsubtle tastes for glitz and gold, Trump’s opponents have missed that these tastes are what many Americans find aspirational, even beautiful.

The pull of beauty — of what we most want to look at — has come to determine in many cases which news events capture the public imagination, and which don’t. Aesthetically appealing images get attention, and attention is today’s most valuable asset. Luigi Mangione’s alleged killing of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was a particularly cinematic recent example, optimized to go viral. From the first grainy surveillance video, showing a peek of Mangione’s chiseled jawline, the internet was hooked. It’s true that Mangione’s story tapped into a deep well of dissatisfaction with American healthcare, but I’m not sure he would have become a beloved online figure if he didn’t happen to be good-looking.

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It seems our culture can’t resist a handsome criminal. Jeremy Meeks, the “hot felon” whose mugshot for gun charges went viral in 2014, parlayed his fame into a modeling career after getting out of prison, walking in fashion week shows in Milan and New York. He now has nearly 1.5 million followers on Instagram. Even fictional killers can be influencers these days if they have the look: Ellis’s better-known protagonist, American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman, has recently inspired a cologne and a namesake Manhattan cocktail bar — on top of a wealth of memes.

While Patrick Bateman channels the nihilism of 4chan, Victor Ward embodies the insidious triviality of TikTok. In Glamorama, Ellis captured the feeling of scrolling through a social media feed long before such a thing existed: a barrage of decontextualized images, a flurry of brands and people and eventually ideologies. If the novel had been written today, Victor’s journey would take place somewhere in the endless scroll.

Just as Victor is sucked into a dark reality through his unquestioning participation in a culture of images, many people nowadays find themselves funneled into various ideological corners by what seems at first to be innocuous content tailored to their interests. Motherhood accounts are full of gauzy day-in-the-life videos that eventually turn out to be promoting free birth or Biblical submission to your husband. Men seeking lifestyle hacks find themselves swept up in the manosphere. People can and do become indoctrinated without realizing it, drawn in by an attractive veneer. “We’ll slide down the surface of things,” Victor often thinks in Glamorama.

The models in Glamorama understand that images define reality, and not the other way around. In a 1999 interview on Charlie Rose’s show, Ellis said he chose the fashion world as the setting for his story because “where would these terrorists want to unleash this conspiracy where no one else would look for it?… They’d do it in a world where image is truth, where surface is truth.” The terrorists operate from within a “beauty culture” that “feasts on insecurity” and “makes us act in ways I don’t think we normally would act”, Ellis said.

Today, beauty culture is even more pervasive than in the Nineties. The question is: how far will we go to keep up with it? “The better you look, the more you see,” is Victor’s catchphrase — and it takes on an increasingly sinister tone as the novel goes on. In Glamorama, beauty is a trap, a smokescreen that dulls our reason. It is a warning for the image-saturated world we live in.

Libman’s book begins with a family photo taken at Vienna Hauptbahnhof on 16 September 1938, just six months after the Anschluss, the Nazi annexation of Austria. In the window of a train shortly to depart are the author’s great-grandparents, Anna and Eugene, and their two daughters, Ada and Eva, all of whom escaped Europe for North America. Standing on the platform below them are 10 family members who stayed behind, and of whom only four survived past 1945. “This is the last photograph they’ll take together,” Libman writes. He recounts his own journey back to Vienna in his early 20s to meet a distant relative of his grandmother Eva, a woman from whom he receives a large bundle of photographs, letters, and other documents that had once been in possession of Eva’s uncle Max’s widow.

And yet The Third Solitude resists telling the author’s family history, tempting though it must have been to commit what W. G. Sebald, in The Emigrants, calls “a wrongful trespass”. The terrible, uncertain fate of Max, Libman’s great-grandmother’s sibling, practically calls out for novelistic speculation. All that can be ascertained is that he was arrested by French police while trying to reach Spain and put on a train to the Majdanek concentration camp. Libman learns as much from a 1947 “act de disparition“, a sort of belated death certificate issued by the French government. It reads: “Interned on 26 February 1943 at GURS; Transferred on 2 March 1943 to DRANCY; Deported on 4 March 1943 in the direction of LUBLIN-MAJDANECK (Poland).” As Libman explains, the vague “in the direction of” represents an official uncertainty about the location and manner of Max’s presumed death. He is not recorded (as he would have been) as having ever arrived at Majdanek. He “disappeared in the worst way imaginable”, Libman writes: “vanished in a question mark, in the space between one railway station and another, in the black ink of the words ‘in the direction of’.”

Libman’s restraint here is impressive. “Some memories are better left undisturbed,” he writes, adding: “How to stop speaking to our artifacts, stop breaking the shell for the sake of the nut, and instead let them speak to and through us: that is the challenge.”

It is a challenge he lives up to by wandering down a series of intellectual cul-de-sacs instead, chapter-length reflections on the varieties of nostalgia (“nostalgia is a defense mechanism against the ruthlessness of time’s passage”); on the self-mythologization of Québécois nationalists; on the peculiar history of the Jewish day school in Montreal that Libman, like his brothers and his parents, attended. What unites these seemingly disparate considerations is a skepticism towards the uses and abuses of history. The way, for instance, Québécois nationalists have feigned ignorance of the historical forces that brought them to Canada in order to see themselves as a kind of indigenous nation always threatened by the Anglo-canadien.

But, of course, the “black hole” at the center of The Third Solitude is the history of Zionism and the problem of Israel, a country Libman’s great-grandmother, Anna, described as a miracle, but which the author can only view with shame. Libman’s book is thus a contribution to a long tradition of intellectual rebellion, a millennial Jewish writer’s reckoning with the pieties and shibboleths of his education and the capture of Jewish life by political Zionism. Why, Libman asks, was it necessary for students at a Canadian Jewish day school to sing the Israeli national anthem or participate in the annual Israeli Independence Day rally? Why did almost all of the students, Libman included, visit Israel as part of a high-school fellowship? And why were Palestinians, let alone the Nakba, never mentioned?

The Third Solitude is a forceful protest against this seizure of Jewish life by Israel and political Zionism. And while Libman is never as rude or irreverent as Philip Roth, I was nevertheless reminded at times of Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman who, in The Counterlife, describes Israel as a militant escape from traditional forms of Jewish life: “All over the world people were rooting for the Jews to go ahead and un-Jew themselves in their own little homeland. I think that’s why the place was once so universally popular — no more Jewy Jews, great!”

One of The Third Solitude’s most memorable moments is Libman’s account of the time he went on the March for the Living, which every year brings Jewish students from around the world to Poland and Israel to study the history of the Holocaust. In Libman’s telling, however, an ostensibly important educational experience becomes a bizarre historical pageantry. It involved students singing old Jewish songs at the top of their lungs in the middle of a residential area in Kraków, as though Poland remained stuck in 1939-1945. “It was like going to the United States and insisting that everything was as it had been during the Civil War,” Libman writes. Later, during a trip to the Buczyna woods, where 10,000 people, most of them Jews, were killed and buried in a mass grave in 1942-43, Libman notices a plaque displaying the opening lines of the Israeli national anthem, the “Hatikvah”, as well as an Israeli flag. What, he wonders, has Israel got to do with the horrors that befell European Jewry back then?

This is organized remembrance, the monopolization of memory. “Holocaust is perpetually yesterday and tomorrow,” Libman writes, adding that this could just as well be the motto for the State of Israel, mired as the country is in a “presentist ideology” that cannot let the past be past, let alone dare to imagine the future. At the end of the book, Libman returns imaginatively to the arrival of Anna and Eugene, his great-grandparents, in North America in 1938, at a moment when different futures were still possible. “Concretely,” he writes, “they were the visions of Jewish life that had yet to be captured and assimilated into political Zionism: pluralistic belonging in North America, for example; or a global, secular socialism in which traditional cultures and languages were nurtured as syndicates; or even, in a bid to divert the already moving colonial-Zionist project toward a more humane direction, a non-theocratic, multi-national, democratic state in Palestine.”

Libman emphasizes the need to resuscitate some of those “vanished visions of the future”, not in the sense of turning back the clock, but as a reminder that the future, no matter what the presentist ideologues may claim, is something that can yet be created. What exactly this future might look like is beyond the purview of The Third Solitude, as perhaps it lies beyond the scope of any single person’s imagination. To recognize this is simply to accept that imagining a better future is one of our shared responsibilities, and that any political project that consigns us to a doom loop is not worth having. As Louis MacNeice once wrote: “What we are about to do / Is of vastly more importance / Than what we have done or not done hitherto.”

Set in the fictional small town of Maybrook, Pa., Weapons opens with 17 children from the same third grade classroom running away from their homes at precisely 2:17 a.m., and vanishing into the night. The next morning, teacher Justine Gandy (Julia Garner) is startled to find only one student, Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher), in her classroom. The story then unfolds in nonlinear, overlapping vignettes, a structure Cregger patterned after Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (1999). 

The first vignette belongs to Justine. An angular, frizzy-headed woman in her early 3os, Justine has a history of professional misconduct (hugging a student—gasp), alcoholism, and promiscuity — making her an easy target for a grief-wracked community desperate for answers. The townspeople’s suspicions send her into a booze-fueled spiral of paranoia and depression. Partly because she loves her students, and partly to avoid being scapegoated, Justine sets out to unravel the mystery. 

Her persecution intensifies when an unknown harasser beats on her door at night and paints “WITCH” in red on her car. This is clever misdirection: Cregger elicits our sympathy for a wrongly maligned woman so we will prematurely discount the possibility that an actual witch is behind the children’s disappearance. The real threat emerges when Justine fixes upon Alex, the sole remaining third-grader, as the likeliest source of information. Snooping around his house, she spies Alex’s parents through a crack in the newspaper-plastered windows. They’re sitting on the couch, catatonic, the home in disarray.

Archer Graff (Josh Brolin) is on his own quest to save his son, Matthew, one of the missing children. At first, he suspects Justine (it was Archer, we learn, who vandalized her car), but circumstances compel the two to join forces, and they become the emotional heart of the story. Archer confirms Justine’s suspicions when he learns from home CCTV footage that all the children ran from their front doors in a straight line, converging on Alex’s house.

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Vignettes foregrounding other characters bring us nearer to the truth. A homeless tweaker named James (Austin Abrams), spars hilariously with Justine’s policeman ex-boyfriend Paul Morgan (Alden Ehrenreich). A plotline centered on Maybrook Elementary School’s principal, Marcus Miller (Benedict Wong), is alternately amusing and terrifying. It’s James, while burglarizing the Lilly home, who is the first to lay eyes on the children: locked in the basement, catatonic like Alex’s parents.

Finally, Alex’s vignette gives it to us in full: his gravely ill great-aunt Gladys (Amy Madigan), who had come to stay with the Lillys, presumably to die, turns out to be a witch who uses blood magic to take over her victims’ bodies and feed on their life force. When Alex’s parents prove too paltry a meal, Gladys forces him to retrieve personal items from each of his classmates. With these she performs a ritual giving her control over the children, and summons them to the Lilly home at 2:17a.m. 

Cregger’s writing is magnificent. Each successive vignette scratches our itching questions in unexpected ways, illuminating ambiguities of character and situation, the narrative pace accelerating as the gestalt comes into focus. Allusions to Stephen King tease where the plot is headed and clue us in to its meaning. Gladys appears in Justine’s and Archer’s nightmares in garish makeup reminiscent of It’s Pennywise the Dancing Clown, perhaps the most famous contemporary devourer of children. “2:17” recalls Room 217 of the Overlook Hotel, wherein young Danny is assaulted by a rotting crone who attempts to absorb his life force (Stanley Kubrick, in his movie adaptation, changed the room number to 237). Justine’s alcoholism also evokes The Shining, as does a scene when Alex’s rampaging parents poke their heads through holes in a bathroom door. 

Some viewers, primed to look for progressive undercurrents by Barbarian’s portrayal of a #MeToo abuser getting his comeuppance, will be tempted to read Weapons as a school-shooting metaphor. At first blush, this is a plausible interpretation. School shootings are the nearest real-life analog to the disappearance of a classroom of kids, and parents are as powerless against them as the parents in Maybrook. Even the kids’ body-language while running—arms outstretched like the “napalm girl”—recalls the suffering modern weapons inflict on children. During a nightmare, Archer sees a colossal AR-15 suspended like a dark beacon over his home, “2:17” glowing on its barrel like numbers on a digital clock. Is this meant to evoke the weapon favored by school shooters? 

A more nuanced reading, one that gives proper weight to Gladys’s characterization, however, shows school shooting to be a thematic red herring, overshadowed by another theme from Barbarian: the monstrous feminine.

Camille Paglia famously reads the history of Western culture through the opposition of Apollo and Dionysus. The masculine Apollonian principle, with its love of mathematical reason and lucid distinctions, seeks to tame the feminine Dionysian, the fecund undifferentiation from which all life springs and, inevitably, returns. Paglia has written: “What the West represses in its view of nature is the chthonian, which means ‘of the earth’—but earth’s bowels, not its surface.” The symbol of the Dionysian (or chthonian) is the Great Mother, a primordial figure of myth who births her children only to devour them. She recurs in myths in various forms, some emphasizing her nurturing qualities, others her role as devourer. The lamiae of Greek mythology embody the latter aspect: ancient succubi who subsist on the blood of children, often depicted as women from the waist up, serpents from the waist down.

While the unjust persecution of Justine may warn us against scapegoating women, Gladys’s demonic ministrations scream that sometimes witches are real, and women can sometimes be culpable.

Gladys, wan and grotesquely aged, rather transparently represents the monstrous feminine, and even its more particular instantiation in the lamia. She derives her magic from a potted tree covered in thorns. In a nightmare, Justine catches Gladys on her ceiling. Only her torso is visible, her legs obscured as if buried in soil—like the roots of a tree or the tail of a snake. Her legs are hidden in the same manner when she appears to James in the forest. Underneath her clownishly red wig, her real hair consists of sparse, snake-like braids. (As Paglia has written, “Medusa’s snaky hair is also the writhing vegetable growth of nature.”) Gladys’s use of archaic language (she tells Principal Miller that Alex’s parents are sick with “consumption”) alludes to her being ancient. Then there’s her lair: the front door of the Lillys’ house opens on a beckoning darkness, an orifice descending into the earth.

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Instead of serving as a reference to school shootings, the long rifle in the film is an Apollonian instrument, a symbolic phallus that kills. By contrast, Gladys kills by absorbing her victims’ life force, or by influencing others to kill on her behalf. Even the zombified state of her victims speaks to the horror of the chthonian, which, per Paglia, “we must block from consciousness to retain our Apollonian integrity as persons.”

It is precisely her chthonian character that makes Gladys so terrifying. Civilization is built on a swamp and might at any moment be subsumed. The Apollonian is powerless before the full force of the chthonian. The ubiquitous Ring cameras installed on Maybrook homes were parents’ attempt to keep the children safe, to control the uncontrollable; but technology cannot save us from primal forces. Archer, a construction manager who, in proper Apollonian fashion, tries to make sense of the mystery by plotting the children’s trajectories on a map, is in the end powerless before Gladys.

It is only when Alex extracts a hair from inside Gladys’s wig and harnesses her blood magic against her, that the good guys triumph. But it is a triumph not of the Apollonian, but of the chthonian against the chthonian: in a scene that recalls Pentheus’s dismemberment by the Maenads in Euripides’s The Bacchae, Gladys is torn limb from limb by the children formerly under her power.

The monstrous feminine is experiencing something of a revival lately, suggesting a rebellion against the ongoing domination of culture by feminist sensibilities. Films like The VVitch, Raw, Hereditary, Midsommar, Beau Is Afraid, Titane, Pearl, and The Substance are refreshingly reactionary, attesting that female agency has its dark side, that women are capable of astonishing violence against others, and against themselves. “The rise of rational, technological woman may demand the repression of unpleasant, archetypal realities,” Paglia wrote in Sexual Personae. The repressed, of course, has a habit of returning. In Weapons it returns with mythic, lyric eloquence.

To the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss the fact that so much of intellectual life was dominated by this topsy-turvy procedure seemed very strange. He spent most of his twenties drifting along the Rive Gauche at a time when his young Parisian contemporaries — Sartre among them — were beginning to formulate what would one day be known as existentialism. Abstraction was in the air; Paris was awash with armchair theorists claiming to have derived, a priori and armed only with a fierce intellect and a few translations of Heidegger, the basic condition of humanity. Yet what struck Lévi-Strauss was that most of these confident assertions were just conjecture: if you really wanted to know what human beings are like, then you probably needed to leave the safety of the café and meet some different types of human beings. In 1935, he did just that, abandoning his post as a secondary school teacher and boarding a steamship for Brazil, so that he could have a look at “human nature”, up close, for himself.

The legendary travelogue Tristes Tropiques (1955) is an account of that journey. Though its author is perhaps best known in the academy as the inventor of structuralism, the writing is anything but dry and theoretical: from the famous, ironical first line — “I hate traveling and explorers” — Lévi-Strauss styles himself as a reluctant hero, on a quest into the jungle to find mankind in his original condition. “I have often planned to undertake the present work,” he confesses, “but on each occasion a sort of shame and repugnance prevented me making a start.” To proceed, he must give up all pretense of academic discipline and propriety, and indulge his most immoderate Romantic impulses. The result is, in the words of another great anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, “a work which, though it is very far from being a great anthropology book, or even an especially good one, is surely one of the finest books ever written by an anthropologist”.

The bulk of Tristes Tropiques is concerned with Lévi-Strauss’s visits to remote peoples living in the Brazilian State of Matto Grosso: the Caduveo, the Bororo, the Nambikwara, and the Tupi-Kawahib, whom the author arranges in ascending order of how “untouched” he believes them to be. This mania for the “untouched” and “unspoiled” and “uncontaminated”, borne of Lévi-Strauss’s youthful fondness for Rousseau, initially strikes the modern reader as rather overblown: the innocently naked Caduveo, for instance, cavort around in their own Eden, “protected by the grassy velvetiness of the outside walls and the fringe of palm trees”, their “flesh tones … set off by… the rich, bright glint of the teeth and fangs of wild animals among feathers and flowers”. But soon, Lévi-Strauss’s trained eye can’t help but notice more subtle social structures: the Caduveo’s tattoos, for instance, are a map of their aboriginal forms of social organization, which time and trade with the outside world have long since degraded.

For all Lévi-Strauss’s ridiculous paeans to noble savagery, the fact remains that every single one of his encounters with an indigenous people in Tristes Tropiques contains at least one such fascinating observation — many of which are still respected by first-rate ethnographers. He is sensitive and meticulous: most editions are accompanied by facsimiles of his wonderful drawings of clothing, drinking vessels and tattoos. He also avoids many of the pitfalls into which other anthropologists have fallen, before and since. Of the Bororo, for example, he sees not simply a unified “people” or “tribe” that has been intact since the dawn of time, but a group struggling with disease and resettlement by missionaries, and trying its best to live in accordance with its own traditions.

Even his rather naïve association of Amazonians with “primitiveness” has a certain truth to it, if we read it generously. When visiting the Nambikwara, for instance, he notices that their social structure changes according to the time of year: in the dry season, the fact that most food is gleaned from hunting makes Nambikwara society more centralized and hierarchical; in the rainy season, when agriculture is possible, the Nambikwara disperse into smaller family units. Recent work in archaeology suggests that this kind of social flexibility — alien to modern, bureaucratic states like Lévi-Strauss’s France — was exceedingly common among peoples who lived tens of thousands of years ago. In other words, by identifying primordial “human nature” with a certain openness, a capacity for choice and transformation that industrial societies have somehow lost, Lévi-Strauss might not have been entirely wrong.

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Nevertheless, in the years since Tristes Tropiques was published, its reputation has suffered. Its initial, rapturous reception — Susan Sontag called it “one of the great books of our century” — has since given way to accusations of colonial incomprehension at best, outright racism at worst. Many anthropologists consider Lévi-Strauss’s hymns to the unspoiledness of his “natives” to be a kind of backhanded compliment, a way of denying them the sophisticated, sexy fallenness of the West. Nor was this picture helped by the title of his next book, La Pensée Sauvage — which, although literally meaning something like “untamed thought”, is simply begging for mistranslation as “the mind of the savage”.

But perhaps we have misunderstood the political and intellectual stakes. If we treat Tristes Tropiques as a perfect catalog of the beliefs and customs of the Caduveo, the Bororo, the Nambikwara, and the Tupi-Kawahib, we will surely find it lacking, especially in the light of half a century of well-funded ethnographic research. But if we treat it as a riposte to the lofty pretensions of Lévi-Strauss’s fellow Parisian intellectuals (not to mention today’s intellectuals) to know “human nature”, it starts to look like a welcome corrective. Beneath all of Lévi-Strauss’s pontifications about innocence and savagery lies a clear, common-sense conviction that things could be otherwise — that many human societies once were otherwise, and that, at least in a few remote corners of Brazil, they still are.

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It is doubly striking, therefore, that so many of the tetchiest criticisms of Tristes Tropiques have tended to emerge after 1980, from institutions in the US and UK that were in the throes of neoliberalism (a way of thinking whose most famous slogan, “There is no alternative”, is a perfect contradiction of the one intellectual assumption every anthropologist makes). In a sense, I suspect, Lévi-Strauss’s reputation was the victim of a resurgent notion of human nature that took the academy by storm in the final decades of the 20th century: a hard-bitten economistic one which held that the essence of mankind was simply to be “rational” (which, to the economist, means calculating, greedy, concerned above all else with the maximization of personal profit). This was almost as prevalent on the political Left as on the political Right: the only difference was that those leftist thinkers who opposed Lévi-Strauss’s “Romanticism” added that to refuse to ascribe such calculating, greedy “rationality” to indigenous peoples was to label them somehow inhuman, and fall victim to “inverted racism”.

But was this really Lévi-Strauss’s sin? In his final reflections, he strikes a remarkably shy, relativist tone: humanity is vast, perhaps infinite, and even the most skilled anthropologist can only ever offer a few, partial gropings towards its essence, if one even exists. “The paradox is irresoluble,” he writes: “the less one culture communicates with another, the less likely they are to be corrupted, one by the other; but, on the other hand, the less likely it is… that the respective emissaries of these cultures will be able to seize the richness and significance of their diversity.” He tells the legend of an Indian, who journeys to the edge of the earth, asks questions of all the people and things he finds there, only to be disappointed. He cannot quite understand them.

I like to come back to Lévi-Strauss again and again for lessons like these. Like many academics, I spend far too much time chasing around dreamy abstractions, many of which claim to contain the essence of human life or social organization. Books such Tristes Tropiques are a reminder that these efforts are, at best, only part of the story. Indeed, they are a corrective to much else besides: “Human nature” is reified ever more readily these days — not just by intellectuals, but by consultants restructuring economic life, lawyers refashioning society’s rules, HR departments rewriting the mores by which people interact. Everyone has his or her own preconceived assumptions, adopted for self-serving reasons, about what it might mean to be human. Except one. Follow him into the jungle this summer, and discover who you are.

This was a play that people talked about, and not just theatre people but regular people — mothers taking their teenage daughters as a way to warn them about the vicious adult world, husbands and wives weighing the claims of the accuser and accused, women whispering to each other: this is how it is. So what that Prima Facie was, in some regards, more a lecture than a play? It was a lecture that audiences were hungry for.

Now, Miller is back with another one-woman show (well, nearly one woman: there are also two small roles for men) about rape and the law, once again directed by Justin Martin. Inter Alia at the National Theatre stars Rosamund Pike as Jessica, a judge/wife/mother/feminist whose roles overlap, conflict and — by the end of the play — tear her apart.

We first meet Jessica as she bawls the line “the fucking PATRIARCHY!” into a microphone in rock-goddess pose. This is the Jessica of the courtroom: a magnetic performer, a take-no-bullshit queen who uses her place on the bench to make her courtroom a “moral” place. She knows all the tricks that barristers use to trip up victims, and she takes a personal pride in her ability to undermine them, sometimes by simply reminding the complainant that she can take her time to reply (“soft skills,” boasts Jessica). She sees herself a trailblazer for women in law.

But we also see her struggling with the second shift. She tells us how she massages her barrister husband’s ego, sore from the fact that she was appointed a judge before him. And then the big twist, though you can see it coming a mile off: her teenage son Harry is accused of rape, and we learn that he has stumbled his way into the sleazy vortex of the “manosphere”. (Once again, great timing from Miller, given that this is the hot take engine of the moment.) Suddenly, Jessica finds herself relieved by the iniquities of the system, strategizing to discredit the victim, trying to convince her son of the fine distinctions between “moral” and “legal” guilt, full of grief for the innocent boy she once had. At this point, is she a mother or a judge? The insinuation of Inter Alia is that she cannot be both.

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Miller’s method in both plays is brutally effective: animate the political question by turning it into a personal one. It’s also got the sadistic logic of a Dante-esque punishment. How can the thrusting girlboss barrister learn the consequences of her actions? By having her raped so she has to experience the dock from the other side. How can the lean-in lady understand the limits of her worldview? By making her son into a predator and forcing her to fail both maternally and professionally. The sins of the system are visited on the individual woman.

In fact, Miller is so keen to make things hard on Jessica that she inadvertently makes things easy on the audience. The bits of the play that really bristle with energy are when there is doubt about what Harry’s done. When he’s first accused, he tells his parents this is all a mistake. He had consensual (albeit drunken) sex with the girl, but he didn’t rape her; he wouldn’t rape her, he wanted her to be his girlfriend. There is a possibility that this really is complicated, one way or another.

The peculiar nature of a rape conviction, as the play explains in one of its most public information-sounding exchanges, is that the difference between guilty and not guilty rests not in the defendant’s actions, but in what the jury thinks that the defendant thought was happening in the complainant’s mind. If a jury believes that an accused man genuinely and reasonably believed that the complainant consented, then that man cannot be guilty of rape. It is, as Harry’s father says, an offense where both parties can be telling the truth in their version of what happened.

But Harry isn’t telling the truth. By the end of the play, he’s admitted to his mother that he did rape the girl — and not only that, he did it when she was asleep. Now he wants to confess to the police, and Jessica has to decide whether to support him in doing the right thing and ruining his life. A dilemma for Jessica, but not for the audience, who now have access to the objective truth of the incident. This unlikely act of conscience lets the audience off the hook.

While you feel for Harry in his initial confusion and terror at being accused, there’s always the moral peril that you are extending your compassion to a sex offender. Confirming that he is, indeed, a rapist might seem to further implicate the audience; but because he is a contrite sex offender seeking to make amends to his victim, sympathy seems merited. And anyway, can he really be blamed when his parents left him to wander in the deep dark forest of the internet? A harder-edged play would make the viewer squirm more.

Like the TV show Adolescence before it, this feels like an artwork that squares up to the terrible truth of male violence and then ducks the punch. A more ambiguous Harry would be more frightening, but also closer to the truth of what rape is. A boy who genuinely believed, reasonably or otherwise, that what he was doing to a girl was what she wanted. A boy who could be both truthful and dangerous. A boy who didn’t need to perjure himself to be morally guilty and legally not guilty at the same time. As much as Miller’s work wants to confront the nightmare of justice for rape victims, this is the place it cannot go.

Perhaps that’s inevitable. Miller is a dramatist, meaning she is great at exposing the razzle-dazzle of the courtroom, and relentless at uncovering the inner lives of her female characters. She’s less adept at getting into the secret brains of men. But that, legally speaking, is where the crime of rape takes place. It is not what happens to a woman’s body that distinguishes sex from rape: it is what happens in a man’s mind, and Miller’s plays have no access there.

In the National Theatre gift shop, you can buy an Inter Alia tie-in tote bag, bright orange and printed with the play’s opening line: “The fucking PATRIARCHY!” This feels very 10 years ago: very Beyoncé dancing in front of the word “FEMINIST”, very “I’m with her” shirts for Hillary, very pre-#MeToo. It’s a throwback to a time, as brief as it was illusory, when the permanent triumph of feminism seemed so close that it could be merchandised into existence. Instead, there was a pussy grabber for president.

By the end of Inter Alia, Jessica’s defiant roar is obviously hollow — when she has to make a choice between her principles and her family, she is the fucking patriarchy. But off the stage, glib slogans and self-affirmations are all there is to offer. As provocative and effective as Miller’s plays are, it is their female characters who are put on trial. Without a serious effort to understand men (including, especially, the most dangerous men), the critique of male violence is an empty project.

Carnac is a longish poem named after the Breton coastal town where Guillevic spent his early years. Over 3,000 megaliths stud the surrounding countryside, arranged in lines and circles, the remnants of a thriving and adaptable stone-raising culture. The earliest signs of settled human habitation in the region may date to 5,700 BC, while the first stones seem to have been raised 1,000 years later. This was Guillevic’s inheritance as a small boy in the 1910s, a policeman’s son who stared out to sea and played among ancient stones. “One is amidst the unknown, surrounded by mystery,” he wrote later. “One is in the sacred.”

As a child, Guillevic noticed something strange. He was living in a country called France, yet hardly anyone spoke French. This was the language of school, where a sentence in Breton would earn you the same punishment as spitting on the floor. Nevertheless, one word of the region’s indigenous language would stick: menhir, literally a “long stone.” Menhirs were more than words for him, of course. His family lived on the second floor of a house, and there were no public parks nearby. So he played among the stones at Ménec — according to his mother, that was where he learned to walk. Though he moved to Alsace at the age of 12, where he was shocked by the soft landscape of forested hills, Guillevic never really left Carnac.

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He studied mathematics and took a job in the tax office in Paris. When the war came, he joined the resistance and became a communist. Montague described the mature Guillevic as “smallish, thick-set, raucous-voiced, with the craggy dome of an intelligent simian, and a sudden smile which lit the beard and large glinting glasses.” He seems to have been happy enough in the capital, but the menhirs followed him. They recur in his poetry like a first love. Sources of wonder, melancholy, and laughter. He gave them strange powers of movement and surprise. The stones of Carnac were not static monuments to be measured and studied. They were unruly, even horny. In his first collection, Terraqué (1942), we find megaliths up to no good when the sun goes down: “The menhirs come and go at night / And nibble one another.”

This isn’t a bad time to read about megaliths. Stone-fanciers seem to be enjoying a solstice moment. Social media accounts dedicated to henges, dolmens, passage tombs, geoglyphs and peculiar mounds are springing up everywhere. The excellent Weird Walk, a zine dedicated to “wanderings and wonderings from the British Isles,” is full of articles on old stones, cheese-lore, and instances of the uncanny in Midsomer Murders. More broadly, there seems to be a growing appetite for folk traditions and local legends, whether in the form of light-hearted BBC documentaries or the books of Francis Young.

Naturally, stone circles have always been objects of intense curiosity. John Aubrey showed an enthusiastic Charles II around Avebury in 1663. We can date written analysis of Britain’s ancient monuments from the publication of William Camden’s Britannia in 1586, but interest in the subject surely extends much further back; even the most incurious Wiltshire serfs must have glanced up at Stonehenge from time to time and wondered what the hell it was all about.

Guillevic was no Aubrey or Camden. He did not want to explain the stones of Brittany. He wanted to live among them. Carnac was published in 1961. Guillevic viewed it as a collection of 150 short poems, but all those little pebbles form a single cairn. It is a sea poem, a stone poem: “From the sea to the menhirs / From the menhirs to the sea / The same road, two contrary winds / With the one from the sea / Full of the other’s murder.” The sea, formless and jealous, is a sinister presence. It resents the old stones, perhaps for their solidity, perhaps for their suggestion of order, perhaps because they were erected by creatures who chose to walk rather than swim. For the sea, perhaps, there could be no greater insult.

The poem’s charm and power rest on such musings. Guillevic proudly claimed to be “a man from prehistory,” and Carnac is a tongue-in-cheek experiment in Stone Age thought. The same subjects are returned to over and over again. Menhirs, sun, sea, and rock pools are poked at and sniffed, sometimes even tasted. They are examined from every angle. What are they? What do they want? At one point Guillevic mocks up a mythological system, relating a daily battle between sun and surf. Elsewhere, he muses on the significance of moorland, the nature of seaweed.

“I believed in answers from stone,” he wrote. The stones are at the heart of it all. Guillevic never tackled their mystery head-on. He had no interest in reducing the menhirs of Carnac to mere archaeology. He offered up playful theories colored by his own eccentric, deeply felt understanding of the region. The sea threatened humans with madness; the stones were there to protect them. Or the circles and lines of shaped rock were a Neolithic Genesis, a record of Creation: “Something happened at Carnac / A long time ago. / Something which matters / And you say, light…”

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In his autobiography, Vivre en Poésie (1980), Guillevic compared the Carnac of his childhood to its modern incarnation. The results were not favorable. “Now,” he wrote, “Carnac is ruined by all the villas and tourism and petrol pumps. But there is something left of it…” That something was “Carnac-préhistoire”, which he regarded as his home. For Guillevic, this was not necessarily in the past. This was a place, after all, “Somehow far from everything / Which proceeds beneath time.” Holiday homes and petrol stations can’t compete with that.

This is the appeal of old stones. My own local dolmen, which crouches within an earthwork ring on the southern edge of Belfast, is no match for the alignments of Carnac in age or scale. But it too seems immune to passing indignities. Last summer there was talk of temporarily closing the place due to the prodigious amount of dog shit left by careless visitors. And I once saw a young man climb onto the stones, standing at the highest point of the sloping quoit in tracksuit and glaring white trainers, laughing down at his girlfriend. I was disgusted, but I also knew that it didn’t matter, not really. This dolmen had seen worse. Stripped of its earthen mound, excavated and robbed, its first name forgotten. The stones sat in shroomy indifference, just as they have since 2,700 BC, and will do long after those white trainers are regarded as an antique mode of dress.

If the number of stone-lovers is quietly on the rise, I suspect this is at the root of it. Lichen aside, not much sticks to a megalith. Philosophy and politics start to look like small, cramped things next to them. Their original function is largely lost, and this is a great part of their power. You can only use menhirs as Guillevic did, as dreaming machines. A lesser poet might have written about his own childhood in Carnac. But he knew that the stones gave him an opportunity to go deeper and wider. Carnac is not a record of little Eugène’s childhood — it is about the childhood of our whole species. From the old stones come touch, fear, form. As Guillevic wrote: “From the middle of the menhirs / the world appears.”

Such forecasts were hasty. So was much of the investment. The railway bubble burst, and speculators suffered bruising losses. Three decades later, a similar bubble arose in the US. This bubble, like the British one, was soon to burst. Around 18,000 businesses failed within two years.

As a share of American GDP, investment in artificial intelligence has surpassed the telecoms boom of the dotcom bubble. In its degree of concentration, it stands second only to the railroad boom of the late 19th century. AI, then, might be approaching a moment of truth. The technology was meant to speed up the economy; now, it appears to be slowing it. Unless the trend is soon reversed, the biggest tech companies might be in for a sharp revaluation.

In fact, if you remove those companies from the stock index, so-called American exceptionalism disappears. Outside the top 10 companies, the indices have been stagnating since the start of 2025. Similarly, minus that top 10, corporate earnings have been flat for the past three years — coincidentally, the period that followed the release of ChatGPT, the event that sent the AI boom into overdrive. With the sector’s capital expenditure having risen tenfold in just the past three years, the AI bubble is now sucking up more than half of America’s investment. So insatiable is this bubble that there may not even be enough cash in America to satisfy OpenAI. Sam Altman attempted to rustle up additional cash by going abroad, seeking to raise $7 trillion from the UAE and other investors.

That rush to the top doesn’t leave much for everyone else. With all that money pouring into AI, investment in the rest of the economy has begun to decline, slowing growth. That helps to explain the rapid deceleration in the US economy now underway, a marked contrast to the recent good fortune of the “Magnificent Seven” tech companies. With job growth flat, consumption now adds less to the economy than a handful of massive AI investments.

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And the gains made by AI are, for now at least, someone else’s loss. Not only is the industry sucking in capital, but it is ravenous for electricity. Data centers consume 10 times the power of traditional servers, and are helping raise American electricity prices — up some 6.5% over the past year. AI centers also consume huge volumes of water for cooling, leading to supply strains and increased prices in many areas. That keeps upward pressure on the inflation rate, raising costs to both consumers and businesses alike and slowing the interest-rate cuts that might facilitate investment in small and medium firms.

In short, the US is currently placing its money on one huge bet: that AI will unleash a productivity revolution so great it will ultimately re-start the economy it’s presently impeding. Americans are doing their bit to make it happen, with ordinary retail investors driving the stock market rally of the last few months and OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT, reporting that Americans prompt their chatbot some 330 million times a day. 

Yet for all that, we’ve yet to see much evidence of a transformation in output. Over the same three years that the AI revolution has been in full swing, labor productivity has grown at barely 1% a year, maintaining a decades-long trend of declining growth across Western countries. And while some might retort that productivity revolutions unfold over many years — several decades passed between the invention of the steam engine and electricity and significant changes in labor productivity — the maths behind the AI boom make little sense. Unlike the railroads built in the late 19th-century US bubble, which are still around today, AI investment is going into data centers that are set to depreciate rapidly. Nvidia, for instance, warranties its GPUs for only five years. 

In short, this bet needs to pay off soon. And while the record profits at the tech giants leading the American AI boom might suggest that’s already happening — Nvidia’s earnings have quintupled and its share price increased tenfold in the last three years — those results don’t actually tell us much. Nvidia isn’t making money off AI so much as the AI mania, capitalizing on the sale of its chips — the “picks and shovels” of the new goldrush — to other companies that then use them to build AI. In a recent earnings statement, Meta said it did not expect the gains of its AI investment to materialize for another two years. Instead, it is still making money off advertisers on its Facebook and Instagram sites, just as Apple still makes its money from iPhone sales.

The record profits of the Magnificent Seven, therefore, do not support a narrative of economic transformation. Instead, we’re awaiting the breakthrough application that will lift economic productivity to a new plateau. Enthusiasts maintain that, once the technology spreads, AI will add one percent or more to America’s annual rate of economic growth. But there’s no shortage of skeptics who question the calculations behind that optimism.

Among them is Goldman Sachs’ Jim Covello, who says that for AI to justify the current wave of investment, it must solve a trillion-dollar problem. It’s hard to see that happening. Daron Acemoglu has argued that AI’s productivity impact will be negligible, because once it gets through the easy-to-learn tasks which are currently exciting everyone, like search tools, the returns will rapidly diminish. This contention is borne out by recent macroeconomic research from Japan. The neuroscientist Eric Hoel calls this the “supply paradox of AI”: “the easier it is to train an AI to do something, the less economically valuable that thing is. After all, the huge supply of the thing is how the AI got so good in the first place.” Take the example of copy-writers. Because so many of them produce so much material, they become easy to replace. Their knowledge is cheap. This phenomenon won’t carry over to fields where knowledge is expensive.

Instead, a closer look at Meta’s bottom line may reveal what’s really going on, and why the optimistic view of AI’s productivity impacts could rest on shaky foundations. The company credits its new AI for helping steer more customers to its products, thereby boosting sales and revenue. We see a similar trend at Google, whose searches previously led people to websites, but which now keep them on the Google site where they can read quick summaries of the linked content: more eyeballs on Google, more ad revenue to it, but less for all those sites.

In other words, the tech giants have been using AI to capture revenue that previously went elsewhere. On the face of it, that’s the market doing its thing, and it’s that very possibility which excites corporate executives. They believe AI will reduce their need for labor, allowing them to similarly suck up money that would have gone elsewhere — in this case, to their workers.

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This, arguably, has been the tale of the information age: new technology doesn’t necessarily raise economy-wide output that much. Instead, it replaces labor and directs the resulting cost-saving to owners, helping to worsen income and wealth inequality. Just as the websites that make those AI summaries possible are now being plundered to the benefit of the AI giants, the LLM chatbots they’re developing are trained using content whose creators receive no compensation. Without that motherlode of free inputs, involuntarily subsidized by their creators, AI might make no sense. As one investor put it in 2023, “imposing the cost of actual or potential copyright liability on the creators of AI models will either kill or significantly hamper their development.”

That route to higher profits raises two problems. The first is that the resulting inequality could stoke a political populism that makes the economy more fragile. We might never have got the volatile policy-making of this Trump administration were it not for the sense of malaise caused by globalization’s decimation of industrial towns and industrial jobs. If AI really displaces workers, one can’t rule out a radically redistributive politics of the Right or Left. If anything, current trends favor it.

But in addition to the possibility that the AI revolution could end up eating itself, this type of job destruction can produce an economic paradox. While professionals might lose jobs to AI, not everyone will. Microsoft recently commissioned a study estimating which jobs will be most affected by AI and least; not surprisingly, those most insulated from its effects are manual laborers and personal-care workers (including health care), with knowledge-workers taking the biggest hit.

In other words, the jobs AI will disrupt least lie in those sectors of the economy where labor productivity tends not only to be lowest, but most resistant to transformation. This gives rise to what’s known as the Baumol-Bowen effect. As workers displaced by AI are forced to take new jobs in lower-skilled occupations, their productivity will decline. In consequence, the needle on economy-wide productivity may budge little.

It may yet be that someone will invent an application for AI that transforms productivity across the economy and lifts everyone’s output and income to a new plane. But time may be running short, because right now, the boom is becoming a bust for many.

So: are we facing another railroad episode? It’s certainly true that AI is starting to resemble a speculative bubble, not unlike the dot-com boom. Although the Magnificent Seven are making profits that justify their valuations, their future growth depends on the AI revolution continuing for years at its current rate or greater.

But that growth depends on AI being deployed in revolutionary new ways. If that doesn’t happen, then those growth prospects will change, and the markets could tumble. Given the weighting of the big tech companies in the US stock market — Nvidia alone is worth nearly a tenth of the market’s total value — a fall in share prices could not only hurt all those retail investors who rode the wave, but ricochet through the financial system.

In the long term, it might be good for America if the market goes back to investing in all the other sectors of the economy. In the short term, if this bubble bursts, it will be very painful. Both investors and the Trump administration are going all-in on their AI bet. If it succeeds, they’ll parade like champions. But if it fails, they’ll be running for the exits. And given last week’s lackluster response to ChatGPT’s newest update, investor patience may be wearing thin.

Does it amplify what we already dread or anticipate? It is all exceptions and no rules, wobbly explanations and multiple vaguenesses which are seldom called upon when we usually subject artistic creation and its makers to scrutiny. A work can be described as, say, neo-realist, plangent, pastoral, melancholy, mauve, belligerent, mocking, cuddly, gormless, cyclopean, sickening, Biedermeyer… All these mean something more or less. They are devices for seeing, pigeon-holing, anatomizing screeches, distinguishing a willow’s bark from a Labrador’s.

These are veneers, a colorist’s province, chromatic patterns for the coming season, “styles” in the debased sense of an add-on, a surface superficiality, applied post hoc. And Late Style should on the face of it belong among them. But it doesn’t. This epithet belongs to a different gamut, determined by the calendar and the infirm body’s deliquescence — which are in tune. Beethoven’s late quartets were welcomed by his friends and admirers with “We knew he’d gone deaf… now he’s gone mad.” And when Op 131 turns into a jug band’s singalong of a century later we can see their point. So this is what he’s been hiding all these years.

Does “late” have any place in a variegated inventory of, inter alia, moods and passions, tempers and humors? Is it merely tagging along, clutching at an elbow as a reminder of its presence in a world sated with competing qualifiers? And can it be allied to such qualifiers? Is, for instance, “late pastoral” anything more than portmanteau clumsiness possibly representing mutton with scrapie, and a shepherd’s despair? The old have a lot to be frightened of — just look at them — just look at the face I see in the mirror.

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The God complex of Muriel Spark

By Kathleen Stock

It is surely Late Style which Buffon had in mind when he wrote “the Style is the very man / the man himself”. It is the quintessence of the artist arriving at the threshold of decrepitude, disintegrating. The earlier tendencies of the career are abandoned. They are not in terminal earnest. They derive from the Pantone guide to life or, for those that don’t drop their aitches, the Farrow and Ball Formula For Fulfillment. The Late Comer is different. Late Style works derive from its maker’s core. It is sooner identified by instances than by a generalized program. We can follow a maker’s creations over a career of many decades but never understand it till the four last things menace and it all becomes clear. Or not.

I can still summon the puzzlement of half a century ago. It was with delight that I realized I had been had. The sensation was electric. I had been Cruyffed by a double-take after a few sentences of Transparent Things. The septuagenarian author was heading apace into his Late Space, which had remained fallow since childhood and was now ready to be cultivated. This marvelous novella, a proxy amulet of a mere 100 pages, was the work of an old man impersonating the young man he once had been, a young man looking forward to being an old writer yet bereft of the old man’s achronic knack of whizzing forward and back though Time. Yet page after page proclaimed a lack of bereavement. And with it a mastery of legerdemain. Although he shared the name of the writer of the greatest novels of the century, this was a previously mute Vladimir Nabokov whose choice of Late Style was unfamiliar, may not even have been a choice… This was Late Style not just as reheated leitmotifs but as entire divergence from the great accumulated oeuvre which was now shed. The burdens of genius and high expectation could be abandoned without reference to them. In his and the century’s late Seventies it appeared that he was reinventing himself, almost provenantlessly, taking as his model without prior example the contemporary French writer he most admired, a generation his junior. He was all of a sudden dressed as Alain Robbe-Grillet. This was evidently a popular choice: Muriel Spark was kindredly togged at the same moment for The Driver’s Seat. Had they listened too attentively to their critics: Émigré purple… Lush and arid…

Transparent Things is a puzzle set, one guesses, by a teasing trickster who has already forgotten both the clues and the solution. It is dense with precise detail. Things happen: and then more things. It is quite unlike the bland featurelessnesses of the current fiction in which dull creative writing students chat to dull creative writing students (there is today a generalized fear of imaginative invention and giving offense). Transparent Things is a treasury of hotel fires, murders, mangled colloquial English, a heart attack caused by a struggle (probably unmatched in all literature) with trousers in a fitting booth, bogus allusions, the shadow of God, infidelities, unremembered strangulation, arch narration by a voice or voices whose owners are never fully disclosed — are they even human? The worst thing a great work can be accused of is that it has taught us something, like a self-help booklet. Don’t believe them, whoever they are — cassock, beard, hijab, forecourt suit etc. The more instructive and pedagogic art intends to be, the lesser its worth, for it is a sort of mental trap which gives the reader or spectator no option but to follow the writer. Transparent Things only rarely makes “sense”, only rarely vouchsafes any explanation of its protagonists’ behavior.

When it broaches the most profound of all matters it is skittish, evasive and improbably avuncular — as though this were not the most profound of all matters.

“….the mysterious mental maneuver needed to pass from one state of being to another.”

“Easy, you know, does it. Son.”

The book suggests to me, upon my 15th or 20th reading, that it is a chalice void to the brim: the valley of the shadow of death where we laugh and dance in amity, not fearing the chummy hand that will, inevitably, grip our shoulder.

I rather fear that the hand is closing in.

Thornton might have felt sore, but as Gaskell and the other industrial novelists understood, those were the rules of Victorian capitalism. It did not matter who you were or how big your business was. It was not just about staying within the law, but on the right side of public opinion too: the “moral economy of the English crowd,” as E.P. Thompson once put it. A reputational whip, more often than a bureaucratic one, kept the show on the road.

Donald Trump is unlikely to be a great admirer of the industrial novels of the 19th century. Yet this week, by denouncing Jaguar’s “total disaster” rebrand and praising American Eagle’s ad featuring Sydney Sweeney (“the HOTTEST ad out there”), he found himself playing a very Victorian role: dispensing public reputational justice with moral fervor. Jaguar’s campaign, launched last year, enlisted pastel-clad models in surreal landscapes. It was a Hail Mary bid to resurrect what wistful motorheads still call “the British Porsche”.

It was meant to make a splash, though not, I suspect, in this particular fountain. In truth, though, this is about much more than a single ad, company, or president. Trump’s attack, and Jaguar’s brief brush with the pillory, speaks to the triumphant return of Victorian moral capitalism — a mood that can turn any firm, no matter how big, or how well-regarded, into a public spectacle.

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Rolls-Royce is an engine of prosperity

By Aled Maclean-Jones

There’s an enjoyable history of US Presidents going after British companies. In 1971, Rolls-Royce management drew the ire of Richard Nixon after succeeding in running the company into receivership, having just agreed to supply engines to Lockheed’s new flagship, the L-1011 TriStar. In 2010, Barack Obama kicked off a search to find “whose ass to kick” after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The ass in question was BP’s.

Rolls-Royce and BP are, frankly, in a different league from Jaguar and American Eagle. Rolls-Royce, during the 1971 crisis, held the fate of one of America’s important companies in its hands. BP, shortly before its time under the Presidential gaze, was the third largest company in the FTSE, and comfortably one of the twenty largest companies in the world. Contrast this with today’s targets: a soon-to-be-relaunched marque of a luxury car company, and a clothing brand that specializes in jeans. These are not industrial giants or systemic threats to global markets, but lifestyle brands punished, or rewarded, simply for being on the right or wrong team.

This matters more than it seems. When we talk about the shift from Victorian moral capitalism to the system we are more familiar with today, it is easy to focus on the obvious changes: the end of the satanic mill, the closure of the workhouse, the disappearance of the emaciated chimney-sweep who still haunts the 19th-century imagination. But just as important was what happened in the 20th century. As the moral economy receded and the regulatory state took its place, public and political outrage became the preserve of the giants: the BPs, the Lockheeds, the Rolls-Royces of the world.

For everyone else, it was the age of the corporate civilian. Stay compliant, stay quiet, and you were generally left alone. In this world, the rules of the game were relatively clear. If you played in certain industries, and at a certain level, it was no longer just about your product and your customer, but about how you looked to the world at large. A touch of the Victorian spirit still applied, as Tim Cook so perfectly exemplified yesterday, arriving in the Oval Office to bestow a gift of gold upon the President. In 1878, Disraeli received the same from the City of London.

Any meaningful divide between corporate civilian and corporate combatant is gone. In truth, it has been for some time. The trends that brought us here are not going away: the unforgiving flatness of the internet (as Astronomer, a little-known data firm rocked by the Coldplay kiss-cam, now acutely understands); the retrenchment of globalization; and the rise of policymakers who increasingly see themselves not as economic stewards, but as cultural commentators. The forces that ended the era are much larger than any single president.

Perhaps now it is even more difficult than it was for Mr Thornton himself. Then, it was clear what would bring public and political ire. Refuse to pay wages. Punch up your coffee with chicory and dirt. Forge an exchequer bill or a letter of credit. Inveigle, as Trollope’s villains so often do, a few hundred pounds from your wife, her father, or her lover. Open your shop on a Sunday. Do any of that, and only then would you draw scandal, satire, and Parliamentary scrutiny. Or, in Thompson’s memorable phrase, face “marauding bands” to “set the price at the popular level.”

Today, the offenses are harder to predict, even compared to the simpler, clearer-cut culture war boundaries of just a few years ago. Hence why car brands, jeans companies, fitness firms, and light beer manufacturers alike find themselves at the center of conversations they never meant to start. What happens when every company, not just the biggest or most geopolitically exposed, has to develop its own cultural imagination? They get Victorian.

Last week the US cryptocurrency company Coinbase launched a two-minute musical takedown of contemporary Britain, its newest advertising campaign. The video isn’t really selling a product. It’s making one thing clear: which team Coinbase is on. Inevitably, the inspiration for the advert, an all-singing, all-dancing tour of an England of calcified dirt, soot-stained street-sweepers, and endemic poverty, was the most iconic of the literary tentpoles of Victorian moral capitalism: Dickens’ Oliver Twist.

Even American Eagle, with their impish campaign in which the actress fixes up a Ford Mustang before driving off to the tagline “Sydney Sweeney has great genes,” might have thought they could be no more contemporary. They might be surprised to learn that Pears Soap got there first. In 1882, they paid actress, socialite, and royal mistress Lillie Langtry to become the face of their product. It worked then. It works now. By 1889, Pears was spending £100,000 a year on advertising (around £15 million today), easily justifiable given its annual profits of £70,000 just three years later.

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How Europe crashed its car industry

By Helen Thompson

The return of moral capitalism matters not just for companies, but for countries too. For a long time we have lived in a world where certain firms operate not only as commercial giants, but as national emblems. In the UK, we have a long tradition of co-opting companies into the machinery of the state. They collect employee taxes, act as pass-throughs for government support schemes, and sit at the heart of our national security regime. But what happens when we have to treat them as cultural actors too? The President’s attack on Jaguar will likely bounce off. But what if the next one doesn’t? What if, instead of calling for the resignation of a US CEO, as he did yesterday, he called for the resignation of a British one?

Historically, our companies have been good at this cultural game: closer heirs to the Victorian imagination than we might care to admit. As Alfred Marshall wrote of Britain in 1890, “the same causes which have enabled England… to set the tone of modern politics, have made them also set the tone of modern business.” Could we not do the same again? While the Swiss president rushed to Washington to plead against 38% tariffs, it is telling how the UK-US trade deal announcement devolved into a debate about the symbolic power of British brands.

“I won’t do that deal on cars unless someone shows me there’s another kind of car that’s comparable to a Rolls-Royce,” the President declared, leading, of course, to the greatest irony of the Jaguar post: that it, alongside the other British luxury carmakers, stands to benefit most from the deal signed by its loudest critic just two months ago. This, I suppose, is what a cultural imagination can do in practice: make the very politician denouncing you the one to whom you now owe the most.

It’s easy to treat this with the indignance of Margaret Hale moments before the shoe hits her temple: “you come to oust the innocent stranger” she calls to the baying mob. Savvier, perhaps, to do as Lillie Langtry did: step into the role and steal the scene. As another Victorian wit (and, coincidentally, devotee of Langtry) put it, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.

However, in our age of narcissism and self-consumed distraction, that feels appropriate. More than that, though, perhaps our lack of recognition stems from the fact that we were merely living through a transition period, a purgatory-like space between liberal capitalism and whatever we’re going to call the digital dystopia piecing itself together in the palm of our hands.

And if that world slowly becomes clearer every time we click “accept the terms” — now, with the help of AI, the pace of corporate tyranny has only accelerated. Any freedoms we used to enjoy, from surveillance and bureaucrats dictating every term of our existence, are rapidly disappearing. The process has become so rapid and all-encompassing that it’s clouding our understanding not only of what’s possible, but what’s human.

For if AI is a new form of intelligence, it also represents a novel form of life itself. To be sure, it cannot actually think or reason, whatever the tech-bro positivists might claim. Yet in its clear-eyed lack of empathy, it nonetheless symbolizes an utter break with the civilization that came before. How else to explain the fact that AI chat systems “accidentally” end up telling depressed people to commit suicide, kill their rivals at work, or start a cocaine habit? To them, such patterns seem logical. The customer is always right after all. And what does the AI know? Killing yourself certainly will end your misery. Cocaine will indeed make you feel good. It’s hard to argue with the validity of pattern recognition.

The logic of an organism using binary code, no matter how sophisticated, can only be self-interested and sociopathic in pursuit of its creator’s wishes. Computer systems will never replace friendships, much less family or life-fulfilling work. Whether we’re talking about Facebook or some future virtual reality system resembling the Star Trek holodeck, digital programs will never be a cure for liberal individualism’s connection crisis. Nor will their implementation improve economic production to the point where “fully automated luxury communism” becomes inevitable.

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The war on America’s radicals

By B. Duncan Moench

It’s no mystery what our AI future will bring. Occam’s razor applies. Whether near or distant, AI will do precisely the same thing they are doing in the present — extract every last element of economic and ecological value available and feed it to wealth-hoarding individuals and corporations. Whether made of skin and bone, or composed entirely of metal and microchips, these entities will then reinvest enough of their extracted resources to create even “better” (more addictive) tools of distraction.

These distraction tools will then be used to extract even more value — in the form of behavioral data and prospective consumer habits — from the citizenry. As for those poor saps, they’ll eventually function as little more than defecating and urinating batteries for an economic system that neither improves existence for most people, nor reflects humanity’s spiritual or moral values. God is indeed dead; Nietzsche’s great error was being too early.

Welcome, then, to the Age of Maximum Extraction. Yanis Varoufakis calls our new order “techno-feudalism”, though if we’re going to nitpick, “hyper-feudalism” feels a bit more on the nose. With omnipresent iPhones, smartwatches, and now internet-connected refrigerators and coffeemakers, our new order is hyperactive in every sense of the word — hyper-consumptive, hyper-distractive, and, certainly not least, hyper-destructive. Like a lecherous porn director, AI both participates and enables our own self-destructive behavior in a manner demeaning to any honest sense of what’s consensual, much less healthy or environmentally sound.

At the current rates, the average US student today will spend 25 years of their life on their mobile phones, which, very soon, will be mostly interacting with AIs of one sort or another. This compulsive behavior — an average of more than six hours a day for today’s university cohort — is almost entirely useless except for the purposes of value extraction on the part of big-tech firms. The amount of time now thrown into the cosmic trash bin by those addicted to their phones is staggering to behold. For instance, if an English speaker were to practice Spanish or Italian for six hours a day, most learners could become close to fluent within four months or less. That same amount of time is now spent, month after month, year after year, simply staring — transfixed — at Orwellian-named “smart” devices.

But self-consumed, time-wasting is only one of many horrifying elements to arise from the mass adoption of handheld computers. When an influential data scientist earnestly prognosticates that the Anglo-American world is likely headed toward a mostly illiterate future, one where reading will soon become a class marker, practiced regularly only by the well-educated and the wealthy, the concept of the “attention economy” threatens to soon take on a new, more grotesque meaning. Orwell himself is rightly celebrated for his insight regarding the strategic use of language to control thought. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Ministry of Truth constantly revises written rhetoric not only to distort the past — but the present too. But what if the written word itself effectively becomes a historical artifact, something only those in power, or else fictional dissidents like Orwell’s Emmanuel Goldstein (a kind of regime-sanctioned scapegoat), still bother to engage with? The mere act of reading could soon become a mark of deviancy.

If the human consequences here aren’t bad enough, meanwhile, the environmental costs of Maximum Extraction are equally staggering. As the move to insert AI into everything takes shape, few appear aware that a typical ChatGPT or Anthropic query uses roughly 10 times more energy than an old-school Google search. Scaled to roughly 700 million queries per day, AI chats already use the same amount of electricity in one 24-hour period as 35,000 American homes do annually.

During a time of raging wildfires and terrifying drought — where the need for large storehouses of water is an absolute necessity to stave off disaster — cooling our existing AI servers already requires hundreds of thousands of gallons of water per day. As AI chats replace most browser searches, that water demand is going to get infinitely worse. Even at the present levels, which are probably underestimates anyway, AI data centers are set to withdraw 4.2-6.6 billion m³ of water by 2027: more than the total water withdrawal of the UK for an entire year.

The obscene ecological waste surrounding the production of AI is merely a drop in the bucket of the hyper-destruction these systems will wreak. Let’s start with the misery they’ve already created for average workers and consumers. During the pandemic, even as millions were dying, and scores of people were thrust out of work — their businesses literally banned from operating effectively — residential rental prices still skyrocketed in cities right across the US. How did this make any sense? AI use, of course.

One rare courtroom win for regular people came when the real estate software outfit RealPage was recently taken to federal court for helping spark the rent-gouging crisis through AI tools offered to landlords. The suit was brought by the Biden administration’s Department of Justice, alongside eight state attorneys general. RealPage’s software, the suit alleges, allowed landlords to collude their pricing via an AI algorithm. No need for backroom deals: just plug in your units, make a few mouse clicks, and let the AI system do the collusion for you — setting rent just high enough to crush tenants with nowhere else to go, because everyone else in the area is doing the same.

Even landlords not using the software profited from the artificial price hikes. Think of it as a labor union, but without any risks involved and with all the benefits flowing to management or, in this case, the rentier class. Even if the government’s lawsuit against RealPage prevails — and, under a presidential administration headed by a real estate tycoon, the motivation to succeed is likely waning — the AI tools are becoming so sophisticated, and the Constitution remains so woefully out of date, that the prospect of prosecutors consistently holding trillion-dollar tech giants in check seems dim. Yet in the Age of Maximum Extraction, rent fixing is only one of many elements of everyday life made dramatically worse by AI.

Companies like Amazon, Uber, DoorDash, and other so-called “gig” employers currently use algorithms to set their pay rates “dynamically”. In other words, an employee’s pay changes minute-to-minute or task-to-task, and is calculated in real time using data that responds to supply, demand, location, and even worker behavior or time of day. An AI algorithm — not an actual human manager or clear set of agreements — decides how much a worker earns for a given job or task, often without disclosing its formula in any intelligible way.

The AI wage formulas used by these firms are entirely opaque. Almost no one understands exactly how they work, and their deployment makes it impossible for workers to anticipate how much they’ll earn on any given day — let alone week to week or month to month. The effect is to turn the worker into a kind of human turbine, spinning endlessly yet going nowhere, all while sinking deeper into debt. And all just to stay afloat in an attention-starved existence where nearly every aspect of daily life serves the needs of value-extracting tech overlords.

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Is the NBA draft rigged?

By B. Duncan Moench

It’s tempting, here, to contrast our coming reality to the old-style feudalism stamped out between Luther and the French Revolution. In truth, though, even that might be too generous a comparison for those at the bottom of the digital pile. Medieval serfs and even 19th century slaves had far more stable and predictable lives. Most US slave masters, as Marxist historian Eugene Genovese noted, were motivated to keep their workers reasonably nourished and safely housed. Purchasing new slaves was extremely expensive, not to mention time-consuming. In today’s Age of Maximum Extraction, conversely, the vagaries of globalization ensure developed economies have a near-unlimited supply of cheap (and often illegal) labor.

Not that the situation is entirely hopeless. President Trump may be faulted for a great many things, but his treatment of the country’s immigration crisis ought not make the list. Draconian they may have been, his policies have seen border detentions fall by as much as 90%. Even if that government figure proves an exaggeration, Trump will still have fulfilled his promise to voters. A message to the global south has been sent: the US is no longer a place of open immigration.

Unfortunately, border enforcement and immigration restriction is the only tangible thing Trump has done to counteract the forces of maximum extraction. Not that Trump’s opponents are much better. The Democrats, too, are fully captured by wealth-extracting exploiters, as evidenced not only by their support for the previous regime’s reckless open immigration policies, which greatly undermined the negotiating power of working people, but also the fact that they too receive a great deal of their financial support from the big tech giants. The voraciously anti-labor Elon Musk famously “donated” over $250 million to Donald Trump’s reelection bid; yet Musk and Peter Thiel’s GOP partisanship is more the exception than the rule. PAC donations from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, alongside nearly all the big tech giants, are generally split evenly between both major parties. The same double-dealing donation pattern can be seen with Uber, Doordash, and the rest of the “gig” economy profiteers.

To be fair, there are some resisters to our new digital dystopia. But their efforts are often disorganized, and typically offered by woke politicians with repulsive social politics. In this vein, Rashida Tlaib and Greg Casar lately introduced legislation intended to halt the use of AI tools and algorithms in coordinating prices and suppressing wages. Everything laid out in their proposed bill is reasonable and indeed highly necessary. But with the Democrats out of power on every national front — and recent polls confirming the party remains at its lowest ebb in three decades — the legislation has no chance of passing.

Even worse, the bill arguably provides tech lobbyists with advance warning for how their opponents seek to attack the AI mothership. A moment of what Michael Oakeshott might call rationalist politics at its most unmoored: abstract ideals offered in place of real strategy, leaving power unthreatened but forewarned.

Given Tlaib’s recent publicity stunt of banging pots and pans on the Capitol steps, meanwhile, it’s difficult not to wish that someone — anyone — other than her had fronted the legislation. Unfortunately, Tlaib and her colleagues in the progressive caucus are reflective of how “resistance” in the Age of Maximum Extraction is offered: purposeless cross-country speaking tours and TikTok sketches, coordinated by 20-something social media “experts” obsessed with their own maximum algorithmic reach. An Emmanuel Goldstein meme served up for mockery by the very tools it seeks to undermine.

That wasn’t because people didn’t think Newman deserved to become one of only 38 saints — out of more than 10,000 recognized by the Catholic Church — whose writings receive the ultimate papal imprimatur. Pope Leo’s announcement was almost universally welcomed. But what did it mean?

St John Henry (1805-90) will join the ranks of Saints Augustine, John Chrysostom, Gregory the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Teresa of Ávila and Thérèse of Lisieux. He will be the first native English Doctor of the Church since St Bede, born in Northumbria in 672 AD. And Newman — who was canonized in 2019 — will be the first former Protestant to be granted this exalted title.

Newman was elected a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, at the age of 21 in 1822. Three years later, he was ordained an Anglican priest. By 1828 he was Vicar of St Mary’s, the Oxford University church. Soon he developed a cult following among undergraduates, who would skip meals in order to hear him preach. His sermons — couched in exquisite prose laced with sarcasm — were the most glittering product of the Oxford Movement, which sought to reintroduce the Church of England to the pure apostolic faith of the early Fathers.

Then, in 1845, swayed by study, Newman sensationally went over to Rome, eventually becoming a cardinal. The decision cost him his teaching post at Oxford and many friends. The Victorian public was horrified. Even Newman’s enemies — of which he had many, since he was both outspoken and thin-skinned — realized that the dreaded Papists had poached the finest mind in Anglicanism.

But the point-scoring that followed Pope Leo’s announcement wasn’t inspired by Protestant sour grapes. Anglicans long ago came to terms with Newman’s defection. They argue that his most celebrated insights — above all, his notion that doctrine of the Church “develops” as successive generations uncover fresh truths — are derived from his Oxford sermons, whose brilliance was perhaps unsurpassed by anything he wrote as a Catholic. If Pope Leo wants to make him a Doctor of the Church, then they accept the implied compliment. It is rarely mentioned that Newman went to his grave believing that the Church of England was a heretical body that should submit to Rome.

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No: last week’s infighting was between Roman Catholics, who are mostly united in their devotion to St John Henry, but at loggerheads over his legacy. Both conservative and liberal Catholics want to “own” Newman, and in a Church scarred by the partisan liberal pontificate of Pope Francis they are ready to fight it out. To quote one prominent traditionalist, “Now that Newman has been declared a Doctor of the Church, it’s important that those who have actually read his works take control of the narrative before the Woke brigade hijacks him.”

The problem for conservatives is that plenty of liberal Catholics have read Newman and believe that he foreshadowed the innovations of the Second Vatican Council, which for that reason has been called “Newman’s Council”. And it’s true that Newman believed that lay Catholics could play a role in safeguarding doctrine. He noted that, during the fourth-century Arian conflict, bishops disavowed the divinity of Christ but their faithful flocks held on to it. Also, while accepting the doctrine of papal infallibility, he was dismayed by its triumphalist definition by the First Vatican Council in 1870.

Yet the constant invocation of Newman by modernizing Catholics is hard to square with the savagery of his attacks on the liberalism of his own era. As an Anglican, Newman lampooned Victorian progressives who believed that moral truths could be uncovered by science. He returned to the subject with renewed ferocity nearly half a century later, in an address when he was made a cardinal by Pope Leo XIII in 1879.

Liberals were guilty of believing that “one creed is as good as another”, he said, and that “it is the right of each individual to make [revealed religion] say just what strikes his fancy”. This would lead to the ruin of souls. To quote Dr Samuel Gregg of the conservative Catholic Acton Institute, “Today, I suspect, the sheer force of Newman’s critique of what he called ‘liberalism in religion’ would make him persona non grata in most Northern European theology faculties.”

Of course, conservative and liberal Catholics are simply indulging in guesswork when they transport an eminent Victorian into the 20th or 21st centuries. What we do know, however, is that John Henry Newman was persona non grata in certain Anglican circles before he even considered converting, and also among powerful Catholics after he sacrificed everything to join their Church.

Partly this was his own fault. Professor Eamon Duffy, doyen of English Catholic historians and a huge Newman enthusiast, writes that as an Anglican the young theologian was “far from fastidious” in advancing his agenda, orchestrating “an anonymous campaign of denigration and protest” against a liberal churchman. (Perhaps he would have felt at home on X.) Decades later, as Provost of the Birmingham Oratory, Newman ministered selflessly to the poor while nurturing ancient grudges and ghosting friends who had offended him. That isn’t saintly behavior — but, on the other hand, it isn’t uncharacteristic of many saints who have temporarily lost sight of human decency in their crusades against “error”.

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A more fundamental problem was that, in both his Churches, Newman was looking for a via media — a middle way. As an Anglican he tried to reconcile the apostolic teachings of Rome with the insights of the Protestant Reformers before deciding that he was wasting his time. As a Catholic he criticized liberals while trying to moderate the dogmatism of Pope Pius IX and his ally Cardinal Henry Manning, Archbishop of Westminster, a fellow ex-Anglican convert who wanted to impose papal authority on every aspect of English Catholic life.

Manning privately thought Newman was a heretic — an absurd notion. When the new Pope Leo XIII offered the old man a red hat, Manning played a really dirty trick, spreading anonymously authored false reports that Newman had declined the honor. Fortunately, a message from Birmingham reached Rome just in time.

Such are the perils of trying to find common ground in a fractured Church. This year the first American pope took the name Leo in order to honor the pope who, in making the great English theologian a cardinal, implicitly conceded that Pius IX had dragged the Church into unnecessary controversies. Newman was more explicit. Pius had suffered the fate of any pope who reigns for too long: “He becomes a god, has no one to contradict him, does not know facts, and does cruel things without meaning it.”

Does that ring a bell? Pope Francis reigned for only 12 years, but it seemed longer. He was a liberal, not an ultra-conservative in the mold of Pope Pius; indeed, he sometimes flirted with the notion, so scandalous to Newman, that “one creed is as good as another”. But, like Pius, Francis tolerated no contradiction, displayed little intellectual curiosity, and did cruel things to Catholics who attended the Latin Mass celebrated by St John Henry. He issued encyclicals that merited the latter’s verdict on Pius’s “Syllabus of Errors” – in Duffy’s paraphrase, “a theological mess, made up of scattergun denunciations of matters in which the Church had no real expertise.” Above all, despite the pantomime of “synodality”, he centralized the government of the Church in the despotic fashion that Newman deplored.

Leo XIV has, so far, given us few hints of specific policy initiatives. But most commentators agree that he is looking for a middle way between conservatives and liberals, and already we can see trouble ahead: both hardline liberals and paranoid conservatives are determined to cast him in the role of Pope Francis II. My guess is that there is a via media out there, but that Leo will find it only if he displays the sort of courage that enabled St John Henry to cross the Tiber, and walks away from the path to chaotic secularism mapped out by his predecessor.